Here are some basic best practices for planning, launching and succeeding with your brand’s sustainable web initiatives.
Green marketing is all the rage today, and with that focus has come an avalanche of green marketing messages, materials and other communication tools from brands big and small. Chief among those green marketing priorities has been a sustainability web presence, an online hub for brands to communicate their green product enhancements and brand tenets.
But just like any marketing strategy, launching a successful green website takes careful planning, thoughtful execution, and an ongoing focus on improvement and optimization.
Below are 10 best practices for launching and succeeding with your brand's sustainability website. The list is broken up into two sections. The first five tips are all about planning -- ensuring that you have the right strategy and resources in place to succeed. The second set of tips is about execution, including critical focus areas to ensure your efforts stand out and successfully promote your green initiatives.
Section One: For Starters
Objectives
Start with why you're building a sustainability web presence in the first place. Is it for PR purposes? Is it to promote and/or sell a new green-friendly product line? Is it to bring more attention to a long-held tenet of your core brand value proposition? The answer to these questions will go a long way towards dictating the ultimate design and architecture of your sustainability website.
For example, if you're introducing a new product or going after a new market, a separate website (or separate section on your main website) might make the most sense. However, if you've always had a focus on sustainable practices and are trying to align that with the growing interest in the general marketplace, creating a separate sustainability site might not be the right answer. Augmenting your core web presence might be a better solution.
Audience
Who are you writing for and what do they care about? Is your audience consumer or business-oriented? If it's business, think carefully about the audience level. The way you write, and the information you present, will be very different for manager and line-level employees than if you're targeting C-level executives. The benefits you emphasize, the pain points you address, and the solutions you offer up may vary depending on subtle differences in who you're addressing externally.
Outcome
This is extremely important and is an often-overlooked step in the planning process. The question is simple: What does success look like? Are you interested in traffic? Sales? Awareness? PR? Thought leadership?
Once you have answers to these questions, define a measurable objective to determine whether or not you've been successful. It could be a specific traffic or web hit figure. It could be a volume of sales leads generated from the site. It could be an uptick in press pick-ups from content posted on the site. Regardless of your objectives, do not begin implementation until you know exactly how to define success. This will make it very clear to your entire team and superiors what you're doing and why and will also focus every resource on achieving that well-defined success target.
Content
Your pre-work around objectives and audience should give you a clear game plan for content as well -- not just what type of content but also format and frequency.
We'll get into topics such as interactivity and transparency later -- tenets that will likely be important no matter whom you're addressing. But think well in advance about the type of content you need for your target audience. If your company or brand already has sustainability initiatives, much of that content is probably already written, or at minimum just needs some editing to be appropriate for your website. Having enough content "in the bank" when your site launches not only gives you diversity and comprehensiveness up front, it also gives you plenty of additional content to rotate in on a regular basis, keeping the site fresh, engaging and relevant.
You may not update the site's content every day, or every week, but launching a site and letting it sit stale is equally a bad idea. Ensure that you're updating content at least a couple times each month. How you've defined your audience and site objectives will dictate what this means in terms of specific content -- articles, blog posts, industry statistics, etc.
Dedicated owner
Many web projects are doomed from the start. Why? Someone on the marketing team takes on creation of the website as a "side project," gets it built and launched, then goes back to what he typically does every day. The site is up and built, so job done. Right? Wrong.
If you're going to launch a sustainability web presence for your brand, ensure that the right amount of resources are dedicated to its upkeep well after launch. If you don't have these resources available, think very hard about whether you're ready and/or committed to having that sustainability web presence in the first place. Your company may consider such web content vitally important, but launching the site only to let it immediately get stale and irrelevant should equally be considered a deal-breaker.