Sustainability is becoming more important to businesses. As well as this obviously being great news for the environment, you can use this when promoting your services.
If you are making efforts to do business in a green way – let’s shout about that!
Not on your radar? You’re risking being passed over for competitors who do make environmental efforts.
Where to start
We’d recommend starting with a policy. It may be that you’re doing a lot of things already that just need documenting! By writing it down, and measuring what you’re doing, you’ll quickly see where the gaps are.
If this is all new to you, consider going on some training to understand what you need to look at. We had free training from Small Business Britain, which is still available at the time of writing.
A business decision
Sustainability is a bigger issue than marketing – it’s about how you conduct your business. The green marketing element is how you decide to communicate about it, but sustainability can also interestingly be considered from a marketing perspective when making business decisions as it becomes more important to your target audience and you decide how you want to appeal to them.
Measuring sustainability
Measuring your sustainability gets harder the bigger the business you are. From understanding your energy output to CO2 offsetting, you need to know what your output is before you can work on – and record! – improving it.
Areas to consider
For our sustainability policy, as a largely working from home service business, we looked at both internal and external factors.
Internal
+ Waste management
+ Office supplies
+ Monitoring + improvement
+ Maintenance + office cleaning
+ Energy
+ Water
+ Legal duties
External
+ Transportation
+ Customers, suppliers and other stakeholders
+ Contractors
What not to do
Tell no porkies. Greenwashing is a huge issue – just do what you say you’re doing! Then you can shout about it.
Our sustainability
We take sustainability seriously. From measuring our carbon output to planting trees, we’ve taken training and have made pledges to remain a highly sustainable business.