This is not an article about ‘Green Washing’ your advertising (that is the practice of using advertising to make your company appear more environmentally friendly then it really it is) or about having your advertising tell the world how ‘Green’ your business is. These tips are to help reduce the impact your company’s advertising has on the environment.
This is important for a few reasons. First, we all need to help protect the environment. Second, there are very real, tangible benefits to you and your company.
Going Green with your advertising will help improve your sales. Being environmentally friendly is very important to many people (for good reasons) and the more your company is environmentally responsible, the more likely you will be to attract like minded people.
Going Green can also help save you money. The 5 tips I put together here were chosen because they will help the environment and not cost you a lot of money. In fact some of them will save you money!
With all that in mind let’s get started:
1. Print your marketing materials on Recycled Paper. You can get high quality prints on recycled or Post-Consumer paper easily and cheaply. This will help the environment by reusing existing resources and shouldn’t cost you anything extra.
2. When preparing your graphics and layouts in house, print fewer proofs. When I used to prepare lots of ads and graphics I would print a proof for each change I made. This wasted a tremendous amount of paper and ink. The better way is to make multiple changes for each proof you print. This is not only better for the environment but will save your company a lot of money on paper and ink.
3. Allocate more of your advertising budget to online advertising. There are many ways to advertise online today, there is Pay-Per-Click, banner ads, press release services, online magazines, online newspapers, etc.. Using these methods of online advertising you can highly target your market and you can be certain your ad won’t end up on the bottom of a birdcage.
4. Put your outdoor signs on timers, set them to turn off during the dead of night. In almost every town there is a window of 3-4 hours every night when there is almost no traffic on the streets. Turning your signs off during this time period will not cost you customers but it will help the environment and help lower your electrical bill.
5. Invest in Outdoor LED Changeable Copy Signs. LED Signs are very environmentally friendly. Not only do they have a long life span, but they use very little electricity, and have one of the lowest costs per view (sometime referred to as CPM which is the cost per thousand views) of any advertising medium. With LED Signs you can display highly targeted sales messages to the cars in front of your business and you won’t be consuming natural resources, except a small amount of electricity, to do it!
Following these five easy tips will help to reduce the impact your business has on the enviroment and will help to save you money. There are many resources available online to business owners to help them find other ways of ‘Going Green’. Caring for the environment is everybody’s responsibility and we all need to find ways to eco-streamline our businesses.