These days, serious environmental issues have at least one advantage: they force us to innovate!

A new category of companies has emerged to meet these global challenges: cleantechs or "clean technology" companies. These aim to reduce the negative impact on the planet of certain industries such as energy, transportation or even waste management.

By focusing on sustainability, they must demonstrate responsibility and a certain sense of ethics to be consistent with the "clean" brand image of this business. 

When you consider that 38% of employees do not think they have personal values in line with their business, the cleantech field enjoys a very favorable opinion and can put forward its responsible vision.  

However, these are commercial enterprises that need to make a profit and thus find customers (the sector will reach $325 billion in sales by 2018). 

Not wanting to use the aggressive methods of traditional Marketing such as unsolicited emails or "cold" calls, they are turning to the least intrusive, most authentic and therefore most ethical technique: inbound marketing.

Why is inbound marketing more ethical?

With its inbound approach, Inbound Marketing focuses on the issues of its potential customers (known as Buyer Persona). He gets to know their needs and tries to provide concrete answers through content marketing. The lead is no longer perceived as a simple consumer and the relationship can thus evolve with confidence. 

Fed a stream of tailored information, the lead who has previously agreed to be recontacted develops a relationship with the brand over time that may lead to becoming a customer (lead nurturing). 

The objective is to provide him with value-added information to help him move forward in his thinking (the buyer's journey) and guide him toward the purchase, while leaving him free to make his own choices. We seek to expose certain obstacles, to highlight a problem and finally to show possible solutions. Thanks to the bond built over time, the offer proposed by the brand becomes obvious. 

Inbound Marketing: the logical choice for cleantechs?

Cleantech companies have three characteristics, which relate them to Inbound Marketing:

- innovation : cleantech has brought a great technological advance in sectors that were previously quite basic. By mixing biological principles and 21st century technology, innovation has emerged. 

- disruption : cleantech like Inbound Marketing, come to challenge the old ways of doing things. Cleantechs 

One of the main focuses of a cleantech company is to revolutionize a market, to bring a new technology, which will evolve the way the customer's need is met or treated (just like biotech, healthtech, fintech, medtech, etc. do)

Inbound Marketing also presents a new vision, which is largely digital. The customer is encouraged to leave his email, following the reading of an article whose subject interests him, in order to receive free information with high added value on an issue that concerns him (and not a product or service offer!).

Thanks to the Internet, the company targets its leads more precisely and can set up a personalized relationship with them, where old-fashioned marketing aimed much more broadly, with a lot of advertising and other less qualified approaches.

- respect :the desire to establish a relationship of trust, based on ethics, in complete transparency ( and in harmony with the environment) is established as an extension of the company's values, such as Enercoop, the only supplier of 100% renewable electricity.ethiq

With Inbound Marketing, the company no longer treats the customer as a consumer, who must be bombarded with advertising to push him to buy. It is an individual, with his needs and problems, to which it focuses on providing solutions. He is the one who has the power and he trusts the company more because as the information is exchanged, he adheres to the vision of the company and its products.

A case study: Health Care 

Heritage Environmental Services, a business services company specializing in environmental innovation. With its traditional marketing policy, it wasn't seeing satisfactory enough results, i.e., too little traffic and visitors who weren't converting into potential customers.

By committing to an Inbound strategy (creating a blog and social media presence), she earned a ROI of 500% relative to the means committed to this development. She gained 58% more leads with a 135% increase in her reach on social networks..

You can get more details in this case study Hubspot.

So cleantech and inbound marketing have a bright future ahead of them!