By Fabienne Rodet, VP of Brand Strategy & Communications - twentytwo & brand
From manufacturers, to renewable energy developers and O&M providers, companies from across the clean energy ecosphere are constantly reevaluating their marketing platform to support revenue and stakeholder awareness. This can range from how a brand is positioned for distinction vis-a-vis its competitors, how it communicates with its key audiences or accounts, or how its visual brand emanates confidence and success within a saturated market.
Crafting a compelling brand strategy and messaging is a nuanced journey that goes beyond mere visuals. Statistics reveal that 72% of consumers feel more connected to a brand when its story resonates emotionally. Whether launching a new brand or rejuvenating an existing one, a PR firm or marketing agency can help.
At twentytwo & brand, we’ve undertaken dozens of projects from developing a brand from scratch, refreshing websites and visuals, to creating powerful messaging that compels new audiences. This work has won multiple awards both for the agency (W3 Digital Excellence) and for our clients (CEP Renewables - Power Magazine Renewable Energy Plant of the Year)
Whether launching a new brand or rejuvenating an existing one, here are five best practices to help you and your company ensure that your brand resonates with your audience and stands out in the competitive renewable energy landscape.
1. In-Depth Brand Positioning: Unlock Your Uniqueness
Identify your unique selling proposition to position your brand distinctively in the market. Convey authority in your industry by clearly defining your brand's position and backing it up with consistent messaging every place you show up. Prospects want to know what you stand for, understand your brand values, and work with companies that will be partners for the long haul.
“Outperform Weather” - when a racking company needed to showcase how its ground mount products delivered extreme-weather resilience, it didn't just publish thought leadership content. It built a multi-channel “Outperform Weather” campaign with its own distinctive brand and dedicated microsite, powerful visuals, advertising with media partners, and case studies on various challenges that integrated seamlessly with the brand’s website. The result: a leadership brand position that stood out from the competition, building credibility and trust to engage new prospects.
2. Thorough Competitive Analysis: Strategic Insights
Dive deep into the competitive landscape, dissecting each element, capability, and function to understand your competitive advantage. Uncover market gaps and capitalize on them by communicating where your brand shines. By analyzing competitors' positioning, you can define creative strategies about how you represent your brand, value propositions, and products or solutions.
“Powering Possibilities” - A new energy storage company, successfully launched its brand in the North American market by leveraging competitive insights to inform a unique brand positioning. Looking across the residential storage market, it conducted secondary market analysis followed by in-depth interviews with contractors and distributors to identify key differentiators.
The research helped the team craft a new tagline for the brand, “Powering Possibilities”, which appealed to audiences’ desire for the comprehensive, affordable, efficient, and eco-friendly solution positioning that the manufacturer delivered. This work parlayed into a full-scale strategic PR and communications launch at the Intersolar show, resulting in four media articles, two executive interviews, and over 55k impressions in just four weeks.
3. Compelling Message Development: Words That Resonate
Craft messages that authentically convey the uniqueness that defines your brand. You might develop memorable taglines and slogans that encapsulate your brand essence, ensuring messages resonate emotionally, forging a strong connection with your target audience. We’ve worked with global brands who need regional or audience-specific messaging. This helps ensure your prospects that you understand the nuances of their pain points and needs.
“Sun Driven” - When a new startup geared up to launch its portable solar-powered EV charging solution, its leadership team knew it needed to plug into a unique message platform to capture the attention of investors, the media, and customers. To emphasize the brand's strength in innovation, leadership, and cost-effectiveness in EV charging, the team tapped into unique value propositions including ultra clean mobility, a culture of innovation, and renewable energy veterans. The “Sun Driven” tagline and a compelling brand messaging helped the company launch an entirely new category of EV charging stations, compelling audiences and driving successful partnerships and company growth.
4. Persona Creation: Understand Your Audience
Tailor your persona to align with the values and preferences of your target audience. Maintain a consistent brand persona across all touchpoints for cohesive communication. This includes your web copy, content, blog posts, and press releases. All marketing should speak to your personas and their values directly and succinctly.
“Designing Tomorrow’s Power”- An engineering services firm sought to address its audience’s most pressing challenges through a strategic lead generation campaign. The first step was to design a robust case study that illustrated the pain points of its EPC and utility customers, while showcasing its unique expertise across electrical, structural, civil, engineering, and project management. In promoting its client successes, the company was able to demonstrate its ability to solve difficult challenges, resulting in building credibility – and ultimately, revenue.
Working with a leading solar publication, it drove its target audience to a dedicated landing page that featured how “Six New York solar projects save $1.2M+ through site optimization.” The campaign was deemed a huge success: 365 downloads of the case study and hundreds of sales-qualified leads that generated $500k in new revenue in the first month of the campaign.
5. Comprehensive Approach: Holistic Branding
Adopt a comprehensive approach that encompasses your brand's mission, vision, and values. Develop a voice that resonates authentically with your audience, setting you apart in a crowded marketplace. By building a strategy that consistently reinforces a brand's unique proposition, you can directly tie marketing efforts and outreach to increases in reach across all of your outbound marketing efforts.
“Renewable. Responsible. Reliable” - When a new renewable energy and transmission project developer launched its integrated services, it needed a fresh new brand to elevate its bold mission. The focus was on attaining brand leadership as a trusted, financially bankable developer, known for its veteran leadership team and groundbreaking innovation in resolving complex energy issues.
The re-branding effort started with an in-depth discovery and competitive research phase. Next an enhanced messaging platform was created to propel the brand forward and support the future development of key project milestones for onshore and offshore wind and solar projects throughout North America. The team leveraged this foundation into a fresh new brand design, a new website, new sales materials, and a robust LinkedIn program that increased followers by 4x in eight months. Finally, the developer launched a strategic brand awareness campaign that resulted in 200k+ impressions within four months to wrap up its holistic re-branding effort.
If you are a renewable energy start-up or an existing company looking to evolve its image in a crowded sphere, consider exploring new innovative strategies to position your brand. Whether it is refining your messaging to align with a maturing audience or evolving your branding to make a splash - brand strategy and messaging enhancements can impact your bottom line.
About the author: Fabienne Rodet, VP of Brand Strategy and Communications │ twentytwo & brand
With 15 years in the renewable energy sector and over 20 years in marketing and communications, Fabienne brings strategic insight and tangible results to renewable energy clients ranging from startups to Fortune 500. Twentytwo & brand is a full-service marketing agency serving more than 80 brands throughout the renewable energy value chain. From PR and communications to brand strategy, creative, and website design, twentytwo & brand is an award-winning marketing partner for companies driving the world’s transition to sustainable energy.
