How to Market Your Eco-friendly Business

The green and eco-friendly movement has gained tremendous momentum in recent years. More and more people are realizing the importance of protecting the planet and are looking for more eco-friendly options compared to traditional products or entire brands. However, customers do not want to spend extra time in a store trying to figure out which brand is green and which one is not. If you want customers to adopt something at mass, it must be easy and borderline foolproof. You can make your business as green as possible, but if you don’t efficiently tell customers about it, you will never receive the extra sales and opinion boost from being a green company. Making your business genuinely green is the first step, but you must market your efforts for customers to notice. Here are a few ways you can get the word out about your eco-friendly business, so customers properly appreciate the steps you are taking to protect the environment we all share. 

What Do Customers What To See

While many customers want to see your company’s green initiatives, not every customer cares about the same green changes. One group of customers may care more about eco-friendly or biodegradable packing, while a different group cares more about your production line is green. The only way to determine which groups of customers care about what is to look in the data. Use data collection and online monitoring tools like Citrix monitoring or social media scrapers to see what different demographics care about. Once you know what aspects of green business customers want to see, it becomes much easier to determine what green initiatives will be most effective in marketing materials. 

Easy To See At Glance

Most people find brands for the everyday items they buy and don’t deviate from that established pattern. Taking a chance on a new brand when you know the one next to it works perfectly fine is not always an appealing choice. Chance and change bring risk, and customers typically don’t like a risk when buying everyday products. One of the easiest ways to attract an eco-conscious customer is to make your green marketing easy to see at a glance. Large stickers with contrasting, often green, colors make a label detailing your eco-friendly changes noticeable, which may get a customer to stop and read. Do not expect customers to read through a paragraph explaining why your green product is better; instead, you should stick to keywords and essential points customers can quickly understand. 

Beware Of Small Contradictions

Something so small businesses might not notice, but customers will have any small contradictions in marketing and messaging. Don’t highlight your green efforts while trying to hide your less than ideal manufacturing process. Customers will notice if you talk out of both sides of your brand’s mouth, so be careful with contradicting yourself, your brand messaging, and your actions. Be careful about sending paper mailers to advertise your eco-friendly products as using paper for marketing is not the most eco-friendly decision. If you use paper for marketing or packaging, make a point to use recycled paper and tell customers about it. This advice extends to product documentation or other inserts within the packaging. If the outside of your box has plenty of green keywords, you should back that up by limiting the waste materials inside the packaging. However, just because you shouldn’t use too much paper isn’t an excuse for not giving customers all the information they need for their new purchase. Use QR codes to limit how much paper documentation you have to include while still giving customers all the information they need and helping to make this technology more commonplace use. 

Money Where Your Mouth Is

Many companies will put green initiatives into their products, but not every brand will take the next step to donate to green charities or nonprofits. While making your products green is a good step, it is still profit-driven and not true altruism. If your business is serious about going green and creating an excellent eco-friendly brand imagine, donating to a green charity is a good way to go. You can pick a local charity if you want the impact to go to a specific community or a larger green charity that helps in your country or globally.  

The green movement is gaining more and more speed as the years go on. Brands should take advantage of the movement, but only if they are genuinely getting on board. Use customer data to determine what green projects your customers would most like to see, and then use smart green marketing tactics to get the word out. If you want to take your brand to the next level, your brand can also donate to eco-friendly causes to take your green efforts from profit to altruism.