First of all, make sure that you are already doing your very best to tick all the Eco-friendly boxes your audience is concerned about. Because they will challenge you and ask for proof of your Eco-friendly claim. Be always as transparent as possible towards your audience.
Don't necessarily focus on sales with your marketing campaign
Educating your audience about why and how your business, products or services are Eco-friendly makes the message stick longer. Tell them the full story in a short way and make sure that you have the long story available as well, just in case they want to dig into the details.
You can do this by creating a campaign around key topics of your Eco-friendly approach. Use strong images with a catchphrase or a very short pitch about the product and you are ready to start your marketing campaign.
A great example of this is the Icebreaker brand. They created a transparency report of 55 pages with a detailed overview of how they try to do better as a company. But they narrowed that full report down to 4 key messages.
They talked about:
The raw product growers
Animal welfare
The product itself
Their supply chain
+ they communicate about how they want to be even greener in the future and what they still need to change within the company in order to accomplish these goals.
Embrace the digital world
Going paperless could be another step for your company. So instead of investing in printed advertising you might want to try out digital advertising. These days it's really easy to target your ideal customers. Through Facebook and Google Ads you can definitely find the right settings to target your niche.
But will online advertising alone do the trick? Probably not...
Your entire digital presence needs to be fine tuned. Make sure that your brand and/or product social pages are reflecting the message you are trying to convey on your website.
With online paid advertising and organic social campaigns you are redirecting people who click on your online campaign message to a certain landing page on your website. Make sure that the images, content and message of your online campaign are also used on the corresponding landing pages.
A lot of potential customers bounce away from landing pages because they do not recognize the same content as the one from the ad or social post they just clicked on. You literally have a few seconds to let your audience feel comfortable when they land on your specific website page. If they don't feel the same emotion as they had when they clicked in the first place, they are gone.
I've seen it already way too many times that brands come up with a great campaign that is build around short funny videos or eye-catching visuals. But they do not do the effort to restyle their webpages to reflect the campaign that people loved. And it hits them hard when they realize they spend a lot of budget on a campaign without the expected online return. In short, make sure that you synchronize all online touch points.
Encourage Customers to Participate
Involve customers and ask them to do their part as well. You could talk to them about how to dispose your product when it reaches the end of it's life. Or give them tips on how to extend the lifetime of your product. Or you can let them take part in ecological initiatives you care about.
It's a good excuse to reach out to your audience without being perceived as too pushy. This will place your brand and product in the picture after your sale. The ultimate goal for your business is most likely to have recurring orders. By being in the picture after the first sale you stay top of mind with that customer. And current customers are more likely to purchase with you next time if you build up a trustworthy relationship with them.
Contact me for more info on Green marketing that would fit your brand, products and company vision.