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Green Marketing: Marketing decisions to weave into your environmental strategy

Aimée Colley and Sophie Henderson

Designer at Shaw and Project Manager at Shaw

Sustainability is high on the agenda for many organisations. At a top level you might have cut down on unnecessary day-to-day printing, changed to LED bulbs, introduced a cycle to work scheme, and be striving to cut your carbon emissions – but have you considered what small changes you could be making to your marketing activity to become greener?

We joined the SME Climate Hub Pledge in 2023, and as part of this we aim to help our client’s find better, more sustainable ways, to move forward with their marketing activity. It’s never too late to start making changes, and hopefully our suggestions can help you evolve your current strategy and develop best practice for greener marketing.

Some of our suggestions can be implemented straight away, but where we suggest making a change to physical items, we always encourage using up any existing supplies first – these ideas are for replacements.

Dabble with digital advertising

A digital advertising campaign is not only good for the planet, but it can usually reach an even larger audience than a print campaign, for only a fraction of the cost. Not only that, it can be very specifically targeted, and the results carefully monitored, so that you can gather important information about your audience, which will reliably inform your future marketing activity.

Try a digital brochure

We’re a design agency, so we love a well-executed piece of print (especially one that’s carbon balanced – see below for more), but we’ve been helping many of our clients make the move towards digital brochures for their day-to-day needs. Not only can we introduce interactive elements (see our Musselburgh Racecourse brochure here), but digital brochures are easy to update and trackable (allowing you to, for example, monitor clicks from the pages of the brochure to your website).

Evaluate your email marketing

If you’re used to physically mailing customers – a regular e-newsletter is a great alternative. You can keep your customers up to date with news and offers – with a much lower environmental impact. You are talking to a warm audience and will be able to assess (very precisely) how your communication was received!

If you are already communicating by email with a standard email provider, and sending out c.10,000 emails per month, you may not be aware that the emissions per year would be around 14,030g CO2eq (https://ecosend.io/carbon-calculator).This is the equivalent to charging a smartphone 1,707 times. If this is important to you, there is a range of suppliers in this sector, some of whom are prioritising sustainability and will be able to send emails with reduced emissions. You could also consider adding a note in the footer of the email asking readers to delete it after it has been read. This might sound counter-intuitive, but emails continue to sit on a server using carbon (albeit in relatively small amounts) until they’re deleted. Adding this request demonstrates your commitment to best environmental practices.

Support a local green initiative

You might have scope to support or partner with a local charity or organisation who works in the green sector. Whether with a percentage of sales from a product directed toward this cause or your organisation might be able to commit time, with a pledge that X number of staff hours per year are spent volunteering.

This creates a win-win scenario: your customers feel good about supporting a brand that gives back, and your business reinforces its commitment to sustainability (at Shaw, we’re proud to support B1G1, is a global initiative that enables businesses to integrate social giving into their operations).

Print consciously
When we commission commercial printing for you, we can ensure it ticks the right boxes for your environmental policy.
Here’s our greener printing checklist:
(all subject to quantity and specification)
  • Can it be printed on recycled paper?
  • Is the paper FSC accredited?
  • Can the print be carbon balanced?
  • Is the printer one of the World Land Trust’s Certified Carbon Balanced Printers?
  • Should the project be printed using a litho process and soy-based inks rather than digitally printing?
Explore longer lasting – or fully recyclable exhibition materials

There can be a lot of single-use print and single-use plastics involved in exhibition materials, and we’ve been working to find more sustainable solutions for our clients.

One of the most common exhibition items is the pull-up roller banner (most companies have one). The graphics for these are usually PVC, or a PVC-coated substrate. Not all of these systems can accommodate replacement graphics, which renders them a single-use plastic item. The only effective recycling of these systems involves full disassembly and taking to a recycling centre.
For a recent brand launch we supplied a more sustainable solution to our client, Democratic Finance Scotland. A fabric banner system with a tubular metal frame. The banners are printed with graphics either side, and slide onto the frame once its assembled. If new graphics are required, the old ones could either be textile recycled or retained to interchange, as required. And, when it comes to the end of its life, the aluminium frame is fully recyclable.

One of our suppliers has been working on some exciting exhibition stands – and other display materials – using Xanita cardboard. They can create a whole custom stand system with this material, with printed graphic panels, and other elements which could usually only be achieved with a more substantial wood or metal build. Being cardboard, it’s very lightweight and transportable. And whilst the aim would be to reuse and reassemble the system at multiple events, it’s possible to fully recycle all elements, if only used once.

Offer eco-friendly merchandise

When it comes to giveaways – it’s not all about single-use plastics. With a little thought to the materials that items are made from, you can still tread a more conscientious path by favouring ethically produced items of good quality. We’ve worked with several clients on this front, supplying them with notebooks with covers made from recycled plastic bottles; tote bags made from recycled textile fibres, bamboo socks, stainless steel water bottles, and bamboo cutlery sets.

Top tip: Adopt a ‘less is more’ approach at events and exhibitions by offering fewer, higher-quality, and sustainable giveaways. Memorable and unique items can create a lasting impression, without contributing to waste.

Eco-friendly websites

For optimum user experience, ranking and maintain a low carbon footprint, we build websites for minimal page load times. Images are compressed and uploaded at the correct scale and best format for optimal viewing. We use cache options to store data, evaluate content and keep page size to a minimum. Code is clean and efficient, svg file format is used for infographics, and typefaces are considered for their weight. We can also arrange renewable energy website hosting.

Our sites can achieve eco-certification.

Hopefully you find the above tips helpful and you can start capturing photos for use on social media. If you want to discuss how we could help with this – whether it’s running your social media calendar – or doing some internal comms activity to generate photos – drop us an email at edinburgh@shaw-online.com. We’d love to chat.