In the snowy Portland Maine offices of Energy Circle, we are usually so engrossed with helping our HVAC, home performance, and solar clients with their digital marketing needs that we don’t take the time to talk much about… ourselves. But a couple of weeks ago, Marty Grohman of the Grow Maine Podcast (get it — Grohman, Grow-Maine?) asked our CEO, Peter Troast, to stop by his radio studio and talk a bit about our mission here at Energy Circle.
Sure, Energy Circle may be a growing Maine business, but the mission that drives each and every employee from our in-house development and PPC teams to our designers, content creators and account managers reaches far beyond Maine’s state lines.
Listen in:
Not Your Average Marketing Services Company
Yes, Energy Circle is a marketing company that focuses on the “better building sector,” but as Peter states, the goal here at Energy Circle is to help “improve the built environment” through better digital marketing. If we want the homes and buildings of America to reduce their energy use and carbon footprint in an impactful way, it is going to require much more than just dialing back our country-wide thermostat settings.
It is a two-sided problem:
1: How can we reduce the energy needs of the built environment?
2: How can we then power those buildings using renewable energy sources?
This takes shape in the HVAC, insulation, solar, home performance contractors, and state-run or non-profit efficiency programs of America. The problem with marketing in the better building sector is that it is an indirect service: “The demand for these services is fairly indirect. The idea of improving the energy efficiency of your house, which we as an industry call ‘home performance,’ is not something people are calling up and asking for.”
Running a Small Business in the Modern Era
Contractors have a lot on their plate. You’re an employer, a tradesman/woman, maybe an accountant, and on top of that a marketer. As Peter puts it, “In this modern era, the totality of what you need to be good at to be a good small business is very difficult.” Our niche is to help those business owners by helping on the demand side. To a contractor, this translates as lead generation.
On the recent success of Energy Circle clients:
“We’ve had some enormous success, and I judge that – not so much on Energy Circle’s success – as much as the guy that we started working with five years ago who was less than $1 million in sales, and called me up recently and said ‘I just had my first million dollar month’. . . That’s what rewards us, and at the end of the day knowing that we are helping contribute to a lot of building retrofit work.”
Mega-Trends: Electrification and Healthy Homes
When asked about the future of the better building sector: “There’s a few things going into next year that I’m excited about. One of them is the ‘electrification’ movement.” If you aren’t already familiar with electrification, we’ve provided a complete guide to marketing these kind of programs in our Challenge Accepted series here.
“The other thing I’m interested in . . . is the ‘healthy homes’ movement . . . this growing recognition that the air pollution inside a house can sometimes be five time worse than it is outside. Many of the things that typically would be done to fix a house from an energy efficiency standpoint are exactly the things that you would do to address a healthy home.”
Maintaining an Integrated Approach
At the end of the day, there will never be one single answer to achieving the goal of making America’s built environment more efficient. “Every home is unique, and presents its own unique challenges.” But Energy Circle exists to put contractors at the forefront of this retrofitting movement, using the best in digital marketing tactics, integrations, and tools.
“We deploy a custom set of (marketing) services, using Google ads, using Facebook advertising, having well optimized websites, doing everything necessary to make sure that you’re well optimized in Google . . . (Our) flagship product is primarily a ‘we do it for you’ product, but given the propensity for how many small companies there are going into 2020, we are really focused on more of a ‘do it with me’ product — how we can guide them as to what they need to do, but recognize the fact that small companies don’t have the big budgets for marketing and still need to be good at all this.”