Marketing Tips For Sustainable Small Business
If your small business is rooted in sustainability, circularity and planet-friendly products and services, you may be wondering how to market your eco-conscious business.
Eco-friendly businesses can use many of the same traditional marketing techniques used by businesses, such as email marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), and social media marketing.
By creating a comprehensive and integrated marketing strategy for your small eco businesses, you can leverage marketing to boost sales, attract new customers, and raise awareness about your mission and impacts.
Effective marketing can also help sustainable brands to stand out from the crowds by elevating their unique selling points in an increasingly eco-conscious consumer market.
Below are 9 of the best marketing tips for sustainable businesses that aim to help your company to grow and thrive.
As a digital marketing agency in Sydney, many of the brands that we work with at Green Socials are Australian small businesses that are purpose-driven. The marketing tips below are therefore tailored to an Australian small-business audience, infused with personal insights from our experience in marketing sustainable brands.
9 Marketing Tips for Australian Mission-Driven Businesses
Ultimately, the key to successful marketing for sustainable small businesses lies in authenticity, transparency, and a genuine commitment to making a difference. By staying true to your sustainability mission and continuously engaging with your audience, you can build a loyal customer base and contribute to a more sustainable future.
Marketing a small business effectively involves using a mix of strategies tailored to your target audience and business goals. Whether it's leveraging social media, optimising your website for search engines, or building strong local partnerships, these ten strategies can help you increase your visibility, attract new customers, and grow your business.
1️⃣ Communicate Your Sustainability Goals and Impacts
If you have a green business, then it’s important to clearly define your sustainability goals for your company. Create a clear mission and goals section for your business plan, and communicate this mission in every aspect of your business operations.
There are many great examples of mission statements you can find from leading eco brands online. For example, Patagonia’s mission statement reads “We’re in business to save our home planet.”
Don’t limit yourself to only communicating your mission statement on your website. Mention it in your social media posts, add it to your press releases, and mention it during events you host.
By clearly articulating your mission statement, other people may feel a sense of alignment and affinity with your brand and what you’re trying to achieve. This can help position your brand as a sustainability leader, which can help to promote your brand.
Just as it’s vital to communicate your mission, it’s also important to communicate your sustainability impacts. Let your customers and followers know what positive outcomes you’re creating and be sure to share these results with transparency and accountability. One vehicle for doing this is through publishing an annual sustainability report.
2️⃣ Create a Strong Sustainability Brand Identity
Having a clear, identifiable, and memorable brand identity can help people easily recognise your brand.
Your brand identity should reflect your values and commitment to being sustainable. Oftentimes this is reflected in colour palates used in visual branding for eco brands, such as shades of green and design elements that reflect nature such as leaves or animals, or sustainability-related symbols.
If your brand identity is old or needs updating, consider refreshing your company logo and its fonts and colour palette, as well as your imagery and tone of voice to make it more appealing to your target audience.
💡 As a small marketing agency, we’ve experienced a rebranding: we updated our logo font and colours to create a fresher, more modern look and spent time crafting our messaging, brand values and tone of voice. These updates have helped us communicate with a more targeted audience and to be perceived as a modern and cutting-edge digital marketing agency.
3️⃣ Embrace Content Marketing for Sustainable Brands
Content marketing is a powerful tool for sustainability businesses. Content marketing in the form of blog articles, videos, e-books, etc., can help to inform and educate your audience about environmental issues and how your products or services help provide an environmental solution.
Businesses can also use content marketing to share industry news, sustainability tips, and guidance, and to show what actions your business is taking to help solve global and local environmental challenges like biodiversity loss, climate change, and waste.
When you combine content marketing in the form of a blog, with search engine optimization (SEO), you can create content on your website that helps to attract your target audience to your site. When combined with calls to action, like signing up to your newsletter or buying a product, your content can then help boost conversations and can also create a loyal and engaged customer base and following.
Tip: Great content marketing usually requires great storytelling: don’t forget to connect with your audience on an emotional level and share your sustainability journey. Customer reviews and testimonials can be a great way to build trust and can be used on social media, your website, and other marketing materials.
✨ Do you need help with content marketing? Or perhaps you need help creating a marketing strategy, or coming up with ideas for blog posts that will rank on search engines? At Green Socials, our sustainability writers and content marketing experts can provide content for all your marketing channels including your blog, newsletters, social media posts, and more. Find out more about our content marketing services.
4️⃣ Engage on Social Media
Green Socials’ vast experience in social media management for sustainable brands has provided our team with valuable insights about the importance of social media for business growth.
Building a social media presence isn’t just about posting content regularly on Facebook, Instagram or TikTok. It’s also about creating a community and engaging with that community in an authentic way. When done right, social media can help you reach new audiences, promote your brand and your products and services, and foster a sense of brand loyalty and trust.
Social media can also be leveraged as a platform for selling directly to consumers, and ‘selling on social’ is revolutionising e-commerce.
Social media is also where you can connect with influencers in your niche who share the same values as your brand and can help to promote your brand to their followers. Over the years, Green Socials has helped spark a large number of collaborations with eco-influencers which has resulted in many positive outcomes for our clients.
✨ Do you need help crafting social media posts that will captivate and engage your audience? Or perhaps you need help creating a social media content planner, an Instagram content strategy, or partnering with sustainability influencers? Green Socials offers bespoke social media marketing services for green, sustainable, and eco brands.
5️⃣ Use Email Marketing to Connect With Your Customers
Email marketing was one of the first digital marketing tools, and it’s still highly relevant today. In fact, email marketing is considered one of the best ways to communicate directly with your customers and prospects.
Email can be used to send newsletters, promotions and discounts, event invitations, sales offers, surveys, and more. There are a range of email marketing tools like Mailchimp that can be used to automate email marketing. In addition, these tools can be used to create customer onboarding email sequences to keep them personally engaged along their customer journeys.
It’s common practice to create a tantalising lead magnet to encourage people to subscribe to your newsletter. This could be a discount code, an e-book, or access to a free trial of your software, for example.
✨ Need email marketing services for your small business? Look no further. At Green Socials, we have a dedicated team of email marketing experts ready to transform your outbox into a marketing powerhouse.
6️⃣ Collaborate with Other Sustainable Brands
As a small business, you can reach a wider audience and boost your credibility if you collaborate with other brands. You can do this by co-designing a new product, collaborating on a giveaway contest, or organising an event together.
When you’re looking for brands to partner with, as a sustainability business, you should try to find other organisations that are aligned with the same values as your brand.
In addition to creating partnerships aimed at sales and promoting products, it can also be beneficial to network within your city or country with other sustainability-focused brands. You can do this by attending networking events both online and offline, joining local environmental communities, by attending trade shows and exhibitions, and by engaging with organisations in your supply chain.
7️⃣ Highlight Eco Certifications and Awards
To add layer of trust to your products or services, many eco brands choose to apply for eco-labels, certifications, and sustainability awards.
If your small business has earned any of these, then it’s a good idea to promote that in your marketing. You can list and promote certifications on your website, and product packaging, and mention them in your blogs and social media posts.
Eco-labels and certifications can help to build credibility, as long as the particular eco-label or certification you applied for is reputable, credible, and widely recognised by eco-conscious consumers. They may also help you sell your products, as consumers are increasingly looking at ESG claims when making purchasing decisions.
Some examples include FSC-certified paper, 1% for the Planet, and BCorp certification. There are also many other ways that you can drive sustainability throughout your business operations, such as measuring and offsetting your carbon emissions, using renewables to power your offices and appliances, and incorporating circular design into your products.
8️⃣ Get Involved With Local Community Sustainability Initiatives
Getting involved in local community initiatives such as beach cleanups, or local sustainability events can help you to network and increase your brand awareness.
You could sponsor local environmental initiatives, take part in local environmental activities (such as rehabilitating a wetland), and attend local environmental events and sustainable business networking meetups.
Getting involved with local community initiatives may also help you build your business’s reputation and can provide great content for your social media posts, newsletters, and blogs.
9️⃣ Harness SEO Optimisation
When you create content for your website, you can optimise that content so that it appears near the top of search engine results pages (SERPs).
This marketing tactic can help increase the amount of traffic that your website receives, and can also help to ensure that a more targeted audience visits your site, which may help to increase conversions.
SEO is a rapidly changing discipline that requires a range of integrated skills to achieve. It involves identifying keywords, and creating content that is authoritative, trustworthy, shows your experience, and is unique and authentic.
To optimise your blog for consumers who are interested in sustainability, think of the topics that your target audience would be most interested in that match with what your brand is about. If you’re in doubt about how to create SEO-optimised content, then get in touch with Green Socials to find out more about our content creation services.
Implementing Sustainable and Stellar Small Business Marketing
Sustainable small businesses can have a large and positive environmental and social impact, while also experiencing great business success. Effective marketing is a core element of any successful business. But, it can be challenging – for small businesses in particular – to dedicate enough time and resources to marketing.
That’s the reason why many small businesses choose to outsource some aspects of marketing to marketing agencies that have the skills, resources, and capacity to take small business marketing to the next level.
At Green Socials, we work with a wide range of brands to support their marketing efforts and drive positive social and environmental impact while simultaneously focusing on the bottom line.
By reading the marketing tips above, we hope that your eco brand will be equipped to grow and thrive while enabling a ripple effect of positive action for sustainable development.
