Hiring a marketing agency for a solar company, or doing it yourself
What a fair price is, the red flags specific to solar marketing, lead vendors versus owned channels, and why a trial should come before a contract.
Solar owners get pitched more than any other trade. Lead vendors, appointment setters, agencies that specialize in solar, agencies that specialize in nothing, software platforms and a rotating cast of people who ran ads for a national sales organization for eight months and now sell consulting.
Some of it is good. A lot of it is priced as though your $21,000 ticket means you cannot count. Here is how to tell the difference.
First decide what you are buying
Three different things get sold as solar marketing and they are not interchangeable.
Leads. Someone else generates a homeowner's contact details and sells them to you at $100 to $500, shared or exclusive. You are renting demand. It works, it scales instantly, and it stops the day you stop paying. You never own anything.
Appointments. Someone qualifies the lead and books a consultation, usually at $150 to $600 per booked sit. Better than raw leads if the qualification is real. Verify the sit rate before you scale, because the incentive is to book anyone.
Owned channels. Your Google profile, your reviews, your website, your ad accounts, your customer list, your content. Slower, and it accumulates. A company with 200 reviews and forty ranked pages gets leads at close to zero marginal cost forever.
Most solar companies buy the first two exclusively and never build the third, which is why their cost per acquisition never falls. A reasonable split for a company doing eight installs a month is to keep buying leads for near-term volume while spending a fixed monthly amount on owned channels regardless.
What a fair price is
For a local installer, roughly:
- Google Ads management: $800 to $2,000 a month, or 10% to 15% of spend at higher budgets, plus your ad spend of $3,000 to $6,000.
- Meta ads management: $700 to $1,500 a month plus $1,500 to $2,500 spend.
- Local SEO and Google profile: $700 to $1,800 a month.
- Website build: $3,000 to $9,000 one time.
- Review generation and follow-up automation: $400 to $1,000 a month.
- Full service across several channels: $2,500 to $6,000 a month plus ad spend.
Above that range you are usually paying for a national agency's overhead. Well below it, one person is managing thirty accounts and yours is getting twenty minutes a month.
Compare it to the alternative honestly. If you buy 20 leads a month at $250, that is $5,000 monthly on rented demand that leaves nothing behind.
Red flags specific to solar
Guaranteed appointments with no sit-rate definition. "Twenty appointments a month guaranteed" means twenty calendar entries. Ask what counts as an appointment, what happens when the homeowner does not answer the door, and what the historical sit rate is across their solar clients. If they will not answer, that is your answer.
They own your ad account, domain or Google profile. Non-negotiable. Every asset is created under your ownership with them given access. Solar has a long history of vendors holding domains hostage at renewal.
Lead quality guarantees with a replacement policy instead of a refund. Replacements let a vendor recycle bad leads indefinitely. Ask for the refund terms in writing.
They will not name their other solar clients. Confidentiality is fair for a competitor in your county. A blanket refusal to name a single client in any market means there are none.
Free solar messaging. If their creative implies a government program provides free panels, walk. It converts short term, it poisons your market, and it is the reason the trade has the reputation it has.
No mention of the sales cycle. Anyone proposing a 30-day judgment window on solar has not run solar. Ask how they measure a channel with a 60 to 90 day lag. If they cannot describe offline conversion imports or a CRM-based measurement, they will optimize to cheap form fills.
A twelve-month contract before anything has run. The whole reason this site offers a trial is that this is standard practice and it should not be.
Questions worth asking on the call
- Who specifically works on my account and how many accounts do they carry?
- Will you import booked consultations and signed contracts back into the ad platforms as conversions?
- What is your plan for the first 30 days, and what should I expect at day 90?
- How do you handle my review process, and who writes the responses to bad reviews?
- What do I keep if I leave in month four?
- Show me a solar account's search terms report with the negative keyword list.
That last one separates people who have run solar accounts from people who have not. Anyone who has seen a solar campaign burn budget on free-panel, job-seeker and solar-pool-heater queries will have a long negative list ready, and will be glad to show it.
What to keep in house no matter who you hire
Some things cannot be outsourced because they happen inside your operation.
The review ask. An agency can build the system, write the scripts and chase the tally. Only your coordinator can ask at permission to operate. See the reviews guide.
Answering the phone. Nobody outside your company should be the first human a five-figure buyer talks to, at least not in a way that cannot get them booked immediately.
Photos and video. Ten minutes a week from a crew phone. No agency can manufacture your installs.
The follow-up conversations after day 14. Automation sends the touches. A person closes.
Doing it yourself
Entirely viable for a small installer, and it is what most of the good ones did before they could afford help. A realistic DIY order:
- Google Business Profile, properly. Three hours, then twenty minutes a month. Start with the profile guide.
- The review process. One hour to set up, five minutes per install.
- Missed-call text-back. Twenty minutes.
- A nine-page website. Two to three weeks on a template.
- The follow-up sequence in whatever CRM you already pay for.
That list costs almost nothing and beats what most of your local competitors have, given 13.1% of solar companies have no website at all and the median company has 18 reviews.
Hand over paid advertising when it stops being a hobby. Google Ads in solar is genuinely difficult, the clicks are expensive, and a badly built account loses more per month than management costs.
Why a trial rather than a contract
A solar owner is asked to commit thousands of dollars a month to a stranger on the strength of a slide deck, in a trade where the sales cycle means nothing is provable for 90 days. That order is backwards.
Fourteen days will not close a solar contract and we will not pretend otherwise. What it will show you is whether the phone rings, whether the leads are homeowners rather than renters, whether the ad account is built by someone competent, and whether the people replying to you know the difference between a string inverter and a microinverter. That is enough to decide with.
Frequently asked
Should I hire a solar-specific agency? Helpful but not decisive. Someone who understands the cycle, the ticket and the door-knocking reputation problem matters more than someone who has a solar logo on their site.
What about an in-house marketing hire? At around 15 installs a month it starts to make sense, usually paired with an outside specialist for paid media.
How long before I judge? Ninety days for lead flow and quality. Six months for cost per signed contract.
Every service here is available as a free 14-day trial, no card, built in your own accounts. Text or call (385) 832-6175, or read the FAQ.