Whether you’re a developer, IPP, EPC, engineering firm, consultant, law or insurance firm, or any other entity in the clean energy space, every company is trying to target key stakeholders at prospective companies.

Let’s say you’re an EPC and you’re looking to partner with developers on C&I projects. You have a couple of options to reach them. Let’s walk through these together:

Strategies to Reach Clean Energy Companies

Cold Calling & Email Outreach

Cold calling is a ‘cold’ touchpoint to a prospect. They’ve likely never heard of your service or product before—and selling to them right off the bat is no easy task. Having said that, if the timing is right, sometimes people really do want to learn about your solution to their problem right away and are willing to buy.

Cold email outreach is similar to cold calling but leverages emails instead. One creative way to gain traction with your prospects is by including a video through Loom that introduces yourself—which provides the prospect value and immediately builds that human-to-human connection.

These forms of outreach are often tasked to a Sales Development Representative (SDR) or other salesperson. It does help build your network and get your brand in front of target accounts but only at a 1:1 level, which takes a fair amount of time to scale.

Social Media

Everyone thinks simply being on social media is enough to generate a ton of new prospects. This can be true, depending on what industry and type of service or product you sell. If you’re an e-commerce business that sells a foldable, portable desk like DriftDesk to literally anyone with a desk job, then being on Instagram and showcasing your product in reels, carousels, etc. can be a powerful way to drive awareness.

On the other hand, if you’re trying to reach C&I developers on a B2B scale with sophisticated buyers, simply posting on LinkedIn won’t guarantee they’ll see your content. There has to be a more precise execution on social media to get their attention. I’ll discuss this later on in the section covering LinkedIn strategies.

Direct Mail

Direct mail involves sending physical mail to a prospect in the hopes they’ll buy your product or service. For the most part, this is a spray-and-pray method; you don’t (usually) have the ability to track them the same way you can from digital marketing tactics.

However, there are some creative ways to leverage this for companies like a QR code on your mailer or a tool like Postal to reach your target accounts before or after a hosted event, for example.

Paid Advertising

This is where the big opportunity is for clean energy companies. Paid advertising can take several forms: Google, Meta, TikTok, etc. Of all of these though, LinkedIn triumphs for B2B targeting. It’s the platform known for reaching people at the company, job seniority, and job title levels.

Let’s dive into some LinkedIn growth hacks that will save your company thousands of dollars and ensure you hit the right accounts in the clean energy sector.

How You Should Leverage LinkedIn to Increase ROI and Save on Advertising Costs

1. LinkedIn Follower Tokens

LinkedIn follower tokens (or credits) are a hidden gem companies often aren’t aware of. They allow you to go into your LinkedIn profile network of clean energy professionals and personally invite them to follow your company page. This is a unique way to leverage social media to target only decision-makers.

The best part? It’s absolutely free—and once they’ve accepted, they’ll see all of your page’s incredible content, which will further funnel them through your sales’ lifecycle. You can invite up to 250 people/month. They renew on the first day of each month. If someone accepts your invite, you get that token back to use again in that month.

2. LinkedIn Text Ads

Another spectacular growth hack that’s on the LinkedIn advertising side are LinkedIn Text Ads. Why are these so great? They allow you to target your developers (or any other clean energy company) with a background brand awareness play with little to no spend.

A success story of this at Marketergy is driving 10,000+ ad views to developers, IPPs, and EPCs for only $5 in just a couple of weeks.

In order to set these up properly, choose the Website Traffic campaign objective instead of Brand Awareness; this is crucial to utilizing this hack.

3. LinkedIn Document Ads

Similar to the concept above for LinkedIn Text ads, you can and should also leverage LinkedIn Document ads. This format of ads allows you to upload a PDF document for people to view such as an eBook, case study, or any other gated content that would be valuable to a prospect.

Choose the Website Traffic or Website Conversion campaign objective instead of Lead Generation or another option. This is a small but critical detail in the campaign structure. Instead of charging you for every time someone clicks on your ad (like the Lead Generation objective), you’ll only pay when they actually visit your website. This means you can give sneak peeks into valuable content for your clean energy audience without paying a dime for it.

4. Automated Bidding vs Manual Bidding

This is where the majority of advertisers go wrong. There’s a pre-selected option for bidding: Automated Bidding. The knee-jerker here? It charges for impressions instead of clicks. If you don’t know what an ‘impression’ is, it’s every time a prospect views your ad. They could simply be doom scrolling through their LinkedIn feed half-awake at 2:00 AM and you’re paying for it. Now, does that sound like the right time and way you want to use up your budget to get a developer’s attention? Of course not.

For LinkedIn ads, Manual Bidding is your secret weapon. It charges you only when people actually click on your ad. So, instead of paying every time a prospect sees your ad in their feed, you’re only charged for meaningful actions.

Why Partner With Marketergy?

Hire a clean energy marketing agency who has spent 250+ hours researching the ins and outs of these segments within the industry to get 100% match rates, avoid ineffective advertising spend, and drive ROI.