Sustainable Digital Marketing
Believe it or not, some common best practices in the field of digital marketing can have a positive impact on nature! Whether you’re in analytics, development, paid media, social media, SEO or UX – doing your job well actually reduces your carbon footprint. A Google search leaves a carbon footprint of .2 g of carbon dioxide, .003 kWh of energy, or the energy one 60-Watt lightbulb uses in 17 seconds.
Let’s take a look at how.
One of the guiding principles of UX and Design is also a cannon of green design – usability. Putting the right information in front of users at the right time can drastically cut the amount of time they spend on clicking around on a site.
Favoring lite file formats and easy-to-follow digital content is not just a better experience for the user but it also saves energy. In the past several years, there has been an increase in awareness of how UX and online sustainability are connected. To learn more, you can check out this video conference series by Sustainable UX.
By putting useful content online, cranking up a page’s speed, and maintaining site optimization a web page is more quickly found by just the right searcher. This saves the user hours of energy used on searches.
Some green social media practices borrow heavily from SEO. For example, by optimizing posts with keywords and creating useful, eye-catching content, you help anyone searching on social media find just what it is they want in a lot less clicks.
Another way to have a positive impact is to encourage clients to use their feeds to talk about their sustainability practices (if applicable), which users tend to view favorably. In this way, you can help grow a brand with an environmental mission and connect consumers looking for green products.
When it comes to paid media, it’s about placing the right ad, with the right message, in just the right spot, which is, of course, the point. You get more qualified users clicking on the link and a lot less, energy-consuming bounces.
Identifying user patterns helps us to understand consumer behavior better. Of course, we use this information to help get users to the products they are looking for in a quicker, easier way. But while basing decisions off of this data helps fine tune the funnel it also helps eliminate time wasted searching online.
By now you might’ve had this thought: The more efficient the code, the less energy it uses. True.
Some solutions to consider are to:
Where it makes sense, consider Progressive Web App technology, which lets websites cache files on the user’s device, so content does not need to be reloaded on future visits. This can significantly reduce the amount of data loaded by repeat visitors, especially on mobile devices where data transfer tends to tap more energy than wired connections.
As you can see, by following best practices, UX and design, SEO, Social and Paid Media, Analytics, and Development not only produce results for clients, but lower our carbon footprint.