What Is Carbon Conscious Marketing?
When it comes to going green and saving the planet, it should be the responsibility of businesses to change the way they run to be as carbon neutral as possible.
When a business plans to become greener, they may think of changing their operations and transport process first but, what about marketing? How can marketers be more carbon conscious and help to improve your business’s carbon emissions? Well, luckily for you we’ve worked out how!
And it starts with Carbon Conscious Marketing.
Carbon conscious marketing is the practice of running your marketing activities and strategies with the environment in mind, and there are so many ways that you can achieve this!
Let’s have a look at some easy ways to achieve carbon conscious marketing!
Greener Website Hosting
Your website is a fundamental aspect of your marketing activities as a digital marketer. 9 times out of 10, the traffic your online ads, blog posts, social posts and emails generates will go to your website. Believe it or not, this website traffic creates carbon emissions. The amount of electricity it takes to host your website on a server and then appear on computers or phones all adds up.
According to Website Carbon, “the average web page tested produces 1.76 grams CO2 per page view. For a website with 10,000 monthly page views, that’s 211 kg CO2 per year”.
So, when it comes to hosting your website, you should choose a host that focuses on sustainability. Start by researching potential hosts for yourself, exploring sustainability or environmental statements to see how they focus on reducing carbon emissions. If they don’t have any of these statements, take that as a red flag and move on!
Top tip: You should also consider the amount of carbon produced by other platforms you use (Hootsuite, Mailchimp, Content studio, Adobe etc.) and your gas/ electricity supplier.
Once you have found the host, it’s your turn to create a carbon conscious website. Your website needs to be as efficient and as fast as possible. You can achieve this by reducing or compressing large-sized files, redirects and unnecessary HTML/ Java and CSS code. And, as a bonus, by increasing your website speed, you are more likely to reduce your bounce rate.
You can also improve website efficiency by reducing the amount of time a user will need to spend on your website before deciding to purchase. This is created by having a user-centric website. A user-centric website is designed and built with your user’s preferences and needs in mind. It’s easy for visitors to navigate, is enjoyable to read, and is delightful to look at.
You can find out how to create a user-centric website in our latest blog post, ‘What Is User-Centric Web Design, And Why Is It So Important For Marketing?
Create Your Own Environmental Statement
As a business, you should aim to have an environmental statement highlighting your strategies to reduce your carbon. You can use this content to promote your net-zero activities and the other great work you do to help the environment, such as planting X number of trees per X number of sales.
Many clients will be willing to pay a little more if they know that the company they are buying from is operating in a sustainable way.
Digital VS Print
Have you ever seen the message ‘save this email instead of printing, it’s better for the environment”? Well, that’s pretty good advice.
According to Kefron, “the average office worker in the UK uses up to 45 pieces of paper per day, and a staggering two-thirds of that is considered waste”. So, considering holidays, that’s about 10,000 sheets of paper a year! That’s per worker, so how much do you think a marketing department will use?
Instead of wasting trees by printing marketing collateral, such as flyers and posters, create digital versions. And if you do need to print, go double-sided and use recycled paper.
Keeping recycling in mind, you can always use recycled packaging for deliveries. Our sister company, Eats, Drinks, No Wheats (https://glutenfreebeerandsnacks.co.uk/) uses recycled boxes for their hampers and subscription boxes instead of just throwing them away. They also sell their damaged or ‘Dinged’ goods at a reduced price.
Stay A Little Closer to Home
A simple but effective marketing trick we have is outbound mail. I know we just said not to print and keep your letters as digital but hear me out. Many find that receiving a letter is more personal and direct compared to receiving an email. Not only that, but people also find the business message more trustworthy compared to information sent in an email. Emails are riskier to online customers, as they can come with potential viruses. So, unless you send them a giant wooden horse, they won’t have threats to their security dropped through their letterbox.
The greener way to do letter drops is by physically handing out these letters instead of using a courier with a van. Get on your bike or walk around your local area to hand out your marketing collateral. This will improve your carbon footprint and get you connected with some great local businesses.
You can also outsource your marketing to someone closer to your target area or desired location. For instance, if you want to film an advert in a particular city, instead of dragging all your heavy equipment in the car and sending an entire crew from your hometown, you can hire a production company from the desired location. This again saves you carbon from travelling.
Outsource To Greener Companies
Carrying out a fully optimised marketing strategy can be tricky and time-consuming. Which is why many businesses outsource some if not all their marketing to other companies. So, as we said previously, use sustainable and carbon-conscious companies.
As a marketing specialist, we pride ourselves on our carbon conscious marketing, following the above recommendations to be as sustainable in our marketing activities as we can be.
We can help you to maximise the effectiveness of your marketing while keeping costs down and bridging any skills gap between marketing executives and multi-role directors and outside agencies to create strategic plans, execute campaigns of all sizes and across multiple channels, giving you flexibility and the resources, you need.
You can explore our full services here.
We are Beyond
Marketing Managed (Bacon Marketing) provides a full review, streamlining and optimisation service that will take your marketing and advertising to the next level.
Please see our range of services or complete the form to discuss your needs with us.
Straightforward Approach
We always start by finding out about your business, its unique, then we get to work on planning, building your strategy and adding sizzle to your marketing.
Our combined backgrounds are a combination of both generalist and digital marketers, largely focused on digital marketing and also how it can be blended with offline marketing. It has meant that we have had to be hands-on and strategic.
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Sources:
https://www.websitecarbon.com/
If you would rather have this run for you, our marketing strategy service is built for it.
