Consumer Research Disrupts Conventional Thinking on How to Get People to Embrace Energy Efficiency

Utilities and their marketing mavens may be speaking the wrong language to their customers, according to our recent proprietary consumer research. 

We’re focusing on how your residential customers engage with energy efficiency across their own social channels. In order to increase their participation in your energy efficiency programs, we want to first understand how/if they’re talking about energy efficiency with their friends. Is energy efficiency relevant to their conversations? If so, how are they talking about it?  On a personal and homeowner level, energy efficiency content tends to be focused around two primary conversation types: exploratory and experience sharing. Users look to social media to ask their peers about processes, costs, and benefits, relying on their extended personal networks to supply information about offers, opportunities, struggles and worth to these types of changes. 

This week, we’re focusing on how your business customers promote energy efficiency across their own social channels. Because in order to increase their participation in your programs, we should first understand how/if they’re using energy efficiency to increase engagement with their own customers. How is energy efficiency relevant to their business and to their customers? How do they communicate about it? Is it working? 

The ongoing conversation surrounding energy efficiency on social media continues to ebb and flow on a daily basis. Featuring a widespread combination of posting angles and discussion types, as well as both positive and negative engagements throughout a variety of channels and audiences, we take a look at how the Industry sector, Small Business, Large Business and Personal social networks are promoting, sharing, engaging with and talking about Energy Efficiency content in social media. First up is Industry. 

As marketers, we’re able to track everything we put out into the ether. So most of the time we tag just that in order to provide clients every impression, click, visit, open, like, follow, share… the list goes on.

Interesting though that what matters most are not campaign results by the click, but overall customer satisfaction scores and annual kWh saved. These are the real measures in which prove you successful, or not. 

First Party Data.

Is it invasive to use this tactic to create personalized connections with your customers?

Or, does it actually provide value by ensuring the messages customers encounter deliver a benefit from your brand? 

83% of research participants correlate “energy efficiency” with a long and uncertain payback period. What does this mean?

It means that a majority of customers hear a regularly used term, energy efficiency, and stop listening. It means that the visions triggered by “energy efficiency” are of new heat pumps, fancy refrigerators and MONEY. It means the extra money on their utility bill is easier to cope with than the price of a solution. 

69% of research participants state they find themselves adapting to inefficiencies in their homes and/or businesses rather than seeking solutions. Here’s what they said:

“You have to educate someone about inefficient areas so they pay attention to it. They just assume some costs are constant and part of their daily lives. People just get used to it. They think it’s outside their realm of control.” - CEO, Global Software Company 

Utilities are working hard to inspire their customers to take action on energy efficiency. There is great opportunity for these power providers to leverage consumers love for technology in this effort. Consumers covet technology across multiple daily experiences. It empowers, simplifies, enhances, excites, connects and creates efficiencies across so many needs and wants. Every day we are engaged with technology. The technology conversation is a great insertion point for utilities.