After centuries of environmental irresponsibility and in the midst of a current climate crisis, individuals and organizations all over the world are prioritizing environmental friendliness in all matters. If you want to capitalize on this, and do genuine good for the environment at the same time, you should strive to make your brand appear more eco-friendly.
But how do you do it? And why is this so valuable?
The Value of Eco-Friendly Brands
You likely already understand the power of a brand. Your brand is the identity of your business, responsible for forming first impressions, building familiarity, and ultimately securing customer loyalty. The more positively your brand is viewed, the more people you’re going to attract to your business, and the more revenue you’re going to generate.
Making your brand more eco-friendly is highly beneficial for multiple reasons. For starters, you’ll be seen as a more responsible and more altruistic business, interested in protecting the environment as much as you are making a profit. Since many consumers now look for environmental friendliness when shopping around for various products and services, this can be a huge win.
This is also a competitive differentiator. If there are many businesses like yours in the same field, and yours is the only one with an environmental sustainability strategy, you could have an easy time siphoning customers from your competitors.
On top of that, each new environmental effort you make is an opportunity for publication and promotion. In some cases, you can even get some free marketing — especially if you pair your sustainability efforts with a smart content and digital marketing strategy through a partner like Marketer.co.
The Easy Solution: Be Eco-Friendly!
How do you make your brand seem more eco-friendly? The common sense answer is to be more eco-friendly. If your company commits to sustainable environmental practices and regularly contributes to environmental causes, people will naturally take notice.
That said, you may have to make some extra efforts to make sure your environmental strategies are seen and appreciated by the general public.
Promotional Strategies, Environmental Protection Opportunities, and More
These are some of the most important strategies for supporting the eco-friendliness of your brand.
- Publish a sustainability report. Currently, 92 percent of S&P 500 companies publish regular sustainability reports. Add in your brand to the mix if you want more visibility and a better reputation as an environmentally friendly company. Sustainability reports typically account for both positive and negative environmental influences, including energy use, carbon emissions, and pollution. In this annual publication, you can prove your environmental value.
- Optimize your physical business for sustainability. To make your sustainability report more impressive, consider optimizing your physical business for environmental sustainability. That could mean strategies as simple as upgrading your light bulbs or as complex as changing your business model to minimize your negative environmental impact. If your customers visit your business regularly, post signs and publish informative content to explain what you’ve done to make the business more sustainable.
- Operate transparently. In all your company’s operations, remain as transparent as possible. People are inherently distrustful of companies that don’t operate transparently. If they understand what you’re doing and why you’re doing it, they’ll have a much better impression of your operations.
- Push new initiatives. Consider instituting new initiatives and goals for your organization, allowing the organization itself and the people within it to make more of a positive environmental change. For example, there are hundreds of companies that integrate environmental protection and sustainability into their business model – like the dozens of companies that plant trees with every purchase a customer makes. You could follow something similar, associating your brand with a specific environmental cause.
- Show off your environmental wins. Whenever you have big environmental winds, show them off on social media and through paid advertising when appropriate. For example, if you’ve recently installed a solar panel array to produce more sustainable energy for your business, take photos or videos and show them off. Over time, and with enough environmental wins under your belt, your audience will come to see you as an environmental benefit.
- Volunteer. Consider volunteering as an organization, or encourage your employees to volunteer for environmental causes on behalf of the brand. As an example, you can close down early on a Friday and take your team to pick up litter on the side of the road or plant a new row of trees on your property.
- Donate. Additionally, consider donating to environmental causes. Even small donations can make a difference.
If more companies realized the benefits of environmentally sustainable practices, the world would be a better place. We would have much greater environmental protections, a better attitude toward sustainability, and a wider range of ethical products and services available to us. You may not be able to change the world, but you can change your brand – and you can strongly benefit from doing it.
