The New Era of Purpose Driven Marketing

A new wave is emerging in Marketing: it’s the Age of Purpose-drive Marketing, in which selling a product is not enough.

You need to offer value.

Your product needs to have a purpose for the customer and reach beyond that: it has to bring some kind of meaning to people’s lives, according to Joey Reiman from the American consulting firm on purpose marketing, Bright House.

When an organization manages to achieve that goal, it profits in the short run, but the world can also take some profit from it.

What is Purpose Driven Marketing

Put simply, it’s goal oriented Marketing.

In Content Marketing, for example, according to Ann Gwynn of Content Marketing Institute, purpose marketing is how a business or brand connects with its target audience based on their shared needs and interests – including interest in supporting some cause, for example.

Most organizations recognize the importance of this purpose. But they are not always prepared to create content around these efforts in a way that not only involves the audience, but also engages them.

Success in this new era of marketing depends on developing an assertive strategy that is executed in an authentic, organic way, bringing mutual benefits to all involved.

Rick Gilgey, also from Bright House, believes that people are not driven only by results. What really inspires them is doing great things for long periods of time.

According to Ari Kalfayan, founder of Startup & Tech Mixer, there are two types of entrepreneurs: those who just want to get rich and those who want to bring some kind of change to the world. The second type of entrepreneur is focused on purpose and on building a profitable conscious company.

Purpose-driven marketing is not a new term, but today, businesses that pay attention to it have become more popular, attracting customers that support and recommend these brands.

In fact, 91% of Millennials say they would switch brands to one associated with a cause.

And it gets better: 6 out of 10 Millennials say that a sense of purpose is one of the reasons that led them to work for the companies they’re currently in.

The Benefits of Purpose Driven Marketing

Purpose driven marketing has many benefits. Among them, we can mention some like:

• It works as a tool to align leaders and team members around a common purpose, mission and culture.

• It attracts customers, employees, partners and investors who believe in the company’s values.

• Motivates you and your team to be more productive

In short, having a purpose is an essential part of your business – even if your purpose is to simply make people’s lives easier by providing a useful product or service.

Now that we have a better understanding of what purpose driven marketing is all about, let’s list some ideas on how to create a marketing campaign geared towards that purpose.

How to Create a Marketing Purpose Campaign

Identify your niche

The first step to purpose marketing is to be aware of the strengths and weaknesses of your company as well as knowing your competitors.

You also need to answer a very important question: “Why would my customers pay for my services or product, and is there a way to do that by differentiating myself from others?”

Zappos, for example, has become famous for the exceptional customer service it provides, going far beyond expectations. This is something that makes them stand out from competitors, not the products they offer or the price they charge. The purpose of Zappos is to deliver happiness to the customers.

We can also mention Tom’s Shoes. Its purpose is to donate a pair of shoes to someone who needs it whenever a pair is bought by a customer at the store.

This one-for-one business model has been very effective in attracting customers and influencing other companies, such as Warby Parker, to follow a similar model.

As we say, Millennials are much more likely to buy from a business that is doing something to someone, even if they have to pay more for it.

Communicate the purpose of your brand

How do you share the purpose of your brand with the rest of the world?

This is a challenging question, but if you apply the right techniques, it won’t be so hard to answer it.

1. Participate in causes that your audience is interested in. How about donating part of the income to an NGO or to a charity?

2. Partner with other brands. Example: Spotify sets partnerships so customers can listen to their playlists.

3. Deliver valuable content. Home Depot and Lowes have created institutional videos with DIY projects and Leroy Merlin stores have delivered similar content as well: a pamphlet handed in at the store shows you how build your own projects.

4. Be timely and reactive. Recognize your opportunities to stand out. Do you remember when it was everywhere on the news that GoDaddy’s CEO had killed an elephant in Africa? Curata provided discount codes to anyone who wanted to switch from GoDaddy and converted part of the profits to an elephant conservation NGO.

5. Humanize your brand. Customers want to support people. So humanize your brand by showing behind-the-scenes images or videos of the people in your business, allowing team members to interact with customers, showing their personality.

6. Have a good time. Due to a high number of accidents and deaths on trains in Melbourne, Australia, the Australian company Metro Trains produced the “Dumb Ways to Die” campaign, transforming a serious subject into something memorable and with even some fun parts.

7. Volunteer! You, your team and your brand can make a difference. How about making something possible for people who do not have the opportunity? Spread love.

8. Be committed. Don’t just talk. Act! Find a purpose for your company and then commit to it. Liberty Mutual, for example, has a longstanding partnership with the US Olympics and Paralympic teams. That shows commitment to a cause.

Measure results and boost your sales

There’s not only one right way to success. Success will vary. The best way to determine the success of one of your purpose marketing campaigns is to set goals and analyze the metrics. Among the most popular:

1. Increase leads and sales

You must track the number of visitors, subscribers, customer inquiries and deals closed for a certain period of time.

2. Create awareness and trust

You should also track the amount of visitors, as well as the conversion rate of visitors-to-customer. You should also measure engagement for each part of your content (actions and comments) and track your sales cycle – the amount of time it took from the initial contact until closing.

3. Increase loyalty

Analyze the number of visitors who returned to your website, the number of customers that came from referrals, how many positive mentions your brand had, the customer satisfaction score and the retention rate.

Why you should do purpose driven marketing?

We can mention many examples of how purpose marketing works. But the main point is simples: you need to evolve your relationships from a simple cause to a purpose.

This evolution is necessary for companies to create a social impact while delivering value to the market – and profit from it as well.

This sense of purpose was amplified by Seth Godin in his speech at HubSpot’s INBOUND 2015 event. He introduced the concept of Permission Marketing more than 15 years ago and was a pioneer of the Inbound movement.

In his speech, Godin pointed out that the Internet has changed a lot of the world as we know and today there is a new way of connecting our everyday lives. According to Godin, companies must answer questions that really matter, such as: Can you be heard? Are you trustworthy? Can you connect? Do you do something that really matters?

Change is what brings great opportunities to another level. For Godin, “the way we make change happen is by being human, being connected, being generous and doing something that changes someone for the better.”

For business, it’s not about getting bigger or appearing as number one in ranking. If you want to be a business leader in this new era of marketing, it’s time to re-evaluate the purpose of your brand and develop a purpose marketing in your company.

Purpose marketing is a challenge, especially when it comes to content and strategy. Contentools Platform provides a means to manage your content and assists you in creating and documenting your content strategy by connecting you to marketing professionals who are socially aware and believe that content can make a difference in the world! Do you want to know more about the way we work? Contact us and talk to one of our experts!