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We love to give solar thermal marketing advice at Free Hot Water. We’re a manufacturer and a distributor of solar hot water equipment, so our job isn’t to sell solar thermal jobs, but to support our installers with engineering, equipment, and marketing.
So, your success is our success, and right now, we’re anxious to see solar thermal grow as fast as solar PV has grown. So here are 3 tips that you can use to sell some solar thermal commercial jobs.
1) Go to events where your customers are. And by customers, I mean your apartment building owners, hospital administrators, Laundromat owners, hotel owners, nursing home owners, and all of the other businesses that use a lot of hot water. And where are they?
They’re at their own trade shows, talking about their challenges. Solar thermal is a solution for all of the above businesses. Invest in a booth at their respective trade shows and perhaps even participate in a panel discussion about plumbing, energy efficiency, etc. You’ll be seen as an authority and owners will want more information from you.
2) Do a case study for each of the above market segments. Yes, every solar thermal job is different. (That being said, there are some that are right for pre-engineered commercial systems too.) So, you’ll have to mention in your case study how usage, utility prices, state rebates, existing pipes, different solar collectors and tanks can all make prices go up or down. Nevertheless, show the incentives applied, and perhaps give a range of prices. Do this for a hotel with so many rooms, for example, and an apartment with so many units, etc. A case study for each segment. If you have some type of financing to go along with it, mention that too.
Once put together in a PDF, offer these case studies to prospects by making them available on your web page or as a free download. Don’t hide them! Have a “case study” link to them on your website’s home page.
3) Offer prospects a tour of a similar business that you’ve done. By now, you have happy commercial solar water heating customers, right? You’re a Free Hot Water installer, so of course you do. See if you can’t strike up some kind of co-marketing arrangement to have a tour of the finished installation with new prospects.
People respond to examples. This is an excellent touch-feel moment, where you can not only explain how solar thermal works, but also show it working, while answering real time-live questions.
Bonus, you could even have someone videotape the tour and then post this very visual, educational (edited) video on your website and on YouTube.
What’s in it for the existing customer? Marketing and branding, for one. Second, you can offer some kind of referral fee on any closed sale. Up to you how much you want to give, but that fee should be worked into your margins.
Solar thermal works. If you’re a Free Hot Water solar pro, you know that. But we have to continue to get the word out to everyone else. Here are three tips to help do that, and we sincerely hope you’ll use them.
We’d like to think that the Free Hot Water Blog and our various online solar calculators are the only resource on the web for solar installers.
Of course, that’s not the case at all. Thankfully, for our industry, there are numerous informative resources for the solar thermal business.
The latest one we’ve found is SolarThermalBiz.com. It’s a news and info source developed by Eneref, a research and advocacy group devoted to growing sustainable building and technology.
In fact, each year Eneref Institute authors the Solar Thermal Market Report published in Solar Industry magazine, so if you have seen that report, thank the Eneref people. (The 2011 report can be downloaded here.)
Their new site, SolarThermalBiz.com is genuinely devoted to promoting and providing resources to the solar thermal business. There, you’ll find links to solar water heating events, solar thermal news, opinion, as well as free reports from Eneref researchers, as well as other organizations.
I hope you’ll read and spread the word about SolarThermalBiz.com. The more information and resources solar hot water installers have, the better they’ll be able to compete and get the attention that the industry desperately needs to thrive in the Untied States.
So, don’t wait. Bookmark it now, spread the word on Twitter, Linkedin, and Facebook, and take advantage of this great solar business resource.
It’s nice to be recognized…by Google’s search engine.  How so?
Recently, if you do a search on Google for “solar water heating for apartment buildings” or “solar hot water for apartment buildings,” or “solar thermal apartment buildings,” Free Hot Water comes up in the first page of search results.
How? Why? Does it work for anyone? Let’s take those questions one by one:
How did Free Hot Water Get on the first page of search results?
Excellent question. The short answer is because we dedicate a great deal of this blog and a lot of other information to helping apartment building owners and their solar installers to go solar.
For example, in past blog posts, we’ve given several economic case studies about apartment buildings going solar, and that organically tells Google that one of our specialties is providing solar thermal equipment and design services for installing solar for ….wait for it…apartment buildings. Very simple. But that’s only part of the story.
We also provide our registered solar partner installers with apartment building resources, such as a down-loadable, apartment building solar thermal site assessment form, not to mention our online slate of solar thermal calculators.
Bottom line: Google search engines reward solar businesses for telling people what you do and sharing specific, useful information.
Why did Free Hot Water get on the first page of search results?
Short answer: Obviously, to grow our business, but also to grow yours. Let me explain:
There are essentially two ways to get attention for your solar water heating business. Advertising or social media efforts.
Advertising, the old way, requires the least amount of effort, but it’s also costly, since it involves a lot of repetitive advertising dollars spent on Google, news papers, magazines, etc. Plus, despite this increased cost, ads provides little or no service to you, our customers. It’s a one-way, “Hey, look at our solar products!” conversation. Actually, it’s not even a conversation. It’s just telling you information.
The second way to market solar is through the new world of “social media.” That is, writing this blog , interacting on Twitter, being on Facebook and other sites. Sure, we still talk about our products here, but it’s not a one-way street. Instead, we can have a two-way dialog through your comments, reaching out to both our professional installer customers and to apartment building consumers who are searching the internet for more information about going solar.
Bottom line: Instead of focusing on advertising, we use social media to provide customers with useful solar information—like this solar marketing related post or last month’s solar thermal state incentives update. We also enable people to interact with us here or on Facebook or Twitter and respond as quickly as possible. So, this is more than just “marketing.” It’s a new form of customer service.
Does it work for anyone?
Absolutely. We’re not Heliodyne or Schuco … but we are on the first page of Google for certain search results—and you can be too.
Want more useful info? Sign up for our monthly e-newsletter, and if you’re not already, become a Free Hot Water solar partner installer. (Also, don’t forget to drop by and say hello at Intersolar! Booth 8111.)
We really have a difficult time understanding why there aren’t more residential buildings in the United States with solar water heating systems. They’re very common all over the world, especially in China, Europe, and Israel. Our only guess is that the U.S. building owners and managers are simply unaware of the short payback period, especially with the new incentives.
The reason the investment is so worth-while is that most apartment buildings have centralized boilers, and therefore include hot water costs as part of the rent. Consequently, many building owners are paying the full gas or oil heating costs for their tenants daily use of hot showers, dishwashers, and laundry loads. With a solar hot water system, landlords could be saving thousands every month, thus earning more profit per apartment.
Using our Free Hot Water solar thermal calculator, we wanted to see the payback time, annual savings, and net costs on an example of a 100 unit apartment buildings in three major cities across the U.S.
We chose Los Angeles, New York, and Boston with the assumption that the building is owned by a for-profit entity/owner-operator and that gas utility prices are similar in each city. All prices are estimated retail prices, not discounted installer prices.
Based on current rebates and incentives, here’s a quick summary of what we’ve found:
Boston
Los Angeles
New York
Net cost after rebates and incentives
$30,231
$38,079
$77,723
Estimated annual savings
$11,251
$11,251
$11,251
Estimated payback time
2.69 years
3.38 years
6.91 years
Just as we suspected, it makes very little financial sense to keep paying full utility prices for apartment buildings, even in colder climates like New York and Boston. Monthly savings can be applied toward any needed loan payments. Also, remember that solar thermal systems last 25 years with very little maintenance, so the Internal Rate of Return (IRR) will be even greater, especially as gas utility rates rise in the coming years.
Please note: Aside from the rebate, building owners should consult with their tax advisers on how best to take full advantage of current Federal and State solar tax incentives.
You can recreate the same results on our calculator and get a more detailed (retail) quote. Simply input “Apartment” at the top of the form, “100″ for the number of units, and then input the respective state, either CA, MA, or NY. Otherwise, if you have further questions, please feel free to contact us.
Need some feel-good solar video PR for your solar thermal website? The Solar Energy Industry Association (SEIA) produced a series of promotional webisodes last year around the time of Solar Power International. These videos clocked in about 5 or 6 minutes and briefly mentioned/showed solar water heating systems.
Now SEIA has taken those webisodes and chopped them down to 15 second, 30 second, and 1-minute public service announcements (PSAs) that you can re-purpose for your own website.
Now, none of these segments include mentioning solar hot water, but you do get a glimpse of an evacuated tube system in all of them…behind PV panels. Even so, the images may inspire your website visitors to go ahead and contact you for a quote. They’re well done, brief, and attractive, so it certainly can’t hurt if to post somewhere in your blog or website. Every bit of positive solar PR helps.
Below are the 3 shortened videos. Simply click on the video. It will take you to You-Tube, where you can hit the “embed” button. Copy that code of your selected video and then paste it somewhere into the code of your own solar website.
Of course, you can certainly use the full, longer versions, as well. They’re available on SEIA’s You-Tube channel–along with other solar-related news videos. Enjoy.
We’ve been playing around with our new solar thermal calculators, and we just thought we’d share some interesting cost comparisons. We took the example of a 50 unit apartment building and plugged in four different Western states: California, Arizona, Oregon, and Nevada.
You can see the full numbers below, but to our surprise, guess which state had the fastest return on investment (ROI) for this 50 unit building? Without the calculator, I would have guessed California. No brainer, right?
Wrong. Hands down, in these four states, the fastest solar hot water ROI for this 50 unit apartment building example is the great solar state of Arizona at a little over a year. And the worst? Nevada, with an ROI over 11 years. That being said, solar thermal systems can last for 25 years or more, so even in Nevada, solar thermal is a valuable investment.
The full numbers are below, but you can always run them again for yourself. Better yet, play, have fun by:
Changing the parameters to larger or smaller apartment buildings and do your own case studies.
Plugging in any of the other 50 states and Puerto Rico
Changing the parameters from an apartment building to a hotel, restaurant, one of the other listed categories.
Keep in mind, however, that these are estimated retail costs. If you’re a Free Hot Water solar installer or distributor, you’ll of course benefit from substantial discounts off the estimated installed costs.
As a manufacturer and distributor, we certainly want our solar installer and distributor partners to succeed. One of the most effective ways to sell anything these days is with video. Video is of course more visual than text, as like the saying goes, a picture is worth a 1000 words. With video, it’s worth at least 10,000.
Each video is able to be embedded on your own web site. Simply go to the end of each video and cut and copy the HTML code into a page of your web site.
The first two videos are brief demonstration videos of our Free Hot Water racking systems for our solar collectors. This is a great way for installers to show customers how simple it is to construct the racking on the roof of either a commercial installation or a residential one. For our distributors, these videos are a great way to demonstrate to customers how easy it is to install solar thermal solutions with either commercial and residential racking systems.
Videos #1: Residential Solar Hot Water Racking Demo
Video #2: Commercial Solar Hot Water Racking Demo
Video #3: A Feel Good Video about Solar Thermal and Solar PV
FreeHot Water is a member of SEIA, the Solar Energy Industry Association, which has created several videos to promote how solar is growing through America. Below is the West Coast segment, which mentions and shows several solar hot water systems. The video doesn’t mention any particular brand or company. It’s just a good video to show customers that solar is already at work in America.
How to implement these codes on your Web site:
At the end of each video, you’ll see three boxes.
The bottom box has a code that corresponds to the video. You’ll see “object style…”
Simply copy and paste that code into your own Web site or blog. If you don’t know HTML formatting or have an easy to use Web site platform like Word Press, you may need to have someone position the videos correctly, but they should feed automatically from YouTube.
You should add some kind of brief introduction to each video, as I did. “Here’s an assembly video of Free Hot Water’s residential racking system. As you can see, assembly is simple and fast.” Etc.
Feel free to use these videos and spread the word about solar and Free Hot Water’s simple solar thermal solutions. If you’d like to see more details about our solar products, including instruction manuals and specifications, sign up to become a Free Hot Water partner-installer.
There’s a great deal of debate in the United States about whether climate change is a threat to life as we know it or hoax by some kind of fantastic scientific conspiracy.
Suggesting that all of these entities are working together to invent some kind of international fraud is a bit far fetched, but okay, say they’re all wrong.
In terms of solar hot water for major hot water consumers like hotels, apartment buildings, and laundry services, it doesn’t matter. Because while you may not care about climate change, you do care about saving lots of money.
For example, last week, we showed just one case study of how a medium sized California apartment building could save $16,000 a year by switching to a solar thermal system. (At a net cost of about $40,000 after all of incentives, the payback time is 3 years!)
Perhaps that’s hard to believe, but I’ve double checked these numbers with our Free Hot Water engineers, and they stand by those numbers for the given example.
My point is that as a landlord, hotel owner, or fitness center operator, you may have your doubts about global warming, but you at least have to believe in saving money.
Still skeptical about the benefits of solar water heating? Then please contact us. As we did in the case study, we’ll show you the numbers for your business and explain how we got those numbers. Worse case, you lose an hour and learn about solar hot water.
Then, even if you don’t believe in climate change, you can still help the planet by believing in going solar.
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We love to give solar thermal marketing advice at Free Hot Water. We’re a manufacturer and a distributor of solar hot water equipment, so our job isn’t to sell solar thermal jobs, but to support our installers with engineering, equipment, and marketing.
It’s nice to be recognized…by Google’s search engine.  How so?
