“GREEN” Marketing Efforts Can Help Keep Your Business in the Black

If you’re like many business owners, you might be thinking that using green methods to market your company might be too expensive.

Going green should mean business sustainability as well as sustainability of natural resources. Consider these money saving marketing tips that also help preserve natural resources:

• Skip printing literature and save money by emailing PDF documents. It’s faster. PDF’s are easy to update, while 4-color printed sell sheets often are “old” as soon as a phone number changes, a model number is dropped or you have to take a price increase.
• Consider email for your newsletters instead of a printed newsletter. These can also be archived on your website to encourage Google to crawl your website for relative content and help your search engine optimization. Best of all, you’ll save the price of printing, handling, not to mention the price of postage! Make sure you use an email program designed for newsletters to save yourself a lot of headaches.
• Look to Social Media Marketing efforts to more rapidly increase your contacts while eliminating the need for filing, sorting and cataloging business cards from networking meetings.
• Use your website. Having a content management program in your website allows you to make changes easily on your website. Creating a frequently asked questions (FAQ) area on your site will help eliminate unnecessary phone calls and help with search engine results as well.

When our company helps small business owners pull together their marketing programs, we try to consider incorporating or at least testing some green marketing ideas to save the client money and help the environment too. Surprise yourself by doing some green marketing and achieve cost savings, faster execution and more effective sales results.

What “Green” marketing techniques do you use that saves your company money and helps the environment as well?  Please leave a comment to let me know what worked (or didn’t work) for you!