Last week, Seattle hosted the first-ever Bloomberg Green Festival which I was lucky enough to get invited to attend. I was inspired by how much crossover there is between climate action and digital marketing, so I’m sharing my takeaways from the experience in the hopes that the two practices can work even better together in the fight against climate change.
1. Finding “Win-Wins” for Clients and the Climate
My first and perhaps biggest “ah-ha” moment from the festival was hearing Stacey Abrams and Ari Matusiak talk about the efforts of Rewiring America to get more heat pumps and climate-friendly appliances into American homes. In fact, I immediately sent a Slack message to the RicketyRoo team saying, “It’s crazy to me that they’re talking about heat pumps right now. I’ve written pages for clients about that!”
RicketyRoo works with a lot of home services companies, and a common selling point we emphasize on those sites is energy efficiency. Using less energy while maintaining standards of living is an important effort in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, so this is an easy “win-win” for our clients and the climate. If you have clients open to discussing climate change on their website, you can even highlight this connection!
RicketyRoo Pro Tip: Here’s a free content idea for your home services clients! Write a blog post that shares how easy it is to use Rewiring America’s electrification incentive calculator. Their customers will learn about the climate-solution incentives available to them, and it might just turn into a lead for installing a new heat pump or tankless water heater!
2. The Climate Fight Needs SEO Too
On Thursday morning, I attended the panel discussion about the documentary film “Bad River.” This film chronicles the Bad River Band’s fight against the Line 5 pipeline, which I had never heard of. So, of course, I Googled “line 5 pipeline” and was disappointed (but unsurprised) that information about the fight to shut it down was below the fold.
I don’t mean to imply that these sites are ignoring SEO, but imagine how much of an impact it would have if the Michigan League of Conservation Voters or Sierra Club showed up 2nd or even 1st for the search query. It’s unlikely they would ever outrank the official entity related to the Line 5 Pipeline (Enbridge), but earning more backlinks and optimizing for the keyword could help them appear in 2nd more consistently.
Digital marketing agencies like us typically work with for-profit clients, but SEO is an important channel for nonprofit causes and organizations, too. If your nonprofit needs digital marketing, we’d love to work with you (especially if you work in climate)!
3. Remote Agency Sustainability
This idea isn’t an exclusively digital marketing takeaway, but it is relevant to RicketyRoo as a fully-remote agency. Excluding the occasional visit to a coffee shop or coworking space, our homes are our offices. That means the power and carbon impact associated with our work is tied to the energy grid our homes use.
When Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell spoke on stage about the city’s recent Building Emissions Performance Standard, it was a reminder to me that we should all push our cities to hold new construction to climate standards. As we move into a world where remote work is more common, more people will spend their workdays at home, and the energy used there needs to be as clean and carbon-neutral as possible.
4. Using the Right (Key)words to Discuss the Problems
Joshua Amponsem of Youth Climate Justice Fund shared his experience with the word “climate” not having a strong impact on conversations he had with people. Instead, he learned to focus on “waste,” as that was a more tangible and top-of-mind issue these communities dealt with. This struck me as astonishingly similar to SEO keyword research: we aim to find the keywords that people naturally use when searching for something, albeit with data.
Connecting with people requires finding and using the words and ideas that resonate with them. Just as SEOs aim to optimize a page for the most commonly used search term, climate communicators have to use language and vocabulary that works for their target audience.
5. You Don’t Have to be an Expert to Make a Difference
So many of the attendees and speakers I met at Bloomberg Green Festival were not necessarily climate experts. From investors to athletes to artists to filmmakers to journalists to digital marketers like myself, it was inspiring to see how many different kinds and professions of people gathered for the common cause of fighting climate change and mitigating its effects.
I’ve certainly not let my lack of climate expertise slow me down! Thanks to the support and budget from our President and Founder Blake Denman, I did the research, calculated our greenhouse gas emissions in CO₂e, and now RicketyRoo is a carbon-neutral SEO agency two years running. You don’t have to be a climate scientist or chief sustainability officer to speak up and try to make a change at your own workplace.
6. You Don’t Have to be Perfect, Either!
Everyone can join the effort and tell their story, and you don’t have to be “perfect” to do so. Graham Zimmerman with Protect Our Winters shared his experience with this mindset as a professional alpinist with a significant greenhouse gas impact related to traveling all across the world to climb remote peaks. He found himself staying out of climate conversations because of the perceived hypocrisy. But the truth is, as he learned, we all have an impact on the climate, and we can’t let that hold us back from joining the conversation and fighting for systemic change.
7. Storytelling is Critical to Climate Activism
Xiye Bastida of Re-Earth Initiative emphasized the importance of being creative and telling climate stories. She wasn’t the only person to make this point; the idea of “climate storytelling” was a common refrain at the festival.
At its core, content marketing, like the work we do at RicketyRoo, is about telling a story and sharing it. One of my favorite parts of SEO is helping a client find, tell, and share those stories about their business and their brand. My biggest personal inspiration from Bloomberg Green Festival was the amazing opportunity digital marketers have to help climate activists, scientists, and “doers” of all stripes tell their stories. If you work on climate solutions and need help telling your story with digital marketing, drop us a line and let’s get started.
Editorial Disclosure: RicketyRoo’s attendance at Bloomberg Green Festival was courtesy of a complimentary pass provided by Bloomberg.
