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Does Your Sustainability Report Design Speak to Both Investors and Consumers?

The stakes are high with corporate sustainability reports. What makes those stakes even higher is that they must build trust, inspire action and enhance your brand’s reputation – all while speaking to two (or more!) different audiences. Designing an environmental, social and governance (ESG) report that resonates with multiple audiences with differing priorities is certainly a challenge, but it can be done with the right strategy. 

Here are some tips to help you design a sustainability report that meets the analytical needs of investors while also engaging the values-driven interests of consumers.

What Investors Want from an ESG Report

Investors are tuned into the numbers. When reviewing your report, they’re looking for hard data and metrics that:

  • Demonstrate financial viability alongside ESG performance
  • Show risk mitigation strategies tied to ESG factors
  • Highlight progress over time with quantifiable results and benchmarks

Investors want transparency, accountability and clear links between sustainability initiatives and financial outcomes. Show them the money, and they’ll return the favor in kind.

What Consumers Want from an ESG Report

The people who walk into your store, engage your services or buy your products are motivated by stories and values. They’re looking for content that takes on the following purposes:

  • Demonstrates how your brand aligns with their personal beliefs
  • Shows real-world impact through relatable examples and stories
  • Inspires action and engagement through approachable, visually appealing content

Consumers want to know that your company is making a difference in ways that feel authentic and meaningful to their daily lives (think Patagonia).

How to Design a Sustainability Report That Resonates with Both Audiences

Now the real challenge begins. To create an ESG report that speaks to everyone’s needs and priorities, you must strike a balance. Here are some tips:

Balance Data and Storytelling

Including detailed ESG metrics, charts and graphs can satisfy an investor’s need for data-driven insights, while inserting stories, photos and testimonials can make your impact feel real and relatable. For example, try pairing a data point with a real-world example to highlight the human side of your initiatives.

Design for Visual Impact

Use infographics to simplify complex data for consumers while maintaining accuracy for investors. Throughout your entire report, remain consistent with branding to reinforce your identity with both audiences.

Emphasize Transparency and Authenticity

Authenticity builds trust no matter the audience. Be upfront about challenges or areas where you’ve fallen short and use consistent messaging to bridge the gap between investor concerns and consumer interests (e.g., sustainability is both a growth opportunity and a moral responsibility).

Contact Us at The Found Gen for Help with Your Sustainability Report

Investors and consumers may have different priorities, but they share one thing in common – they want to see that your sustainability efforts are genuine, impactful and aligned with your business strategy. By thoughtfully designing your sustainability report to address both audiences, you can turn it into a powerful branding asset.If you’re ready to elevate your sustainability report design and turn your core ESG components into compelling narratives that resonate with all types of readers, contact us at The Found Gen today. We’ve partnered with globally ranked corporations to transform their sustainability reports into effective marketing tools and are ready to do the same with yours.

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Should You Outsource Your Sustainability Report Design?

Corporate sustainability reports are more than just compliance documents with boring charts and graphs. When done well (and this is becoming increasingly important by the day), these professionally designed documents tell a story about a company’s environmental, social and governance (ESG) efforts and performance. 

As content marketing assets, a professionally designed sustainability report can turn an everyday PDF into a powerful brand storytelling tool that builds trust and loyalty while giving companies a competitive advantage in the marketplace. But designing impactful and engaging sustainability reports isn’t a simple cut-and-paste job. It requires strategy, design expertise and the ability to visually tell a story. Here are some key considerations as you assess whether to outsource your sustainability report design.

What’s at Stake with ESG Reporting

Sustainability has always been a key talking point for corporations, but in recent years, ESG efforts have become increasingly meaningful to investors and consumers alike. Investors rely on these reports to assess the risk and long-term viability of the business. Moreover, transparent reporting helps attract ESG-conscious investors and consumers. Millennials and Gen Zers want to support brands that align with their values, and what better avenue to communicate a company’s ESG position than in its sustainability report? 

The Role of Design in Sustainability Reports

In competitive markets, showcasing ESG efforts can set a brand apart as innovative, responsible and forward-thinking. For marketers, the design of a sustainability report is just as critical as its content. Professionally designed ESG reports account for these and other elements:

  • Brand consistency – Ensuring the report reflects the company’s visual identity and tone reinforces brand recognition.
  • Visual storytelling – Leveraging infographics, charts and visuals simplifies complex data and makes the report more engaging.
  • Accessibility – Keeping the design inclusive, easy to navigate and available in multiple formats (digital, print, interactive PDFs, etc) ensures full accessibility. Designing the report for optimal human and AI readability is critical. 
  • Authenticity – Honesty about successes and areas that need improvement builds trust. Strategically using callouts and visuals to emphasize human-centered stories, milestones and successes makes the report stand out and resonate with readers.
Time to Outsource?

Professional designers and marketing agencies that specialize in sustainability report design understand how to blend data, visuals and storytelling to create a report that resonates with your stakeholders. 

By outsourcing these efforts, not only are you tapping into experienced professionals who can create a customized report that reflects your company’s unique identity and priorities, but they can also save you time – lots and lots of time. Outsourcing ESG design lets your internal team focus on strategy and execution while experts handle the heavy lifting.

Need Help with Your Sustainability Report? Call us at The Found Gen.

A well-designed sustainability report serves as both an informational tool for stakeholders as well as a powerful branding asset. If you’re ready to elevate your sustainability report design and turn your ESG initiatives into compelling narratives that resonate with readers, call us at The Found Gen today. We’ve partnered with globally ranked corporations to transform their sustainability reports into effective marketing tools and are ready to help you with yours.

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AI Can’t Build Relationships: Why Content Professionals Are Key to Connecting with Your Audience

We buy from people, not machines. This adage is as true today as it was a hundred years ago, but with artificial intelligence creeping ever more presently into our lives, it can feel challenging to maintain a personal touch as you market your business. Fortunately, there is a solution to this, and, you guessed it, it’s a person.

The Importance of Human-Generated Content in Building Relationships

The rise of AI-generated content has created a buzz among marketing professionals, and like any new technology, there’s a mix of fear, curiosity and hesitation to jump on the bandwagon. 

Despite any potential reservations, however, AI is a bandwagon many business owners are keen to ride. The tool is fast, cost-effective and can deliver a power-up to marketing efforts. 

But it also comes with limitations. A big one is that it lacks empathy, emotion and understanding of human behavior and relationships.

As potential clients go online to search for solutions, they’re looking for authority, expertise and trustworthiness. Google gets this. In fact, it uses these exact criteria as it evaluates its search ranking systems.Recently it added another E: experience. 

Only humans are experienced authorities, and only humans can produce authentic content that resonates with readers. 

Bridging the Divide

The emergence of any new technology has a way of rattling people. Generative AI is no different. As we wade through these waters and learn to coexist in this new environment, we should never lose sight of what marketing is all about – relationship building. As much as we want to lean on technology, it’s not human and never will be. 

To close the deal on your marketing efforts and build lasting relationships that will pay dividends for years to come, turn to professionals who have been doing this for their entire careers (yep, that’s us). 

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The Role of Hashtags in Increasing Engagement on Social Media

Hashtags are an essential aspect of any successful social media strategy. Designed to categorize and track social media content, a hashtag is a set of words, phrases, or numbers following the # symbol. Hashtags can be injected into your social posts, bios, and comments to most major social networks, including LinkedIn, TikTok, Pinterest, and even YouTube. 

When you click on a hashtag, it pulls together all the other social media posts with the same hashtag, generating more content centered around a similar topic. In this sense, a hashtag is like a shortcut to more content that suits your audience’s interests. 

Through this primary function, a hashtag can be used to increase engagement in a number of ways: 

Participate in Larger Conversations 

Hashtags can be used to participate in larger conversations about a trending topic. Let’s say you’re a sporting goods company and you want your posts about the FIFA World Cup to be seen by more people. If you use relevant hashtags like #WorldCup and #FIFAWorldCup and your content is highly relevant to the topic in itself, your posts about the FIFA World Cop will appear in searches and feeds when someone searches or clicks on these hashtags. This is a massive increase in visibility to users who are clearly interested in this topic, and that makes them more likely to engage with your content. 

Make Your Brand Easier to Find

Hashtags make your content much easier to find for anyone interested in that particular topic. Think about the kind of words or phrases someone might use to search for products or services like yours on social media. 

For example, someone who is interested in a healthy new moisturizer might use hashtags like #skincare and #moisturizer to search for a relevant product. If you use these hashtags in your posts about your company’s latest moisturizer, users who are interested in a product just like yours can discover your brand. On that note, you might also consider using branded hashtags so that people who have already heard of your brand can easily find posts about specific topics. 

Distinguish Your Content 

Hashtags allow you to distinguish your social media content by specific topics and themes. After all, a successful social media strategy involves content that stands out. Your posts don’t just cover the same topics and themes as your competitors, right? 

With hashtags, you can narrow down exactly what makes your content different and make it easier for people to discover your content by pursuing related topics and themes. Your competitors’ content might not be accessible through these hashtags, but yours is. And when people see how unique and tasteful your content is, they’re more likely to engage with it. 

To maximize the visibility of each individual social media post, don’t use the same hashtags every time. You want your audience to see that you are putting thought into your content and tailoring your hashtags specifically to each post, so they feel fresh and relevant. 

For more advice on how to use hashtags to boost engagement on social media, contact the team at The Found Gen today. 

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How to Optimize Your Website Content for SEO Without Hiring an Expert

All successful businesses share at least one thing in common: it’s easy to find them on Google. If you want your business to show up when someone in your area searches for products or services like yours, you’re going to have to make your website SEO-friendly. 

There are the basics of SEO, like creating a Google Business Profile and listing your business on relevant directories. To fully maximize your website’s accessibility, you have to show Google that your website is relevant, trustworthy, and user-friendly. 

Here are some fairly easy ways to optimize your small business’s website for SEO:

Leverage User-Generated Content

Your customers probably place a lot of value on reviews and testimonials. Well, so does Google. An SEO-friendly website is rich with reviews and testimonials. If you consistently encourage your customers to leave either form of social proof after making a purchase, you are consistently generating fresh and relevant content for your website. Reviews, testimonials, and frankly any user-generated content significantly enhances your website’s credibility. And when customers trust you, search engines will follow suit. 

Increase Inbound Links

Another great way to gain the trust of searching engines is inbound links. When another website links to yours, it shows Google that this website trusts your website enough to send its own visitors to your site. Each inbound link is like a vote of confidence.

So, how do you get other businesses to link to your website? One popular strategy is forging a partnership with a credible business that offers a complementary product or service to yours. When your partner posts content that relates to your business, they link to your website, and vice versa. Other ways to get credible websites to link to yours include attending and sponsoring local events, applying for local awards, and conducting research that’s highly valuable to your industry. 

Optimize Category Pages

People tend to search for specific products or services, not specific businesses. They might know what they need (e.g. “kitchen remodel”) but they might not know what kind of company can give it to them. Google often responds to these queries with links to product pages, as opposed to the homepages of these businesses. 

For this reason, you should make sure your product pages are SEO-friendly in themselves. Are you using the most important keywords in the product name in description? Are your product pages easy to navigate, with high quality images? 

If you offer products from many different categories, you should definitely optimize your category pages for SEO as well. In addition to relevant headings, make sure your category pages feature a clear product hierarchy, since this simplifies the customer experience and makes your website seem more legitimate. 

Update Content Regularly

Updating existing blog content takes much less time than developing new topics and composing new content. For instance, if you have content that revolves around important statistics, see if those statistics are still up to date. You could potentially add another paragraph to the post to clarify the update. 

Content can also be updated with quotes, additional statistics, and new developments in your industry. This is how countless successful companies continue to rank highly on relevant searches for years and years: They update high-volume content like listicles to account for new technology, new products, etc. 

At this point, it’s probably clear that a cornerstone of an SEO-friendly website is fresh, relevant content. If your website is informative, easy to navigate, and constantly adding fresh and relevant content, then you’ve checked the main boxes for effective SEO. For further guidance about SEO for small businesses, contact the team at The Found Gen today.

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Should You Use AI to Generate Social Media Posts – Including Graphics + Imagery?

Don’t. Just don’t. Here’s why.

If you want to build trust with your audience, you must be authentic and true to your brand. Using artificial intelligence to plug and play content and images on your social media accounts is neither. Audiences will take note. And that’s before we even get into a conversation about copyright issues.

The Double-Edged Sword

AI-generated content including text, graphics and imagery sounds like a dream, and in many ways it is! These tools deliver “creative” work in seconds, which means you don’t have to wait for your coffee buzz to kick in before your brain really amps up. Moreover, experimenting with AI can be fun. There’s a thrill in anticipating what will color your screen after you hit enter on the keyboard.

But fun and games aside, some of the biggest problems with using AI-generated content to market your business have to do with copyright protections and ensuring brand consistency and professionalism. 

In terms of content ownership and copyright protection, U.S. Copyright Laws only protect against human-made creative endeavors. So, if AI creates a sweet logo for your business, no one’s going to be able to stop an up-and-coming competitor from stealing it. Worse yet, who’s to know if AI didn’t steal that logo from someone else? Then, suddenly you will find yourself with a very big problem because, in case you haven’t heard, lawsuits are expensive. 

Quality Control Concerns

Another issue with using AI to generate social media marketing materials is that you run the risk of breaching brand standards. AI tools are machines. They can’t achieve the same level of creativity as your design team or marketing agency, and they can severely miss the mark on nuances required in human interactions. Moreover, they may deliver inconsistent, inaccurate or poor-quality posts. In many ways, generative AI feels too good to be true, and, well, that means it probably is. The best way to balance technology with personality is by adding the human element to your marketing endeavors. We’re here to help. Call us at The Found Gen today.