Ask an Expert: Digital Media Strategy with Grant Lapping
Series: Ask an Expert Expert: Grant Lapping — Digital Media Executive LinkedIn: Grant Lapping Commentary by: Anthony Lopes, Lopes Advisory
Introduction
In this instalment of our Ask an Expert series, I sat down with Grant Lapping, a digital media executive with deep experience across performance and brand campaigns in the South African and international digital landscape.
Grant's perspective is particularly valuable because he sits at the intersection of platform strategy and commercial reality — exactly where many solar and renewable energy businesses struggle most. When your sales cycle runs long, your product requires education, and your buyer's journey starts with a Google search they didn't know they needed to make, getting channel strategy right isn't optional. It's the difference between a pipeline that compounds and a budget that evaporates.
What follows is our conversation, with my own commentary on how these principles apply — and often get misapplied — in the renewable energy sector.
Q: How do you decide which channels matter most for a specific business model?
Grant Lapping: The range of effective channels has consolidated significantly. Where media choices once proliferated, marketers now often dedicate substantial budgets to two or three dominant platforms — primarily Meta and Google.
Different channels serve specific roles in the consumer journey. Search excels at converting in-market buyers, while video builds awareness. Platforms like Google benefit from unifying engagement data across their products — Search, YouTube, DV360 — to boost campaign outcomes. Meta operates a similar model across its network.
For e-commerce, blending awareness and performance campaigns on Google and Meta improves results, while TikTok is gaining ground and X has declined. Programmatic display, particularly through DV360, plays a key role in driving new users given its broad reach at lower cost. LinkedIn is best for niche B2B campaigns targeting high-value leads, though at higher costs. Premium media buying suits brands prioritising association with specific content over broad reach.
Ultimately, channel selection should reflect each platform's strengths within the consumer lifecycle and campaign goals.
Anthony's Commentary
This consolidation point lands hard in the solar sector. I see installers spreading thin across five or six channels without the budget or content to sustain any of them. Grant's insight here confirms what I've observed across the EU solar market: for most installers in the €2M–€20M range, the realistic starting point is Google and Meta, full stop. Google captures the homeowner who just received an energy bill shock. Meta builds the case for solar before that shock arrives.
The LinkedIn note is also worth highlighting for solar businesses selling into commercial or industrial segments. If you're targeting facility managers or sustainability officers, LinkedIn's higher CPL is justified — but only if your landing page and follow-up process match the intent. Most solar businesses I've audited don't have that alignment.
Q: What does a good channel mix look like for long sales cycles?
Grant Lapping: A long-term sales cycle should include a continuous digital media presence, supported by short-term strategic campaigns. Always-on marketing helps machine learning algorithms optimise by analysing consumer engagement. Over time, platforms collect data to improve targeting and reach those most likely to convert.
As budgets grow, ads may saturate in terms of identifying in-market audiences, and acquisition costs start to increase. It's therefore important to supplement ongoing campaigns with awareness efforts — video, display, and engagement-focused social content — to expose new audiences and attract fresh visitors. These new audiences provide fresh data and broaden the pool of high-intent consumers for the algorithm to target.
Anthony's Commentary
This is possibly the single most important answer in this entire conversation for renewable energy businesses. Solar installations — whether residential or commercial — are rarely impulse purchases. The decision cycle can span weeks to months, and involves significant research, multiple quotes, and often spousal or board-level sign-off.
Grant's point about algorithm saturation is something I almost never see solar marketers account for. If you're running the same Google Ads to the same geography month after month without any top-of-funnel activity, you're not scaling — you're exhausting a finite audience. The always-on plus campaign burst model he describes is exactly what I build into client strategies: a steady foundation of search and retargeting, punctuated by seasonal awareness pushes timed to energy bill cycles, subsidy deadlines, or tariff changes.
Q: How do you define the role of each channel — awareness, consideration, conversion?
Grant Lapping: Most channels — TikTok, Meta, Google, YouTube — can serve multiple phases of the funnel. The key is selecting the right tactics within each channel and allocating budget to cover all stages from discovery to loyalty.
Meta campaigns can be optimised for reach, engagement, or purchases. Programmatic advertising often delivers cost-effective traffic but generally lacks the strong conversion optimisation of targeted platforms, making it effective for first-time visitors who then feed into conversion-optimised campaigns. Effective budget allocation relies on attribution modelling tools that identify which channels most influence purchase decisions across a consumer's journey.
Anthony's Commentary
The idea that channels are multi-functional rather than single-purpose is something the solar industry needs to internalise. I regularly see installers treating Meta as a "brand awareness only" channel and Google as "lead gen only." In reality, a well-structured Meta campaign with a strong lead magnet — say, a free solar savings calculator — can generate qualified leads at a cost that competes with search.
The attribution modelling point is crucial, and also where things fall apart for most SME solar businesses. They're making budget decisions based on last-click data, which almost always over-credits Google Search and under-credits the awareness activity that created the demand in the first place. If you can't see the full journey, you'll keep cutting the spend that's actually filling your pipeline.
Q: What are the biggest mistakes businesses make when planning strategy?
Grant Lapping: A common mistake is undervaluing brand awareness. Many businesses focus only on bottom-funnel campaigns for quick results, which limits growth if the brand lacks presence and consumer trust. An effective attribution model can show how multiple campaigns — including video ads — contribute to sales beyond last-click search ads.
It's also crucial to bridge online and offline sales by integrating offline data into analytics. Additionally, many marketers fail to use their first-party data effectively — feeding existing customer information back into ad platforms helps algorithms optimise performance.
Anthony's Commentary
Every word of this applies to solar. The industry has a chronic addiction to bottom-of-funnel lead generation — typically Google Search Ads pointing to a "get a free quote" page. It works, until it doesn't. And when CPLs climb and lead quality drops, there's no brand equity to fall back on.
The offline data integration point is especially relevant. A solar installation doesn't close on a website — it closes after a site survey, a proposal, and often a financing conversation. If none of that downstream data flows back into your ad platforms, your algorithms are optimising blind. This is where CRM integration becomes non-negotiable, and where most of the installers I speak to have the biggest gap.
Q: How do you balance short-term performance with long-term brand building?
Grant Lapping: It comes back to the importance of an effective attribution modelling tool. This will help you understand the role an awareness campaign plays in overall sales. It's dangerous to attribute all sales to search without understanding what preceded that consumer performing the search.
Anthony's Commentary
Grant is being diplomatic here, but the underlying message is blunt: if you're only measuring last-click, you're systematically defunding your own growth. In solar, where a homeowner might see a Facebook ad in January, read a blog post in February, and finally Google "solar panels [city]" in March, the search ad gets all the credit for a journey that started months earlier.
For solar businesses scaling into new markets — particularly EU installers expanding across regions — getting attribution right early prevents the painful cycle of scaling spend, watching ROAS decline, and panicking. The answer isn't usually to spend less; it's to measure better.
Q: What does a good content plan look like when you have limited time and resources?
Grant Lapping: With the advancement of MarTech and AI tools, generating fresh and engaging content has become more efficient than ever. Content should be highly tailored to the target audience, leveraging the dynamic capabilities of modern advertising platforms. These platforms can automatically generate advertisements based on website content and customise messaging according to individual consumer interests, as determined by their browsing behaviour.
Anthony's Commentary
This is a practical point that solar businesses consistently underestimate. Platforms like Google's Performance Max and Meta's Advantage+ can now pull creative elements from your website and assemble ads dynamically. But that only works if your website content is strong in the first place.
For a solar installer with limited marketing resource, the priority should be building a library of core content assets — case studies, savings calculators, FAQ pages addressing common objections — and then letting the platforms do the assembly work. AI won't fix bad inputs. But it can multiply good ones.
Q: How should measurement work across channels without drowning in dashboards?
Grant Lapping: A straightforward attribution modelling tool can create dashboards that provide clear insights into where investment is too high or too low, with actionable recommendations on budget adjustment for improved ROI.
It's also essential to establish clear campaign objectives and define KPIs in advance, supported by a measurement strategy tailored to those specific indicators. This enables dashboards to present only the most relevant data, helping to avoid analysis paralysis and ensuring that information supports strategic business growth.
Anthony's Commentary
Analysis paralysis is real, and I see it regularly in solar businesses that have grown beyond a handful of campaigns. The cure isn't more dashboards — it's fewer, better ones, tied to the metrics that actually predict revenue.
For a solar installer, the dashboard that matters most is deceptively simple: cost per qualified appointment, conversion rate from appointment to signed contract, and average contract value. Everything else is context. If your marketing team can't tell you those three numbers by channel, the reporting infrastructure needs attention before the media spend does.
Q: What does strategy execution actually look like week-to-week?
Grant Lapping: It's important to have a clear strategy upfront — channels, approach, assessment criteria. Once a campaign goes live with daily tracking, early red flags become visible, along with what is or isn't working.
Digital media is very fluid given the real-time data available and the ability to shift budgets on the fly. But being too reactive can make it difficult for a campaign to settle and for backend algorithms to effectively learn. There needs to be some restraint around big changes, while allowing tweaks over time to ensure continued optimisation.
Anthony's Commentary
The tension between reactivity and patience is one of the hardest things to manage in paid media, and it's amplified in solar because the feedback loop is so long. You might run a campaign for two weeks, see low lead volume, and panic — when in reality, those leads haven't had time to move through the sales cycle yet.
My general rule for solar clients: commit to a four-week learning window before making structural changes. Tactical tweaks — bid adjustments, creative rotation — are fine within that window. But rebuilding a campaign after seven days because the phone isn't ringing is the fastest way to waste budget.
Q: What are the early warning signs a strategy is failing?
Grant Lapping: It's uncommon for an entire strategy to fail — typically some components underperform while others deliver. The best practice is to benchmark performance against historical data, aiming for continuous improvement. This approach remains effective until a campaign reaches a state of full optimisation, at which point fluctuations may occur due to various external factors. It's essential to analyse the data and identify trends to pinpoint seasonal or other influences.
Anthony's Commentary
The seasonality point is critical for solar. In Europe, enquiry volumes follow sunlight hours and energy bill cycles — peaking in spring and early autumn. A solar marketer who doesn't account for this will misread a natural seasonal dip as a strategy failure and make changes that hurt performance when demand returns.
Build your benchmarks with seasonality baked in. Compare March to last March, not March to February. And when performance genuinely does decline, look at the component level before overhauling the strategy. Nine times out of ten, the problem is a single landing page, a fatigued creative, or a tracking issue — not the entire approach.
Q: If you had 90 days to improve growth outcomes, what would you focus on?
Grant Lapping: I would begin by auditing all current and past campaigns to uncover missed opportunities and quick wins. Using analytics, I would review historical trends to pinpoint issues or successes to leverage. The main considerations are evaluating existing processes, reviewing which platforms are in use, and assessing how effectively those platforms are being used to achieve the necessary KPIs.
Anthony's Commentary
This mirrors the Diagnose phase of my own methodology. Before you build anything new, you need to understand what you already have — and most solar businesses are surprised by what an honest audit reveals.
In my experience, the biggest 90-day wins for solar installers almost always come from fixing what's already there: repairing broken conversion tracking, re-qualifying a neglected lead database, improving landing page load speed, and connecting CRM data back to ad platforms. The instinct is always to launch something new. The leverage is almost always in fixing what exists.
Closing Thoughts
Grant's answers reflect the kind of clarity that comes from operating at scale across diverse campaigns and industries. The through-line in everything he shared — consolidation, attribution, patience with algorithms — maps directly onto the challenges facing solar and renewable energy businesses trying to grow sustainably.
If there's a single takeaway from this conversation, it's this: the channels aren't the problem. The measurement, structure, and patience behind them are. Solar businesses that get those foundations right will find that a focused, well-measured media strategy outperforms a scattered one every time.
This Field Note is part of the Ask an Expert series on Lopes Advisory, where we speak to practitioners across digital marketing, RevOps, and growth strategy about the questions that matter most to scaling businesses — with a particular focus on the solar and renewable energy sector.
