Wish to become more eco-friendly in your content marketing? Start with cleaning up your digital content house.
As a conscious content marketer, you can create content and strategy that doesn’t compromise the needs and happiness of future generations. You also consciously reduce the environmental and social impact of your content campaigns.
In this article, you will learn how to apply sustainability to your work as a content marketer, by
- Reducing your content creation efforts,
- Creating better content, and
- Optimizing content.
Let’s get into it!
What is sustainable marketing?
Sustainable marketing is a comprehensive marketing approach that places people and the planet at the center focus of all your marketing efforts. In sustainable marketing, all aspects of sustainability are considered, focusing on the environmental, social, and economic factors.
Moreso, sustainable marketing is a transformative approach to modern-day marketing as a discipline, rethinking its intentions and tactics for positive social and environmental good.
Where to start: your digital house
You can do good work by simply looking at the content you already strategize and create.
As content marketers, our thoughts filter through content structures, idea creation, and strategic content tactics. When you become eco- and socially conscious in your day-to-day, you place a hypothetical lens on your content work. From this point onwards, the work no longer focuses only on optimization and growth but on how to achieve those goals sustainably.
As you start your sustainable content journey, try these steps.
1. REDUCE CONTENT
As in any responsible sustainability strategy, the first step in meeting planetary targets is to reduce your current consumption. We can apply this same way of thinking to content strategy!
Let’s look inward at the current content you’ve already published. Is this content performing? If it’s not performing, consider deleting that content and removing it from the internet.
If it’s performing but could be better, consider optimizing that piece of content for a new topic or keyword that is more relevant to the needs of your audience. Reducing, revising, or deleting bad content from our website structure is a simple way to reduce your impact.
The more someone searches for a topic on your website, the more digital emissions they emit. It’s difficult to acquire aggregate data to understand the carbon footprint of a single search entry. However, the Website Carbon Calculator averages a single web page to produce 0.5 grams of CO2 per pageview.
If you have a page or article that generates 10,000 monthly pageviews, it produces 20 kg of CO2 per year. One tree could absorb that amount of carbon in a year! When you have pages or content that isn’t relevant to your target audience or generating business, but generating loads of page views, you must ask yourself if the digital footprint is worth it.
Lastly, you can improve content navigation and reduce friction for the user. An impact is generated every time you load a website page. Imagine someone clicking through multiple pages and articles on your website to find an answer. Every time a new website page loads and a view is generated, that is 0.5 grams of CO2. You can reduce your impact by optimizing your website structure and removing unnecessary pages, having fewer call-to-actions, and minimizing unnecessary clicking.
Time will only foretell the true environmental and social impact of AI-generated content. Watered-down and irrelevant content flooding the internet can give any sustainable content marketer elevated blood pressure!
2. CREATE PRECISE CONTENT
Simply, better content, and not more content.
I’ve always believed in producing and publishing high-quality and well-written content. But it never occurred to me that it also has a positive environmental impact! By producing less, your impact is less. Take the time, attention, and strategic mindset to create new content that is hyper-relevant to your audience’s interests and needs.
You can produce better content in two ways, by leveraging data to curate topic ideas or talking to important stakeholders. I recommend using both approaches to ensure precise content tailored to your audience.
You can actively engage with your team like management, customer service, and sales to generate content ideas. These people are on the frontlines of your topic, and they understand the needs of your audience the best. Start here before you perform the SEO research to not compromise on human-centric content.
Afterwards, you can dig into the data. Leverage data from social media, search engines, external sources, and other relevant channels to hyper-target topics based on relevant research tuned to your target audience. The more precise you are, the less content waste you create.
Sustainability isn’t only about the environment. The content we create emotionally impacts our audience. Consider less content and content that is easier to digest. Make content readable and enjoyable for humans!
3. OPTIMIZE CONTENT
Optimize, optimize, optimize. Optimizing is one of the best tactics in the sustainable content marketer’s handbook.
Content optimization happens at the initial content creation but also can become a quarterly maintenance activity. From text to images and videos, articles, and website pages, these can become dirtier with age as you update them.
Here are a few things to consider:
Images
54.9% of images used on the internet are JPEG and 28.2% are PNG.
Images involve a huge amount of page requests and weight on websites. HTTP Archive’s State of Image research estimated that images carry approximately 45% of the total page weight of websites. Ultimately, you can do a lot of good work as a sustainable content marketer, by simply reducing the weight of your website’s images.
How can you remove unnecessary images from your website? Many marketers use stock images, but are those images adding value and elevating your brand? Likely not. You can also consider creating clean and image-free pages. And if you’re a techie, you can consider moving away from JPEG files altogether i.e. WebP.
Generally, JPEG images for photography are the lowest and can be used on blogs or website pages. Upload your images to the correct size and maximum width of the specific content area you’re working on. Several tools exist to support you like Image Optimizer, Photoshop, and TinyPNG.
Video
In the world of low-carbon web design, videos shouldn’t be used. But videos are highly impactful in delivering your message and product campaigns. It’s not possible to assume that we can live in a world without video.
When you upload a video, consider reducing the file size as much as possible to reduce the load time and the energy required to load the video. Simple good maintenance like turning off auto-play, sizing your videos correctly, shortening your videos to under 10 minutes, and not using data-hungry websites like YouTube, are all sustainable content practices for video. However, to be sustainable is not only about the environment. Considering well-written captions in multiple languages can aid in video content accessibility.
Now, let’s dive into the final step of cleaning up your digital house with a sustainable content lens. This step isn’t a step at all! Rather, it’s all about consciousness and how you approach your work going forward.
4. IMPACT CONSCIOUS
The single most important step you can take as a content marketer is to add a sustainable marketing lens to all your current and future work.
I believe when marketers become more conscious of their physiological and physical impact on people and the planet, we move mountains. Ready to step up as a content marketer for people and the planet? You can take on the ecomarketer role and bring it into your day-to-day job. The work that you do has a transformative impact!
At MTC The Content Agency, we actively apply a sustainable marketing lens to all our content work. If you’d like to learn more about whether our services are right for your team, review our packages or book a meeting. You can also broaden your knowledge of sustainable marketing by subscribing to our CEO’s newsletter, the Ecomarketer Lens.
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