Companies who are looking for new ways to attract customers and boost their bottom line may find that green marketing is a surprisingly effective tool.
What is green marketing? It is the process of developing eco-friendly products and services, or improving current business practices to be more environmentally friendly and then focusing on that in your marketing materials.
Before we go any further, it is important to note that although green marketing can promote positive PR and bring in new customers, lying about your company’s green credential is a really bad idea. People will find out and the opposite of what you hope to achieve is likely to come to pass.
With that being said, let’s take a look at some of the biggest business benefits of green marketing:
A unique selling point
If you are the first company in your sector to pay for eco-friendly tyre disposal or the first to use eco-friendly hemp to craft your goods, for example, then making a big fuss about that will immediately set your company apart from the rest in the most positive way possible. It could help you to get ahead of the competition.
Find a new audience
Green marketing can also help you to find a brand new market of people who are willing to buy your products and services, There are many people who really care about the state of the planet, and they are always looking for companies who do things the green way. If you can position yourself as one of them,m you can break into markets that might have been previously closed to you.
Increased loyalty
As if that was not enough, once you have found a target audience of green consumers to buy your products, as long as you keep doing what you are doing, you can keep them onside. If you do things in your business that align with their values, they will, more often than not, stay loyal to you, and as you will know, it is as much as six times more expensive to find new customers than it is to keep doing business with your existing ones, so you could save a lot of marketing money in the process too.
Generate more revenue
Perhaps, one of the biggest benefits of green marketing is its potential for raising more revenue. In the UK, research has found that one-third of all customers would be willing to pay as much as 25 percent more for products they perceived to be eco-friendly than they would pay for the same product without its green credentials. Yes, customers will willingly pay me for things that have been marketed as green! So, even if it costs a little more to make your business eco-friendly (it is often true that you save money by doing so) it will almost certainly be offset by your potential to charge more.
As you can see, green marketing can bring a lot of benefits to your business, so if you are already doing things the eco-friendly way or you think you can start doing so, it is a fruitful avenue that you may want to pursue.