Houston Energy Audit

Situation/Challenge

Anticipating the emergence of a new market following passage of Federal HomeStar legislation, Houston Energy Audit (HEA) came to Normal Modes wanting to be the leading provider of home energy audits in Houston and eventually all of Texas. The company's owner challenged Normal Modes to develop a complete marketing strategy for the new company, including branding and positioning of the company and product, and website development.

Objective

In order to become the leading provider of home energy audits in Texas, the HEA website needed to achieve the following:

  1. Educate the consumer about energy audits.
  2. Explain the pending HomeStar legislation and how the consumer can benefit from it.
  3. Establish trust and credibility in a market of biased practitioners.

These are not easily measurable objectives, but they are critical first steps to sales. Home energy audits are a relatively new service. As such, most consumers do not know what an audit is, why they would need one, and what to do with the results. Additionally, most consumers are not aware of the pending HomeStar legislation and how they could benefit from it. So the primary objective of the website had to be to educate the consumer. Moreover, up until now, companies that provided energy audits usually did so as part of a sales tactic to push windows or solar panels. As there were no independent, unbiased auditors, the website also had to establish trust and credibility with the consumer by emphasizing HEA's unbiased, prioritized recommendations based on cost-benefit analysis.

Services

Strategy/Tactics

The target audience for the marketing strategy was the 70% of homeowners in the Houston area whose homes were built prior to 1995 – before energy efficiency was a significant feature of new home design.

In order to address the objectives, the website featured:

  1. A homepage designed to establish trust and begin the education process on first touch.
  2. Seven videos totaling nearly 15 minutes, explaining the primary tests performed during an audit, why they are performed, and their benefits.
  3. A page with illustrated use-cases dedicated to explaining the HomeStar program as a simple four-step process.
  4. Staff bios with pictures to help foster rapport with potential clients.

Message Alignment

Since a primary objective of the website was education, it was paramount to avoid intimidating visitors with technical jargon or bureaucratic complexity. The site copy and video scripts struck a friendly and approachable tone to help convey that the concepts were not difficult. Normal Modes also tried to find a balance between appearing knowledgeable (i.e. credible) and professorial (i.e. boring). Imagery on the website was designed to either educate, as in the case of the benefits illustration, or to engender feelings of trust. Normal Modes used friendly, average looking people in average looking homes to emphasize that energy audits are for everybody.

The videos were also crucial to developing trust. Normal Modes used actual auditors in the videos so visitors could become familiar with whom they were inviting into their home.

Results

Despite HomeStar's failure to pass Congress, HEA has successfully used the website to promote the benefits of home energy audits and to establish trust with state and local government leaders. Since the site launched in the summer of 2010, both the City of Houston and The Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs have launched projects that use HEA to perform energy audits on homes in low-income neighborhoods. Because these homes are often the least energy efficient, these local and state programs provide subsidies to low-income homeowners who complete any updates recommended in the audit. The government programs also trust HEA to perform follow up audits to ensure the improvements were properly installed and are providing the expected benefit.