Sustainability is a story worth telling
If you tell it right
By Reka Agopcsa
Each year, Earth Day shines the spotlight on sustainability – trees are planted, limited edition eco-friendly products fill the shelves and social media feeds get littered (pardon the pun) with promises. But for the companies building real sustainable tech, the impact must last more than 24 hours.
We work with companies that are doing the heavy lifting – from IT asset management to sustainable power management for data centres and other critical infrastructure – and we see time and time again that important tech often doesn’t always speak for itself.
This is especially true in a business-to-business context. B2B buyers may have a higher degree of technical understanding but that doesn’t mean they will wade through whitepapers or decipher acronyms just to understand what your technology does. They want to understand what problem it solves and why it matters – fast!
At the same time, technical audiences have fine-tuned ‘fluff-detectors’. They can tell AI slop from real insight, and they don’t care for empty ‘hype’. If your message is too weak, too vague or too complex, they’ll move on, so what you say is just as important as how you say it.
This is where good comms can make a difference. A specialist PR team can take your complex tech and tested marketing messages and create strategic comms that is targeted, clear and backed by substance. Here are just a couple of ways this can work:
Skip the slogans – show the evidence
Sustainability isn’t a buzzword, it’s a metric. B2B buyers want to see proof that your tech works and the measurable outcomes it delivers, and they want it in a format they can trust – making case studies a powerful tool for comms.
But rather than just having the asset sit on your website, PR can take your customer stories further and create real momentum – developing news stories, securing press interviews and helping the project gain wide-spread industry recognition at awards and events. When done well, this extends the shelf-life of your assets and makes them significantly more visible. Crucially though, good PR can give your most important stories a vital credibility boost from influential third-parties like journalists, analyst and peers – so when your brand reaches the right audience, your message lands the right way.
In short: If you’re doing the work, show it – and if you’ve got the data, use it.
Talk like a human
Your product may run on AI but your audience runs on attention, patience and human understanding – and often, not very much of it. At the end of the day, B2B is still human-to-human speak, so sorry, but ChatGPT just won’t cut it.
Your buyers want to read insightful thought leadership that offers clear explanations of how your tech fits into the bigger picture – whether that’s net zero, regulation or operational resilience – and how it moves the needle for businesses just like them. But if the message is buried in jargon or unnecessary detail, your content will turn readers off faster than you can say ‘synergistic bottom-line optimisation’.
Don’t mistake complexity for credibility – the best solutions are often the simplest ones, and this is true for sustainable tech as much as the language we use to talk about it. Not to say your audience isn’t smart – they absolutely are – but clarity always wins out.
Working with a PR agency can not only give you an external, expert perspective on where your brand excels and where you lack message pull-through, but can also help you refine your approach to more readily step into important industry conversations and be heard.
Let’s get your story straight
Sustainability is a crowded conversation. It’s not enough to join it – you also need to add something. At Eleven Hundred Agency, we help B2B tech brands craft stories that cut through, challenge assumptions and build credibility. For example, Icelandic data centre operator Verne relies on Eleven Hundred to raise its profile in the media, using a wide arsenal of tools such as strategic message development, earnt media campaigns, case study creation, social media management and more.
Verne’s sustainability story is not a once-a-year campaign – why should yours be? If every day is Earth Day from where you’re sitting, we’d love to help you talk about it, so get in touch and let us drive your impact.