7 Ways to Align Climate Strategy with Digital Marketing Strategy
How to Reduce Your Company’s Climate Impact and Help Create a More Resilient Future
In this post, we cross-examine seven ways to align your organization’s digital marketing strategy with an impactful climate strategy.
Marketers use the internet every day to promote our products, provide services and programs, advance our missions, and run key operations. However, some of these tactics can be at odds with proven climate strategies.
How might we create harmony between good digital marketing and impactful climate strategies grounded in science and environmental justice? Below we share an overview of some of the challenges and seven strategic suggestions for addressing them.
Climate Strategy vs. Digital Marketing Strategy
With few exceptions, our digital marketing strategies are designed to achieve more impressions, click-throughs, likes, comments, views, conversions, and so on.
It’s always more. Campaigns that improve the metrics above are deemed successful while those that don’t are abandoned like single-use plastic. Plus, many organizations leave outdated information online rather than properly disposing their data or governing their content.
What’s more important to consider is whether these campaigns actually move the needle to help an organization thrive. For most, there are only a few metrics that really matter. Yet we insist on collecting far more data than we ever need.
This wasteful approach has consequences. In fact, our dysfunctional relationship with data is so ridiculous that data centers have become the digital equivalent of landfills, packed with bits and bytes we’ll never use or need. Over 90% of the data we collect or create has little or no value, despite its huge cost to the environment. What’s more, sloppy data practices lead to all sorts of potential security and data privacy issues.
Sure, tactics like sustainable web design and choosing a green web host will help. However, doing these things doesn’t automatically make your digital product or service “sustainable.” There is a huge amount of waste created in ongoing use of a product or service as well.
It’s time that marketers, analysts, product managers, search consultants, and other data power users come to terms with this.
What’s in Your Climate Strategy?
Recent IPCC reports emphasize that drastic changes are needed quickly across sectors to maintain a livable planet. Every organization needs a clear, stakeholder-focused climate strategy. It is only a matter of time before this becomes a requirement to operate in any sector.
Plus, from health issues and natural disasters to supply chain and operational problems, resilience in the face of a changing climate will be a top priority for any organization hoping to stay solvent and relevant.
Yet many organizations still haven’t made climate strategy a priority. This is especially true in the online advertising and marketing industries, which have been slow to address their own environmental impacts. However, it is possible to align an effective climate strategy with a good digital marketing strategy. Let’s explore how.
7 Ways to Align Climate Strategy with Digital Marketing Strategy
Try the seven tactics below to create a better relationship between your digital marketing efforts and an effective climate strategy. Some you can accomplish with little time or effort. Others will require more resources. All are better for people and the planet.
1. Create an Emissions Reduction Strategy
Covering a complete organizational strategy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is beyond the scope of this post. Plus, those strategies will be different for each organization and department. However, by including digital products and services in your emissions reduction strategy, you can directly influence your marketing’s impact. Here are some things to consider:
- Energy efficiency: Implement energy-efficiency plans. For digital businesses— in addition to emissions associated with facilities and operations—improve the digital products and services you create and use, including third-party services, which are covered under Scope 3 below.
- Data strategy: Adopt a sustainable data strategy that includes ongoing testing and good governance practices, like data disposal and data privacy.
- Verified offsets: Don’t rely on offsets before reduction. Reduce first, offset what you can’t reduce, and only use verified solutions!
2. Focus on Quality Over Quantity
Retool your relationships with important stakeholders and the campaign data you generate to prioritize quality in every task and interaction. Consider the following:
- People first: Put relationships before interactions or transactions. In planning, collaboration, and co-creation, include diverse stakeholder perspectives to ensure their needs and pain points are represented. Understand non-human stakeholders, like the environment, as well. Prioritize meaningful interactions at every step.
- Build community: Nurture and co-create customer or stakeholder communities around shared values and common ideas. Center marginalized voices in these conversations.
- Knowledge sharing: Similarly, educate and encourage carbon consciousness and climate justice among end users. Alert organizational stakeholders to your efforts by declaring a climate emergency. Use B Lab UK’s Climate Emergency Playbook for Business to get started.
- Digital resilience: Create a long-term governance plan that includes quality control policies related to digital resilience: security, data privacy, content strategy, access to information, product management, maintenance, technical debt, and so on.
3. Improve Performance and Efficiency
Websites are the foundation of many digital marketing campaigns. Website performance has a direct impact on your bottom line. People quickly leave slow or poorly performing websites. Slow websites also significantly contribute to the internet’s massive environmental impact.
Improving website performance reduces both abandonment rates and emissions. This impacts search rankings and can reduce hosting costs as well. Consider taking these actions:
- Prioritize page weight: Set a page weight budget to help your team understand and stick to performance goals.
- Check page experience: Similarly, make sure pages react the way users expect them to and help them complete tasks as quickly and efficiently as possible.
- Reduce file sizes: Optimize media and scripts to ensure content loads quickly across browsers and devices. Images, audio, video, and other media types often present the biggest opportunity to improve site performance.
- Reduce user journey steps: Analyze each user journey on your site to identify opportunities to streamline the experience and remove steps.
- Prioritize accessibility: Finally, products that are both accessible and more sustainable provide intersectional benefits, like quick access to important information for people with disabilities and those on older devices or in low bandwidth areas.
4. Prioritize Scope 3 Emissions
Digital organizations or departments can make the biggest potential difference with Scope 3 emissions. Because these are indirect emissions associated with your value chain and not direct operational emissions, Scope 3 is also the most challenging for an organization to implement. Consider taking action on the following items:
- Know the Scope 3 categories: Learn about the different categories that fall under Scope 3 emissions. Understand how each applies (or doesn’t) to your organization.
- Create strategic partnerships: Because supply chain emissions fall under Scope 3, find ethical partners for third-party vendors, suppliers, and services you use. Partner with them on measurable climate solutions.
- Go beyond requirements: Finally, the GHG Protocol currently lists Scope 3 emissions reporting and reduction as optional. However, this is changing quickly in favor of mandatory disclosures. To more meaningfully address digital emissions, prioritize optional tasks alongside those required.
5. Prioritize (Social) Innovation
In order to tell a compelling sustainability story in their marketing, many organizations need an innovation overhaul first. Otherwise, you might run into some pretty severe pitfalls.
Plus, during times of increasing uncertainty and ongoing disruption, agile organizations that focus on continuous improvement and better understand how to create shared value for stakeholders will also be more resilient. B Corp Certification is an example of social innovation, though not every B Corp is a social enterprise.
Social innovation can inform compelling content and form the foundation for impact-focused marketing campaigns meant to engage organizational stakeholders. The activities below just scratch the surface of available opportunities for organizations, but they’re a good start.
- Stakeholder mapping: Map out your business ecosystem with a stakeholder mapping workshop.
- Journey mapping: Employ a journey mapping process to better understand how stakeholders interact with your organization, especially in regards to your products, services, and programs.
- Impact Business Models: Incorporate Impact Business Models into your operations to better align your organization’s approach to finance with a strong sense of purpose.
6. Climate Justice Over Carbon Tunnel Vision
Next, meaningful climate justice can’t happen without centering the voices of marginalized communities who are most impacted by the climate emergency in your communications. When we focus only on emissions, we miss a big part of the equation — justice for those who are least responsible for this crisis in the first place.
Marketers can make a compelling difference in the stories they tell. Yes, reducing emissions is critical to addressing climate change. However, climate justice requires a strong social foundation alongside emissions reductions. To do this:
- Center marginalized voices: Inclusive climate communications feature those who are directly affected by climate change. Highlight their voices in your marketing campaigns.
- Embrace intersectionality: To reduce risk, be sure to prioritize related intersectional issues in your work. For digital organizations or departments, prioritize sustainability and accessibility alongside data privacy and security. Better yet, create a digital-specific Code of Ethics that includes all these things and more.
- Ensure data equity: Similarly, make equitable decisions when doing data-driven research. Representation matters. This is key to implementing the sustainable data strategy mentioned in point one above.
- Build a JEDI supply chain: Finally, incorporate justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion (JEDI) principles into your supply chain and vendor vetting policies. For digital businesses, this could mean partnering with an ethical marketing agency or not supporting suppliers that fuel injustice.
7. Advocate for Impactful Climate Legislation
Most importantly, we can’t build the strong social foundation mentioned above without changing legislation. This is where individual actions make the biggest difference. It is also another way marketers can differentiate their organizations in the content they create and share.
In order to redesign how we work, we must change laws that keep current broken systems in place. We need new legislation, grounded in climate justice, that incentivizes organizations across sectors to make the right decisions. To accomplish this:
- Meet legislators: Work with local representatives to enact laws that support climate justice and make it easier for everyone to improve their digital carbon footprint.
- Co-create with community: Next, engage your community, co-create solutions, and participate in advocacy efforts that center Black, Brown, Indigenous, Asian, low-income, LGBTQ+, disabled, and other marginalized voices.
- Find strategic partners: Join forces with a local nonprofit that has specific expertise in political advocacy to make your collective efforts more successful.
- Support energy disclosure: Finally, support legislation that requires full disclosure from companies on their pollution and energy use, including those in the tech sector.
Aligning Digital Marketing Strategy with Climate Strategy
There’s a long road ahead for all industries to redesign their organizational systems and procedures to be more equitable and climate-focused. Unfortunately, the clock is ticking and time is limited.
However, digital businesses and departments — including marketing — have a unique opportunity to lead in these efforts. With each organization playing its part, we can collectively reach a long-term goal of shared prosperity and environmental justice. The best time to do something is now.
A version of this article was originally published at https://www.mightybytes.com. B The Change gathers and shares the voices from within the movement of people using business as a force for good and the community of Certified B Corporations. The opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the nonprofit B Lab.
