In 2023 Ava Community Energy was born after East Bay Community Energy (EBCE) expanded its borders and changed its name to reflect its new geographic service area. Ava is a Community Choice Aggregation company chartered by the State of California to hasten the transition to a carbon-free future. Ava sources and buys green energy, while PG&E delivers and bills customers for it. Ava’s name is barely noticeable on a bill which few can afford and fewer understand.

Situation

In an environment fraught with communications challenges, Outfront Solutions was retained to produce a brand awareness campaign and implement a year-long marketing strategy focusing on brand name recognition and education about Ava’s mission, connection with green energy, and the importance of electrification.

Awareness of the EBCE name was low, PG&E was implementing record-breaking rate increases, 25% of Ava’s customers were behind in their energy bills, and knowledge of CCAs and their mission was nearly non-existent.

With this backdrop, Outfront Solutions implemented an aggressive plan to reach 80% of the service-area market with 3x frequency. Three-month flights were outlined and implemented through an omnichannel marketing approach.

Solution

First, we implemented an AI technology that told us which brand-specific topics Ava’s customers were engaging with (clicks, comments, and sharing). These topics informed how we developed the website, directed the plan, and informed communications strategy, advertising creative, and content development.

The Outfront team (in partnership with Celery Design) created campaign landing pages, defined conversion events, and created advertising creative with an upbeat, witty tone of voice Tactics included search engine marketing (SEM), and hyper-local media in each of 16 service areas. These tactics included pay-per-click (PPC), search engine optimization (SEO, direct mail, local news advertising, paid social media, out-of-door billboard advertising, and Bay Area Rapid Transit station ads.

Results

Traffic to the site showed immediate improvement. Within one month Ava brand began driving traffic while the old EBCE name dropped from #3 to #6. Users were up 28.6%, organic search increased by 17%, and 77% of traffic was driven by direct, organic, and PPC marketing. The advertising cost per click (CPC) came in below average, the brand name PPC advertising achieved a click-through rate (CTR) of 17.59% (significantly higher than the 2% norm). Currently, a collaborative direct mail effort between service area municipalities and Ava is dropping, hyper-local radio advertising is being added, and we achieved 80% reach in the target geographies half-way through the campaign.