Really it’s not very hard to do green marketing. In fact marketing shouldn’t even be called marketing if you’re honest about what you do. The story of what you’re doing to help the environment and society should be detailed and your goals should be clear. No one expects you to be perfect — just let us know what you’re trying to do (for real).
The Four Simple Steps to Pitch-Perfect Green Marketing: “How do you create a green strategy that is pitch perfect and tuned for long-term success? It’s not easy, based on the efforts I’ve seen. Companies executives — and their advertising, marketing, and public relations partners — are prone to make broad, sweeping statements about their environmental commitment or the green attributes of their products or services, statements and claims that often pose more questions than answers.”
So what are 4 steps that can get you started straight away?
The 4 Steps
Joel Makower gives 4 quick points on how to tell your story of striving from his book Strategies for the Green Economy.
Credibility
Back up your strategy with facts and figures — the most important ones, the ones that get the point across. This isn’t about convincing your customers – it may well be about convincing your employees.
People want to work for honest companies. Look to Wall Street if you want dishonesty to the highest level.
Relevance
“How do you ensure that they are sustainable from a business perspective?” Your strategy can’t be tacked on. It has to actually assist in your business objectives. It has to be an integral part of success.
Joel gives the example of Ford just greening its historic manufacturing site instead of its cars. You’re definitely going to wonder if that was a waste of time.
Relevance — make your green marketing strategically count for something.
Effective Messaging
You’ve got to make the message easy to understand. Of course the right moment, proper timing and the right circumstances are just as vital to effective messaging. What are the right channels or pathways to reach people?
“In other words, it’s the medium as well as the message.”
Differentiation
Are you really doing something unique or are you just copying something else someone else has done? This is a tough one because the standard is always going up. Talk about competition.
Smaller companies have it a bit easier according to Joel. Either way, it has to be something that makes it easy to find you – and it doesn’t necessarily relate to the number of actions.
Joel dubs these components as CRED and says that in the end it doesn’t matter where you start, just as long as you cover all the bases.
What are you doing to get to sustainable? Even in this tough economy?
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