10 Ways to Promote Sustainable Practices in Your Digital Marketing Strategy
To provide a comprehensive understanding of sustainable practices in digital marketing, we have gathered ten insightful responses from professionals in the field, including digital marketers and founders. Their suggestions range from establishing purposes beyond living to ways to reduce the website’s carbon footprint. Dive into these expert insights to enhance your digital marketing strategy with sustainability at its core.
- Establish Purposes Beyond Living
- Optimize Content for Sustainability
- Promote Sustainability in Digital Presence
- Highlight Environmental Benefits of Products
- Leverage CEO Activism for Sustainability
- Make Data-Informed Decisions
- Commit to a Sustainable Cause
- Partner with Eco-Friendly Providers
- Use Green Keywords in SEO
- Reduce the Website’s Carbon Footprint
Establish Purposes Beyond Living
In today’s business landscape, it’s hard to imagine a company that doesn’t incorporate social and environmental initiatives. From my perspective, when integrating sustainable practices into your marketing strategy, it’s crucial to establish “purposes beyond the living.”
While the traditional business approach is “create, sell, and repeat,” sustainable marketing is about caring for society and the environment. Start from your mission. Find the planetary issues of concern to you and develop a concrete plan on how to resolve them.
For instance, car manufacturers prioritize the reduction of exhaust gasses and harmful emissions as the core of their sustainable marketing strategy, which is based on environmental protection.
Dmytro Rodionov
Digital Marketer, Elai.io
Optimize Content for Sustainability
Incorporating sustainability into your digital marketing strategy involves optimizing content for search engines to reduce the need for resource-intensive advertising, using green web hosting to minimize your website’s carbon footprint, and implementing email marketing strategies that focus on personalized, relevant content to reduce waste.
Prioritizing search engine optimization (SEO) in your digital marketing strategy is an effective way to promote sustainability, aligning with several Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Doing so minimizes resource-intensive advertising, reducing the carbon footprint and waste generation, thus contributing to SDG 13 (Climate Action) and SDG 12 (Responsible Consumption and Production).
It also supports SDG 9 (Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure) by fostering innovation in marketing strategies and promoting eco-friendly practices. Collaborating with eco-friendly partners also aligns with SDG 17 (Partnerships for the Goals).
Juan Arguelles
Senior Consultant
Promote Sustainability in Digital Presence
I think sustainability in digital marketing might mean quite different things, depending on who you ask! To me, it would encompass all areas relating to sustainability and your digital presence.
For example, one of the most obvious places to start would be with the website of the business—whether it is powered by a renewable data center or not for its web hosting. This can be an important way to reduce emissions in the most efficient way.
Another area would involve reducing the physical size of your website in terms of the data transferred every time it gets loaded. That can involve removing unnecessary videos and imagery, and making your website as lean and quick as possible—which should have a powerful impact on conversion rates too.
Outside of items relating to emissions, I think ensuring that you’re involved in ethical practices—not blanket spamming with email outreach, and adhering to any privacy policies—is important.
Matt Tutt
SEO Consultant, Matt Tutt Digital Marketing
Highlight Environmental Benefits of Products
We incorporate sustainability into a client’s digital marketing strategy by promoting their sustainable products and services. We highlight and ethically market the environmental benefits of these products, helping our clients capture the attention of their customer base that values sustainability.
We emphasize the positive environmental impact, long-term value, and public goodwill the product or service brings. This supports sustainable business practices and also encourages customers to make environmentally conscious decisions.
Valerie Lavska
CMO, Promodo
Leverage CEO Activism for Sustainability
Promoting sustainability in a digital-marketing strategy can be highly effective through CEO activism. Voicing strong opinions on pressing environmental or social issues allows CEOs to build a highly engaged community of like-minded supporters on social media. This includes potential customers, employees, and investors.
Anton Levytskyi
Communications Consultant, Self-employed
Make Data-Informed Decisions
As a digital marketer, I believe that one of the most effective ways to promote sustainable practices in our digital marketing strategies is by making sure that everything we do is informed by data and analytics.
By leveraging data and analytics, we can make decisions about our campaigns that are truly rooted in reality and will have the greatest positive impact on the environment.
Alex Murray
Search Director, Tilious
Commit to a Sustainable Cause
Commit to a cause. If you take on too many sustainability practices, your business won’t be able to sustain itself. Surface-level involvement in several fields won’t let you contribute meaningfully to any. Think about a mission that is in line with your business and the passion of your customers. Even if it takes more resources to implement the changes, there are long-term benefits.
The modern consumer is more conscious of business practices than their predecessors. Sustainable practices will build customer loyalty and brand recognition. If you focus on one goal, you can create innovative solutions that inspire others. Thought leadership in sustainable practices will give you an edge over your competitors.
John Hughes
Founder and President, ContractorNerd
Partner with Eco-Friendly Providers
We work with partners and providers who commit to eco-friendly practices. At Ammo, we take a keen interest in using sustainable practices for our digital marketing strategies. A major initiative we undertake is working with like-minded companies.
For example, we use Cloudflare as our CDN because they are committed to reducing their carbon footprint. We route our web traffic through their network, which increases the speed of web content with minimal energy consumption.
Thus, every email campaign, digital ad, or content we share reaches our audience in a way that respects the environment and planet. Therefore, businesses can promote sustainable practices by using providers who prioritize eco-friendly initiatives.
Alex Horsman
Head of Marketing, Ammo.com
Use Green Keywords in SEO
One way you can promote sustainable practices in your digital-marketing strategy is through “green” keywords.
Choose keywords that are related to renewable-energy resources such as solar power, wind energy, and geothermal energy instead of traditional sources of electricity like coal or gas. This will help direct people searching for these topics directly to your website, while simultaneously helping reduce emissions from traditional power sources.
Sehrish Aslam
Marketing Assistance Specialist, Bank Statement PDF Converter
Reduce the Website’s Carbon Footprint
In a recent meeting, our manager shared a fact: “If the Internet was a country, it would be the fourth-largest polluter” (2021 study by Freitag et al.). An often overlooked aspect is the carbon footprint associated with hosting a website and the content that we all contribute to online.
As a digital team and business, we’ve committed to making our website more lightweight and reducing the amount of energy required to publish our content to minimize our carbon footprint.
So far, we’ve taken several steps to do so, including moving to a web hosting service that is powered by 100% renewable energy, changing the size and format of our images and videos to reduce their weight, and culling lots of pages with redundant content that cluttered the website.
Omar Agor-Wood
Founder, Pick Ethical
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