Public utilities

Utility marketing in Charlotte and nationwide, built for outages, bills and programs

Utility customers search when the power is out, the bill is due or they need help paying it, and almost never for the rebate a program offers. We plan the outage and alert pages, the bill help pages, search, social and video ads, and email and text to customers as one program, and we count program enrollments, assistance applications, paperless sign-ups and lineman applications, not impressions.

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33,100Charlotte-area searches for "duke energy outage" in August 2026, against 4,400 in November 2025
$1.10low-end click cost for "help with electric bill", searched 390 times a month around Charlotte
10Charlotte-area searches a month for "energy efficiency rebates", against 110 for "home energy audit"
$0.07low-end click cost for "lineman jobs", with 390 Charlotte-area searches a month

The short answer

What should utility marketing deliver for a public utility?

Utility marketing should deliver customers who know where to look and act in time: outages checked on the map instead of the phone line, assistance applied for before a cut-off, energy programs enrolled, rate and service changes understood and lineman jobs filled, each traced to the channel that produced it.

Most public utilities spend their marketing on bill inserts, a brand campaign and a press release after the storm. In the utility accounts and websites we review, the gaps are specific: an outage map that slows to a crawl on the one night everyone opens it, assistance programs named in agency language customers never type, rebates promoted on a page nobody finds, and lineman recruiting that waits for job seekers to search. We plan utility advertising on Google around what customers need that week, social ads and video by service area, SEO for every outage, bill and program page, and email and text to account holders as one program, on pages built to WCAG 2.1 AA, the standard the Justice Department set for state and local governments.

What public utilities need marketing to do.

A public utility serves every household in its territory whether they think about it or not, and most only think about it when something goes wrong. These are the jobs we see utilities ask of their marketing.

Outage answers that hold up
When a storm hits, thousands of customers search at once. The outage map, the report form and the restoration updates have to load fast and rank first, before customers jam the phone line.
Bill help found before the cut-off
Customers who fall behind search for help in plain words. Assistance, payment plans and budget billing have to reach them before a disconnection notice does.
Energy and water programs people join
Audits, rebates, weatherization and conservation programs are built to be used. Few customers search for them, so the program has to find the customer.
Advisories everyone sees
A boil water advisory, a water main break or planned work reaches the customers who follow the utility. Everyone else has to hear it by text, email and on the map within the hour.
Linemen and operators hired
Line crews, water and wastewater operators and meter technicians are hard to hire, and the people who could do the work rarely search for the utility.
Results the board and the council can weigh
Enrollments, applications, paperless sign-ups and call volume avoided, by program and channel, set against what each campaign cost.

What utility customers search for, and when.

Monthly searches and estimated click costs in the Charlotte area, with the US for scale. Many utility searches show no advertiser at all, so the notes below read who bids, who does not and when the curve moves.

Monthly searches in the Charlotte area

duke energy outage 12,100
water bill 5,400
power outage near me 2,900
power outage map 1,000
liheap assistance 590
boil water advisory 480
help with electric bill 390
lineman jobs 390
home energy audit 110
energy efficiency rebates 10

Monthly searches and estimated click cost
Search	US / mo	Est. click cost, Charlotte
duke energy outage	90,500	n/a
water bill	201,000	$2.50 to $4.34
power outage near me	246,000	$1.00 to $20.00
power outage map	110,000	n/a
liheap assistance	49,500	$0.47 to $7.30
boil water advisory	33,100	n/a
help with electric bill	18,100	$1.10 to $7.05
lineman jobs	18,100	$0.07 to $1.81
home energy audit	8,100	$2.75 to $33.15
energy efficiency rebates	1,300	$3.02 to $5.34

Outage searches follow the weather, and the map has to win them: "duke energy outage" averaged 12,100 Charlotte-area searches a month, but reached 27,100 in July and 33,100 in August 2026 and 18,100 in January, against 4,400 in November 2025. "power outage map" went from 260 in November to 6,600 in January. Neither showed an advertiser bid, while "power outage near me" drew bids from $1 to $20 a click from other advertisers.
Bill help is searched in plain words, and the program name peaks in the fall: "help with electric bill" and "help paying utility bills" each drew 390 Charlotte-area searches every month of the year, with clicks from $1.10. "liheap assistance" peaked at 1,000 in October and November 2025 and fell to 260 by September 2026, the shape of the heating season.
Nobody searches for the rebate: "energy efficiency rebates", "heat pump rebate" and "smart thermostat rebate" each drew about 10 Charlotte-area searches a month. "home energy audit" drew 110 and peaked at 320 in February 2026, with clicks from $2.75. Program enrollment comes from the bill, email and social ads, not from people searching for the program.

Source: OVERTOP Search Intelligence, 12-month averages for the United States and the Charlotte, NC media market, pulled October 2026. Estimated click cost is the typical range advertisers pay for a top-of-page click.

Our approach: it depends, and the data decides.

A town-owned water and sewer system, a municipal electric utility and a regional authority with several services need different plans. Four things set the starting point.

What has to move Program enrollment, assistance applications before winter, paperless billing, a rate change everyone must understand, or open line crew seats. Each starts with a different channel.
Your storm and program calendar Summer storms, winter cold snaps, the heating assistance season and program budget years each have a date. Pages and alerts are ready before the date, not rebuilt during the outage.
Your regulators and your board Rate cases, notice rules, program funding and public records rules shape what can be said and when. The plan fits those rules and the board calendar.
Who else bids Generator dealers, electricians, bill-pay apps, loan offers and solar sellers bid on searches that look like yours. Where they bid, we exclude them; where nobody bids, the utility wins with its own pages.

Data sets the mix between pages, alerts, search, social, video, email and text for each goal, ties every enrollment and application to its source, and shows which outage, bill and program pages customers find and which they miss.

Town water and sewer system
One service, a small office and a council
Bill pay and start-service pages built for search, text and email alerts for advisories and main breaks, and operator recruiting on social and search.
Municipal electric utility
Electric, often with water, and a storm season every year
An outage map built for peak load, bill help and assistance campaigns before winter, energy program campaigns by season and lineman recruiting.
Regional or multi-service authority
Electric, water, gas or broadband across several towns
A campaign per service and program, alerts by service area, email journeys for new accounts and a report by service, program and channel.

If a public utility near Charlotte came to us, here is how we would start.

This is the plan we would pitch to a real client, built for a fictional city-owned utility near Charlotte with real Charlotte search data. The utility, its phone number and its website are invented. Sample data shows the kind of results a campaign like this tracks; it is not a client result and not a promise.

Sample campaign: fictional business

Kelvesta Public Utilities

Kelvesta, NC (fictional), city-owned electric, water and sewer service · (704) 555-0118 · kelvestautilities.org

Electric service with an online outage map
Water and sewer service
Energy audits, rebates and bill assistance

How our specialists segment search demand by buyer intent

The utility wants more income-qualified customers enrolled in assistance before the heating season, more homes through its energy audit and rebate program, an outage map customers use before they call, and a full line crew. The account is split by what the customer needs, each group lands on the page that answers it, and other utilities, lenders and sellers are excluded before anything runs.

Bill help and assistance

Steady searches all year in plain words, with clicks from about fifty cents to a dollar. Each ad runs only inside the service territory and lands on one page with assistance, payment plans and budget billing, never the bill pay login.

Search	Charlotte area / mo	Est. click cost
liheap assistance	590	$0.47 to $7.30
help paying utility bills	390	$1.10 to $7.05
help with electric bill	390	$1.10 to $7.05
help with water bill	90	$1.12 to $4.07

Energy savings programs

Small searches at the highest click costs in the plan, because energy auditors and contractors bid on them too. The group stays small and peaks in winter; most program sign-ups come from the bill, email and social ads.

Search	Charlotte area / mo	Est. click cost
home energy audit	110	$2.75 to $33.15
weatherization assistance program	70	$3.47 to $22.03
energy audit	40	$2.49 to $14.22
energy efficiency rebates	10	$3.02 to $5.34

Outages and service alerts

The largest searches in the plan, and they arrive in a few storm days a year. The map and outage pages win most of them unpaid; a small budget runs only during an event, inside the territory, so the utility’s own map shows above other advertisers.

Search	Charlotte area / mo	Est. click cost
power outage near me	2,900	$1.00 to $20.00
power outages by zip code today	1,000	$1.20 to $12.60
power outage map	1,000	n/a
report power outage	390	n/a

Lineman hiring

The cheapest clicks in the plan, with steady searches every month. Each ad lands on the line crew page with the pay, the apprenticeship and the storm duty schedule, and social and video reach the people who never search.

Search	Charlotte area / mo	Est. click cost
lineman jobs	390	$0.07 to $1.81
lineman electrician	70	n/a
journeyman lineman	50	n/a
utility jobs	20	n/a

How our negative keyword governance protects the budget

Other utilities’ outage maps and bill pay
Generators and electrician services
Loans, bill-pay apps and rent assistance
Solar panel sales and tax credits
Interest rate and Fed news
Lineman schools and other employers

Our specialists exclude other utilities, sellers, lenders and news searches before launch, and review search terms every week. A rate-hike search around Charlotte is mostly about the Fed: "fed rate hike" jumped to 1,900 in September 2026. A public budget should only pay for customers who can enroll, apply or report here.

How we write and test the Google search ads

Each intent group gets message-matched ad copy engineered by our specialists to qualify buyers before the click and lift expected click-through rate.

Ad for the "Bill help and assistance" group

Sponsored Kelvesta Public Utilities
www.kelvestautilities.org/help/bill-assistance Help Paying Your Utility Bill | Payment Plans and Assistance | See What You Qualify For Kelvesta customers can get help with electric and water bills. Check what you qualify for. Energy assistance, payment plans and budget billing on one page. Apply online or by phone. Energy assistancePayment plansBudget billingTalk to our team

Ad for the "Energy savings programs" group

Sponsored Kelvesta Public Utilities
www.kelvestautilities.org/save/energy-audit Book a Home Energy Audit | Rebates on Heat Pumps | Lower Winter Bills at Home Kelvesta customers can book a home energy audit and see which rebates fit their home. Insulation, heat pump and thermostat rebates for customers. Check your home in minutes. Book an auditRebatesWeatherization helpWays to save

A listing for the customer center and every payment location

Utilities are not a Local Services Ads category, and customers rarely search for the utility’s office until they need to pay in person, start service or bring paperwork for assistance. The customer service center and each payment location get their own Google listing with hours, accessible entrances, the drop box and a link to the right page. Storm updates, holiday closings and advisories go on the listing the same day, where customers look when the website is slow.

Places

Kelvesta Public Utilities Open until 5 PM · Serves Kelvesta, NC (fictional), city-owned electric, water and sewer service Customer service center · Bill payment drop box · Accessible entrance

CallMessage

The Facebook ad

Customers who need help rarely know the program’s name. Facebook and Instagram reach adults inside the service territory from September, before the October and November peak, with the plain question they would type.

A smiling mother stirring a bowl in a bright kitchen while holding her young son, with the father and a baby beside her — Mockup of the Facebook ad

The email

Account holders already read the utility’s email, and nobody searches for the program by name. One email in January ahead of the February search peak, a reminder two weeks later and a rebate follow-up after the visit.

Email header photo: a smiling mother stirring a bowl in a bright kitchen while holding her young son, with the father and a baby beside her — Mockup of the email

The landing page the ads send people to

Each keyword group lands on the page for its job: bill help on the assistance page, programs on the audit and rebate page, outages on the map and hiring on the line crew page. Each page hands off to the application, the booking form, the outage report or the job portal, and each is tracked to the finish.

Landing page photo: a smiling mother stirring a bowl in a bright kitchen while holding her young son, with the father and a baby beside her — Mockup of the landing page on a phone

Other channels, only where they fit

YouTubeA storm shift with the line crew
A short video of a line crew restoring power after a storm, shown to adults in the service territory, with hiring ads that follow Google’s rules for employment ads, which rule out targeting by age, gender or ZIP code in the US.
Text and email alertsAdvisories within the hour
Boil water advisories, main breaks and planned outages sent to the affected streets by text and email, with a link to the map. "boil water advisory" jumped to 2,400 Charlotte-area searches in September 2026 from 70 in January: customers search only after it hits.
InstagramPrograms, season by season
Short posts and ads for the audit in winter, conservation in spring and summer and assistance in the fall, shown to customers in the territory when each program matters.

What each piece turns into, and how they hand off

Pages answer the search Outages, bills, programs and jobs.
Social and video reach the rest By service area and season.
Program pages take the sign-up Apply, book or report.
Email and text carry the news Account holders hear first.

How our team tracks calls, bookings and revenue

Assistance applications and payment plansStarted and submitted applications and payment plan sign-ups, tied to the search, ad or email that brought the customer.
Program enrollments, not page viewsAudit bookings, rebate claims and weatherization referrals by program and week, set against the campaign for each.
Outage self-serviceOutage map visits and online outage reports during each event, set against call volume, so the board sees what the pages saved.
A monthly report by program and goalSpend, applications, enrollments, paperless sign-ups, lineman applications and cost per result by channel, on one page the board can read in a minute.

Sample data

Sample monthly report: assistance and energy programs before winter

$300 sample monthly search budget for bill help and energy savings programs (outage ads and lineman hiring run on their own budgets)

Metric	Sample	Built from
Estimated cost per click	$1.13	Low end of the Charlotte-area estimated click cost for the 8 bill help and program keywords in the plan, weighted by searches (OVERTOP Search Intelligence)
Clicks	265	Budget divided by the estimated cost per click
Applications and program sign-ups	21	8.05% of clicks, the Home and Home Improvement conversion rate in the LocaliQ 2026 search benchmarks, the closest published category for a household service request (LocaliQ has no utility or government category)
Cost per result	$14.29	Budget divided by applications and program sign-ups
Energy audit bookings	3	Sample: assumes about one in seven results comes from the energy savings group, its share of the plan’s searches; most audits are booked from email and the bill
Lineman job click cost	$0.07	Low end for "lineman jobs", about a sixteenth of the program plan average; hiring gets its own budget so it never competes with assistance

Sample data: the kind of results a campaign like this tracks, built from Charlotte search data and a published benchmark. Not a client result and not a guarantee.

Utility marketing services, and which come first.

The four core services carry most utility plans. The others join when the storm season, the programs and the hiring needs justify them; a town water system and a regional electric utility rarely need the same mix.

What has worked for services people sign up for and jobs that are hard to fill.

No published platform story comes from a public utility, so these are the closest fits: a phone and internet carrier that gave people a reason to switch with short videos, a public university that kept its email reaching inboxes, and a career school that filled its pipeline with lead ads. They are those organizations’ published results, not ours; each story shows what we would take from it for a utility.

All success stories ›

Utility marketing from Charlotte, a region where storms and growth test every utility.

We are based in Charlotte, where summer storms and winter cold snaps send outage searches up tenfold in a week, and where towns keep adding customers who have never heard of their utility’s programs. That is why we plan around each service area, from Concord and Mooresville to Gastonia, Monroe and Rock Hill. We also work with public utilities and utility authorities nationwide; the way customers search during an outage or for bill help is much the same everywhere, while the weather, the programs and the regulators change.

Six places utility marketing loses customers.

When we review utility accounts, websites and alerts, these are the places we most often find customers and applicants slipping away, and what we change first.

An outage map that fails on storm night
The map gets ten times its usual traffic in a few hours and slows or breaks. We build outage pages light enough to load on a weak phone signal and keep a plain text status page behind them.
Programs named in agency language
Customers type "help with electric bill", not the program’s acronym. We name pages and ads in the words customers use and keep the program name in the body.
Assistance promoted after the peak
Heating assistance searches peak in October and November. We start the campaign in September so applications arrive before the first cold bill.
Rebates waiting to be searched
Almost nobody searches for a rebate. We take programs to the customer by email, bill, social and video, and keep search for the few who look.
Paying for other people’s searches
Generator sellers, lenders, solar companies and Fed news crowd the searches near yours. We exclude them before launch and review search terms every week.
Reports that stop at reach
Impressions do not show the board what changed. We report applications, enrollments, outage reports filed online and lineman applicants by source.

Questions public utilities ask us.

Should a utility pay for ads during an outage?

Only a little, and only during the event. Outage map searches showed no advertiser around Charlotte, so a fast map and outage page win most of them. A small budget inside the territory on "power outage near me", where other advertisers bid, keeps the utility’s own map on top.

When should a bill assistance campaign start?

In September. Heating assistance searches around Charlotte peaked in October and November 2025, so ads, email and social should already be running when customers start looking, with the application one click away.

How do you get customers into energy efficiency programs?

By going to them. Rebate searches are tiny, so we reach account holders by email, the bill and social ads in the season each program matters, and keep search for the few who look, mostly for home energy audits in winter.

Can marketing help us hire linemen and operators?

Yes. Lineman job searches are steady and the clicks are the cheapest in the plan, so search catches the people already looking. Social and video reach the rest under the employment ad rules, and land on a page with the pay, the apprenticeship and the storm schedule.

Do you work with utilities outside Charlotte?

Yes. We are based in Charlotte and work with public utilities, utility authorities and cooperatives nationwide. The way customers search during an outage or for bill help is much the same everywhere; the weather, the programs and the regulators change.

Can you report on results the board cares about?

Yes. We report applications, program enrollments, paperless sign-ups, outage reports filed online and lineman applications by program and source, with what each cost, on one page.

Get a free audit for your utility.

Tell us what has to move: assistance applications, program enrollment, outage self-service or line crew hiring. We will look at the searches in your territory, your outage and program pages, your listings, your ads and your tracking, and show you where the next enrollments and applicants are.

Get my free audit Call (704) 237-0707