How Sustainable Marketing Can Help Your Business
As a business leader or marketer, you know that sustainable practices are becoming increasingly important. With growing pressure from stakeholders and customers to demonstrate social responsibility, it is essential for businesses of all sizes to look into how they can make a positive impact not just on their bottom line but also on the environment.
Sustainable marketing is one way to achieve both goals – helping your business reach its target audience while minimising environmental harm.
In this blog post, we will cover how sustainable marketing strategies can elevate your brand and benefit your business as a whole.
What is sustainable marketing?
Britain’s Transition Plan Taskforce (TPT) is developing mandatory standards for listed companies and financial firms to ensure comparable plans, with the work completed by the end of 2023.
If you’re in a supply chain, no matter how small your own footprint, the pressure is on to measure and reduce it too.
With consumers increasingly favouring businesses that they can trust and pivoting towards more sustainable lifestyles according to Deloitte, climate-impact aware businesses can attract loyal customers and advocates.
Employees and investors have environmental stewardship on their radar too.
But beyond your business model, how sustainable is your marketing approach?
By employing more sustainable marketing tactics, businesses can make an impactful and measurable statement about their commitment to sustainability while also improving their bottom line.
Additionally, prioritising sustainability can help businesses to stand out from the competition and build loyalty among customers who are looking for eco-friendly brands.
There are many aspects for the marketer or business owner to consider not least the negative impact of greenwash and legislation.
We’ve created a sustainable marketing planning framework to break down the process, step by step; plus a campaign monitor to simplify the process for individual initiatives.
More eco-friendly marketing tactics
When it comes to more sustainable marketing tactics, there is a variety that businesses can employ. Some examples include:
- reducing packaging materials and advertising waste
- promoting digital marketing campaigns instead of print media
- leveraging renewable energy sources for production processes
- utilising biodegradable or recycled materials in products and services, and
- incorporating green messaging into marketing plans.
Strategic sustainable marketing
The starting point is to devise a sustainable marketing strategy, or Charter specific to your business.
Whilst each Charter will be different depending on the audiences, channels, resources and values, here are a few key principles to bear in mind.
First, businesses should focus on creating campaigns that are measured and monitored and have long-term sustainability goals. Rather than using resources inefficiently or relying on short-term tactics that may not have a lasting effect, businesses should focus on creating campaigns that will maximise true engagement. Testing, tracking and tweaking performance closely as they go to maximise ROI.
Second, businesses should consider their target audiences closely when creating sustainable campaigns. For example, if your target market consists primarily of millennials, you may want to focus on campaigns that emphasize environmental responsibility and sustainability. On the other hand, if you are targeting an older demographic, you may want to focus on campaigns that reduce waste of resources.
Add the Planet to your personas to clarify how you will be impacting the planet – both negatively and positively; and what mitigations you can put in place such as off-setting or partnering with others to reduce impact.
Finally, businesses should consider green marketing legislation and best practice when creating their sustainable campaigns.
Two useful guides are:
Monitor the carbon footprint of marketing
The carbon footprint of marketing is a measure of the amount of greenhouse gases emitted as a result of an organisation’s marketing activities. It takes into account things like energy use, transportation, packaging materials and waste management.
By creating a measurement of emissions related to its marketing operations, businesses can gain insight into how their marketing might be impacting the environment and make adjustments to their plans accordingly.
Sharing your goals and a scorecard of the results including footprint will help to engage others in the role of marketing in creating a fairer and healthier world not just in flogging more stuff!
Takeaway
Sustainable marketing is an important part of any successful business strategy. By utilising more sustainable or green tactics, businesses can communicate their commitment to social responsibility while also improving their bottom line.
With careful planning and thoughtful strategies, businesses can stand out from their competition and reap the rewards of sustainable marketing.
We have been developing more sustainable marketing techniques to help businesses reflect their values in the way they market.
With studies showing that consumers increasingly prefer sustainable brands, not to mention the drive from ethics and legislation; the benefits of consumer, employee and investor loyalty are significant.
We’ve developed a sustainable marketing planning process and a campaign reporting tool.
We look at the campaign’s carbon footprint and ways to benefit the planet as well as effectively communicating and reporting to stakeholders.
About Clarity in Marketing
We’ve worked for more than 50 companies in the past few years. We focus on devising more sustainable marketing techniques which benefit our client’s businesses, their communities and our planet, whilst also driving greater consumer loyalty and brand profile. It’s a Win-Win situation!
Next Steps
Talk to us about ways to reflect your sustainability credentials in your marketing.
Our focus is on helping make good decisions on:
- Brand purpose
- Delivering your business goals
- Showing value to stakeholders (including the planet)
- Adapting marketing strategy & targets to reflect sustainability goals
And execution:
- Choice of channels
- Tactics
- Analytics
- Tools
- Reporting
- Governance & legislation.