Retrofit Ads - Love Them or Hate Them?

Have you been brave enough to click on a solar PV ad on your social media channel? And if you got that far, did you discover a hinterland of great customer engagement, transparency of intent and a purchasing pathway where you felt nurtured?

Perhaps not. Why should there be? Companies sell, customers buy (wisely or not).

This is why it could be a significant issue. All the advertising noise out there creates a confusing and opaque world of retrofitting. As a result, many potential customers will back off and defer making a purchasing decision. That has a detrimental effect on the overall take-up of energy efficiency measures.

Here are some marketing stats. Only 3% of people who click on an ad will end up making a purchase, (Techjury). Once someone arrives on a website’s landing page, the average conversion rate across all industries is 5.9%. The sense is that the retrofit industry falls below these values.

Where grants are involved (and some ads allude to their availability), they do make a difference. For example, The Great British Insulation Scheme saw a 26% monthly growth in October 2023 with 203 grants allocated that month, totalling 1,026 households since the scheme started in April 2023. The Government’s target is 300,000 households by March 2026. There are other schemes too, but the enormous challenge for grant policy makers can be seen when confronted with 16.2 million homes in England and Wales with EPCs below ‘C’.

Another source of market stimulation comes from advisories, such as Retrofit West CIC or the Carbon Co-op in Manchester. Increasing funding is going into local initiatives involving these organisations. In an ideal world, everyone would go through one of these, accessing independent advice and grants, and receiving competitive quotes from appropriately accredited companies. In reality, their relatively low throughput rate would create huge backlogs, even if the construction industry had sufficient capacity to satisfy these orders.

Is there an opportunity here for all parties? Could advisories use supply chains to integrate their own marketing messages and tools in return for supporting suppliers and installers in bidding rounds for multiple projects? In other words, use the ads as hooks to onboard more householders onto supportive purchasing pathways.

So perhaps clicking on that ad in the future can bring a warm feeling of trust rather than dread of what lurks in that dark marketing hinterland.