How to leverage education-based environmental marketing
For many years, brands have used storytelling and the delivery of helpful content to create value and attract customers. The ultimate goal, of course, is to create a community and promote products and services with a solution to community issues.
When we explore the question – what is content marketing? We’re exploring a history of creativity and a future of opportunities to make humans better through education. A long-standing leader in content marketing is John Deere. They developed a magazine for farmers called “The Furrow” and printed articles that resemble the Farmer’s Almanac. To this day, the John Deere brand educates and delivers incredibly helpful information to assist those that would use their farming equipment, inadvertently building a community and brand loyalty.
In this post, we will answer the following questions:
- What is content marketing, and how does it work?
- What are the main components to make content marketing efforts effective?
- Why do you need a content strategy as an environmental company?
- What are the various forms of content marketing?
- What is content marketing for beginners?
- What are the benefits of content marketing?
- How to get started adding education to your content marketing efforts?
- Top content marketing books to get you started.
What is content marketing and how does it work?
Content Marketing is a type of marketing that involves creating and sharing online material (such as videos, blogs, and social media posts) that does not explicitly promote a brand but is intended to stimulate interest in its products or services.
Oxford English Dictionary, 2019
Green content marketing is a type of content marketing that includes environmental education and awareness as an integral part of a marketing campaign aimed to raise the knowledge level of average consumers about environmental issues, not greenwashing. –Denise Anderson-Rivas
How Content Marketing Works:
- Get your brand on the mission of the consumer, making your brand a powerful advocate for things your consumers believe in, want, and need for improving their lives.
- Helps to start a politically motivated campaign that aligns with your consumers’ beliefs and gets them on board for a cause that aligns with everyone’s mission.
- Propels your word-of-mouth factor and educational content as consumers grow to trust your transparent way of educating. Brand enthusiasts happily share and promote your content with their network – the most trusted form of information delivery, peer-to-peer.
- Increases trustworthiness.
- Increases reach to new and broader markets.
What are the main components to make content marketing efforts effective?
To make your content marketing effective, you have to step into the shoes of your ideal customers. Here are some main points to follow.
- Know who you are – documented brand identity guidelines.
- Know who you serve – target personas and their journey.
- Have a solidified content mission statement – to guide your team on the purpose of creating content and who your content will serve.
- Serve beyond the sale – deliver helpful, insightful content that’s not geared toward the sell but toward the tell.
- Deliver and promote content where customers hang out – if you have a TikTok resistant team, but your customers are moving their time to that platform, speedily get your content on TikTok and be a part of the community. Look for relevant communities to be a part of, like #earthtok.
- Be consistent– have an optimized content production process that works like clockwork and is agile.
- Plan ahead – with a content calendar and a schedule.
- Deliver content as a long-term strategy – not only for a few months or a year. The payoff is usually longer, but the ROI is greater.
- Be transparent – admit where your company and industry lacks and where you’re making improvements. We live in the age of transparency, and your customers will appreciate your honesty. It makes you stand out and makes you authentic.
- Collect data – weekly, monthly, and quarterly data collection to guide content decisions.
Having a Content Mission Statement is important for every environmental company delivering helpful information. It will tie in the most critical aspects of your team’s content creation for your brand’s community. Your team should never get off track if they read the content mission statement before creating every piece of content, no matter the format. When you add new team members, this statement will quickly help them know what to create and who to create it for. Here’s a formula you can use:
[Name of Company/Organization] is dedicated to delivering [types of content] on the topics of [list content pillars] to achieve [goals for your customers].
A.R. Environmental Content Marketing House’s content mission statement:
A.R. Environmental Content Marketing House will consistently produce content for CEOs and CMOs of environmental companies on environmental content marketing topics to help grow their business, accomplish their mission, and increase their measurable impact on the planet.
The biggest secret to content success is staying consistent and continuously improving based on new findings and relevant trends. Check out the secret to successful environmental content marketing by clicking here.
If you’re looking to get started on a content strategy or your marketing team could use support, send us a message info@armarketinghouse.com.
Why do environmental companies need a content marketing strategy?
You’ll want a strategy to connect with people in a meaningful way. Your team will need customers to know that you’re part of the problem but that you’re working toward solutions. Take a lesson from Patagonia. Having a content strategy prevents your team from creating content for the sake of content.
Starting with your customer’s goals (and yes, you should definitely find out what they are through engagement social surveying), your marketing team will want to find the right way to support their efforts. Whether that’s through environmental legislation, arming customers with the knowledge to be better stewards, or bringing out environmental research that often stays locked in academia. Your brand can use its marketing dollars to do the right thing and deliver the information lacking in the public sphere.
Transparency is golden – admit your company isn’t perfect but aims to be the best solution. Since most big brands are lower on the sustainability spectrum and have greenwashed messaging, you can help customers make the best decisions through re-education on important environmental issues. This means creating educational content, delivering company transparency, showing proof, referencing scientific studies, and doing all this through enticing engagement on critical issues.
What forms of content marketing fit best for your sustainable brand?
Most companies know they need a content marketing component for their product or service to reach more consumers and get those consumers to buy and commit to their product. Sustainable brands need to incorporate education to get people to “make the switch.” Here are some examples of content marketing tactics your brand can leverage.
Environmental Educational Content. Consumers demand authentic information. People are spending more time on their smartphones communicating, researching, and people want immediate answers to the questions they have — hint: sustainable brands aren’t leveraging this need nearly enough. At the same time, there is a disconnect between scientific studies and delivering academic information to the masses in a coherent, accessible way. The breakdown from science to public knowledge is the same juncture where environmental educational content meets marketing strategies. The premise is that to connect people with the backed-by-science information they’re looking for. Environmental companies are in a unique position to use their marketing dollars to do just that — environmental content marketing. In the same vein as filling a gap in the consumer market with a green product, environmental educational content fills a market gap of knowledge.
Environmental education is a highly valuable measure that leaves your company with assets in the form of content that can look like any mix of the following:
- Documentaries
- Short-form videos
- Podcasts
- Voice/storytelling
- Articles
- Stats and Facts Microcontent
- Email marketing
- Photography
- Study and science-backed articles
- Infographics
- Speaking events
- Online presentations
- Webinars
- Online course creation
- Magazines
- User-generated content
- NFTs (non-fungible tokens)
And the content format list goes as long as the imagination.
Political Involvement. Green companies are uniquely positioned to connect with consumers on an authentic level that major brands like Chevron or Coca-Cola will never be able to. You can uncover any company’s values when you a) follow the money and b) follow the politics. Most companies are involved to some degree in policy influencing, which is why environmental brands must adopt the same ferocity when approaching political engagement for the issues their brand represents. Content comes into play here by having your content team develop educational tools and messaging for political leaders and policymakers. You can contact us to learn more about this!
Advertising your content. The advertising industry isn’t going anywhere because of the increase in content marketing strategies. In 2018, advertisers spent 376 billion dollars, and that number is expected to grow 41% over the next three years. With the increase in access to analytics, ROI discernment of where advertising dollars can and should be spent, the focus will begin to shift toward creating content, new strategies, and new ways to offer experiential marketing to people. Whirlpool failed to execute education and learned this lesson the hard way. Had they taken the educational-content route, they would have seen that consumers would pay a premium for a CFC-free refrigerator but didn’t because Whirlpool failed to educate them on what CFCs were. -Abramovich, 2018.
What is content marketing for beginners?
For green businesses just getting started on content marketing, the best advice is to decide now if you will take a slow and steady approach, or if you want to dive in fully. Be cognizant of the demands of a full-scale content strategy. Because the last thing you want to do is start too big and not be prepared or start too small and realize you should have planned a much larger strategy. Either way, you want to have a team supporting your efforts and delivering to make your company part of meaningful conversations.
Let’s not forget, sustainability investors are on the rise. Consumers, especially younger consumers, are paying more attention to climate change effects. Their demands and purchasing choices are proof. Every large conglomerate, big-box chain, and many major brands are aware of the growing awareness of climate change and are adding ESGs to their business plans and marketing endeavors. Companies low on the sustainability level will eventually be forced to make major changes for the better, and environmental companies like yours can push the inevitable even faster through effective communication and content efforts.
Environmental content marketing is growing companies by delivering high-quality, reliable, well-researched content that informs and engages communities on the environmental issues their product or service solves. Everyone wants to be a part of the solution. The goal is to always support people with your marketing efforts and solutions. This is done by consistently leveraging substance to your content marketing and advertising efforts.
What are the benefits of content marketing for sustainable brands?
While ⅓ of consumers actively seek out sustainable brands, there are ⅕ waiting to connect with brands they believe are doing the things they claim on their packaging. Content marketing provides consumers the right to have truthful information, to deeply communicate, educate, and inspire them into action and a joint-effort relationship.
Content Marketing benefits include:
- Offers an opportunity to educate on the environmental problem your company is trying to solve.
- You can use your marketing dollars to do good by educating.
- Use content marketing to educate lawmakers.
- Influence policy and start a movement around solving an environmental issue.
- Increase sales.
- Cost savings.
- Attract better customers who have more loyalty.
- Content as a profit center.
There are benefits for sustainable brands that produce tailored, educational content:
- Build brand awareness.
- Build your brand as a leader, teacher, and change maker.
- Teach the topics people need to understand for change and buy-in.
- Grow a committed following that promotes your brand’s environmental solution.
- Support sales and B2B efforts more effectively and intuitively.
- Supports B2C customers along their learning and buying journeys.
- Supports social media organically.
- Open up PR opportunities organically.
- Attract like-minded partners to join your cause.
- Improved SEO.
Steps to start adding environmental education to your content marketing efforts
Here are some steps for getting started on adopting a content marketing strategy for your environmentally conscious brand.
- Set a goal. Set one clear goal and small subset goals for your educational content marketing plan. The goal could be to remove x amount of plastic cutlery in the world by selling x amount of my reusable traveling cutlery and getting 10,000 people to sign my petition to ban single-use plastic cutlery in my state or country, whatever makes the most sense for your brand’s mission.
- Determine what is needed for your industry to advance. Take a hard look at the last significant advancements in your industry, address where your industry currently is, and the environmental damages the status quo has caused in your industry. Then, determine how you can use your product/service to advance the industry toward a sustainable future.
- Locate the biggest supporters of your brand or solution. Determine what groups of people are genuinely excited that your sustainable product or service exists.
- Build a strategy around your supporter’s educational needs. Learn what needs they have and what gaps in knowledge exist to truly understand the underlying environmental issues behind the solution that is your product. Often, customers will love the idea of your product just because it’s “green.” However, it will never be enough to sell a green product by merely making unsubstantiated claims. Do good and use content marketing to increase brand integrity by uncovering the environmental education that customers require to act. Then develop the educational strategy necessary for customers to understand your solution in long-term ways. Finally, execute the educational strategy so customers can commit to the advancement of your solution and together you can make a measurable impact.
Our favorite content marketing books to get you started
Epic Content Marketing by Joe Pulizzi, founder of Content Marketing Institute
Content, Inc. by Joe Pulizzi, founder of Content Marketing Institute
Guerilla Marketing by Jay Conrad Levinson
Using content to educate on the climate crisis
Consumerism will not stop climate change. However, we are standing at the precipice of our climate crisis, and there’s so much we humans collectively need to know to move forward. As we witness devastating effects of climate change on our homes, health, air, food, and local weather patterns, the time has come for an all-hands-on-deck approach to environmental literacy. So what is content marketing? It’s really about what content marketing can be. Content marketing for organizations and businesses that are tackling some of our biggest environmental problems is imperative. Why? Because our educational system cannot catch up to teach everyone what they need to know to make better choices. Better choices in their voting decisions, their purchasing habits, and in lawmaking.
Need help with your environmental content? For more information on how you can successfully grow your business through educational marketing, contact us or check out other articles here!
Resources:
https://www.deere.com/en/publications/the-furrow/
https://armarketinghouse.com/tag/green-marketing/
https://armarketinghouse.com/tag/environmental-marketing/