Understand your solar business' audience with a Journey Canvas

Strategic and tactical planning to reach your audience

Purpose: To understand your audience at different stages through the funnel and help your solar business develop messaging and campaigns.

The Journey Canvas asks questions like:

Who is your audience?
What are their pain points? (What problems are they trying to solve?)
What are the key messages we should show to these people?
What assets do we have for this audience? (If we don't have any, what do we need to create?)
What topics can we talk about to target this audience?

Format: Typically the XEN team fills out the Journey Canvas after getting to know your business (after the Annual Marketing Review and onboarding calls).

In some cases, it may be beneficial to work on the Journey Canvas together on a call with XEN Solar. This call would typically take about an hour.

We use a doc to map out the Journey Canvas (take a copy of the example doc here).

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Choose a focus area

In the Annual Marketing Review, you should have identified what the main problem area is for your solar business. Go back to the AMR doc and check this.

Which stage is the problem in (which stage needs focussed improvement?):

Awareness
Consideration
Decision

Based on this, you'll know which column in the Journey Canvas to focus on first.

Fill out this column first and you can review the rest later.

Goals

In very high-level terms, discuss your goals in your focus area (Awareness, Consideration or Decision).

Here are some examples:

Awareness stage goal: increase website visits
- Action: Look at your current Google Analytics data to see how many website visits you get per month right now. Note this in the Journey Canvas doc so you can refer to it later and see your progress.
Consideration stage goal: convert leads
- Action: Look at your current CRM to understand how many leads you are converting per month right now. Note this in the Journey Canvas doc so you can refer to it later and see your progress.
- If you know how many leads you need per month to reach your revenue goal, note that in the Journey Canvas. i.e. we need 20 leads per month.
Decision stage goal: close customers
- Action: Look at your current CRM to understand how many customers you are closing per month right now. Note this in the Journey Canvas doc so you can refer to it later and see your progress.
- If you know how many customers you need per month to reach your revenue goal, note that in the Journey Canvas. i.e. we need 15 customers per month.
Delight stage goal: get reviews/referrals
- Action: How many reviews/referrals do you currently get? Do you have a process for asking customers for reviews? Do you have a campaign in place to promote referrals?

Audiences

Describe your audience/s in as much detail as possible. Here are some questions to get you started:

Location?
Age range?
Gender?
Job title / Industry?
What issues do they care about? i.e. the environment, saving money.
What does a typical day look like for them? i.e. do they work full time, are they retired?
What channels do they hang out on? Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, etc?

Plus anything else you think is relevant and will help you understand your audience.

Messages

What are their pain points?
What problem/s are they trying to solve?
What solution are they looking for?
What's most important to them? i.e. budget or quality
What information are they looking for?
What topics are most interesting to them?

Based on the answers to the questions above, what kind of messaging will resonate with this audience best?

Emotional messaging (speaking about their lifestyle, improving their situation)
Cost-based messaging (speaking about cost savings, how to save money)
Value proposition messaging (speaking about the value they'll receive)

Don't just list which type of messaging you think will work.

Also include examples i.e.

Break away from higher energy bills - save money with solar today
Enjoy the simple life? Get your energy from the sun, save on power, gain energy independence.