A solar marketing audit that ends in a plan, not a list of ideas.

Nine areas, every time: measurement, paid search, paid social, spend efficiency, website and funnel, organic and AI search, offer and positioning, competitors, and lifecycle. For a solar or renewable energy business we read them against installed systems rather than traffic, so lead quality by source, speed to contact, set and sit rate, proposal-to-signed rate, backlog cancellations and storage attachment are all inside the scope. The output is a findings workbook with evidence and severity, plus a 90-day plan.

A marketing audit. Energy audits are something your company may sell to customers; this is a review of your marketing function, built from your analytics, ad accounts, CRM and invoices. Where your energy audit or assessment offer is used as a lead magnet, we audit how it performs as an offer: cost per booked assessment, show rate, and conversion from assessment to signed contract.

That is usually the first finding. We reconcile marketing's report with qualified appointments, signed contracts and installs, then attribute cancellations inside the backlog back to lead source. A channel that produces cheap signatures and expensive cancellations looks excellent in an advertising report and terrible in the accounts. The workbook shows which channels do that, with the records referenced.

On the same basis as self-generated demand: cost per qualified appointment, sit rate, close rate, cancellation rate and cost per installed system, market by market. Shared leads usually lose on speed to contact rather than on intent, so we measure response times from the record rather than from policy. Findings say which sources to keep, cap or drop, and what would have to change to make a capped source worth more.

Yes, as context for the numbers rather than as an excuse for them. Wood Mackenzie expects US residential solar to contract 21% in 2026 after the Section 25D credit expired at the end of 2025, with recovery in 2027 for residential and 2028 for commercial. We read your performance against that backdrop so a market-wide decline is not mistaken for a channel failure, or the reverse. We give no tax or legal advice.

As far as they affect what marketing can produce, yes. EnergySage's marketplace data shows national battery attachment falling from 41% to 38%, with average quoted prices at $2.49/W and the spread between highest and lowest quotes widening 24% to $0.72/W. Where you sit in that spread, and whether energy storage is presented in every proposal, gets recorded as an offer finding with the evidence beside it.

No. We give no tax, legal, securities or project finance advice, and nothing in the workbook should be read as guidance on incentives, power purchase agreements or third-party ownership structures. We audit how your offer and financing options are presented in marketing and sales assets, and whether prospects understand them, which is a communication question rather than a financial one.

A fixed fee quoted after a scoping call, with deliverables and dates written down before you commit. It varies with the number of markets, brands and ad accounts in scope and the state of your data, so publishing a rate would mislead most readers. For context on scale, The CMO Survey puts marketing at 9.0% of company revenue and 33.6% of digital activity in the hands of outside agencies. Book a meeting for a scope and a number.

Not as part of this. The audit is a project with a defined end, and no retainer is attached, which is what lets the workbook say that a channel we would happily sell is not worth funding for you. Your team, your current agency or another firm can execute the plan. If you later want us to run something, it is scoped and quoted separately.

No, that is part of what the audit measures. Validity's 2026 study found 62% of organisations lost revenue to poor CRM data and only 41% had a named governance owner, so waiting for clean data means waiting forever. We document what the data can and cannot support, label directional findings as directional, and put the repairs in the 90-day plan. Building that layer is marketing operations consulting, quoted separately.

Yes, on output rather than volume. We measure which pages and social media assets produce qualified enquiries, which ones only produce sessions, and whether the library answers the questions buyers actually ask about panels, storage, savings and installation. Visibility in AI answers is measured alongside search, because a data-driven content programme with no citations in either is an expensive habit.

Direction of travel. The audit looks backwards at evidence: what the marketing function has been doing, what it produced, and what is broken. Solar and clean energy marketing strategy consulting looks forward and decides segments and offer priority, positioning, channel roles and budget. Many operators buy the audit first because a plan written on unverified numbers is a guess with headings.

Scope of the question. Growth advisory hunts the commercial constraint on growth wherever it sits, including offer and financing structure, backlog cancellations and install capacity. The marketing audit stays inside the marketing function and produces evidence and a 90-day plan. If you already know marketing is the problem, the audit is the cheaper first step.

Whoever owns marketing, one sales leader, someone from operations who knows the backlog, and someone who can grant access to analytics, ad accounts, call tracking, your CRM and invoices. Expect roughly three to four hours of your team's time across the week: a kickoff, short interviews, and the handover call. Everything else is our work on your data.

Your team runs it, and every action has a named owner and an acceptance test. Many operators book a review at ninety days to check the leading indicators, which takes half a day and is optional. Where you want a standing numbers habit, scorecard advisory sets one up and hands it back, and the parent engagement is the marketing audit itself.