Marketing Strategy That Actually Grows Your Business
No matter what kind of business (or non-profit) you’re operating, you need a marketing strategy running in the background if you want to grow strategically. In our line of work, we find that many companies are the best-kept secrets in their industries precisely because they haven’t invested time, money, and thoughtful energy into crafting a marketing strategy beyond the occasional Instagram post or email newsletter. Occasionally “doing” marketing content doesn’t mean that you’re actually marketing effectively.
With our purpose-driven clients, we spend a lot of time discussing their current marketing plans and what we can do to make them more effective without losing the core purpose behind the business. It’s so important to balance strategic marketing initiatives with a deep and consistent understanding of who your brand is and what it stands for. We’ve spent a lot of time on this type of work, and through the process of working with purpose-driven leaders of varying backgrounds, we’ve come away with a few key conclusions that hold true for all of them and have written them down here.
So whether you’re amplifying your growth or seeking to become more mission-aligned in your marketing, this guide is for you.
Solidify and Live by Your Mission, Vision, and Values
As a purpose-driven brand, you must have an authentic purpose that you actually believe in and act on. This should align with your business model, company culture, and customers’ wants and needs. If you don’t know what your purpose is or how to write it down in the mission-vision-value framework, now’s the time to sit down with your leadership team and map it out. You’ll all want to be on the same page so that you not only understand what the brand is about but also each have a clear idea of how to communicate your purpose to the wider community.
If you’re feeling stuck in the process of defining these concepts for your company, it can be helpful to view your purpose through a problem-solution lens:
- What problem (or problems) has your brand noticed in your particular focus area?
- What do your product(s) or service(s) do to address these problems?
- What have the outcomes been so far?
- What do you hope to see as outcomes in the future?
- What does it look like to approach these problems ethically?
The answers you come up with here will give you what you need to better understand your purpose and refine it into a mission statement, a forward-looking vision, and concrete values that everyone can get behind and live by.
Again, it’s so important to have your most important people in the room when establishing your mission, vision, and values statements. You need to get everyone on the same page internally to ensure external messaging stays consistent. After all, customers of purpose-driven companies are the most likely types to walk away if they sniff out any form of inauthenticity or inconsistency.
Get to Know Your Target Audience and Their Values
Who is your target audience and what do they care about most, especially when making purchasing decisions? Ask this question from the outset and continue to ask it as you refine your marketing strategy over time. As soon as you move too far away from answering this question, you’ll begin to lose touch with the people who matter most to your purpose-driven outcomes, so don’t lose focus.
Beyond this question, take a look at intentional data points about your current audience and who they are:
- Age and life stage.
- Global, regional, and local geography.
- Education level.
- Income and economic status.
- Employment and work background.
- Cultural background.
- Digital access and typical approach to media consumption.
- Where they spend their time online.
- Where else they like to shop and spend their money.
- What brands they like best.
- What other values they espouse.
Some of these data points will be easier to collect than others. When in doubt, encourage your top customers to complete a survey that helps you to better understand who they are and what they value. From there, you can continue to tailor your marketing plans to people like them.
Prioritize the Right Marketing Channels
Your marketing strategy will become overwhelming and ultimately inactionable if you don’t narrow your plans down to strategic channels. But how do you determine where you’re most likely to get the best results? Again, it helps to get to know your target audience and their habits. Do the research to know where your audience spends their time and consumes content, especially online. Then, be selective with social media presence, as not every platform will support a meaningful conversation with your target audience. For example, TikTok may be a trendy app with certain groups of people, but if your audience doesn’t spend much time there in their daily lives, you’ll be wasting your time if you put all your effort into making TikTok videos.
Beyond thinking about what channels are best suited to your type of messaging and the audience it targets, you should also consider if you need to diversify your messaging approaches to make them work for different channels. You’ll want a mix of short-form and long-form content, as well as a mix of simple content and well-researched content in your specialty area.
Especially for purpose-driven brands, you should spend strategic time on channels and content formats where you can really engage in nuanced long-form content, like blogs, email newsletters, case studies, and storytelling. Purpose-driven brands are expected to know their “why,” better than anyone else, and the only way to demonstrate that knowledge fully is by providing your audience with informative content that they can use to increase their own knowledge. So while long-form content might not always be an immediate “money maker,” it ultimately pays off to create it because it sets you up in your audience’s mind as a trustworthy expert in this area.
Adopt a Transparent and Straightforward Content Marketing Strategy
The way you talk to your audience matters and can make a huge difference between if they keep scrolling or if they actually decide to buy from your brand. But it’s important to not overthink things here. You want to sound like you no matter what, keeping messaging direct, specific, authentic, human, and simple whenever possible.There will be appropriate times and channels for getting into the weeds of your industry’s research and progress, but even then, what you say about that data and information should still sound like your brand.
Here are a few additional content marketing tips that can help you remain true to who you are, whether your CEO, your newest marketing intern, or your fractional partner is creating content that day:
- Use plain language whenever possible to reach a larger audience and keep them engaged.
- Focus on language that illustrates outcomes, impact, and progress.
- Ensure both digital assets and written content communicate the same things.
- Develop a style guide that explains who your company is and how your content should reflect that identity. The guide should get specific on what to say and how to say it in different formats and channels.
- Don’t just dive into viral trends without considering the purpose behind the work you’re doing and if this aligns with that purpose or not. You can scare the right customers off with the wrong kind of messaging, even if it generates a higher follower count.
More on this topic: Content Marketing for Social Impact
Connect Your Marketing Plans to Real Business Goals and Initiatives
Marketing, no matter what kind of business you’re running, will fail if it’s operating in a silo. You cannot successfully market a business and what it sells if you’re not constantly in touch with and aware of what the product and sales teams are doing and experiencing, for example.
So regularly meet with other teams and divisions in your company to understand their pain points and what they’re seeing among your target audience. They’ll likely offer a helpful perspective you haven’t considered before, or they’ll at least add some additional information and depth to what you already know.
From there, tie your marketing goals to sales goals wherever it makes sense. Is your company hoping to have 100 new customers this quarter? Tie your CTA clicks and landing page visits to that goal. Track how many people move from one of your blogs or social posts to the shopping cart on your website. Depending on the tools you use, there are multiple ways you can tie your marketing efforts into the greater efforts of the business.
Measure What Actually Matters
You won’t know how your marketing efforts are performing if you don’t measure them. And for purpose-driven brands, there are additional unique markers of success that you’ll want to evaluate. These are some of the most important ones we’ve found in our own work:
- Track brand trust, loyalty, employee advocacy, customer alignment, and other metrics that show if your purpose is reaching the right people in the right ways. You can use net promoter score surveys on both employees and customers to make sure you’re heading in the right direction with these key groups of people.
- Engage in regular sentiment analysis and collect feedback often in different places, including in your comments and DMs; clicks and impressions are still important, but you want more depth than that to really understand if people understand and like what you’re working toward.
- Don’t just measure to measure; be prepared to make adjustments as you learn what is and isn’t working.
Amplify Your Growth With Purpose-Driven Marketing Plans
Purpose-driven marketing works best when it’s custom-designed for your particular business. No two purpose-driven businesses have the same exact offerings or goals, so it’s important to really reflect on who you are and what you’re working to achieve in the coming weeks, the coming quarters, and the coming years on the job.
Our team at Mane Impact focuses our own efforts on sitting down with you to have these reflective conversations and then developing a marketing strategy that directly builds toward those loftier goals you have. We care about making your purpose known through strategic marketing because that is such a huge part of the work we do for our own purpose-driven business.
Contact Mane Impact today for help getting your purpose-driven marketing strategy in motion.