How To Market Your Sustainable Business For Meaningful Results
More sustainability-driven businesses and organisations are entering all corners of the market, from eCommerce brands to charities looking to boost the visibility of their cause. The growth in regulations like the CSRD, and voluntary sustainability certifications and objectives to reduce emissions, has completely transformed the way companies do business. The thing that sets the successful ones apart is how they build and sustain their presence, and the factors that determine this lay within the marketing mix that they pursue. By ‘marketing mix’, we’re simply referring to the channels that they choose to invest in to spread awareness of their business, sustainability actions and their impact.
How to create a marketing strategy for a sustainability business
To give you an idea of the things you need to consider when putting a marketing strategy together for your sustainability business, we’ve provided a breakdown of some of the key stages. We’ve approached this over four key pillars.
Pillar 1: Your business & objectives
Creating a bespoke profile for your business
When devising a structure for your marketing efforts, the most important factor to consider is ultimately your business, and its unique objectives. What do you do that’s different from other similar companies? What are your short-term, and long-term goals, and what is your normative vision? You’ll need to account for where you’re currently at in terms of your journey, while also mapping out what’s next. Building a strategy that can help you to scale, but that is also agile enough to be tweaked to meet new objectives, will add more value to your overall investment. This is particularly important in the world of sustainability, where terms and concepts are constantly evolving and changing. You may even need to consider the political atmosphere in the way you lay out what it is that you do, and the value you bring. Messaging is also key here. Understanding exactly what you do and framing the services you provide is a key part of building your messaging and hitting your target market pain points. This is where you can also reflect on the actions you’ve chosen, and explore which approaches you’ll be able to benefit from in a more evergreen, longer-lasting way.
Your audience: Who are they, what interests them and why should they care?
The next part of this step involves focusing on your audience, and there’s a few pieces of analysis that you’ll need to carry out to get the right data in order to make good decisions further down the line. First of all, who are you targeting specifically? Marketing to everyone and casting your net too wide will dilute the impact of your efforts. Get clear on the demographics that you’d like to target, and create a profile for each. You might want to include details such as:
Job title and field - are they in finance and investment, government contracting, sustainability, or procurement?
Age bracket - what age range does your audience mainly include?
Interaction location - where can you likely reach them? Social media? Conferences? Elsewhere?
Actual location - where do they live, what languages do they speak, and what is culturally relevant to them?
Lifestyle - what does a week in their lives look like? This is important so you can curate your services and approach to be convenient for them and their daily activities..
Social awareness position - what kind of things do they care about, what is on their radar?
Don’t just estimate these things. Get out there and try to gather primary data. You might be able to find exactly what’s been giving your target audience a headache by finding a webinar where they actually complain about it. Use their words when you can find them. Better yet, survey them.
Getting clear on your story
At this point, you’ll also need to focus on building as much clarity as possible around your story. What are the values that your business cares about, and why are they important? Your story is really a combination of what you want to achieve with your business, and what your audience wants to see solved. Additional partnerships and certifications can help you stand out. Has your business already demonstrated its green commitment with B Corp certification, or is this an important focus for you?
We’d recommend approaching your values from a few different angles - consider impact on the consumer as well as impact on the environment if you’re an eCommerce business or service provider; and non-profits should think about the broader social narrative around the cause they’re focusing on. Your story should become synonymous with your brand, and this can only be achieved when you’ve spent time building solid foundations - so don’t skip this step!
Pillar 2: Creating your presence
Choosing your marketing channels & platforms
Now that you’ve got information about your objectives, your audience, and your story, it’s time to choose the channels and platforms that you’ll use to build your strategy out across. The marketing channels that you choose will become your main point of communication with your customers, so you’ll need to choose wisely and with the information you gathered in Pillar 1 to hand. Your platforms will be the tools and systems you’ll use to implement actions for each channel. We’ve demonstrated the distinction between channels and platforms with the following examples:
Channel: Organic social media
Platform: LinkedIn, X, Instagram, Reddit, TikTok
Objective: Create interest and relationships with customers by sharing content that resonates with them
Channel: Search Engine Optimisation (your visibility in search engines)
Platform: SEMrush, Google Search Console
Objective: To rank higher in organic (not paid) results in search engines such as Google, Bing, or AI-powered search systems such as Perplexity and GPT Search
Channel: Digital PR (getting media attention/coverage for your business), your website
Platform: Editorielle, Buzzfeed, Edie, sectoral outlets
Objective: To secure online coverage for your business from high quality, relevant external websites
Channel: Paid advertising/PPC
Platform: Meta ads, Google ads
Objective: To generate revenue for your business by boosting conversions
Channel: Real life
Platform: You.
Objective: Don’t forget this one! Sustainability is a small world and people know each other. Get out there, go to conferences, speak, listen, share ideas and be ready with printed media (pamphlets, business cards, etc.)
Fine tuning your choices
For social media marketing, the platforms that you choose to include in your strategy also need to be relevant to your audience, as each option attracts different types of users. LinkedIn is a place for customers to seek out professionals, whereas TikTok plays a key role in creating community through creative UGC content. An all-rounder, and an essential for SEO, would be to develop a functional, user-friendly website with a stream of informative sustainability content.
Pillar 3: Ideation & research
Critical, decision-driving research
Each marketing channel within your sustainability marketing mix will serve a different purpose, warranting a degree of critical thinking and access to insights. If you are a one-person marketing department, this might be the point that you consider outsourcing your efforts to a specialist sustainability marketing agency like Other One. In this scenario, the experts that you choose to work with will provide all of the research necessary to proceed with planned strategy actions; this might look like carrying out keyword research for some landing page copywriting, or researching media publications for some ESG PR coverage.
Having access to an expert in each channel will be a huge advantage, as you won’t feel as though you’re taking a stab in the dark when making key business decisions.
Creative campaign ideation
This is where the fun starts! If part of your efforts will include outreaching reactive Digital PR campaigns, or coming up with content marketing assets, you will benefit from setting aside some creative ideation time. Take a look at what your competitors are doing, explore the latest trends, and find out what angles your sustainability business would benefit from developing some thought leadership around.
Pillar 4: Implementation & reporting
It’s time to put all of the work you’ve done in the first 3 pillars into practice! Implementation isn’t where it ends though, as you’ll also need to report and monitor how your strategy is faring - there’s always room for improvement and iteration, and we regularly dive into client insights to find out how we can get even more from the investment our clients have made in their sustainable marketing strategies.
Rely on our expertise for your sustainability marketing strategy
Want to work directly with a team that has already crafted bespoke marketing strategies for businesses in the sustainability space? We’re here to help, so simply contact us to find out more about how we can support you with our sustainability marketing services, or take a look at our latest case studies.
