Sustainable or eco-friendly digital marketing defines as “the promotion of company products or services on the internet and online-based digital technologies by using less sustainable resources and energy.” In other words: an environmentally friendly approach, which is key an of huge importance for the time we live in today.
Through the progress of time, the value of traditional marketing in this modern and technological era is becoming more obsolete. Use of newspapers, billboards, pamphlets, banners, etc. are the main causes of natural resource depletion and scarcity. But digital marketing not only makes promotional activities easier through the internet, but it is also more eco-friendly for many companies. According to research, digital marketing is more environmentally friendly than all other marketing approaches combined.
Eco-friendly marketing and promotional activities are gaining popularity among consumers, society and companies who value and promote sustainability and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). Due to the rapid growth of internet users and digital technologies available to us, it is essential we keep it a healthy environment for our planet by using as little resources as possible. As a recent report stated, the internet’s annual carbon footprint is 830 million tons, which puts it on par with the aviation industry. The analysis also illustrates that if the internet was a country, it would rank sixth in electricity usage. But digital marketing firms and computer developers can reduce this huge carbon footprint and improve customer, society and stakeholder relationships by making efforts to create an energy-efficient user experience in all areas. In other reports, it was estimated that data centers around the globe use more than 2% of the world’s electricity! Data centers make up about 50% of all energy consumed by digital ecosystems, while personal devices use another 34% and the industries responsible for manufacturing them use 16%. Companies such as Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, IBM, etc. have data centers that store incredible amounts of information and therefore are leaders of burning resources.
Presently, the most used digital advertising tool is the smartphone, and unfortunately mobile usage greatly harms the environment too. Smartphones and data centers are damaging to the environment and will have the biggest carbon footprint in the tech industry by 2040, researchers have found. In 2020, the energy consumption of smartphones are going to be more than PCs and laptops. In the search engine market, if we look at Google for example, every Google search harms our planet, especially when there are more than 3.5 billion searches every day. As much as everyone loves Google, it accounts for about 40 percent of the internet’s carbon footprint.
Instead of targeting and sending individual information to each customer, they must create groups, blogs, community groups, social groups, based on common characteristics. Because targeting individually waste resources and increase the carbon footprint.
When building websites, if we SEO optimize and make them load quicker for example, they become more user-friendly because the website is using less energy with the help of SEO. It will consume less resources, but this mentality needs to be scaled and rolled out and understood by everyone to have a positive effect.
Ecograder.com is an interesting but basic tool that helps us to check how green a website is. And if you want to estimate how much carbon dioxide your website emits, you can head to websitecarbon.com to get an estimated emission report, which will then give you ideas and recommendations on how to improve.
Green Marketing explains companies’ efforts to advertise the environmental sustainability of its’ business practices. Firms can incorporate the Green Marketing approach in its’ digital marketing practices and with this effort they can gain customers, stakeholders and a positive awareness, etc. Green marketing activities promote and highlight the importance of limited and scare resources under the shadow of its’ business campaigns.
Green web hosting or eco-friendly hosting techniques are also recommended to reduce environmental impact. In this technique, powering data centers work directly with renewable energy instead of fossil fuel energy.
A content delivery network (CDN) is also fruitful in digital marketing, as this network is used to speed up website page loading speeds and along with it, it also shortens the physical distance that data needs to travel between the visitor’s device and their nearest server.
At the end of the day, we can conclude that digital marketing has played a vital role in the sustainability of natural and limited resources as compared to traditional marketing activities. But, in digital marketing activities, as time progresses, energy usage will increase as more websites, users and technologies are also brought up. An increase in users’ carbon footprint ultimately enlarges the threat for our society and environment. In a nutshell, digital marketing firms must adopt effective ways and techniques which improve environmental sustainability.
At MANTODOM we place great importance on being sustainable and are proud that we can offer solutions in the most eco-friendly way possible. Please see our Services for details.