How to successfully run your green marketing campaign
iPad plants office coffee business green branding
Photo by Leone Venter
As more and more entrepreneurs are becoming aware of the impacts of their business on the environment and the importance of becoming more sustainable, they are also starting to see the benefits of sharing insights on their sustainability journey through green branding and marketing. With the demand for sustainable and ethical goods and services increasing more rapidly than ever before, we can see businesses across a variety of sectors making sustainability claims.
Whether you live up to your sustainability claims or not can really make or break your marketing campaign’s success and even your business’ image. In this post, we will address the topic of green branding and marketing, explore workable methods on how to optimize your green marketing campaign whilst living up to your sustainability claims and how to tread the fine line between green marketing and greenwashing.
Analyze, set goals, improve & reflect
Businesses don’t simply become more environmentally and socially responsible overnight, nor is there an one-size-fits-all solution to alleviating some of our environment’s biggest threats. You will need to put in work to improve the social- and environmental performance of your undertaking before you claim to be sustainable and on a consistent basis repeat the steps listed below:
Analyze. Before even creating a green-marketing campaign, it’s important to first understand the social and environmental impacts of your business and its supply chain. Ask yourself, how is my business affecting the natural or social environment? Is my business heavily reliant on plastics? Does everyone part of the supply chain receive a fair wage? Are a lot of (scarce) resources required to create my business’ products or services? Are there ways through which my business can contribute to overcoming social- or environmental challenges, such as poverty or climate change? Ask your colleagues and staff how they think your business could become more socially and environmentally responsible, and write down all of these points to set goals. There are plenty of free online courses available for those interested in improving their socio-environmental impacts. If you want to do an entire impact assessment, you can reach out to sustainability experts who can support you during audits.
Set Goals. Once you know how your business is currently impacting the environment and society (both positively and negatively) and have established a baseline for improvement, you can start with setting goals. Make sure that your goals are realistic, and include short-, medium- and long term goals. Using the SMART method can make it easier to set realistic goals. SMART goals are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound. Goals could for example be going plastic free, carbon reduction, carbon neutrality, carbon positivity or contributing to the circular economy.
Implement and improve. then you can start implementing the needed changes for improvement. Becoming more responsible and environmentally aware can start with small steps and can be fun at the same time. Your company team can for example gather to plant trees in the local parks or other places where governments allow doing it. Your staff can also organize a cleanup; collecting rubbish from streets, beaches, parks and other areas. Additionally, you can donate money to charity organizations that contribute to environmental protection, enable separation and recycling of garbage, or other similar activities. These are only a few of the many contributions your business can make to support social and environmental wellbeing and become an impact-driven undertaking. As an added benefit, organizing such events will strengthen the feeling of cohesion and the team bond.
Reflect. After having established a good baseline, set goals, and already improved your impact to some extent, you can share the details of your sustainability goals and journey with your customers and potential clientele. The next step would be to reflect and to repeat all of the aforementioned steps
Talk the talk, walk the walk
Green branding should be based on truths about your service or products and should not make your business look more sustainable than it actually is. In general, living up to your claims and promises is crucial to building trust amongst your customers. Greenwashing is an absolute no-go. Not only can greenwashing have disastrous consequences for your brand once exposed and lead to customer losses, it is also an inherently unethical practice which misleads customers with distorted facts with the goal of making more money. On top of that, research has also shown that the presence of greenwashing negatively affects employee’s career satisfaction, as employees are most often unwilling participants of immoral behavior (source).
It’s important to really live-up to the promises you made concerning your business’ sustainability performance. For example, you cannot use harmful chemical ingredients for the creation of a product and promote them as natural. As mentioned before, there is a fine line between green marketing and greenwashing, as consumers and businesses highly value transparency and trustworthiness more than ever. but if you are honest about what your business is doing to improve its negative impacts and about what could still be improved in your external communications, there is nothing you should be afraid of.
Communication is key
To make regular and potential customers aware of your aspirations and efforts towards becoming a more responsible business, you simply have to announce it from time to time and be transparent. By being honest about the aspects of your business that still require improvement, you will build stronger customer relationships and position your brand as one that is trustworthy and vision-driven.
There are several methods that can be used to effectively communicate about your business’ environmental performance. For example, if you offer eco-friendly products, then you should definitely describe the green fabrication methods on labels. You can provide sustainability reports related to your contribution to eco-friendly organizations and what green activities your team has recently made. As your business continues to improve its environmental impacts, you can provide these kinds of reports on an annual basis. Rated by Students recommends recording videos or taking photos to prove your words. Sharing this type of content on your website, social media profiles, email campaigns, and so on.
Replace Traditional Marketing With Digital Marketing
Today, digital marketing has almost entirely replaced traditional marketing. The target audience and products or services you promote can be more or less the same, while you only need to change your approach. Traditional marketing involves plenty of printing and wasting various resources like paper, electricity, and other natural resources. According to the writing service, Top Writing Reviews, digital marketing is much easier to plan and perform. Besides, it’s really difficult to evaluate the results of your traditional marketing campaign and to see who you have reached with your campaign. How can you monitor how many potential clients noticed your billboard, for instance? Considering all of these above mentioned points, digital marketing, including social media, content writing, email campaigns, and other activities, is more eco-friendly and effective for your business. On top of that, digital marketing makes it easier to reach younger generations who are easily targeted through digital media and demand eco-friendly products and services.
Takeaway
Green branding and marketing have proven beneficial to many businesses across the globe who wish to share their sustainability ambitions with their customers and engage them in their journey. Make sure your green marketing and branding is based on intrinsic motivation to improve your business’ environmental and social responsibility and take steps to improve any negative impacts before considering this type of branding and marketing. This will position your undertaking as one that is impact-driven and relevant.
In order to communicate with your customers in an effective and ethical way, digital marketing is recommended over traditional marketing methods, which rely on paper and don’t offer any easy monitoring options. Additionally, by opting for digital marketing you can also reach new and younger target markets who have been associated with the growing demand for sustainable products and services.
The most important aspect of green branding and marketing is the validity and transparency of the claims that are being made. Make sure to avoid making unrealistic and false promises, in order to avoid contributing to the unethical practice of greenwashing and misleading unaware customers and employees. By being honest about your organization’s current sustainability efforts and about the areas that still require improvement, your business will not only be recognized as a trustworthy one, but also contribute to the much needed transparency sought after by the modern day consumer.
Running a green marketing campaign takes patience and a good game plan. Sea Going Green specializes in creating campaign strategies that play to your strengths while avoiding greenwashing.