Last Updated on March 21, 2024
What does Hygiene have to do with marketing?
What is Hygiene Content?
Why is Hygiene Content so important?
Identifying Hygiene Content
What is Evergreen Content?
Our Marketing Hygiene Eco-system
HACCP for Our Marketing Hygiene Check
We Can Use HACCP to Manage the Hygiene of Our Website
Sustainability can save the planet. It can also save you time.
Green Marketing vs Sustainable Marketing
An Example of How Hygienic Marketing Helps You Win
I was more than excited to talk about this topic during a Green Geeks webinar on 19 October 2022. Click here to check that out.
What does Hygiene have to do with marketing?
Marketing Hygiene is the process of maintaining the freshness and function of our marketing tools, processes, and strategies to preserve the overall health and wellbeing of your business.
Hygiene can do more than save our marketing – keeping our processes clean, also means keeping them sustainable.
Sustainability can save the planet. It can also save you time.
We think most often of sustainability as having to do with the climate, food production and consumption, even our survival as a species.
Sustainability can also be about how we build or decorate our homes, or what we wear. It can be about our personal, work, or cultural relationships.
“Cleaning is about more than sparkling countertops and company-ready bathrooms — it’s about protecting yourself.” Everybody’s Mum
A clean process, pipeline, tool, workflow, allows things to go from A to B faster, easier, effectively and more efficiently. There is less friction. Speeds wins.
This is why an electric car can go faster than a gas powered car. Less moving parts. Less energy lost between those parts. The power goes from the battery directly to the wheels.
If you want no other reason to be hygienic in your marketing, it is so you win.
How did I arrive at this topic?
I was talking with a colleague about the term ‘Hygiene Content’ and experimentally googled ‘Hygiene Marketing’. It seemed to daze and confuse Google. I found a Google ad for a marketing strategy hygiene companies can use, 2 links from 2020, and 7 about marketing hygiene and health products.
Hygiene Content is a term that comes up in the SERPs.
What is Hygiene Content?
Hygiene Content is evergreen content. The goal is informative and not promotional. Also called Help Content.
Why is Hygiene Content so important?
Hygiene content answers queries in the form of permanently valid guides, tutorials, instructions or information.
Identifying Hygiene Content
Users are offered added value in terms of content.
“Hygiene content, sometimes also called Help Content, is the best kind of content you can produce. Why? Because it’s just that – it’s helpful. It’s useful. And it stands the test of time and requires less fussing about.” What is Hygiene Content and Why is it Helpful?
What is Evergreen Content?
Evergreen content is intended to create lasting added value for readers. I find it often connected with the idea of marketing hygiene.
Content and topics that are of lasting interest and do not lose their significance.
Content that is timeless and independent of the current season or events.
Our Marketing Hygiene is as Important to Our Business as Personal Hygiene is to Our Bodies
Marketing Hygiene is the process of maintaining the freshness and function of oour marketing tools, processes, and strategies to preserve the overall health and wellbeing of our business.
Our Online Marketing Hygiene includes your Social Media, Website, Online Shop, Email, Search, and Controlling assets and tactics. Artificial Intelligence can help our sustainability too!
I talked about this topic in July 2022 together with Social Champ on their Instagram Chat. Check that out here.
What do we mean by “Hygiene”?
Since Corona it’s all anyone thinks of. If you’re healthy, you’re happy.
When we’re happy we feel at ease. When we’re stree-free, it’s wonderful.
Today it’s a healthy lifestyle that connects us: what we eat, our beliefs, the products we buy …
Hygiene, cleanliness, makes us happy. This is also true in our marketing.
Something “hygienic” is seen as safe and most likely also “good”.
The Golden Ratio
Found in Art, Science, and Nature, the Golden Ratio is “good.” You can find the Golden Ratio when you divide a line into two parts and the longer part (a) divided by the smaller part (b) is equal to the sum of (a) + (b) divided by (a), which both equal 1.618. This formula can help you when creating shapes, logos, layouts, and more.
https://www.invisionapp.com/inside-design/golden-ratio-designers/
What do we mean by “Unhygienic”?
Unhygienic is unclean, possibly dangerous, and not best practice.
- + Unoptimized Popups and Overlays
- + Complicated Signup Processes
- + Asking for Registration Too Soon
- + Fake Reviews
- + Freebies That Cost
Our Marketing Hygiene Eco-system
Marketing refers to activities a company undertakes to promote the buying or selling of a product or service.
Hygiene refers to behaviors that can improve cleanliness and lead to good health.
Sustainability is the ability to maintain or support a process over time.
Agile is an iterative approach that helps us deliver value to our customers faster and with fewer headaches. An agile team delivers work in small, but consumable, increments.
Mindfulness encompasses awareness and acceptance. Awareness focuses our attention on the present moment. Acceptance is the ability to observe and accept, rather than judge or avoid.
Accessibility means that (fill in the blank) are designed so that they are accessible to all without assistance.
Is Hygienic also “Being Helpful”?
Google’s Helpful Content Update (Sept 2022)
1. willing to help, or useful: 2. willing to help, or useful: 3. giving help
“The helpful content update aims to better reward content where visitors feel they’ve had a satisfying experience …”
Always On? Sustainable? Maintain Freshness? On Brand? Probably, yes.
What Can We Do?
From my years in the kitchen I remember HACCP:
HACCP – Hazard Analysis Critical Control Points
This is a universally recognised process to minimising food poisoning by limiting the hazards that can cause it.
I spent a lot of years in the food business. I even wrote a novel about it.
HACCP for Our Marketing Hygiene Check
There are two main components to HACCP:
Hazard Analysis: identifying and analysing risks present in our processes. In particular, hazard analysis centres on evaluating potential sources of failure
Critical Control Points: Look at key junctures in a process at which controls can be applied to prevent or eliminate hazards, or to reduce risk to an acceptable level.
Step 1: Hazard Analysis:
- Identify any hazards
- Assess the significance of each hazard
- Develop control measures
Step 2: Critical Control Points:
- Establish limits for preventative measures
- Clarify how the limits are determined
- Ensure this makes sense
Step 3: Monitoring Procedures:
- Frequency of monitoring
- Records and communication
Step 4: Corrective Action:
- Corrective actions should be pre-planned
- Ensure records are maintained correctly
Step 5: Verification:
Obtaining evidence that the elements of your plan are effective.
Step 6: Training:
History of training, records of training, and review.
Step 7: Commitment:
Review and verify any information, and make an overall commitment on how your marketing hygiene is performing.
We Can Use HACCP to Manage the Hygiene of Our Website
Example: the images used on our websites
Hazard Analysis:
- + Images uploaded by Users
- + Images unoptimised
- + Workflow for image upload
Critical Control Points:
- + Check only images above 300K
- + Measure load time differences
- + Triage-like process
Monitoring Procedures:
- + Monthly or Weekly check?
- + Reminders per email, or in chat
Corrective Action:
- + Optimisation process
- + Fails and successes explained
Verification:
- + Link to page speed measurement
- + Find links to other processes
Training:
- + On-boarding training plan
- + Quarterly review Make it fun!
Commitment:
- + Dashboard of all processes
- + Update with new tech – such as WEBP
We Mentioned Sustainability …
Sustainability can save the planet. It can also save you time.
We think most often of sustainability as having to do with the climate, food production and consumption, even our survival as a species. Sustainability can also be about how we build or decorate our homes, or what we wear. It can be about our personal, work, or cultural relationships.
There are sustainable processes like social media, storytelling, gardening, even a fitness regimen. There’s even the chance to talk about sustainable websites and email, as well as sustainability and AI. We should, if we want to understand what we mean by the term.
Green Marketing vs Sustainable Marketing
Green marketing: strategies that promote environmental awareness and protection.
Sustainable marketing: encompasses green marketing but includes practices that go beyond the environment, like social and economic issues.
Sustainable Marketing:
- + Must be reliable, replicable and measurable
- + Rectifying past mistakes
- + Reducing or eliminating current problems
- + Building legacies going forward
Our sustainable mindset is almost always thinking in the direction of the environment. It’s not often that we think about sustainable emails, websites, or social media.
Sustainability means:
Maintain the business of marketing at a profitable, balanced, and responsible level.
Avoid the depletion of resources – both natural and human.
andrewswharton.com/blog/clean-email-lists-sustainability-mindset
We Mentioned Our Carbon Footprint too …
The internet consumes a lot of electricity.
What is the carbon footprint of your website? https://www.websitecarbon.com/
What can you do to improve that score? It is about loading faster. If you can do something faster and better, you will make the sale before your competition. YOu will also make people happier. You will be more agile. More present.
- + Save energy
- + Reduce waste
- + Repurpose code etc
- + Do it once – Be fussy!
- + Look internally – and externally
- + Regular audits and controls
- + Review our supply chains
- + Reduce the size of our websites
- + Reduce content – focus on answers
- + Reduce the back end
- + Reduce the steps – make it clearer
- + Did this meeting need to happen?
An Example of How Hygienic Marketing Helps You Win
I relaunched a website, interestingly enough, for a Climate-focused NGO. They were using the page builder Elementor with WordPress. We relaunched the website without the unnecessary Elementor plugin. This brought our load speed up considerably. It also gave us a better carbon footprint.
Optimising the images and using a lighter WordPress theme – Neve – did the rest.
Management of our Marketing as a whole
The ecosystem is a type of ecological system that is made up of the reciprocal relationships that exist between living things and their surroundings.
What can we do in addition to optimising our websites to make our marketing more hygienic?
SOCIAL MEDIA– engagement / respecting permission / pruning old posts
WEBSITES – pruning our sitemap / compressing images / updating content / clean HTML
EMAILS– asking people to unsubscribe / segmenting our segments
ANALYTICS – cleaning our funnels / recalibrating those ROI checks
SEO – are those search phrases from August 2021 or August 2020?
Our Marketing Hygiene is as Important to the Success of Our Business as Personal Hygiene is to Our Quality of Life
Making our processes Easier, Better, Durable, Anti-Fragile, Agile. Breaking down barriers. Making our processes Faster.
Getting from A to B with the least resistance.
Speed wins. If we can deliver what people need faster (and better) than our competitor, we will win.
