How do you organically maximize awareness for a rapidly growing brand that has a top-rated product by marquee media and consumers alike? How do you enable a brand’s subreddit to grow over 1000% in views and over 300% in subscribers over 12 months? How do you ensure the brand has an increased opportunity to be top-of-mind for a consumer asking other consumers on forums about which brand to buy?

You provide answers — not sales pitches. You provide valuable insights. You remain trustworthy. You enable the community to have more conversations with them knowing you’ll be there to help. Ultimately: You listen. You respond.

BACKGROUND

That’s what GreenRoom enabled and accelerated for Emporia Energy. A key program element we introduced was finding relevant conversations for the brand to proactively respond to. This would help build brand trust among consumers, aligned with building broader awareness through digital marketing (especially SEO and increased community chatter), complementing public relations activity.

If you’ve shopped for an EV charger or Smart Home Energy Management solution during 2022-2024, you’ve likely seen the big buzz about Emporia Energy (EV Chargers, Home Energy Management, Smart Plugs, etc).

That’s thanks to GreenRoom’s impressive media outreach program garnering positive reception from the likes of the Car and Driver to New York Times Wirecutter to CNET. (And yes, we wrote and designed those Emporia blogs featuring these pieces of secured press, too!)

Given the technical nature of Emporia’s smart home energy management products, we continually distill complex topics to bolster mainstream appeal. Messaging that easily resonated with tech-savvy early adopters had to become more accessible to a mainstream audience that can benefit from the cost savings of smart home energy management (anyone with an electric bill) or anyone new to owning or considering an EV.

APPROACH

In general, for many products, you’ll discover lots of people asking search-relevant questions while they are in the consideration stage. It’s no surprise that some of the top search results in Google pull from forum discussions and subreddits.

If you research Emporia Energy or its products, there’s a good chance you’ll end up going beyond social media and ended up reading community chatter on likes of Reddit or an EV Charger forum.

If there was a mention of Emporia Energy on a subreddit or forum related to EV charging or smart home energy management (smart plugs, solar, energy monitoring) from late 2022 to early 2024, it’s likely that Emporia responded with helpful insights.

And that’s thanks to two key elements that enabled an ability to support everything from general questions from potential buyers to complex help with  troubleshooting related to installations:

  • GreenRoom’s Digital Marketing department conversation monitoring know-how and toolsets to develop a Listening & Response program from strategy to implementation.
  • Emporia’s commitment to Customer Satisfaction, enabled by a Colorado HQ-based support team that’s easily available, friendly, and expertly technical.

RESULTS

In Q1 2024, we saw that over 1/3 of brand mentions by the audience and community took place on forums (inclusive of Reddit).* Interacting with the brand’s subreddit for a year and half enabled an over 1000% increase in views and an over a 300% growth in followers.**

Ultimately, we achieved the goal of enabling Emporia Energy to transparently respond to mentions with detailed insight. As well, we provided Emporia with broader consumer insights for use across all consumer-facing channels. This aligns with Emporia’s core customer service pillar, as well.

There are other factors this activity likely influenced:

  • Built more brand trust and awareness among the most engaged communities, especially in the consideration stage, wherein we didn’t see Emporia’s competitors participating.
  • Provided an SEO benefit, as many of these forums show up in search which helps with the awareness stage as well, aligned with PR activity.
  • Provided a contemporary insight avenue for those who don’t use email, phone, or chat to contact Emporia for questions.
  • Apprised the Emporia support team of and/or collaborated them on responses for hundreds of examples of mentions of the brand as Zendesk support tickets (inclusive of social media mentions) that could help to discover messaging themes for future optimizations — from easier technical support explainers to improving consideration-stage messaging.

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Interested in learning more about how GreenRoom can help your company meet and exceed your business goals? Contact us so we can talk shop. Contact info: Email: [email protected]; phone: (305) 347-1787.

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Read more about our other work for Emporia Energy, inclusive of growing the brand’s profile through highly effective public relations strategy and tactics by clicking the image below:

ABOUT EMPORIA ENERGY

Emporia was launched in 2018 in Littleton, Colorado, by a team of developers, designers, engineers, energy geeks, and customer support staff with a vision of starting a truly different kind of company. A company that believes in putting others first – starting with our customers. A company that believes that capitalism, when done right, can have a huge positive impact on society. A company that believes it can truly make the world a better place.

Emporia exists to revolutionize home energy with smarter home energy management technology that helps its customers save on electricity costs. Its team strives to understand the impact of energy use, where it comes from, and what it costs; and they want to empower customers to understand it too.

The brand’s goal is to save customers money by making their homes more energy efficient through its Smart Home Energy Management technology. They aim to create this technology at the lowest cost and the highest quality, ensuring it’s affordable to as many people as possible. By reducing their customers’ energy use and saving them money, Emporia is helping people create a healthier planet and build a brighter future for us all.

*Based on monitored brand keywords and platforms via Brand24. Share of Mentions circle graph highlights February 2024.

**Reddit view and audience increases account for the period of 03/23 thru 03/24 compared to the previous 12 month period.