Learning how to market sustainable brands effectively is a highly important part of the business. Nowadays marketing is not only about promoting your brand and products anymore but it’s also an excellent way to encourage your consumers to make a positive impact. This isn’t always easy and it might take a lot of time and effort but as a result your brand will be able to promote change for the better. According to the Business of Story, surviving in today’s market requires the brand to turn their advertising campaigns into movements. This will educate the consumers of better choices while filling their needs with their brand offerings. When marketing your sustainable brand, your marketing strategy should always be customer-orientated and add value to your customers. When your strategy is focused on putting the most effort and resources into continuously improving the value added to the offering, it is easier for you to attract consumers who are truly interested in your brand.
When marketing sustainable brands it is important to be truly, completely transparent, and to communicate with your audience efficiently. Social media is a great way to connect with your target audience but it also gives them a chance to constantly share their opinion about your brand and services. By being transparent of your brand’s actions you will be able to get ahead of the conversation and give people the transparent information they want to hear, before they start to make assumptions. Transparency is not only a way to be open for your consumers but it is also a way to avoid greenwashing. When companies are spending more time and money to market themselves as environmentally friendly than on minimizing their environmental impact, they are practising greenwashing. Greenwashing can also be a simple change of a name of a product to make it appear more environmentally friendly than it truly is. The danger of greenwashing is to mislead consumers to act sustainably even when they are actually buying unsustainable products. To avoid greenwashing, good communication and transparency is therefore necessary. However, there is a really fine line between too much information and not enough. To avoid sharing too much information, it’s a great idea to consider setting up a separate page on your brand’s website to fully explain your brand’s story and efforts. This way consumers will be able to find your whole story from one place.
Making a positive change through your marketing efforts, being transparent and avoiding greenwashing aren’t the only important things to consider when setting up your marketing strategy. Choosing the right marketing channels is a significant factor for powerful marketing. Therefore, we have listed the top 10 marketing channels for sustainable brands, and divided it for inbound and outbound marketing. We hope this list will help you to choose the best marketing tactics for your brand.
Inbound marketing for sustainable brands
Inbound marketing refers to any marketing that is attracting customers by creating valuable contact and experiences tailored to them. The primary aim of this type of marketing is to build meaningful relationships between consumers. Inbound marketing tactics are use of website content, blog posts, social media and SEO for example.
Blog posts
Creating a blog and sharing posts actively, is an effective marketing tactic. The aim of the blog posts is to engage the audience by reaching them through the blog posts. Blogging is an ideal way to provide new content to draw your audience back to your website and encourage consumers and business to interact. The advantages of sharing blog posts is that blogging is an inexpensive marketing tactic, the platforms are most likely easy to use and it builds website traffic.
Top Tip: Having an active blog on your website will not only attract new customers but it will also help your business to appear more trustworthy to your audience. Blog is a great way to market sustainable brands!
Blog of Oh Seven Days, a sustainable clothing brand
Social Media
In today’s society use of social media as a marketing tool is essential. There are various social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Pinterest that are used everyday by millions of people around the world. Each of these platforms have various ways to boost your marketing from hashtag use to smaller groups where people interested in the same topics connect. Social media marketing is an effective way to bring brand awareness, interact with key audiences and increase website traffic.
Top Tip: Pinterest is a great addition for your social media platforms. Creating visual infographics of your brand to your Pinterest is an excellent way to add value to your customers. Remember to link your Pinterest account to website and blog!
Instagram and Pinterest of Washed Ashore, a sustainable jewelry brand
SEO
Search engine optimization, SEO, is a process of optimizing your webpage and it’s content to be easily discoverable by users searching for terms relevant to your website. Millions of searches are conducted each day and for this research SEO is an effective way to make sure your content doesn’t disappear into the traffic.
Top Tip: Pay close attention to your SEO and make sure you do it properly, after all there are millions of searches conducted every day and you don’t want your content to not be seen by your audience!
Influencer outreach
Reaching out to influencers on social media helps your brand to increase brand awareness and to exchange value with industry leaders. Influencer outreach is a beneficial strategy if you want to build relationships and promote your brand.
Top Tip: Do a proper research on the influencers you would like to reach out to as you want to work with people who are truly interested in your brand, and who share the same values with you.
Infographics
Creating visual infographics is a great marketing tactic to share the most important information of your brand and product to your target audience. Sometimes the most effective tactic to promote your brand is to share the most insightful information in a simple, visually appealing infographic.
Top Tip: Keep your infographics simple and visually appealing, and stick with one topic in one infographic.
Podcasts
Podcast marketing allows you to communicate to a captive audience. There are millions of daily podcast listeners with an on-the-go lifestyle. Sharing your brand’s story in a podcast is a great way to reach these listeners anywhere at any time. It has been studied that brands that advertise their products and services during business podcasts have a 14% lift in purchase intent.
Top Tip: Podcast is a great way to build your brand loyalty, and to share your story for your audience.
Outbound marketing for sustainable brands
Outbound marketing uses tactics that are interruptive, and pushes itself at the audience whether the audience wants it or not. Outbound marketing tactics are tv and radio ads, telemarketing, banner and display ads, billboards and newspapers for example. Simply, outbound marketing refers to any marketing where the company initiates to contact the audience.
Email marketing
Email marketing is a great way to share your brand and content straight to your audience. By creating an email marketing strategy, you will be able to promote your brand and products and this way create a demand for your business. Email marketing helps you to attract leads to your website, blog and social media channels. Email marketing can be considered as an outbound and inbound marketing, however outbound emails are those that are sent to consumers who didn’t directly submit their email address to your company.
Top Tip: With the new GDPR and data protection law, customers have nowadays more power over their own data than ever before, and they will be able to customize their settings to receive only the emails that are bringing them true value.
Email marketing by Amber Fort Bedding, a sustainable bedding brand
Social media advertising
If you want to take all the advantages of social media marketing, it is a good idea to consider advertising in social media. Social media advertising is possible in most of the social media platforms. Just choose the platforms you would like to use for advertising and where most of your audience is, and you will be able to directly share your brand for them.
Top Tip: Social media advertising improves effectively your brand recognition.
Search Engine advertising
Search engine advertising is a marketing method that lets you to directly display your paid ads to your chosen search engines. It will let the consumers search for products or services with certain keywords to find your brand on top of all the searches.
Top Tip: Search engine advertising grabs the attention of your audience at the right time. Use of the right, accurate keywords will improve your position, and help your audience to find your brand.
Newspaper advertising
Especially for smaller local brands advertising in a local newspaper can be highly beneficial. A simple, visual advertisement in a daily newspaper can be an effective method to reach local people.
Top Tip: Create an advertisement that stands out and grabs the attention of your audience immediately.
The main difference between inbound and outbound marketing is that inbound marketing is pulling the interest of the audience to itself, whereas outbound marketing is pushing itself to the audience. Moreover, inbound marketing is often written for the consumer’s needs and outbound marketing is written for the product’s needs. Whether you would like to use inbound or outbound marketing for your sustainable brand, always remember that your marketing efforts should be transparent, and they should encourage your audience to make a positive impact.
Author: Oona Yletyinen
