WHY SHOULD YOU MAKE ONLINE MARKETING A PRIORITY FOR YOUR ECO-FRIENDLY BUSINESS FOR 2023?
Online marketing is undeniably one of the most critical success factors when it comes to running a business in 2023, including any purpose-driven and eco-friendly business. If you aren’t able to reach and engage with your audience (who’s inevitably spending lots of time online), then there’s a slim chance of them buying your products or services (or even knowing about them).
For any eco-friendly business, having a bespoke digital marketing strategy is the first step towards creating brand awareness, a sense of consumer trust and loyalty, and in converting followers and visitors into customers and brand ambassadors.
Below we look at the reasons why sustainable brands should make digital marketing a priority in 2023, and more specifically how the power of social media marketing, email marketing, website marketing and paid advertising strategies can be used to benefit green businesses.
We also delve into some reasons why ethical and eco-conscious brands may want to consider hiring a specialised green marketing agency to handle your digital marketing - with some tips on how to choose the right digital agency for your brand.
Reasons to invest in digital marketing for your eco-friendly business in 2023
There are many reasons that businesses should invest in digital marketing in 2023. And in the digital age, online marketing needs to be a core component of any effective marketing plan.
Business success is closely linked to the calibre of your marketing strategy. After all, you may have the best product or service in the world, but if no one knows about it, you’re unlikely to make many sales.
Online marketing - also known as digital marketing - can help you reach a larger and more hyper-targeted audience, which in turn can help increase your conversion rate (i.e. sales). Digital marketing can be more cost-effective and flexible than traditional marketing, allowing you to remain agile and adaptive.
Digital marketing can also help businesses to raise brand awareness, increase sales, and build reputation and trust.
As a small green business owner or ecopreneur, you may feel overwhelmed by having to think about marketing on top of all your other responsibilities. Luckily there are boutique marketing agencies in Australia like Green Socials here to provide you with professional social media marketing services, to help you on your eco-marketing journey.
Here are 11 ways that eco-friendly businesses can benefit from digital marketing
Increase awareness of your eco brand by creating an online presence and building customer trust.
Deploy a cost-effective marketing solution that can increase your positive impacts on the planet and sales results - all while being a more cost-effective solution when compared with traditional forms like TV ads, etc.
Use a more sustainable form of marketing, which is something that should resonate strongly with ethical brands.
Measure the impact of your eco-marketing efforts: online marketing makes it easier to measure the performance of your actions and campaigns, gleaning valuable insights that can be used to design future strategies and campaigns.
Increase your conscious brands’ sales and revenues: digital marketing can be strategically used to help convert leads into customers or sales using a mix of social media marketing, SEO optimisation, email marketing, and other digital marketing tools.
Get a better return on your marketing investments (ROI): whether you pay for display ads or social media ads, if they’re designed right this could be a cost-effective and measurable way of increasing sales and conversions.
Reach more (and new) customers: digital marketing allows you to reach a very specific audience anywhere in the world, to help build your brand and raise awareness about your campaigns.
Enhance your engagement rate: digital channels like social media can help boost your community engagement rate, helping you grow your reputation and earned media.
Keep up with your competitors and learn from them: be where all your competitors are - online! That way you can keep up with the latest marketing trends and with what your competitors are doing.
Build and manage your brand’s reputation: unlike traditional media which can be very static, digital media allows you to create conversations and engagement which can earn you social trust and build your brand’s reputation.
Strategically target your audience: finding leads and potential customers is easier using digital marketing as there are lots of tools to target very specific and niche audiences.
How to drive business success using online marketing in 2023
As of 2023, integrated and innovative marketing strategies are more important than ever.
Marketing strategies help businesses to use a wide range of available channels to reach and engage with your target audience and in so doing can help to increase brand awareness, elevate brand reputation, and increase business sales and revenue.
An increasingly important component of any integrated marketing strategy is digital marketing, which includes social media marketing, email marketing, website marketing, digital advertising, and other types of digital communication.
Compared with traditional marketing, digital marketing is data-driven, interactive, highly accessible, and part of a continuously evolving process or journey - rather than being a stand-alone, static campaign as is often the case with traditional marketing.
Companies around the world are driving business growth by harnessing the power of digital marketing and digital analytics tools that are able to pinpoint and respond to your audience’s needs and desires.
Below we take a deeper look at online marketing tools that you can use to grow your green and sustainable business and brand.
Powering and promoting your green business with online marketing
Powering and promoting your green business with online marketing can bring tremendous benefits. You can take your purpose-driven business beyond survival mode into being able to thrive, profit, and create a more meaningful impact.
Digital marketing encompasses various disciplines, tools, and channels, such as social media, email, websites, SEO, and paid ads - all of which we take a deeper dive into below.
Using social media marketing to build an engaged and active online community
With over 4 billion people using social media worldwide, with that number projected to grow to almost 6 billion users by 2027 - brands can leverage the power of social media to generate leads and sales, increase brand awareness, grow your brand’s audience, and drive more people to your website.
Brands also use social media to build active and more engaged online communities that foster a deeper sense of connection, with some of the most popular and well-known social media platforms including Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Twitter.
Social media marketing (SMM) is a critical component of online marketing for any eco-business, and there are plenty of great examples of successful social media campaigns launched by sustainable brands.
TOMS, for example, created a highly successful ‘One Day Without Shoes’ eco and social awareness campaign - while also promoting their brand of sustainable footwear.
Social media marketing is an ever-changing and innovative landscape to work in, with new social media trends continuously emerging. And with rising popularity, it’s not surprising that social media commerce (i.e. ‘selling on social’) is even overtaking e-commerce in some instances.
In fact, Deloitte estimates that social commerce will reach around $2 trillion by 2025 - which will be close to 30% of all online retail sales for the same period. This represents a major growth opportunity for brands.
Communicating with your customers, clients, and supporters through email marketing
Email marketing is another powerful digital marketing tool to help you communicate directly with your customers, clients and supporters and stay in touch with them.
Hundreds of billions of emails are sent and received every day around the world, with over 4 billion global email users. Email marketing is a tool that your eco-friendly business can use to communicate directly with your customers and audience.
You can use emails to promote a campaign, offer a special or discount, announce a new product, send out a monthly or weekly newsletter, stay in touch with customers, or direct people to your website.
Research has shown that the vast majority of customers actually like to receive monthly emails from companies they do business with - some even far more frequently. And, a small study of 1000 small businesses found that email marketing was their most effective marketing medium to raise awareness of their brands.
Email marketing is therefore a critical tool for any green brands and is a streamlined way to talk about your business and your offers. It's also quite affordable, very easy to measure success, and can reach people in real-time.
Using the power of website marketing to attract eco-conscious customers and clients
There are over 5 billion internet users around the world, many of whom have access to multiple internet-connected devices. That’s why website marketing has such huge potential to attract customers and clients to your site.
But just because you have a website, doesn’t automatically mean you’ll be found. If your website isn't searchable, SEO-friendly, and mobile-friendly, then you may end up with few visitors, and therefore few conversions.
That’s where a carefully crafted SEO strategy comes into play, along with having an innovative content strategy.
As a green business, you’ll want to focus on providing informative, relevant, and helpful content about the sustainability and ethics behind your brand, and how those relate to driving real change in the world. You’ll also want to create an SEO strategy that attracts eco-conscious and pro-sustainability customers to your site, to improve your conversion rate.
The good news for sustainable brands is that most people want to support them - customers just need to be given the right information to be able to identify sustainable brands (including eco-labels and certifications) and to find them (hence the need for integrated marketing)!
Paid Digital Advertising to target eco-minded consumers and supporters
Don’t underestimate the power of paid digital advertising to boost the achievement of your marketing goals.
Digital marketing allows you to hyper-target the right audience, which gives you a better chance of converting them to be your customers. Paid ads are also full of robust analytics to help you measure the success of your campaigns and to help you set budgets that are in line with your goals.
In combination with other forms of digital marketing, online advertising can be an affordable marketing solution that helps you reach a wider audience. It also has a good return on investment if it’s done right.
That’s where specialists come in. Digital marketing agencies can help you to design and target your paid ads to optimise their success and your ROI, as well as interpret analytics.
Given that consumers are looking for sustainable brands, paid ads through search engines or paid social media ads can help you reach these eco-conscious consumers with highly targeted messages and campaigns.
Reasons to choose a green marketing agency for your eco-friendly business
Creating effective and integrated online marketing campaigns and content requires significant time and expertise. For many small businesses, digital marketing can help significantly to drive growth and success.
But the challenge for many small businesses is that there often isn’t enough staff capacity for a dedicated marketing person, so it’s done ad-hoc (and perhaps by non-specialists).
And while this might seem like the prudent thing to do in terms of your budget - the reverse may actually be true. Ineffective marketing could actually be preventing your brand from growing as quickly or as successfully as it could.
Investing in effective digital marketing can help significantly raise brand awareness and accelerate your sales strategy, helping your business to grow more quickly and scale.
That’s where hiring a professional sustainable brands marketing agency can be beneficial. If you’re an eco-friendly business, you’ll want an agency that grasps your ethical and sustainability goals and can help you reach your specific audience.
As an eco-friendly digital marketing agency in Sydney, Australia, Green Socials represents purpose-driven brands using our digital marketing skills, deep sustainability knowledge, and genuine passion to help market and grow the impact of sustainable businesses. That includes offering bespoke social media training and consulting sessions, conducting social media audits, designing social media influencer strategies, and creating impactful content strategies for all your social media channels.
When it comes to choosing an agency, you’ll want to make sure you get the fit right, as with any type of business partnership or collaboration. You’ll also want to choose an agency that has the time, expertise, and experience to take on new clients and to create bespoke solutions based on your needs.
Final verdict: why to make digital marketing a priority for your sustainable brand
It’s clear that marketing is a core component of business success and that digital marketing is undoubtedly the most important priority for any sustainable brand. That’s because of its power to help brands reach highly targeted audiences, raise brand awareness, drive conversion rates, create trust, and establish ongoing brand loyalty.
Sustainable brands already have an advantage: most consumers want to buy their products or services, as long as they're truly ethical and eco-friendly (and not just greenwashing).
That means that any sustainable brand that can leverage digital media to promote awareness about their brand, to convey their sustainability credentials in a transparent and understandable format, and show customers how they can have a positive effect on the world by using the brand - should have a great chance of business success.
At Green Socials, we’re a multicultural and multilingual team of passionate, planet-first marketing experts, working with a wide range of clients in Australia, New Zealand, and beyond. If you’re looking for professional eco-friendly marketing services in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, and beyond, we’d love to hear from you.
