Most client engagements hand an agency one job. Run the ads. Manage the profile. Write the posts. Heliocan handed us the whole thing.
Heliocan Europe is the European arm of the Canadian company Heliocan PV. It sells the HDC100, a DC-coupled battery system that fits onto solar parks that already exist and pulls more revenue out of an asset the owner already paid for. When the project started, there was no European website, no leads, no partners, and no brand in the region. A blank page.
A blank page is the most interesting brief an agency can get. It is also the clearest test of whether a marketing partner can build a whole market or only decorate one.
A blank page is a different brief
When you inherit a funnel that already works, you optimize it. When you start from zero, you have to decide the shape of the whole thing first: who the buyers are, what they search for, what they are afraid of, and where the money to pay for the product comes from. That is not a campaign. It is the commercial architecture of a company.
Heliocan made that sharper, because the product is not one product sold to one buyer. The same battery system is bought by solar-park owners who want more out of an asset they already run, by EPC installers who fit it, by electricity traders who care about stored energy, and by investors who fund projects. Four buyers, four vocabularies, four different decisions. No single message reaches all of them.
One general website was never going to work
The reflex in a new market is to build one company website and point everything at it. For Heliocan that would have buried four buyers on one page and made every one of them do the sorting themselves.
So the web presence is built as a network of focused assets, each answering one buyer's questions instead of all buyers at once. A bilingual Bulgarian and English main site. Separate country pages for Bulgaria, Romania, and Greece, because a grid and a market look different in each. Technical pages explain DC-coupled storage against the AC alternative for the buyer who needs to understand the engineering before the economics. A separate route serves project-scale and investment buyers who are not shopping for hardware at all.
This is the opposite of the usual advice to keep everything on one domain. It works here because the PV market is not one decision. It is several decisions wearing the same word.
And most importantly we had to build it extremely fast and it has to be presentative. Website isnt great but it works, so we can begin our cold outreach and partnership proposals step. And all the digital assets were build under 10 days.
The calculator does the selling a brochure cannot
The hardest objection in battery storage is simple: show me the numbers for my site. A page that says "great returns" cannot answer that. A tool can.
So one of the channels is not a post, it is an instrument. An owner enters their park capacity and local electricity prices and sees modeled daily revenue across a full 24-hour cycle: charge in the cheap hours, discharge into the evening peak. The visitor produces the number themselves, which lands harder than any number we could print. The figures are modeled rather than promised, and the tool says so, but the buyer leaves having done the math instead of being told the result.
For SEO purposes it would be better that we collect data and could send the results as branded asset to the visitor, but we had to build a static website and chose not to be under GDPR regulations at least for the first several months.
Teasers, partners, and leads reach the buyers a website never meets
Plenty of the real buyers never land on the site at all. Electricity traders, aggregators, and EPC firms are reached directly.
For them, the channel is a set of standalone investment and sales teasers built to travel: usable in a cold conversation or passed along by an affiliate. Alongside that runs a partner program with four clear lanes: EPCs and installers, electricity traders and aggregators, energy consultants and referrers, and regional resellers. Each lane is a distribution channel that keeps producing without a new spreadsheet mailed out every month.
The lead sourcing follows the same logic of grounding everything in something verifiable. Instead of buying a generic list, the B2B leads were pulled from the official electricity-trading license register and filtered by real buyer signals: balancing-group rights, generation exposure, and storage activity. Every name traces back to a public source, which is the difference between a list and a reason to call.
The financing layer is the channel most marketing ignores
The biggest brake on solar and storage is rarely interest. People and businesses already want lower energy costs and more independence. The brake is the upfront cost and the question of whether it fits cash flow.
Most marketing stops at the headline and hands that problem straight back to the buyer. On Heliocan we treat the financial path as part of the offer. That means exploring options that make adoption easier: partnerships with financing providers, and the question of whether a compliant ETF, ETF-like structure, or other fund-like vehicle could support adoption at scale.
This still needs proper legal, financial, and regulatory review, and it is not financial advice or a financial product on offer today. The direction is what matters. A buyer who can see a realistic way to pay decides differently from a buyer who only has a reason to want the thing.
When the financial path is missing, sales and marketing carry weight they were never built to carry. When it is present, the same website and the same teaser convert better, because the last objection finally has an answer.
We still have a work to do on this aspect but our hopes are to the end of July we would have a supporting financially structure - no matter if it is our own or by partners.
Why this is the model, not the exception
Heliocan is a clear picture of how we prefer to work. One brand, the whole sales and marketing function, and every channel that shapes the decision running as one system instead of a stack of separate vendors the client has to manage.
The strategy and the business read sit above the channels. The website network, the calculator, the teasers, the partner lanes, the lead sourcing, and the financing exploration are not separate projects competing for attention. They are one market being built in the right order. Sales tells us where buyers hesitate. Marketing turns each point of hesitation into an asset. Finance removes the objection that neither of them can argue away.
Most companies do not have a market problem. The demand is real. They have a path problem: too technical, too fragmented, too much left for the buyer to assemble alone. Closing that gap is a channel question and a business question at the same time, which is exactly where broad-channel marketing earns its place.
We are doing the proper SEO structure to the digital assets and support the chosen social networks: Instagram, Facebook and Youtube. But I hope the strategy is clear here. We have 560 potential clients in Bulgaria and 1300 more in Greece and Romania, our main approach will be direct sales with supporting Branding all the way.
The honest summary
Give us one channel and we will run it well. Give us the whole market and we will build the architecture, the assets, the distribution, and, where it unlocks the sale, the financial path.
Heliocan started as a blank European page. It is becoming a market with a shape: clear buyer routes, real distribution, education that does the selling, and a financial layer that turns an expensive technical purchase into a decision a buyer can actually make.
We will keep you in touch with the project progress here. Next report will be until December 2026.
Dimitar Georgiev is the founder of SmartKey Agency. SmartKey leads sales and marketing for selected projects where positioning, web assets, distribution, and buyer education need to work as one system. See the broader SmartKey service model.