Sustainable digital marketing: How to reduce digital waste without creating more work

How can organisations create effective content without constantly producing more of it? That was one of the key questions explored by Content Consultant Fiona Brennan from Indie Essentials in the first webinar of our Digital Waste Month series. During the 30-minute ‘byte sized’ session, Fiona shared the P.I.M.P. framework, showing how businesses can repurpose existing content more strategically, reduce digital waste, and improve marketing performance without increasing workloads.

Watch the webinar recording

The hidden environmental cost of content

When people think about waste, they tend to picture overflowing bins, packaging or food waste. Digital waste rarely enters the conversation.

But our digital lives have an environmental impact. Every email stored on a server, every social media post uploaded and every AI query processed requires energy. Fiona highlighted estimates that digital technologies account for around 3-4% of global carbon emissions, putting them in the same ballpark as the aviation industry.

That doesn’t mean organisations should stop using digital tools. However, it does raise an interesting question: If we’re creating more digital content than ever before, how much of it is actually useful?

Content isn’t sustainable just because you repurpose it

One of the most common pieces of marketing advice is to repurpose content. Turn a webinar into a blog. Turn a blog into social posts. Turn the social posts into emails.

There’s nothing wrong with that approach and it’s a great place to start. But Fiona challenged the assumption that repurposing automatically makes content more sustainable.
“If the thing you are creating to begin with is crap and not landing and not making a change for your business, then all you’re doing is making more and more content.”

Repurposing poor-performing content simply creates more poor-performing content. The more important question is whether the original piece of content is doing something useful for your audience and your organisation.

Do you have a content FOMO?

One of the strongest messages from the session was that most organisations don’t need more content. They already have plenty.

What they often need is a better understanding of what content is working and why – using your data to influence decisions.

Fiona shared an example of a client who was juggling blogs, social media channels, newsletters, Facebook groups and more. The workload was huge, the founder was exhausted, and the results didn’t justify the effort. After reviewing the data, they removed activities that weren’t contributing to business goals.

One of those channels was Instagram. Despite the pressure businesses often feel to be active everywhere, stepping away from the platform made no meaningful difference to performance. It simply freed up time to focus on the activities that were already working.

That’s not a recommendation to delete your Instagram account tomorrow but it’s a reminder that marketing strategy should be driven by evidence, not by a fear of missing out.

Building content with purpose

Throughout the webinar, Fiona returned to a framework built around four principles:

• Purpose
• Impact
• Momentum
• Profit

Every piece of content should have a purpose. It should matter to the people reading it. It should contribute to consistent progress. And ultimately, it should support organisational goals. If content isn’t helping customers, generating enquiries, building trust or supporting sales, it’s probably worth questioning why it exists.

This matters from both a sustainability perspective and a wellbeing perspective. After all, creating content that nobody reads isn’t just a waste of digital resources. It’s also a waste of people’s time and energy.