Gary Hilberg from Continuum Energy just posted a great note about using social media to keep customers engaged with the utility to enhance program performance. You can find it here: The Engaged and Knowledgable Utility Customer – Key to Energy Transition.
I thought it was a great post with an interesting position about leveraging media to the phone for utility program success. I’m a fan of social media and have seen first hand the engagement it delivers. A thoughtful and planned approach to social media that delivers personalized communication for relevant audiences in their direct feed or sponsored ads with careful segmentation delivers very high engagement and interactions with customers directly on their phones. No better way to get close to customers if done with care.
Because social media’s engagement path drives content directly to a personal device like a phone or tablet, utilities must take care to more personalized content. Traditional 1:All messages common to display ads and emails often trip up utilities when applied to social media. Messages that attempt to reach everyone invariably fall flat for most, so shouldn’t be used in social media campaigns.
Social media requires timely, relevant and personalized communications in order to be most effective. A few handy tips to help with these key attributes:
- Timely – social media campaigns compete in a torrent of posts competing for attention, so utilities can make their media stand out by capitalizing on trends and triggers. Seasonal campaigns keyed to key dates like daylight savings, the first day of a season, or around major weather warnings to leverage those trends for maximum attention. Better yet, trigger a social media post to an audience based on actual customer information from the CIS system such as a high bill, a special program, or new eligibility for a rebate or special savings to guarantee a timely engagement.
- Relevant – messages that try to apply to everyone won’t work in social channels, so utilities need to tailor their campaigns to key audiences and customer segments. Social posts about EVs fall flat for customers with only combustion engines. Social posts about a business newsletter don’t resonate for residential customers. Social campaigns for wastewater programs don’t work for customers with septic systems. Your utility doesn’t need “Madison Avenue” segmentation exercises by expensive data firms to be relevant. In fact, public information may be available including EV registrations, permits for new HVAC systems and other records help segment your customer pool. Companies like Questline Digital do an incredible job of creating relevant and helpful customer segment profiles specialized for utility companies. When you get segmentation right, your engagement rates on social campaigns will skyrocket.
- Personalized – ultimately, customers respond best to social media posts that demonstrate a connection to their personal needs or expectations. Utilities can tailor campaigns informed by CIS data to create campaigns with individual triggers like usage changes, local impacts, and community affiliations.
Capturing a range of customer attributes in a CIS or CRM solution and leveraging insights for more timely, relevant, and personalized outreach campaigns on social media provides utilities with enormously effective digital channels to engage customers for all manner of program success. From energy efficiency and conservation to usage or outage information, to special programs to offer assistance to eligible customers, social media campaigns informed and triggered with useful customer information should be a regular tool in utility communication strategies.
