Marketing sells. If you move products, marketing can help you achieve goals, sustain the business, and take care of stakeholders. In the world of marketing, some ideas tend to generate reliable returns while helping your business in multiple ways. Two that come to mind are holidays and environmental consciousness.
Marketing around the holidays taps into the spirit of the moment, and many people enjoy getting caught up in it. That’s why holiday sales are important to the world economy, much less any one business.
At the same time, many people express their desire to pursue eco-friendly products. They want good products, but they don’t want to hurt the environment along the way.
You can combine these concepts to market your eco-friendly goods around the holidays. To pull that off, you’ll need some solid tips, which you’ll find below.
Engage Audiences
It’s marketing 101, but the essentials don’t change when you make your marketing aims more specific. People remember things that catch and hold their attention. Tell a story. Make someone laugh. Make them cry. Your marketing efforts should always aim to elicit a specific response from your audience.
Also, remember that you can’t reach everyone with a single advertisement or communication. People are different. That’s why you’re targeting a specific audience with this marketing program. Stay specific and focused on your initial goal (and we’ll talk more about goals in a bit).
Value Propositions
Marketing presents a chance for you to demonstrate value propositions. Stepping away from industry lingo for a bit, you’re showing people why your product is good.
When you’re marketing eco-friendly products during the holidays, then eco-friendliness is the chief value proposition.
Get out of generic ideas and into the specific. You don’t necessarily have to create a Bill Nye episode but answer real questions. How does this shirt help the environment? Is it the dye? The development process? Are you using proceeds to clean up water in affected regions? Does it just last a really long time thus lowering manufacturing impact?
Explain how your product impacts the environment. Your audience will appreciate it.
Don’t forget what got you here in the first place. It’s not enough just to be eco-friendly. Your product still has to solve a problem, and in most cases, the environment isn’t the original problem. If you make an eco-friendly pencil, it still has to be able to write, and you need to show why it’s good at writing.
Eco-friendliness is a bonus point; it can’t carry the product. Remember both of these things in your marketing.
Try an Event
Your whole marketing campaign shouldn’t hinge on a single event, but leveraged properly, events can help jump-start a campaign and draw some of the heaviest, most valuable engagement.
Since you’re focusing on eco-friendliness around the holidays, why not sponsor an event to that end? You can lead a clean-up effort, awareness campaign, or other event that speaks to your audience.
These ideas are really a starting point. With some creativity, you can make a unique event that cements your brand and reaches the people you want as customers.
This is your chance to show that you don’t just think about the environment. You take action, and you’re inviting your customers to take action with you. Best of all, holidays make for the best moments to plan these kinds of events.
Do Some Math
Analytics don’t go out the window when you run a temporary or focused campaign. You still want to track engagement metrics and the bottom line. If you spend a bunch of money on this campaign and nobody responds, you need to know that.
Conversely, if an aspect of your marketing reaches people, you want to know that too.
You’re taking on this endeavor for a reason, and analytics help you correct the course if you aren’t getting the results you want. They also help you fine-tune things when your marketing is generally successful.
Set Goals
Speaking of the reason for it all, why are you doing this? You should have clear goals in mind, and if you don’t, it’s time to get started writing them down. Otherwise, you can get lost down the rabbit hole of min/maxing.
So, pick your goals, and then think carefully about metrics that will help you see if you are getting closer to or further from those goals. Analytics only work when they serve a directed purpose.
While you’re at it, remember a couple of things. First, it’s reasonable to have business goals, even when you’re promoting eco-friendliness during the holidays. Set sales goals, engagement goals, profit ideas, or whatever goals really suit the business.
Since you are creating a specific marketing campaign, set some goals along those lines too. How exactly are you helping the environment, and how much do you want to help? You can put numbers on it.
Pick all of your goals, then prioritize them. Run the numbers, and you’ll be on a good path.
Avoid Trade-Off Traps
You might want to make an eco-friendly change here only to suffer over there, and environmentally conscious customers will notice. So if your new eco-friendly headsets come with extra packaging waste, you’re making a trade-off, and you’ll lose at least some of the goodwill you’re trying to generate.
Take the time to pursue holistic sustainability. You can’t fix everything with a single campaign, and some trade-offs are unavoidable. But, if you keep the big picture in mind, you’ll end up on a better path, and your audience will resonate with that effort.
Here are some traps to think about before you fall into them:
- Increased rate of returned products (extra shipping has an environmental cost)
- Longer shipping for new products
- More packing materials or waste in manufacturing
- Shorter product lifespans
- Sustainable sourcing
Put it all together, and you have a reliable approach to marketing that points you in a direction of your choosing and helps you pursue it reliably. Your eco-friendly marketing can succeed during the holidays and beyond.
