Communicating your ESG efforts through content marketing

Effectively communicating your Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) credentials through content marketing is an essential prerequisite of companies of all sizes today.

However, there are three key trends surrounding ESG at the moment to be aware of:

The first is the politicisation and controversy of ESG as a term despite general recognition of underlying values, leading to “greenhushing”, particularly in the US.
The second is changes to sustainability reporting requirements, particularly in the EU.
The third trend is changes to greenwashing legislation to enhance consumer protection.

In this piece, we’ll explore how these trends affect small to medium businesses, and how creatives can use content marketing to effectively communicate their small business’ ESG efforts.

The ‘anti-ESG’ movement may seem distant, but it can have a knock-on effect, generating distrust around the term and associated action. This can create a discouraging and difficult atmosphere for ESG communications.

Meanwhile in Europe, there has been a shift towards more disclosure to drive transparency on corporate responsibility, such as the Corporate Social Responsibility Directive (CSRD). This has created opportunity for communications professionals, although it has also increased the pressure on sustainability professionals as the default team to handle sustainability reporting. For example, a survey by PWC found that 60% of businesses have not involved their technology function and teams in assisting with data collection for their CSRD.

While the requirements of the CSRD currently affects large businesses, it is likely that they will trickle down to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

From a consumer perspective, there has been a real focus on consumer protection in recent years with the release of the Green Claims Code in 2021. While the primary focus is consumer-facing communications and advertising, the rules apply across the board and creative agencies should use this as a guide to check if their client’s sustainability claims are misleading, protecting all parties from legal fallout.

Greenwashing is also mentioned in the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumer’s Bill, which has been in the pipeline for the last year and was hurried through parliament due to the general election on the 4th July. The most recent amendment of the Bill, explicitly states that it is seeking to ban greenwashing through its policies and states the need for a legal definition of sustainability.

How does this apply to content marketing?

Typically, one might associate greenwashing with misleading statistics, or words, but it is important to remember that the Green Claims Code applies across all contexts—including visual, such as graphics, imagery and videos.

For example, Innocent smoothies was accused on greenwashing in 2022, after one of their adverts called for consumers to “get fixing up the planet” by choosing their products. The sing-song jingle, and animated animals gave the impression that buying Innocent drinks would solve climate change— and was deemed to be misleading. Indeed, Innocent is owned by Coca-Cola thelargest known contributor of branded plastic.

It’s important to consider tone and context as well as any written content when marketing sustainability and climate claims.

Creatives for Climate lay out guidelines very clearly in their anti-greenwash guide for agencies which creatives can consult when creating any form of consumer-facing content marketing.

Using an impact report to content market your ESG efforts

An annual report focuses on the business performance of the organisation that year, whereas an impact report focuses on the impact the organisation has on people and the planet.

Generally, an impact report communicates your ESG goals and strategy, and reports on your progress in achieving these. You can tie this into your organisation’s mission and culture. For example, if your goal is to reduce Scope 3 carbon emissions by 20%, you can describe how you strove towards this, and list your actual Scope 3 carbon reduction. You might have used a company culture initiative to achieve this—such as implementing a cycle to work scheme, or a travel policy.

Transparency about your results is important—remember the selective omission anti-greenwashing rule! If you didn’t achieve your goal, being honest will build trust, and the accountability of the impact report will encourage your organisation to reassess their strategy.

An impact report can set out your ESG goals, and align your business’s goals with frameworks, such as the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Each industry will have its own frameworks to work collectively towards an industry impact—such as Ad Net Zero for the advertising industry.

It’s important that these are part of your organisations business strategy. For example, if your organisation focused on SDG 3 ‘Ensure Healthy Lives and Promote Wellbeing For All Ages’, and perhaps you focused on overhauling the work wellbeing or sickness policy, or providing a gym membership as a work perk, as well as corporate donations going towards global health charities that year.

You can then look at the effects of this – by focusing on health did your staff feel more motivated? Were there fewer sick days taken? How did their mental health fare? Did you have any feedback from the charities you donated to? You can include any quotes from your staff or other stakeholders. Weaving compelling stories in amongst your data points makes it more interesting and adds authenticity.

Another part of the impact report, as with any content, is data visualisation. Having clear and engaging visuals will help readers understand your data and statistics.

How to market an impact report

As a public-facing document, it’s important that your impact report fulfils anti-greenwashing guidelines and the Green Claims Code.

As such, any assets syndicated from this central report should be checked as well, especially in the context of a social media profile. For example, only posting about the “good” parts of the report, or only sharing certain targets might be perceived as selective omission. Making sure you always link to the whole impact report so the reader can find more detail is also pertinent.

You can maximise the value of your impact report by breaking it down into social media assets. For example, you can take the key highlights and turn that into a graphic with icons for LinkedIn titled ‘Our top three impacts this year’.

Any data visualisation, or images can be repurposed as a visual for a LinkedIn post, along with a link to the full report.

TikTok

Video footage of any volunteering projects, or of employees cycling to work etc can be made into a light-hearted TikTok post. You could create a highlights reel from the last year of positive impacts, or even make a TikTok asking your staff if anything surprised them from the impact report.

Blogs

There is plenty to be written around the notion of an impact report: why are they important for SMEs? How did you conduct yours? What did you prioritise? What problems did you encounter?

A blog is also a chance to dive deeper into a subject from the report, for example why your organisation chose your particular charity. Or perhaps a team member would like to share personal testimony about something from the impact report—an intern might share their story and their steps since leaving the internship.

In conclusion, communicating your ESG efforts is an intimidating task, but through creating an annual impact report, you can create a reliable central document to create content assets across a range of channels.

Sarah Woodhouse

Sarah Woodhouse is a director and co-owner at AMBITIOUS, a strategic communications agency. Sarah is a seasoned public relations and communications professional with over 21 years’ experience working in the UK and Asia. Based in Bristol, but with a national and international reach, AMBITIOUS helps clients find, engage and grow audiences. From print and digital PR to communications strategy, media training, social media and content services – it connects clients to the conversations that matter.