What do you do when you have a small budget and need to get people excited about a not-so-exciting subject?
You go for the low-hanging fruit.
Sometimes a concept is as good as the first thing that comes to your mind. The City and County of Denver, along with their rebate partner, Michaels Energy, needed to put a campaign together to promote a rebate program targeting building owners and property managers. The rebate would allow these target audiences to replace their gas-powered heating systems with electric heat pumps, saving them money and reducing their carbon footprint. The initiative is a sustainability-based one, but due to city rules and regulations, the replacement will ultimately help these buildings avoid fines for not keeping their carbon footprint down.
Get Pumped For a Great Concept.
The campaign language plays on the word ‘heat pump’ to tie building owner and property manager motivations with the product offering. It’s catchy and grabs people's attention, but most importantly it leads to supportive copy that is straightforward and educational. After some competitor research, most other energy companies and cities are using ‘Save Money,’ ‘Save Energy,’ or ‘Better for the Planet and Your Heating Bills’ type of language. Since we wanted to avoid over-promising, this campaign language focuses on the motivation these audience members have to stay ahead of the curve. We want to urge them to make a power move: do what’s best for their asset, be an early adopter of new and efficient tech, save themselves money, avoid fines — get pumped to get ahead. The tone and voice of this campaign is upbeat, motivational, direct, matter-of-fact, and in line with CCD’s stance of being a ‘good news machine.’
Pumping Up Results.
After a few months on the market, the Facebook and Google ads we ran helped increase applications for the rebate from an average of 1 a week to 9 a week!
