Trade magazine advertorial for EcoVadis
Overview
EcoVadis is a well-respected global provider of sustainability ratings and intelligence, helping businesses engage their supply chains and improve performance across environment, human rights and business ethics. EcoVadis is a sustainability SaaS company with several solutions based around their digital platform, with an impressive network of 150,000+ rated companies.
This advertorial was published in Procurescape, a B2B trade magazine for procurement and supply chain professionals.
The brief
EcoVadis has a partnership with the procurement software provider SAP Ariba, which sponsored a special report with the trade magazine Procurescape to cover how procurement leaders are transforming their approach to risk and compliance.
Within this issue, EcoVadis was to be featured with a double-page spread. One page was for a full-page ad with headline, subheading and call to action. The other page was for a short advertorial, which needed to be informative and provide value to readers, positioning EcoVadis as an expert voice on supply chain sustainability.
The objective was twofold: to promote the EcoVadis integration with SAP Ariba (which benefits existing joint customers), and to promote an offer (free risk mapping sample) that generates new leads for EcoVadis.
The target audience was procurement professionals, who may not be very familiar with climate and sustainability but care about risk and business resilience, are likely to use the SAP suite of procurement software, and may or may not already use EcoVadis.
The advertorial: writing techniques
The double-page spread within the Procurescape special report (digital magazine).
The first page features the headline ‘supply chain resilience made easy’ which highlights the most important benefit (resilience) and promises that this can be ‘easy’ by using the EcoVadis and SAP tools. The subheading shares more benefits, which highlight the benefit of the integration and how this is more convenient and efficient for customers, and the call to action drives people to take the next step.
The second page is a short but informative ‘advertorial’ - a piece of sponsored content that reads like an editorial article but also promotes a brand. This article is titled ‘From mapping risks to maximising profits’ to link the offer (risk mapping sample) to a desirable business benefit (maximising profits). The piece opens with some of the topical issues that business people are grappling with at the moment, such as volatile tariffs, and then uses scannable bullet points to outline how sustainable procurement drives business value. The purpose of this opening section is to reposition sustainable procurement as a value creation strategy, which is even more important in a challenging economic environment, not a nice-to-have or a cost. The article then segues into the need for quality data and automated systems and shares some of the problems with manual approaches. Without being too direct or salesy, this educates readers on why they need an automated solution for supply chain sustainability data (such as EcoVadis).
The final part of the advertorial covers the benefits of the EcoVadis integration with SAP, which is useful for people who already use both tools, and finally the readers who are new to EcoVadis are offered a free risk mapping sample to get started. This is the natural first step to building supply chain resilience and starting the customer journey with EcoVadis. It was slightly challenging because we essentially had a slightly different message for readers who already use EcoVadis and those who don’t, so my approach was to speak to both groups explicitly in the copy.
My process
We started with a kick-off call with the content director, where they shared the brief and draft wireframe and I asked lots of questions to understand their needs and goals. They shared some extra briefing materials and ad copy that had been used for other campaigns, which I used as a basis.
I drafted the article and several options for the advert headline, subhead and call to action, including a comment to indicate which option I preferred and why. (They agreed with my recommendation).
I worked in Google Docs to allow for comments and collaboration on the live doc.
In the feedback process, the EcoVadis marketing team said they wanted to focus the article more on ROI and the business case for action, so I made edits to make that messaging more prominent. The team made some other minor edits before signing off.
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