588 kW in One Campaign: Inside an Alberta Solar Installer's Lead System
How Simple Tree Digital built a Calgary-to-Edmonton residential solar pipeline from organic content and video, Facebook, and AI-booked appointments — and set a 588 kW single-campaign close record along the way.
The Situation
This Alberta residential solar installer runs across the Calgary-Edmonton corridor, with smaller satellite markets in places like Cold Lake. Alberta's deregulated energy market and the federal Canada Greener Homes incentives create real buyer motivation, but the installer's lead flow was inconsistent — bursts of volume from word-of-mouth and referrals, then dry stretches with no reliable way to fill the pipeline.
The goal wasn't just "more leads." It was a system that could run through Alberta's seasonal swings: organic content and video to build trust before someone's ready to buy, paid social to generate volume on demand, and an AI layer to make sure nothing booked went cold waiting on a callback.
The core problem: Referral-driven pipelines feel great until they don't. Without owned channels generating demand on a schedule, a slow month is just bad luck instead of something you can diagnose and fix.
Our Approach
Phase 1: Organic content and video first
Before scaling paid spend, we built the organic layer: city and service pages for the core Alberta markets, Google Business Profile optimization, and a video content system covering the questions Alberta homeowners actually ask — net-billing credits, how solar performs through Alberta winters, and what's left of the Canada Greener Homes Loan. Video does double duty here: it's used as organic YouTube and social content, and it gets repurposed directly into paid Facebook creative, so the same asset works two jobs.
The 3-pillar system we use to sequence organic, paid, and AI follow-up for every solar client, including this one.
Phase 2: Facebook at scale across Alberta markets
With organic laying the trust foundation, we built out Facebook as the volume engine — running dozens of concurrent ad sets segmented by market and audience: Calgary, Edmonton, and province-wide dynamic campaigns targeting 18+ and 30+ homeowners. At any given time the account runs 70+ active ad sets testing audience and creative combinations against a live cost-per-lead benchmark, pausing underperformers and scaling winners weekly.
Phase 3: AI-booked appointments with bill collection built in
Every Alberta lead gets a consistent AI-driven follow-up sequence: confirm interest, book a discovery call, and — critically for a solar quote — collect a copy of the homeowner's utility bill before the call happens, so the sales team walks in with real consumption data instead of guessing.
Phase 4: Appointment flow and call center tracking
Booked doesn't mean sat, and sat doesn't mean closed — so every stage is tracked separately: leads in, disqualified, appointments booked, appointments sat, and deals closed, broken out daily by source. That visibility is what let us tell the installer which part of the funnel needed attention in a given week instead of guessing.
Alberta Keyword Strategy
The organic layer was built around Alberta-specific search intent in three tiers, the same framework we use across every solar market:
- Head terms — "solar panels alberta," "solar installer calgary," "solar company edmonton" — anchoring the provincial and city hub pages.
- Incentive terms — "canada greener homes loan," "alberta net billing," "solar rebates alberta" — capturing homeowners researching financing before they're ready to talk to a rep.
- Winter-performance and objection terms — "do solar panels work in alberta winter," "solar panels and snow" — the exact doubts Alberta homeowners search before buying, answered directly in both blog content and the video library.
That third tier matters more in Alberta than almost any other market we run: winter-performance doubt is the single biggest objection standing between an Alberta homeowner and a booked call, so it gets its own content track instead of being buried in an FAQ.
The Outcome
The Alberta account has become a reference point we point to in every other Canadian market conversation: a single campaign closed 588 kW of installed capacity, a record for any campaign we've run in Canada to date. That result sits on top of a pipeline that doesn't depend on any one channel — organic and video build trust and feed the content Facebook creative is built from, Facebook supplies on-demand volume across dozens of concurrent ad sets, and the AI layer makes sure every booked lead shows up to a call with a bill already in hand.
What Made This Work
- Organic and video built first gave Facebook creative a head start and gave homeowners answers to their winter-performance objections before a rep ever called.
- Dozens of concurrent Facebook ad sets across Calgary, Edmonton, and province-wide audiences meant volume didn't depend on any single creative or audience working forever.
- AI follow-up with built-in bill collection meant the sales team walked into every call with real consumption data instead of a cold start.
- Daily funnel-stage tracking — leads, booked, sat, closed — turned a slow week into a diagnosable problem instead of a mystery.
Key insight: In Alberta specifically, winter-performance doubt is the objection that kills deals before they start. Content that answers it directly — not defensively — converts better than any amount of extra ad spend thrown at the same cold audience.
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