An SBM Partner Update by Molly Sanders
The is a collaborative post
Consumers nowadays are making a distinct effort to be more environmentally conscious, which means that a busy market has finally developed for sustainable brands. With more and more companies aiming to stand out in this space though, it’s becoming increasingly competitive – which is perhaps good for the world, but may be difficult for your business! You might be left wondering how your brand can gain meaningful traction online when what once set it apart – a sustainable focus – is growing more commonplace.
The most important thing is, for whatever service or product your business offers, to excel beyond the benefit it gets by claiming sustainability. But a strategic marketing approach can go a long way also, which is why we’ve written up some simple, effective ways to attract more positive attention to your business or brand online.
Tell A Story Relating To A Specific Cause Or Non-Profit
Consumers may be inclined to give your product a try if they are more invested in the story behind it, or the goal it supports. For example, a piece about my Boo bamboo bikes we published recently noted that company’s partnership with “Booomers – The Yonso Project”. That’s an organization that provides jobs for people in the Ashanti Region of Ghana. It’s not related directly to the concept of bamboo bicycles, but it’s the sort of cause people can get passionate about supporting. Thus, it could well serve as a call to action for individuals to engage with the my Boo brand. It’s one example, but it explains perfectly why you should be transparent about any passion projects, charities, or similar efforts attached to your business. This will allow people who may share your company’s values and beliefs to find you, and they may become some of your most reliable customers.
Keep Your Site Fresh & SEO-Friendly
One of the most important ways to increase your website visibility online is to implement quality SEO (or search engine optimization). Essentially, SEO helps to boost traffic to your website by curating search-friendly content and external backlinks to your platform. It’s vital to any online business attempting to grow in a competitive market – though also difficult to implement once a site is fully designed, or if you’re simply not an expert on the topic. But don’t let that stop you from giving SEO some real thought. Updatable reveals that it’s possible to apply changes to your site and fix SEO-related while keeping the initial codebase intact. Putting it more simply, there are ways to dig into your site’s content and make SEO-friendly alterations without changing much fundamentally or on the surface level. That can optimize your business for search engines quickly, and set you up to continue focusing on SEO moving forward (even if you may need help from a digital marketing professional to do it).
Drive Social Media Engagement
Utilizing social media is a wonderful way to market your product or service alongside your efforts in SEO. In order to best engage with your target demographic, try to establish a specific voice for your brand. You’ll want something that is completely unique to your company, and which customers and even “fans”, so to speak, will come to recognize. Once you have that figured out – the social personality of your brand, for lack of a better term – you can put it to use across various social networking platforms. Incorporating tools like a free link shortener can further streamline your content sharing, making posts more engaging and easier to track. Whether that means captioning photos on your accounts, answering questions from other users in a personable manner, or whatever else, any kind of positive engagement helps.
Green Marketing
When it comes to marketing you do not just want to be marketing your business but marketing your company’s green credentials too. By undertaking green marketing, i.e marketing your business based on its environmentally friendly benefits you will be directly targeting customers who are looking for sustainable brands and businesses and therefore more likely to use your services. Alternatively another great marketing technique to attract relevant customers to your business is to team up with services such as those offered by performance-leads.co.uk, who specialize in generating targeted leads specific to your business. Use a trusted internet provider to look after your network like Cincinnati Bell Internet.
Consider A Blog And/Or Podcast
If you happen to have regular updates about whatever cause you’re supporting or whatever good you may be doing for the world, you may want to establish a blog for your site. Blog posts can be easily shared across social media and on other sites, and therefore increase overall engagement (which is actually why they’ll be a big part of the aforementioned SEO efforts also). Even if you are not a particularly gifted writer, you may want to consider finding some outside talent that can help to further your company’s persona via the occasional written post. There are plenty of content writers who would be happy to join your team for a reasonable asking price.
Another option to consider is to dip your toes into the world of podcasting. The medium has become extremely popular, with over 800,000 podcasts live as listed at Podcast Insights. By this point, over half of the United States population listens to at least one podcast. All of this means that the medium has also become quite competitive – but you do have some potential to establish a fairly large listenership with a little luck. All you need is basic equipment to get started, and if you have interesting things to discuss in relation to your brand – and you market the podcast alongside your brand – you might establish not only a whole new method for outreach, but a fresh revenue stream as well.
Do Cross-Promotion With Another Sustainable Brand In a Different Category
The Balance explains that cross-promotion partnerships can be an excellent, cost-effective way to advertise. This, too, can factor into the SEO efforts described above, though we also want to specifically note the value of aligning your company with another one that shares your devotion to sustainability and eco-friendliness. This way you can promote your products or services to another audience that might be specifically inclined to admire your brand and what it stands for. When engaging in cross-promotion, you must ensure you have the suitable payment options to allow for easier transactions based on this partnership. A USD account can help you accept payments in dollars and allow for a smoother payment option for consumers and businesses.
Molly Sanders is an aspiring writer who wrote her first piece on sustainable business practices for the high school paper. She currently works in the marketing department of a tech startup, where she continues to push for sustainable practices in whatever way she can.
