With consumers becoming more and more socially aware, the one thing businesses cannot succeed without is a purpose – a purpose that drives the businesses’ values, vision, mission and day-to-day operations. It is not really the brand or the product/service customers connect with. They connect with purpose of the brand. What does the brand truly believe in, what does it live by?

So, if you are a solopreneur or a small business owner who wants to make a big impact, pause and think what is it in this world that matters to you and how would you like to give back to society while running your business.

This article will give you the reasons to make your business purpose driven and explain how you can go about it with a straightforward strategy.

The Power of Purpose-Driven Branding

83% of employees believe that a company must lead with purpose. This statistic highlights the importance of purpose in motivating and engaging your team. When your employees identify with your brand’s purpose, they are more likely to be passionate about their work and actively contribute to your business’s success. This, in turn, positively impacts employee morale and productivity.

But it’s not just your employees who value purpose-driven brands; consumers do too. 54% of consumers want to buy a product that supports a cause and are willing to pay extra for socially and environmentally responsible products. By aligning your brand’s purpose with a cause or values that resonate with your target audience, you can attract and retain loyal customers who believe in your mission.

5 steps to brand your business with a meaningful purpose

Express Your Purpose

The first step in building a purpose-driven brand is to express what purpose you would like to connect to your business. What is that one cause that inspires you to keep going even during the toughest of times? Is it the desire to do something good for the environment or your passion for helping stray animals?

To illustrate this point, let’s take a couple of examples. Imagine a pet food store whose mission is to improve the lives of stray animals in the community by providing nutritious food and promoting responsible pet ownership. Their values center around compassion for animals and creating a more caring society for pets.

Similarly, a restaurant owner might run their business to promote sustainability and community nourishment, ensuring everyone can savor sustainability with every meal. Defining your purpose will guide every aspect of your business and influence the decisions you make.

Take a moment to reflect on your purpose and write it down. Ask yourself, what drives me? What impact do I want to make? By defining your purpose, you gain clarity and direction for your brand.

Infuse Your Purpose into Operations

Once you have defined your purpose, it’s time to infuse it into your day-to-day operations. Incorporating your purpose into your work makes all the difference. It shows that your purpose is not just defined for the sake of it but that you are taking active steps to put it into practice.

For example, the pet food store mentioned earlier could ensure that every aspect of their operations reflects their commitment to helping stray animals. From sourcing ethically produced pet food to offering adoption information, the store would make decisions that align with their purpose, such as organizing adoption events and collaborating with local animal shelters to provide support.

Get Buy-In from Employees and Stakeholders

Building a purpose-driven brand requires the support and buy-in of your employees and stakeholders. It’s important to communicate your purpose to your team and encourage their involvement.

In the case of the restaurant, the business could actively engage its employees in sustainability initiatives, such as organizing community cleanup events and partnering with local farms to highlight the importance of locally sourced ingredients. They could encourage customers to participate in bring-your-own-container programs to reduce waste. By involving employees and stakeholders in your purpose-driven initiatives, you create a sense of community and inspire others to support your vision.

Communicate Your Purpose

To build a purpose-driven brand, you need to let the world know what you are working towards. This step involves effectively communicating your purpose through social media campaigns, brand storytelling, and other marketing efforts.

A sustainable clothing store can effectively communicate its purpose by using social media campaigns that showcase eco-friendly materials and ethical production processes, along with relevant hashtags like #EcoFashion. Their brand storytelling can narrate their journey toward sustainability, emphasizing values and environmental impact, while marketing materials encourage sustainable choices through newsletters and eco-friendly packaging.

Collaborations with environmental organizations and initiatives, such as donations and recycling drives, demonstrate active involvement in sustainability. Regular impact reporting, and sharing data on waste reduction and environmental improvements, builds trust with customers and solidifies the brand’s commitment to its purpose, ultimately attracting like-minded consumers.

Measuring Your Impact

To ensure the success of your purpose-driven brand, it’s essential to measure your impact. This step involves tracking relevant metrics and gathering feedback to evaluate the effectiveness of your initiatives.

For a purpose-driven yoga store, measuring impact can be achieved by tracking several key metrics and gathering customer feedback. They can assess their success by monitoring factors such as the number of participants in their mindfulness workshops, the percentage of customers purchasing eco-friendly yoga mats and clothing, and the reduction in single-use plastic waste from their store.

Additionally, the store can regularly seek feedback from their yoga community through surveys or direct conversations to gauge customer satisfaction, understand their perception of the store’s commitment to mindfulness and sustainability, and identify areas for improvement.

By measuring these metrics and gathering feedback, the store can adapt its initiatives, refine its purpose-driven approach, and ensure it’s making a positive impact in line with its values.

By following this straightforward strategy, you can create a purpose-driven brand that speaks to the hearts and minds of your customers, fostering an engaged community that passionately supports your mission. Remember, purpose-driven branding is not just a trend; it’s a long-term strategy that can transform your business and make a lasting impact.

If you found this article helpful, consider checking out the video where I discuss 10 mindsets you must overcome to make your small business fly. Together, let’s inspire and support each other as we build purpose-driven brands.

How many of us want to take our businesses to the next level?

How many want our products and services to be loved and in demand?

If you hear your mind scream “YES!“, then my friend you are in the right place to begin this journey with Marketing!

Like many MSME business owners, I was very reactive when it came to Marketing. I was waiting for leads to come my way, had no control on my goals and relied too heavily on word of mouth. This meant that I was barely scraping by, hoping and praying that customers would magically discover me. If this even remotely sounds like you, we know what this leads to. Disappointment and dejection!

We need to understand that we must move to being more proactive and creative when it comes to Marketing. And the first step to that is dispelling some prevalent myths MSME business owners have and understanding how Digital Marketing for Small Business Owners can work for you.

The Myths of MSME Marketing

Myth #1: Word of mouth is good enough! And I already get enough business from my existing customers!

Truth:

While word of mouth is an effective means of marketing, it’s hardly effective at the starting line. Word of mouth gets wings when there is enough marketing momentum lifting it. With long time existing customers, it’s often a case of having low bargaining power in the relationship. In the long run this strategy is dangerous, relying too heavily on existing customers to bolster your business, should things take a turn for the worse.

Myth #2: Ours is a small/traditional business. Large players can expend on marketing, money that we can’t spare for marketing.

Truth:

Most small businesses stay small because they don’t invest in marketing. The latitude for success through marketing is much higher when it comes to traditional businesses since most of them are not! Honestly, not marketing costs businesses way more money. It also needs to be stated that investment in marketing needs more skill, effort and ideas than just money!

Myth #3: We tried doing marketing but didn’t see any results.

Truth:

Marketing isn’t an activity that starts and ends when we most need it. That’s a purely reactive approach which hardly garners dividends. Marketing needs to be consistent. The results of marketing are the outcomes of a proactive system.

Some Fundamentals of Marketing:

With these myths out of the way, let’s get to what the goal of marketing is. The management guru, Peter Drucker puts it best –

The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well, the product or service fits him and sells itself. The aim is to make selling superfluous.

Peter Drucker

Marketing is the science of adding value to customers before, during and after they buy. The process of marketing starts before building products and services. It begins with understanding the customer and their needs. Armed with this information, businesses can build products that are the right fit with their customers. It also is a means of developing mass trust, gaining brand credibility and dominating a position in the minds based on your business niche.

While Marketing may precede and succeed products and services, it is imperative to ensure that marketing should never take precedence over the product. As business owners, ensure you don’t overplay the importance of marketing. Great marketing for a bad product only serves as its death knell. 

A great product sells itself, and makes loyal brand ambassadors of your customers!

In summary, as a first but fundamental step – invest in understanding your customer, their needs and detail the 4P’s of marketing – Product, Price, Promotion and Place. You could also add 3 more Ps – People, Process and Physical evidence, if it makes sense to your business. Pour this knowledge into your products and make them no-brainers for your customer. Invest in marketing to accelerate Visibility, Credibility and Lead Generation.

Traditional versus Digital Marketing Channels:

Once we get into the mindset of Marketing, let’s talk about what marketing in India looks like today with Traditional and Digital channels. 

• TV can reach 800 million to 1 billion people
• Radio has a reach of approximately 650 million Indians
• Newspapers reach 465 Million people
• Digital has the reach of about 100 million users

Based on the numbers it is clear that if you have generic products that cater to large audiences traditional marketing means are the way to go. However if there is a need to reach specific audiences, to be able to reach the right people with the right message at the right time, digital should be your gig. So choose wisely!

Marketing as a Success and Wealth accelerator:

There is an equation that helps make sense of the above statement.

Wealth = n^CATT where

•  n – Niche

• C – Content

• A – Attention
• T – Trust
• T – Transaction

In simple terms it means – 

Thus making Success and Wealth inevitable.

Integrated Digital Marketing for Small Business Owners for the Win!

Many MSMEs pick and choose what channels to use for their marketing. This minimalist approach, while easy to manage, doesn’t cover the ground required to make businesses successful. The eagle eyed amongst you must have noticed how there are a variety of components in CATT like videos, social media, automation, SEO, ads and so on.

This is called an Integrated Marketing approach where one communication touchpoint feeds the other, creating a marketing ecosystem that works for your business.

This is what an Integrated Digital Marketing Framework looks like:

Don’t be intimidated by the image. In reality, it is a straightforward system which will take the customer on a journey. Integrated Digital Marketing frameworks help unify marketing efforts to tell a clear and consistent story to build brand awareness, increase ROI and establish brand loyalty.

Personal Branding: The Marketing edge to lift your business(es)

While Integrated Digital Marketing Frameworks give your business a fair shot of increasing their visibility and credibility, there is another BIG asset most businesses own that is under-utilized as a marketing vehicle. That is you, the business owner! This is where Personal branding comes in. To utilize your expertise to promote your brands.

Let me draw your attention to people like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Anand Mahindra, Richard Branson, Elon Musk and so on. These professionals arguably have larger followings than the businesses they own. These, and many other professionals, are experts in their own right and have made the effort to be the voice for their businesses and their beliefs. 

There is a fair bit that goes into creating Personal Branding strategies for MSME business owners, but lets cover the basics right here.

Right at the get go professionals/business owners who want to create Personal Brands, follow a Mass Trust Blueprint in a cyclical manner starting with 

Wrapping things up:

There is a joke that goes “Googling symptoms only tells you which diseases have the best SEO”.

While it’s funny, this goes to show how powerful Marketing truly is. Multiple mentors have told me:

The best known always beats the best!

Let’s round it up. I encourage you to train your mind and practice marketing on the basis of the following:

And we are just getting started. I will jump into more detail as I surf through my own Mass Trust Blueprint wave. Like, share, subscribe! Stay with me on the journey and get more on board!

P.S. I would be amiss if I don’t share my gratitude and give much due credit to one of my mentors Digital Deepak, whose marketing theories have been mentioned here.

Please follow him for deep dives and marketing gold!