Solfium

Overview

Solfium is focused on facilitating the customer experience for LatAm consumers switching to solar energy. As a budding startup, Solfium had just begun the switch from targeting investors to catering to consumers.

Its business model is centered on simplifying the installation process with a fixed quote, as well as managing the customer’s savings and environmental impact through its app.

Goals

1. Stand out from the crowd by having a transparent customer experience
2. Create a seamless experience between its website, app, and online social presence

Research

To create the brand’s style guide, we first needed to get the lay of the land. I began by noting and analyzing the solar energy companies in Mexico, paying special attention to the ones that offered the same area coverage as we did.

Competitor Analysis

Style Guide

Social Media

From the beginning, Solfium has had an active LinkedIn account with content catering to VCs and investors. For Instagram, our goal was to target potential customers instead of potential investors, so I started by benchmarking competitor's social media presence in both English and Spanish to understand what type of content was already available to users, as well as to tailor our own brand persona and for content creation and community management. Secondly, I researched influencers in the sustainability space to understand who we have to create for, to map the pain points we have to solve, and to understand what type of content users were engaging with.

Website

For the website, we wanted a strong focus on the story-telling for the brand. Especially for the About page, we aimed to be clear, authentic, and transparent. I used research from the Nielsen Norman Group as page content guidelines and decided to focus on: realistic photography, use of plain language, and stories about its business model, policies, and working at the company.

Learnings

As a startup, we were limited in hands but it also meant we could be more creative and we had to learn how to be the most resourceful.

1. From this project, I was able to learn a lot about social media best practices, especially for LinkedIn and Instagram. Content-wise– welcome posts for new team members consistently achieved more impressions than the average post. Plus, video posts overall received less impressions than image posts on LinkedIn. In terms of images, photos of people received more impressions than infographics.

2. Starting with a competitive analysis right off the bat was definitely the way to go. It allowed me to recognize gaps in the market and to discover future features that we could offer as the product progressed. For example, we filed away the idea of having a community forum for when the product had gained enough users for continous discussions.

3. And, I was able to get a lot of Spanish practice in! Despite time-zone differences and language barriers, it was very fun and exciting to work with the team on this project.