Solar Lights - $4.6k/mo
Steps to launch a D2C single-theme store around solar garden lights, and grow it through paid digital channels.
As a product area, solar lights have seen growing interest over time. This interest spiked massively during the early days of the pandemic, but still appears to be on a strong upwards trajectory.
Despite the growing demand, the search ads landscape still appears to be under-priced, and it wouldn’t be too challenging to grow a single-theme store around the category.
Keyword analysis
You can see the top 25 non-brand search keywords in the space here, along with an estimate of click prices at the top and bottom of each results page.
There’s plenty of demand for solar lights, with around 2.5 million searches per month in Europe and North America.
Despite the potential for high AOVs and conversion rates, volume is fairly cheap. Over 1 million searches per month have a first page minimum bid of $0.30, meaning you only have to bid 30 cents to appear on the first page of Google ad results.
Campaign build
I’ve put together a typical campaign build that you might use to sell solar lights via paid search. You can find it here.
If you’re not familiar with this type of spreadsheet, it’s basically a list of keywords and ads that you can upload into a search ads platform to start bidding on relevant keywords.
Each keyword has its own tailored ad copy, meaning you can serve relevant ads on every keyword that you’re bidding on. This might cost you hundreds, or even thousands, of dollars from a marketing agency.
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Targeting strategies
In addition to paid search, you could also grow a brand in this space using social & display ads.
Prospecting
I’d expect prospecting to be harder for something like solar lights, given that it’s difficult to instil a need for them quickly through a channel like paid social.
If I was to try prospecting I’d start off by looking at directly relevant audiences like solar lamp (4.7 million users) or solar panel (26.2 million users).
Depending on how these do, I might also try a home-owner audience layered on top of a solar energy (147 million users), to try and find users interested in home improvement and have some leaning towards solar products.
Retargeting
On top of the usual retargeting considerations, I’d advise focusing on serving ads within the first 3 days of a visit.
I wouldn’t see solar lights as being especially high-consideration products, and so you’ll want to hit potential customers before they have a chance to convert elsewhere.
Given the low unit cost on most lamps, an aggressive strategy could be to offer a free extra item to users who purchase a certain number from you. This could work given that:
It gives a reason for users to re-visit your store.
It could potentially push up AOV, and compensate for the retargeting spend.
Profit forecasting
So, what sort of profit and ROI could you expect to see if you built a brand around solar lights?
I’ve put together an interactive dashboard here which lets you forecast the profit you could make from running paid search campaigns in this niche.
You can adjust the inputs along the top of the dashboard to see how different conversion rates, margins, and bids would affect your results. If you’re unsure, you can enter ranges for the inputs, and your outputs will be displayed as probability distributions.
The numbers in the dashboard rely on forecasting data from Google for the relevant keywords. They’re also just projecting profits on Google search ads, not including any other channels, so are really a lower estimate of the volume you could generate.
Creative strategies
I think the main creative danger on a product like this is in trying to get too clever. Simple, clean product shots (especially when retargeted at people who’ve viewed those products before) are the way to go.
A look at other players in the game shows that they’re taking this approach too.
While this might break the above rule of not trying to be clever, there’s also potential to do scheduled campaigns that only run in the evenings and show what a user’s garden could look like when lit up.
Summary
That’s a quick roundup of how you could grow a brand selling solar lights online.
As we saw at the start, the category has not just a strong baseline level of growth, but has seen an acceleration of this growth since the start of the pandemic. Ad inventory is still relatively cheap despite this acceleration, making it an area worth exploring.
If you have questions on anything above, drop me an email and I’ll see if I can help.
Thanks for reading.