Total Marketing Solutions

Sustainable marketing is good, Greenwash is bad. That seems to be the gist of recent articles on this blog and elsewhere including the Sunday Times. So how exactly do they differ? How do you undertake marketing without running the risk of tokenism?
Most of the targets of activists are large corporate organisations, who generally use a product launch to boast about its green credentials without considering the company’s wider environmental strategy. Environmentalists, and many customers, find it difficult to reconcile the “green” messages with the company’s other activities or its history. One of the great rules of marketing is that you have to deliver on your promise and customers do not see these companies delivering.
So as a marketing consultant there are a few simples rules that I recommend to clients undertaking sustainable marketing :
- Try to make it more than a gimmick. Take steps to make sustainability a strategy of your organisation, not a marketing tactic. Customer s will see through anything less.
- Make sure it’s real. If you promise to offset your carbon emissions, then do it.
- And don’t let concerns about greenwash put you off from doing the right thing. That’s akin to not recycling your newspapers because you’re worried that you drive a 4×4. So if in doubt, just do it!

So you’ve given your website an extreme makeover, you’ve optimised it to the max and you’re still not getting the traffic you had hoped for. Why not get in touch with your inner journo and get writing? Submitting articles on topics of interest to your potential customers to some of the many online article directories and online PR sites like Article Blast or Expert Articles could be a further opportunity to exploit and ultimately increase traffic to your website. Once you have written your article, you submit it with a link to your website’s url. What’s more, your article may then be picked up by other webmasters for publication in their own directories, meaning that you can get an awful lot of mileage for very little actual cost. As marketing consultants for SME’s, we are constantly looking to improve and measure the impact of any marketing spend. If your sole cost is the time it takes you to write the article, then it can be an excellent investment. However, there are some golden rules to follow: 1. Use conversational copy. The relationship you have with an online reader is very different to printed material. Use words your target audience will know and be familiar with, but avoid jargon at all costs. Cheesy ad-speak will not work online.2. Get a shave. Once you have written your piece, use Occum’s Razor. Shave off all the wasted words. Keep sentences short and avoid long, scary chunks of information. Online readers do not dawdle or sift. Make sure your point comes across loud and clear from the beginning. Don’t wait until the end of the article to reveal your point - your online reader will have clicked and fled.3. Make sure your copy is benefit-oriented. Your customers don’t want to know how many Institutes you belong to, they just want to know how you can help them. 4. Simplify your ideas. It’s not that your online audience is educationally challenged in any way, but there is a lot of other good stuff out there to read. Make sure yours hits home quickly. It all sounds very easy but once you have got a good idea for an article, you’re halfway there to driving more traffic to your website. Happy writing!