What is carbon conscious marketing? Expert shares 4 tips for digital marketing optimisation to reduce your carbon footprint

When a business plans to become greener, they may think of changing their operations and transport process first, but optimising your marketing strategy can also have a significant impact on your carbon footprint.

This is called ‘carbon conscious marketing’ – the practice of running your marketing activities and strategies with the environment in mind.

26% of marketers believe that people are not actually interested in this practice, but in this climate-conscious era, that couldn’t be further from the truth.

Marketing expert Philip Bacon shares 4 tips for optimising your strategy to reduce carbon emissions.

Greener Website Hosting

Believe it or not, website traffic creates carbon emissions. The amount of electricity it takes to host your website on a server and then appear on computers or phones all adds up. According to Website Carbon, the average web page produces 1.76g of CO2 per page view. For a website with 10,000 monthly page views, that’s 211kg CO2 per year. So, when it comes to hosting your website, you should choose a host that focuses on sustainability. Start by researching potential hosts and exploring their environmental statements to see how they focus on reducing carbon emissions. If they don’t have a statement, take that as a red flag and move on. Once you’ve found the host, it’s your turn to create a carbon conscious website. Your website needs to be as efficient and as fast as possible. You can achieve this by reducing or compressing large-sized files, redirects and unnecessary HTML/ Java and CSS code.

Create an Environmental Statement

As a business, you should aim to have an environmental statement highlighting your strategies to reduce your carbon. You can use this content to promote your net-zero activities and the other great work you do to help the environment, such as planting X number of trees per X number of sales. Many clients will be willing to pay a little more if they know that the company they are buying from is operating in a sustainable way.

Digital > Print

According to Kefron, the average office worker in the UK uses up to 45 pieces of paper per day, and two-thirds of that is considered waste. Considering holidays, that’s about 10,000 sheets of paper per year per worker. Instead of wasting trees by printing marketing collateral, create digital versions. And if you do need to print, go double-sided and use recycled paper.

Create a Green Office

The pandemic has made many of us realise we don’t actually need to go into an office every day to get work done. This is kinder to both the environment and our sleep schedules! If remote working for all staff isn’t possible, kit out your office to make it as energy efficient as possible – movement based lighting in common areas, wifi-enabled heating and low power LED lighting.