As a digital marketer who is passionate about sustainability and finding creative solutions for long-term sustainability, this topic is close to my heart. If you’re looking to make an impact with your marketing message but don’t want to make a negative environmental or social impact in the process, this guide is for you.
What Is Sustainable Marketing?
Sustainable marketing is a set of marketing tactics and strategies that talks about your products or services in a compelling way, all while never compromising on your values of sustainability. That means that even if there’s a marketing solution that may seem more “efficient” or save on costs, if it’s not sustainable or it involves potentially unethical shortcuts, you won’t use it.
Another example: If there’s a marketing campaign, partnership, or other opportunity that looks promising but doesn’t align with your company’s sustainable values, then those opportunities ultimately aren’t worth pursuing.
Compared to traditional marketing and digital marketing strategies, sustainable marketing is more focused on your core values as they relate to the longer term and the bigger picture. You may ask yourself: How do our products and services impact or connect to environmental, social, and economic issues? How does our approach to marketing and promotion engage with these causes responsibly? This type of marketing takes more thoughtful effort and discernment, but over the long haul, it offers many valuable benefits to your company. We’ll get into those in the section below.
Similar Content: What Is Social Impact Marketing?
Why Is Sustainable Marketing Important?
Sustainable marketing is important because, first and foremost, our planet, its people, and all living things on this Earth are worth protecting. Many modern corporate tools, solutions, and strategies overlook what’s best for others in favor of what’s best for their bottom line.
This fundamental is wrongfully ignored or forgotten in so many of today’s businesses. If you’re not actually having a net positive impact on the world through your products and services, can you really feel good about your earnings if you’re doing harm in the process?
Sustainable marketing and business decisions are even more important for companies that consider themselves mission-driven. If you’re a purpose-driven business, where your purpose is a core part of your messaging and branding, then it’s absolutely necessary for you to walk the walk, not just talk the talk.
But no matter what type of impact business you run, sustainable marketing is going to be a win with the people who matter most to your business. It builds trust with existing customers and may bring in new customers who appreciate your sustainable values. Additionally, it can improve employee morale and company culture if everyone feels good about your ethical approach to marketing.
And finally, on a practical and logistical note, making your marketing efforts more sustainable can actually save you money. Often when you start down the path toward a more sustainable strategy, you look to cut out waste wherever it lives. Almost always, this means that you’ll stop paying for tools and resources that you no longer want or need to do the job.
5 Tips to Get Started With Sustainable Marketing
1. Audit the sustainability of your current tools and processes
Tooling and software sprawl happens in organizations of all sizes and backgrounds. Even if you’re operating a small business with a small team, there’s a good chance you’re working with tools you no longer need or that aren’t serving your business and its goals well. For greater sustainability and efficiency in your business, we highly recommend performing an audit of your existing tools and processes, across marketing and beyond.
If you’ve never done anything like this before, what might this audit look like? To help you get started, we’ve outlined a potential process for you here:
- Identify and document all of your tools and systems: Take an inventory of all departmental and company-wide software, storage systems, third-party integrations, and anything else that your team is using. Don’t forget to document any tools that you are no longer using but still pay for or otherwise store/host in your company systems.
- Write down important product and performance data: Once all tools are documented, take a look at each one and write down how it’s currently being used (or if it’s being used), how many people and departments are using the tool, how much storage it takes up, how much it costs, and anything else that you want to remember and (re)evaluate.
- Highlight known or potential problem areas: Consider if any tools are being used for overlapping purposes, if a tool that you no longer use shows up in your accounting, or if any tool is overwhelmingly expensive or storage-hungry. Reducing unnecessary and inefficient tools, based on the results of this part of the audit, is a great way to increase the impact of your sustainability efforts.
- Research the brands and products you’re currently using: Even if you like and regularly use one of the tools you’ve documented in your audit, that doesn’t automatically make it a sustainable or ethical choice. At this point in the audit, widen your lens to look at the quality of the brands you’re currently working with; are they operating ethically? Have they had any major sustainability failures that have made it into the news cycle in recent years? If you have even a little bit of hesitation or concern about any of them, it’s worth diving deeper to see if they are a good company to work with or not—or if there’s a better solution you can swap to.
- Take action: You now have all kinds of information about the tools that you use for marketing and more. But to actually improve and work toward your sustainability goals, you’ll need to write down action items, based on what you’ve discovered, and set timelines and expectations for when you’ll take these more sustainable steps. Inaction really isn’t an option at this point. If you have a public-facing impact report, this is also a great initiative to highlight to your audience.
2. Ideate, build out, and share educational materials with your audience
As part of your quest for marketing sustainability, it’s also a good idea to create content that helps your audience join in on the cause. You can do this by becoming a values-driven expert source your audience can trust (or, if you don’t have that kind of expertise or time in house, you can partner with experts to produce and share valuable content).
This informational content can obviously be about your products and services, but you should also be creating top of the funnel content that educates your audience on the value of your products and services and the good your organization is trying to do in the world. More on that in #4 on this list.
3. Partner with like-minded organizations, influencers, platforms, and tools
Especially as more companies around the world begin to recognize the importance of sustainability, you’re increasingly likely to find potential partners who share your sustainable values. This means that you can often find tools that run on green energy or take steps to mitigate the environmental and social harms that may be caused by their production or operation. Additionally, you can find platforms, companies, and individuals who are willing to highlight important causes and donate profits, time, and energy to projects that do real good in the community.
Here are some real examples of how brands are making sustainable partnerships a core part of their brand:
- Patagonia, a successful clothing and outdoor gear company that cares deeply about sustainability, donates some of its profits to various environmental and conservation groups that align with their values. Its website is filled with examples of how the company takes personal responsibility while also maintaining relationships with other companies that hold sustainable values.
- Smol, a company that sells sustainable cleaning products, uses plastic-free packaging and creative product formulas to reduce waste. All of its digital branding highlights this “no-compromise cleaning” approach that is core to its values.
- We at Mane Impact are researching and then adopting alternative marketing tools from brands that care about sustainability and the environment. A few tools we’ve adopted include platforms like Ecosend, Viro AI, and GreenGeeks to improve our impact while maintaining high-quality marketing operations.
As we mentioned above, tools like Ecosend, Viro AI, and green hosting are easy changes you can adopt to start improving your sustainability posture through your marketing and operations toolkit. You can find more of our examples and recommended partner options here. And, if you’re looking for help swapping to more sustainable platforms, reach out to our team today.
4. Tell your sustainability story in compelling and creative ways
Customers are more likely to come back to a brand that tells stories that are both personal and interesting. When you decide to make sustainable marketing a part of your core identity, it should also become part of the brand story you tell to these individuals. Your website, social media, email newsletters, media channels, and all collateral should mention the work you’re doing to market more ethically and why that work matters.
You should tell your sustainability story through a combination of interesting visuals, videos, long-form and short-form blogs and other written content, and quick infographics that do particularly well on social media. As you would with any other type of marketing content, consider your audience on different platforms and what they’re looking for when they engage with content there; from that point, adjust your content to fit each platform without changing the overarching sustainability message.
If you’re not really sure what this content should look or sound like, these are a few examples we’ve pulled from our clients and our own sustainability storytelling:
- First-person narratives and stories, told by the people who benefit from your efforts. This can be in a written or video format.
- Impact reports and content that explains how you’re actually sticking to your values in measurable ways.
- Email newsletters with easy-to-digest information about your sustainability efforts, followed by a clear call to action like “donate now” or “become part of our cause.”
5. Stay transparent – don’t greenwash your efforts
Always be transparent about what you’re doing when it comes to sustainable marketing. You can absolutely highlight your wins and best efforts to your audience, but don’t downplay or ignore the challenges or mistakes you’ve encountered past and present. In fact, telling honest stories about where you’ve gone wrong and how you’ve made changes can both humanize your efforts and encourage your audience to support the cause moving forward.
Most importantly, don’t overstate or exaggerate your sustainability efforts. Especially for the purpose-driven clients that we often work with at Mane Impact, their particular audience is great at sniffing out inauthenticity and will take their purchasing power elsewhere.
Pretending to have a greener marketing strategy than you actually do ultimately backfires. So, take the steps to actually make your marketing more sustainable, and when it makes sense, let your customers have a sneak peek at what that journey looks like, including when it looks a little messy.
One More Thing: Find a Marketing Agency Partner Who Shares Your Values
Here at Mane Impact, sustainability is not simply stacked on top of our marketing efforts but is interwoven into everything we do and everything we are. We think of it as a central part of our brand and the core values that our team holds dear.
If you feel the same way and need help from marketing experts who know how to get results while sticking to our values, we’d love to get to know you and your brand. Sign up for our email list to learn more about us and our marketing strategy tips, and for a more one-on-one approach, book a strategy call below: