Pacific Energy Concepts (PEC), based in Washington State, serves the nation with energy efficiency expertise, deploying customized lighting and full energy audits and solutions for companies including IKEA, Costco, and Alaska Airlines. Their journey began with LED lighting retrofits and has since expanded to include full service energy management, HVAC smart motors, and EV charging stations. As a company, the biggest benefit they provide is to save companies money on energy, while positively impacting work environment and the environment.
As PEC grew over the years, their talented marketing team kept its small size, and was stretched in many directions, leaving little time to accomplish the additional marketing tasks that would help them reach even more conservation-minded companies.
Project + Goals
To maintain a high-level of involvement, the marketing team searched for a partner that could help guide them through a tested digital marketing strategy for growth as well as fill in the gaps as needed. PEC came to Solid Digital specifically for their Digital Growth program. In PEC’s period of growth, they needed to be found by their ICP (ideal customer profile) more easily—through search and and an increased online presence.
PEC had just finished building a new website using WordPress and Elementor, the exact host and plug-in combo Solid’s team typically uses for website builds and designs. PEC needed extra hands on deck, along with analytics tracking to confirm their efforts’ efficiency and efficacy. Bottom line: PEC’s marketing team needed help getting more traffic and leads to their brand-new website.
Together, Solid Digital and PEC created one main objective:
Use digital to move PEC from a sales-driven to a marketing-driven organization.
While the company grew, it was crucial optimize the website for engagement and conversions, to track efforts and find the holes in the funnel. Other objectives included bumping up the number of site visits and prospects, and improving site brand visibility and awareness. PEC also sought to create inbound lead generation for new targets.
PEC’s marketing team hoped to build the brand’s authority as well, by showcasing their technical expertise, adding additional content and resources to the site, and focusing energy on their newest services and offerings.
Process
Both teams collaborated from the start to get Digital Growth rolling. Using the program, the KPIs were set up to begin tracking:
- Number of content pieces created
- Organic website visitors
- Number of top 20 keywords (>200 search volume)
- Number of conversions (using Google Analytics)
As the teams investigated the positive and negative forces impacting PEC’s marketing efforts and digital value, they engaged in a work session, building an editorial calendar. This helped PEC’s team plan ahead with internal links, promote new services, and make use of priority keyword mapping.
With this step, they were able to drive additional organic traffic to their website with site updates and page updates. Additionally, because PEC is nationwide, they built geo-targeted pages to use both PPC and SEO, which resulted in an excellent conversion rate.
To help align with PEC’s expansion of services, the teams worked together to create more page updates, including updating the homepage and top nav to include a broader focus on energy efficiency beyond LED lighting. To improve SEO, the teams created an FAQ page using Q&A schema and completed an SEO audit for the entire website. Solid Digital’s team worked with PEC to better display their case studies, as well.
In order to track efforts, Solid’s team began A/B testing and updating contact forms, and set up goal tracking in Google Analytics. The content calendar continued to allow PEC’s marketing team to have a structure in which to work towards their content goals, as well.
PEC’s marketing team also requested help with paid ads, which Solid Digital’s team restructured and expanded for both Google Ads and MSN Advertising.
Results
By investing time and energy in Solid Digital’s Digital Growth program, PEC achieved an 81% increase in their digital value over the course of their first year. The positive forces behind the website, their marketing, and their content calendar and creation all came together to boost slow and steady, month-over-month digital growth.
All told, since the engagement began, PEC has:
- created 95 new pieces of content since the engagement
- received 282 new contact forms through online efforts
In the first year of working with Solid Digital, Digital Growth has been a successful way for PEC to focus, track, and celebrate their marketing efforts.
An On-going Approach
As PEC found, Digital Growth is a long-term solution, using consistency as its base. Through creating (positive) habits and having Solid Digital come alongside to fill any missing gaps (i.e. paid ads, content creation, Google Analytics) they are able to get to the next level of their broader marketing plan, with the statistics on hand to grow their team and their budget.
As for the future, Solid Digital’s development team still gets pulled in for regular monthly site audits to ensure the site is up to date and the page speed is maintained. Much like PEC’s end-to-end, white-glove installation processes, Solid’s team is guiding the goals, and ready to assist with anything else their marketing team may need.
