During my travels with GO Paperless!, I get asked the question at least once a day, “How are you replacing Paper? I never offered “take-home” Paper on my billboards before. I don’t understand how you are going to save the environment.
There are two ways you can use Paperless Paper™. Both ways are completely eco-friendly.
- As a replacement to your existing Paper-based marketing.
- As an addition to your existing marketing channels.
As a replacement to paper, we will see ‘tree-savings’ by consuming less trees for our paper resources. This is important if we are going to start reducing the impact we have on our planet.
As an addition, Paperless Paper™ is a way to increase the value of traditional marketing channels without increasing the carbon footprint of the company.
This is important to remember because all of our projects must have a sustainability component to our decision making process. We already have a problem with how much we consume, we need to be smarter in the decisions that we make.
The Environmental Impact of Marketing Communications
What is the environmentally impact of different marketing vehicles:
- DIRECT MAIL – the #1 culprit of natural resource consumption and it provides less than 1% engagement rate. This is the planet destroying marketing vehicle.
- Newspaper Insert – Imagine a circulation of 500,000, 7 days a week in every city, town and country around the world. That’s a lot of inserts.
- Business Card –Remember all those business cards you threw out because you changed titles. Multiply that by everyone.
- Catalogue – They’re big, they’re glossy and I’d rather go to the website.
- Booklet –The standard for B2B marketing. Everyone has them, no one likes using them and they are usually outdated anyway.
- Brochure - Every company uses at least one, but many have reams of them. And at the pace that business changes today, most of them are thrown out.
Greening your Marketing Budget
There are 2 channels of marketing that are environmentally friendly, one-to-one direct sales, and engaging with online media. Other channels have a significant carbon footprint with a consumption of natural resources, human resources, energy and the byproduct of GHG emissions and waste.
Every choice that marketers make comes with a dollar cost, but there is a carbon cost that is an important factor to developing a green marketing budget. It is up to markterers to start making the right choices and be the champions for the environment.
