Located in the sunny middle east and cursed with barren lands devoid of oil, Israel, or the start-up nation as we know it, has never been the world’s energy capital. This is one reason the Israeli Government has been at the forefront of developing methods to harvest renewable energy sources like wind and solar power stations.
For example, the solar energy power plant in the Negev Desert can produce a whopping 300 megawatts of clean energy every day. However, this is just a new project that started a couple of years back. The heroes, in reality, are the young innovative minds and entrepreneurs like Gilad Shamri. These young entrepreneurs have used growth marketing strategies to promote the clean energy industry to make a difference to their community. Born in Israel, Shamri is a well-known business and marketing expert who owns Growth Artists, a top California-based growth hacking agency with a mission to scale American companies using data-driven growth hacking and rapid experimentation. He is also a climate activist who in the past led the solar energy campaign at Greenpeace, the largest environmental organization in the world.
This Israel-born growth marketing expert who began his outstanding career at 18 believes that we should apply the knowledge we have to ensure a better future for the coming generation. One way of doing this he explains is by encouraging more and more people to switch to clean energy sources like solar energy.
He decided to use his exceptional knowledge and expertise in the area of growth marketing to enable the clean energy revolution.
What is effective Growth Marketing?
Growth marketing over the past couple of years has become quite a sensation as marketers have progressively realized the importance of paying attention to the entire marketing funnel.
In simple words, it is an approach used to attract, engage, and retain customers, through an intense focus on the unique, changing motives and preferences of the customers.
It allows businesses to build and deliver tailored, individualized messaging aligned to the customers’ needs. Marketers can optimize your organization’s growth rapidly through a multitude of channels, especially the ones that matter most to their customers. Growth hackers like Gilad use a range of innovative experiments and constant analysis to increase the user base in a cost-efficient and timely manner.
Redefining the Solar Energy Sector
Gilad and his growth marketing tactics have been able to make a significant difference in the solar power sector in his community.
Through an initiative that he started SolarGroupBuy, he has built a strong customer base for solar power. It started after Gilad and his team realized that the Solar Energy market was just too saturated, when they began using performance and top-of-the-funnel online marketing to generate leads for Solar Energy companies. This meant a higher cost per click.
To mitigate this problem Growth Artists brought another player into the game—home remodeling companies. They collaborated with these companies to expand their business to offer solar panel installation solutions by connecting them with client financing solutions along with hardware sourcing and training to help them complete the job.
This out of the box idea worked as most remodeling companies have licensed electricians and professional roofers - it was a low hanging fruit to make this transition for them.
Also, this transition lowered the costs for everyone involved. As most of the heavy lifting and expenses to the solar companies are to acquire the job and deliver the materials to the job site. After realizing this Gilad decided to create geo-micro targeted campaigns on Facebook and Instagram targeting homeowners in the radius of 1 mile of the jobsite and offering up to 25% discount for a limited time creating a win-win situation for everyone.
Similarly, to make it even more profitable for all the stakeholders involved, Gilad introduced the revenue share model. Where instead of generating leads and selling them to 4-5 solar companies like the standard industry practice. Gilad generated leads for one company and charged 5% of the company’s revenue from the leads. Helping the companies he was working with beat competition.
Today, Growth Artists is considered one of the top growth marketing companies in the industry. Gilad emphasizes that growth marketing is more than just data-driven marketing. “It is an art of experimenting with various business activities to ensure maximum growth” – he says. Gilad hopes to redefine multiple other sectors, not only the solar energy industry.