15 Great Green Marketing Ideas

Going green isn’t just a catch phrase any more. Companies that utilize green marketing ideas are finding that the emphasis on environmental protection is paying off with higher revenues and a more diverse customer base. It’s a strong message that is sent, saying that you’re not willing to compromise the community around you or the world at large just to make a quick buck and that’s ultimately what is attractive to others.

It all begins with your identification of local community needs and wants. Going green is good, but knowing how to implement green marketing ideas that relate to your community is better. Find out what the local issues are, get involved in some way, and then utilize these additional marketing ideas to supplement your next campaign to find greater success.

Green Marketing Ideas for Businesses

1. Start Recycling
Use recycled paper and other products for your marketing efforts to reduce the consumption of virgin products. If you do need to use first-run products, then make sure to have them be recyclable products and encourage those who receive the items to recycle them when they have finished with them.

2. Be Remote
One of the easiest ways to save on fuel is to utilize internet meetings instead of requiring everyone to be somewhere in person. This will reduce the carbon output into the atmosphere because fewer miles are being driven or flown. For an added bonus here: power the router, modem, and computer with solar or wind energy.

3. Focus on the Email
By using email communications for your newsletters and other marketing documents, you’ll eliminate even more paper from the equation to help save some trees. Email marketing is also more effective when it comes to receiving feedback about your campaign. Of course emails can just be deleted, but that’s a lot better long-term than having paper products being thrown in the trash.

4. Be Local
Look for local suppliers to fill your green marketing needs. The money stays within the community and it also minimizes shipping costs, which in return minimizes the impact that each order has on the environment.

5. Look for Green Seal
This organization looks for products that are fully sustainable in all industries. If you’ve never taken on a green marketing effort before, check out the information that Green Seal has collected because they’ve done a lot of sourcing so you don’t have to do as much work.

6. Have a Good Platform
Having an ecommerce platform that is effective is what of the best green marketing efforts a business can have. Even though it seems like common sense, a vast majority of small businesses today don’t have an online selling presence. Thanks to digital credit card processing platforms or readers that connect to smartphones, it’s even easy to run batches, accept all forms of credit, and offer the right payment options for customers.

7. Use Reuseable Swag
Water bottles are one of the most popular items to have branded for swag right now. Instead of investing in the millions of plastic bottles that are used every day just to hold water, put your brand onto swag that can be reused, like a water bottle, travel coffee mug, or other daily use item. Your brand will get a lot more exposure for the investment and people will use the items more because they’re more useful.

8. Make Direct Mail Fun
Direct mail marketing can still be effective and you don’t need to chop down trees to do it. Consider using reusable envelopes for your letter campaign so that the recipients can use your products again should the need arise. They’ll actually find some value in this and that might give you the additional boost in exposure that you need.

9. Upgrade the Wheels
If you can swing it in your budget, upgrade your vehicles to electrical models. You may still be using coal-sourced electricity in many communities, but you’ll take tons of carbon out of the atmosphere thanks to the reduction of exhaust that your organization is producing.

10. Encourage Participation
It’s more fun if everyone joins up and begins the emphasis on going green. Offer your customers a specific discount if they provide evidence of helping the local community become more environmentally sustainable. It could be through a highway cleanup program, a specific event you hold to remove litter from a park, or evidence of a switch to green cleaning products in their home.

11. Go Internal
You and your employees provide a lot of unspoken marketing every day. If your office hasn’t gone green, your green marketing ideas will fall on deaf ears. Even something small, like transitioning to reusable shopping bags, can have a big visual impact on the customers that walk through your door.

12. Get Scrappy
Instead of buying packing material for your item shipments, use your scrap paper instead. Run it through a shredder, make sure you’re not putting in documents that have sensitive data on them, and you’ll save money and be able to go green at the same time.

13. Prepare
Offset your environmental impact that’s negative with an environmental impact that is positive. There are a number of tree planting initiatives that can help to establish your organization as a green company. Focus your recovery efforts locally for a larger community impact.

14. Print Smarter
With the push of a button on your printer, you can make a tremendous impact on the environment. Instead of printing your documents at standard or best quality, try printing them on the draft quality setting instead. Most people aren’t going to notice a difference and you could end up saving 50% or more on the ink that you use per document. That means needing fewer refills, which also means a healthier budget.

15. Pursue LEED
LEED Certification might be a good pursuit for your company. Credits can come in many forms and the pursuit could be the final part of your green marketing campaign that makes the difference in creating an effective sales funnel.