Combine Online with Offline Green Marketing

This is part one of a two part post based on a new post I have just published  on Jacqui Ottman’s website . Jacqui is probably the world’s leading expert on traditional green marketing and she and I have discussed how to combine her work with my focus on online green marketing. So in the post  I write about how to integrate online and offline marketing.

It is evident that conscious consumers are shifting over to the web rapidly, and probably faster than many other market segments. According to a report in 2010 from Burst Media, the web is the primary source of product information for green consumers. Almost 40% of this audience prefer the internet  as opposed  to the TV, in second place, at only 18%.  Every business and organization that wants to engage with these consumers needs to have an online strategy and find a way of reaching its target market.

Marketing professionals  are adapting to a significant shift in budgets towards “online marketing” including Pay per Click Advertising, Video, Social Media and Mobile. At the same time, we can witness an overall decline in traditional “offline” marketing such as Print, Direct Mail,  radio  and TV Ads.   A recent forecast from E Marketer confirms this transition, predicting a nearly 11% growth in online advertising during 2010. In addition,  a Forrester  Research study predicts that interactive marketing budgets, as a share of overall budgets, will rise from 13 to 21% by 2014.

This is due to many reasons including lower costs, highly focused targeting, and more predictable returns on investment.  With Google Adwords, for example,  you can create an ad campaign on Monday for a small budget, test it on Tuesday to your target market, evaluate the results on Wednesday, re-launch an “optimized” version of  the campaign on Thursday, evaluate again and then scale up your campaign on Friday based on the results from your testing and measurement. In terms of tracking, measuring and fine tuning  interactive online marketing wins hands down!

On the other hand, this does not mean that offline marketing is dead.Far from it in fact. Most successful green branding would never have worked, or green marketing efforts reached their consumers without traditional media. Take Clorox Green Works for example and how their availability in retail outlets like Wal-Mart or Walgreens have increased sales more than the best green marketing campaign or green branding online could ever do. Moreover, green marketing is also geared towards local and community promotion such as local-owned stores and Farmers Markets

Balance is critical and green marketing professionals need to integrate both online and offline, and establish a “virtuous cycle” where they both will enhance each other. This means establishing a sales and marketing process that takes advantage of the best that each can medium can offer.