Kate Khom
You may think that promoting your recycling business through one channel (a website, for instance) is enough. But you couldn’t be more wrong. With so many marketing channels to promote your recycling business, it’s a crime if you don’t take advantage of at least two or three of them.
Multichannel marketing brings a lot of benefits for companies, helping them be more visible and reach more people through various channels. Different statistics support the beneficial influence and popularity of multichannel marketing:
- According to Zoominfo, 73% of marketers have a multichannel marketing strategy already implemented.
- According to Invespcro, 52% of marketers reported using 3 to 4 marketing channels simultaneously.
- Quadwrangle reports that 73% of consumers use multiple channels to communicate with a preferred company.
More and more consumers expect from businesses to be more versatile in terms of means of communication that they use. Thus, multichannel marketing can help your recycling business be more accessible.
Multichannel or Omnichannel?
Multichannel and omnichannel marketing strategies often get confused. Both strategies imply using different channels for marketing purposes. However, there’s a slight difference in how these channels are used.
In omnichannel marketing, all channels act as one to create a unified experience. In multichannel marketing, however, all the channels used by a business act independently.
For instance, in multichannel marketing, you can use different types of content for different channels, whereas in omnichannel marketing you have to use one type of content for all channels.
Using Multichannel Marketing for a Recycling Business
Multichannel marketing is a versatile strategy that a recycling business can employ as well. Let’s take a look at some tips as well as some examples of how multichannel marketing works for a recycling business.
#1: Increasing Your Social Media Activity
The goal of a recycling business is to be helpful as much as possible. Also, one of the goals of a recycling business is to educate people, how to recycle. Previously, a survey has shown that one-third of people in the U.S. don’t know how to recycle. And, with over 250 million tons of trash discarded each year, it’s time to make a difference.
The easiest way to reach millions of people to start making a difference is via social media. So, this is where your multichannel marketing strategy should start. Each social media platform is different in terms of content, which you can largely benefit from:
- Instagram for stories and carousel photos
- Facebook for creating a community
- Twitter for quick updates
- YouTube for recycling tutorials and how-to videos
Precious Plastic, a global community of people from different countries, who work together towards finding a solution to plastic pollution, is also a perfect example of how multichannel marketing can be used by a recycling business. Apart from their website and blog, they are very active on Facebook, where Precious Plastic Community unites almost 40K people:
On YouTube, precious plastic shares great how-to-recycle tutorials as well as things you can create from recycled plastic (for instance, making marble and tote bags from recycled plastic):
On Instagram and Twitter, Precious Plastic promotes its local subdivisions from around the world (they have subdivisions in the U.S., Brazil, African countries, Europe and Asia):
Employing social media to promote your recycling business is already a multichannel marketing campaign. From the example of Precious Plastic, you can see that different social media platforms can act as independent channels, which, however all work in cohesion to promote your cause
#2: Selling the Results
When developing a multichannel marketing campaign for your recycling business, think about how you can make the results you achieved more tangible. For instance, you can create a shop where you’ll sell products, somehow connected to what you do.
Creating a shop where people can buy something to directly impact the cause of your charity, considerably increases the visibility of your business. According to Flatfy’s statistics, having an online shop increases a company’s conversion rates by at least 40%.
Here’s an example. 4Ocean is a team of hundreds of people worldwide, who travel around the globe to collect plastic from the beaches and coasts. From the plastic and trash that they recycled, the 4Ocean team creates bracelets that they sell at $20. This money then goes to support this business and help 4Ocean clean more places around the world.
Thus, 4Ocean created an additional channel to promote their company. Besides being very active on social media, they also have another channel, where people can see and impact the results. Moreover, by selling these bracelets, they make people understand that their purchase isn’t in vain and that money goes to support a good cause.
#3: Benefiting from an App
Lastly, another channel to add to your multichannel marketing strategy is an app. Having an app is pretty unusual for a recycling business, so introducing one is a great move when developing a successful strategy for recycling business marketing.
Developing an app for your recycling business is also a good way to attract attention. By doing this, you engage people in supporting your cause, no matter where they are.
Clean Swell is a good example of such a strategy. This app encourages people to join a global movement to keep beaches, waterways, and oceans free from the trash. People can track their progress online and share their efforts with the global community. These results are also uploaded to the Ocean Conservancy database to help them keep track of the current state of pollution.
The app is very popular, with over 10K downloads worldwide. This is a very good example of how an app as an additional channel can help promote your recycling business and support your cause. Having an app also means that people can help your business at any time by just interacting with their smartphone. This is a good way to remain relevant and promote your recycling business.
Wrapping Up
As you can see, multichannel marketing can be a very beneficial strategy for recycling business. Besides being active on social media, you can introduce tutorials to educate people about recycling, offer unique products and even engage with people around the world via your own branded app.
Using multichannel marketing for your recycling business means keeping it fun and educating for an average person. At the end of the day, your goal is to spread knowledge about the necessity of recycling, and multichannel marketing is a great strategy to do that.