Every year, millions of homeowners overpay on energy bills because they don't know free help exists. Pepco's Qualified Heating and Cooling Equipment program offers no-cost in-home energy assessments to residential customers across Washington, D.C., and Maryland, but awareness remained stubbornly low. The barrier wasn't eligibility. It was trust. Utility messaging, no matter how well-intentioned, reads as corporate. Customers scroll past it. We needed a different messenger. Someone who had actually walked through their front door, watched a technician inspect their HVAC system, and come out the other side saying, "This was worth it." Our goal: leverage micro-influencer authenticity to close the trust gap between a utility program and the families it was built to serve. Specifically, we set out to surpass a 3% engagement rate benchmark, generate earned media value exceeding campaign spend, and most critically, drive real appointment sign-ups that put assessors inside homes.
We re-partnered with Katayah Jones (@katayah), a DMV-based lifestyle and family creator with 65.7K followers who had completed her own QHEC assessment the previous year. That repeat partnership was the strategy's backbone. This wasn't a one-time sponsorship, it was a returning customer sharing what happened after she took the advice. That distinction changed everything about the content's credibility. The campaign ran May 27 through June 4, 2026, across Instagram and Facebook, structured to mirror the actual customer journey in three acts. Act one: an Instagram Reel walking through the QHEC experience, demystifying what happens when a technician shows up. Act two: a carousel post and four supporting Stories sharing specific things Katayah learned from her assessment. Act three: a final push across Instagram and Facebook reinforcing what to expect, designed to neutralize the last-minute hesitation that kills utility program sign-ups. The creative stayed radically specific. No stock-photo families. No generic "save energy" platitudes. Katayah talked about her home, her HVAC system, her surprise at what the assessment revealed. That specificity is what most branded utility content lacks, and it's exactly what made audiences stop scrolling. Instagram Stories drove interactive engagement through polls and direct replies, turning passive viewers into active participants. Facebook extended reach beyond Instagram's algorithm. Every call-to-action pointed directly to Pepco's QHEC booking page, keeping the path from inspiration to action as short as possible. What made this unique in the influencer space: we didn't treat the creator as a distribution channel. We treated her as a case study. The content worked because it documented a real experience, not because it featured a familiar face.
The campaign reached 1,432,142 people and generated 9,454 clicks with a 4.99% engagement rate, blowing past the 3% benchmark by 66%. A single Instagram post drove 959,611 impressions and a 0.71% CTR, the strongest individual performance in the campaign. Year over year, the numbers moved in the right direction across the board: impressions up 357,154, clicks up 2,055, earned media value up to $85,391.72, a 4.27x return on spend and a $14,092 increase over the prior year. Customer sentiment was 100% positive. People shared their own QHEC stories in the comments. They tagged friends. They asked how to book. The campaign shifted the program's demographic reach, with 55% of engagement from women and 32% from the 35-44 age bracket, populations the prior year's campaign had underserved. Most importantly: the campaign generated 2 direct QHEC appointment conversions, compared to zero the year before. Two families who will pay less on energy bills this year because a creator they trusted told them the program was real. In utility marketing, that's not a vanity metric. That's impact.