According to the Solar Energy Industries Association U.S. Solar Market Insight 2016 Year-in-Review report, the solar market doubled its size in 2016 and is on pace for record-breaking growth. “Over the next five years, the cumulative U.S. solar market is expected to nearly triple in size.”

With this blockbuster growth rate, the competition is fierce amongst solar companies to attract high-intent solar prospects, and lead generation is taking center stage. Events, content marketing, SEO, and lead acquisition campaigns are all being employed to entice prospects, with purchased solar leads remaining the most scalable channel.

Purchasing leads sounds simple, but unfortunately for buyers, the solar lead supply marketplace is highly fragmented and relatively unsophisticated. Dozens of lead suppliers deliver different levels of quality, consistency, targeting, and price flexibility.   Under these conditions, scaling profitable and operationally efficient lead programs is a challenge.

For solar buyers navigating this landscape, a number of factors make it tough to succeed:

• Fragmented universe of lead suppliers
• Static or inflexible pricing and targeting
• No ability to deploy valuable data or integrate real time signals
• Limited lead inventory insights
• Time consuming processes to unify campaign activity and performance

And, unfortunately, these realities are creating real costs for solar companies:

• Budget is wasted on low or no conversion leads;
• Customer acquisition costs go up because of inflexible and negotiated pricing; and,
• Call center efficiency suffers because of the inability to match lead delivery and capacity.

But this is 2017! There should be a better and more efficient way to buy solar leads. Enter programmatic technology. Acquisition marketers across industries are discovering that the programmatic, platform based, approach to running campaigns in display and search, can be used to manage more optimized and efficient lead campaigns.  

MediaAlpha for Advertisers, the programmatic platform for vertical search clicks, calls, and leads, empowers marketers to:

• Replace insertion orders with dynamic real-time buying
• Stop negotiating and manage lead bids in real-time, according to performance
• Dictate targeting and right pricing across all lead fields
• Control lead flow with budget and pacing tools
• Integrate data to better inform when to buy and how much to bid
• Achieve operational efficiencies by unifying lead campaigns in one platform
• Unlock audience and campaign insights through centralized and comprehensive reporting

Download our MediaAlpha for Advertisers eBook to learn how you can improve your lead buying process, campaigns, and subsequent results: