Tag: Digital Marketing

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Purpose-Driven Marketing Tips Sustainability Tips

Challenges That Are Unique to Sustainable Marketing and How to Overcome Them

Taking the road less travelled to make the world better may result in a bumpier ride along the way. Your purpose-driven organization is likely no stranger to unique challenges like sourcing sustainable materials or getting certified (for example, through Greenguard or B Corp). 

But in the end, you know that it’s all worth it, because you’re making tangible and positive impacts on not just people, but the planet.

However, just because you know your organization is doing the right thing, that doesn’t always mean customers know. When it comes to convincing people to choose your company, you may face specialized marketing challenges as a purpose-driven organization. Here’s our guide to overcoming them.

Communicate Your Value to Customers

Brands that pay fair wages, use sustainable materials, and have ethical production processes usually incur higher operational costs, so generally charge more for products that may also have an inexpensive “fast factory-made” counterpart. 

Money-conscious customers may be tempted by the cheaper option, so you’ll need to communicate your value and impact.

It’s a good idea to include an “About” page on your website that showcases your backstory, goals, and impacts. Periodically share this page and related content on your social media platforms, emails, and advertisements to educate new customers and remind existing customers of the impact of your good work.

Kotn, a B Corp-certified Canadian clothing retailer, is a great example of how to do this. Check out their About page here. 

Another way to let customers know that they’re making the more sustainable, ethical choice is to inform them of the impact they have by choosing your products or organization. For example, US shoe retailer Thousand Fell shows the driving emissions avoided, bulb energy saved, and plastic bottles recycled for each product, so customers know their individual impact before purchasing. 

Rise to the Challenge of Meeting Higher Customer Expectations

Customers that are willing to choose an environmentally and socially conscious product generally have higher expectations, as they’re potentially paying more and waiting longer for their product.

It’s a good idea to ensure your marketing-adjacent user experiences, such as your website and your customer service channels, are solid and easy to use, so customer satisfaction is not only met, but exceeded. 

It’s also important to remember that these are well-researched, well-educated customers, which means they’ll likely be able to sniff out any potential marketing disingenuity, like greenwashing. Always be completely transparent and honest with your processes and efforts.

Stand Out From the Competition

Whether it’s for altruism or to keep up with increasing consumer demand, more brands are entering or transforming themselves to fit into an environmentally and socially conscious marketplace. 

The Global Sustainability Study 2021 found that “Globally, 85 percent of people indicate that they have shifted their purchase behavior towards being more sustainable in the past five years.”

While this is great for people and the planet, it also means increased competition for your organization. You can set yourself apart from the competition by focusing on what makes your company unique – and get specific.

Have you innovated an existing product? For example, SAYE is a shoe brand that uses “leather” made from cactuses. Have you innovated on the process? For example, Canadian furniture brand Pivot has a circular approach to their manufacturing by using reclaimed materials for their furniture, and they also have a made-to-order option. Communicate these differences, and their impacts, through your marketing efforts.

Another important way to set your purpose-driven organization apart is through your branding. Make sure you have a distinct visual identity (i.e. logo, fonts, imagery, and colour palette), and tone of voice that fits with your values and resonates with customers. Here are some examples of eco-friendly companies who have memorable branding. 

Keeping up with trends can also ensure that you’re also keeping up with (or getting ahead of) the competition. Check out some Marketing Trends to Look Out for in 2022.

Time and Budget Constraints? Plan Marketing Efforts Strategically

For purpose-driven organizations, tasks like developing aligned partnerships, working towards or maintaining certifications, and developing new sustainable products may take up the lion’s share of your time and budget. However, you can still employ sustainable marketing tactics strategically, even if you don’t have a lot of time or resources.

Whether you want to drive website traffic, grow your social media audience, and/or convert prospective customers, here’s how to up your marketing game on a budget. 

Choose Sparx to Elevate Your Sustainable Marketing

You’re making the world better and we want to help you do it. 

If you’re looking to elevate your sustainable marketing, the experts at Sparx Publishing Group are always available to chat. We help purpose-driven organizations secure their website, create great content, build experiences to delight their customers, and help grow their business, all within a variety of budgets. You can reach us here.


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Purpose-Driven Marketing Tips

How to Up Your Marketing Game On a Budget

As a purpose-driven organization that’s making the world better, it’s important to amplify your impact story. If you’ve been around the block, there’s a good chance you’ve already undertaken some sort of marketing effort, whether it’s email newsletters or social media posts.

For many organizations, especially in the ESG space, there’s a chance that marketing efforts may wind up getting deprioritized to help keep different priorities or impact projects on track. 

This might make marketing seem like an expensive “luxury.” However, being tactical and strategic with your efforts can result in effective marketing that doesn’t break the bank. Here’s how to up your marketing game on a budget.

Drive Website Traffic

Whether you want to educate your audience on your important cause, or encourage them to buy your company’s sustainable products from your digital storefront, it’s a good idea to make driving website traffic one of your goals. After all, your website is the digital home of your organization! 

You can tailor your marketing tactics depending on your budget to increase website visitors. One relatively inexpensive way to do this is by regularly producing educational and value-driven blog posts that include necessary search engine optimization keywords to help your Google ranking. 

Similarly, an email newsletter can also be another effective website traffic driver and all-around great marketing tool. There are several free and paid email marketing tools out there that can help you create emails to strategically drive traffic directly to specific pages on your website.

If your target audience is particularly active on social media, running paid ads on Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn that link to your website can be a way to put your budget to good use and get more eyes on your brand. 
Alternatively, you can also launch paid Google search ads, which is when you bid on keywords to show up at the top of Google search rankings. Just a heads up, though, this tactic can get expensive quickly, so you’ll want to be very strategic in its execution if you choose to do this.

Grow Your Social Media Audience

When it comes to achieving your organization’s impact goals and boosting awareness of your cause, social media can be a powerful tool. In fact, 83% of Canadians use social media, which means it’s likely your target audience is already there. 

In addition, according to GlobalWebIndex, 71% of consumers are more likely to purchase products and services based on social media referrals. 

A good first step is to regularly post well-curated content on your key social media platforms with relevant hashtags. Hootsuite recommends posting at least once per day depending on the platform.

In order to show your audience and prospective followers what your values are, it’s also a good idea to post about the causes that matter to you through educational infographics, reshares of content from other value-aligned organizations, or collaborating with micro influencers in your specific niche. Content resharing in particular is a budget-friendly method of community building online.
If you’ve got a little extra room in your marketing budget, you can introduce paid social media ads into your repertoire designed to increase your followers. For example, to show up on the Explore page of like-minded Instagram users, you could try Instagram Explore ads. Other social media platforms have similar ad types as well.

Convert Prospective Customers

For many organizations, conversion is the ultimate end-goal – literally. Perhaps you want to sell more of your ethically-made products or get more donations for your worthy cause. That’s where marketing efforts towards conversion come in. 

If you sell a tangible product or service, one relatively budget-friendly way to encourage sales is to offer a deal or promotion, or to run a giveaway. You can promote the sale in your email newsletter, on social media, and on your website. Encouraging sharing and tagging in your social media posts is a good way to get more eyes on your promo.

If you have the budget for paid advertising, an excellent form of paid ads for converting customers is retargeting ads. These ads remind customers of an item in their cart or an action they didn’t complete to remind them in order to edge along the conversion. For example, if someone went to your page, learned about your cause, but hadn’t yet donated, a retargeting ad could remind them to do so. 

If this all seems a little overwhelming, it’s fine! The most important thing to remember is that if you’re on a budget, you don’t need to do it all when it comes to marketing. Find out where your audience is, identify your most important business goals, and create strategic content around that.

Marketing agencies are also a great resource. We’re able to help you map out your customer journey, strategically identify and target critical marketing touchpoints in that journey, and build tactical content and ads designed to support your most important business goals.

Choose Sparx for Your Budget-Friendly Marketing Efforts

You’re making the world better and we want to help you do it.

If you’re looking to amplify your world-changing message, the experts at Sparx Publishing Group are always available to chat. We help purpose-driven organizations secure their website, create great content, build experiences to delight their customers, and help grow their business, all within a variety of budgets. You can reach us here.

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Purpose-Driven Marketing Tips

How to Set SMART Goals in Cause Marketing

Your company is doing amazing things to make the world better. Whether you’re creating a more environmentally-conscious and sustainable product, raising awareness for an important and impactful cause, or organizing volunteers to contribute to a local initiative, it’s important to be able to see the impact of your work.

Regardless of the positive mark your company is making, it can be challenging to measure the tangible impact of your good works and to visualize how each separate initiative contributes to your organization’s overall business goals and mission. It’s time to get SMART with the way you set goals! 

What are SMART Goals?

The SMART system, which stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Timely, is a method of goal setting that includes clear, realistic, easy to measure targets. SMART goals increase the likelihood of success by encouraging you to determine which measurable metrics define success, and to verify that your goals are actually achievable. Plus, you can clearly see how close you are to achieving a milestone. They can also be used holistically to map out steps towards a long-term goal. 

Here’s a breakdown of the SMART system and how to apply it to cause marketing.

Specific – Get specific with your goal. For example, “I want to reach more people” is too vague. Think about the why and how. “I want to increase subscriptions to our email newsletter to boost awareness of upcoming sustainable product launches by running paid ads on Facebook, where we typically see the most engagement” is much more specific. (But still contributes to an overarching goal of reaching more people.)

Measurable – “More” isn’t a measurement: percentage and quantity increases are. Using the example above, you could set a goal of a 25% increase in the number of subscribers. Or, if you’re setting a numerical target, 50 or 150 (or more) new subscribers might be reasonable.

Achievable – While it’s good to shoot for the stars, make sure your goal is realistically achievable based on your current performance and resources. Use your past numbers as baseline data, and if you don’t have any, now’s the time to establish KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and track them. 

For example, if you’ve got 1,500 email newsletter subscribers and typically see an increase in subscribers of between 10 and 20% after a social media push, trying to get an increase of 100% in a relatively short period of time may not be realistic.

Relevant – Ensure that your goal is value-aligned. Does it contribute towards your overall values and mission? In the example above, if your company’s mission is creating more ethical and sustainable products to help save the environment, getting more people to subscribe to your email newsletter to let them know about your upcoming product launches increases the likelihood that more people will choose your environmentally-friendly product, thus contributing to your sustainability mission.

Timely – There needs to be a deadline, so you know when you’ve achieved your goal, or how close you are to achieving it. Monthly, quarterly, and/or annual goals are a great place to start. Remember, 1,500 new subscribers in a month may be unrealistic. 1,500 new subscribers over the course of a quarter or a year might be more achievable. Adjust timelines based on your KPIs.

SMART Goal Examples 

Scenario 1: Sustainable product marketing to increase sales

Specific – We want to increase sales of our biodegradable soap product by running an “always on” sales campaign on social media and paid channels. 

Measurable – Our goal is to increase our current sales by 10% to sell 5,000 units. 

Achievable – The last time we ran a two-week sales campaign on those channels, sales increased by 5%.

Relevant – By selling more units, it means more people are using sustainable soap products, which contributes to our mission to protect the Earth’s fresh water sources. 

Timely – We will achieve this by the end of the quarter. 

Scenario 2: Building awareness for a cause

Specific – We want to raise awareness of the harm caused by tourist elephant riding by circulating a petition across all our social media channels to stop the practice.

Measurable – Our goal is to get 1,000 people to sign the petition.

Achievable – Last year when we circulated a petition on social media, we got 750 signatures over the course of six weeks from our audience of 5,000. Our audience has since grown to 11,000.

Relevant – As an ethical clothing retailer whose branding prominently features elephants, our mission is to end harmful practices against elephants worldwide. Raising awareness of the harm caused to elephants is the first step to ending these practices.

Timely – We will get 1,000 signatures over the next six weeks, before peak tourist season begins. 

How to Take SMART Goals Even Further 

You can also use the SMART system to break down larger impact marketing goals into specific channels and campaigns. For example, in Scenario 1 above, you could set a SMART goal for your sales campaign on Instagram. How many impressions are you aiming for? How many people would you like to see click through to your website? Smaller SMART goals can support larger SMART goals.

If you’re still new to marketing your impact organization, we recommend checking out our How to Create an Effective Marketing Strategy for Your Impact Organization blog first.

Let Sparx Help You Reach Your Cause Marketing Goals

You’re making the world better and we want to help you do it. 

If you’re looking to get your world-changing message out there, the experts at Sparx Publishing Group are always available to chat. We help purpose driven organizations secure their website, create great content, build experiences to delight their customers, and help grow their business. You can reach us here.

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Purpose-Driven Marketing Tips

How to Avoid “Rainbow-Washing” during Pride Month

June is Pride month, which celebrates members of the LGBTQIA+ community, supports their rights, and honours their resilient past. Pride month is more than just a rainbow-coloured party; it began with protests like the Stonewall Riots in the US, and the Operation Soap riot in Canada. 

Whether or not your organization employs members of the LGBTQIA+ community or has clients who identify as LGBTQIA+, you should consider participating in Pride month to show your support and solidarity. 

However, there is a right and a wrong way to do Pride. The phenomenon of brands embracing the rainbow during Pride but avoiding actionable or tangible support to the LGBTQIA+ community is known as “rainbow-washing.” 

Rainbow-washing can be considered as virtue-signalling, which often leaves a poor impression of a brand. As an organization who wants to live your values, it’s important to walk the talk. Here’s our guide on how to avoid rainbow-washing and be a true ally to the LGBTQIA+ community. 

Do Your Research 

The landscape of the LGBTQIA+ community is vast and complex. 

There are unique identities, intersections, and struggles within the LGBTQIA+ umbrella, which makes it important to do your research before your organization jumps into Pride promotion. 

Dive into the history and important figures of the gay liberation movement, issues that affect the LGBTQIA+ community, politically-correct terms to use, groups that fall under the LGBTQIA+ umbrella, and what the various Pride flags mean. 

Include LGBTQIA+ Folks in the Conversation

It’s important to involve people in the LGBTQIA+ community in your Pride month efforts to ensure you’re being truly authentic and supportive. Do you currently employ “out” members of the LGBTQIA+ community? See if they’d be interested to help with the ideation and decision-making process. If not, respect their wishes. When asking advice from your LGBTQIA+ staff that goes above and beyond their normal duties, they should be compensated for their time and work.

You can also hire a LGBTQIA+ consulting organization to help get your Pride and LGBTQIA+ allyship efforts right, including within your workplace. Some great resources include Qmunity, Pride at Work Canada, TransFocus, and The 519. 

Amplify LGBTQIA+ Voices 

As with other social causes, it’s a good idea to amplify voices within the community instead of trying to dominate the space. Not only does doing the latter potentially hurt the livelihood of LGBTQIA+ members by increasing the chance they’ll get drowned out in the noise, your audience may view it as disingenuous or performative. 

Plus, by elevating LGBTQIA+ people and their stories, you can align your company’s efforts, show you’re knowledgeable and active in the LGBTQIA+ community, and shine a light on issues that are important to your organization.  

Donate to LGBTQIA+ Causes 

If you have the resources, it’s a good idea to put your money where your mouth is. Expensive  healthcare (such as gender affirming surgery for trans folks), lack of mental health services, and homelessness are all issues that affect the LGBTQIA+ community. 

Luckily, there are organizations that deal directly with these issues (and more) that your company can donate to, And of course, you can show your audience that you’re supporting these organizations. While it’s important to find non-profits that resonate and align with your brand, some to check out are The 519, Rainbow Railroad, and Pflag.  

Post More Than a Rainbow Flag

By this point, you’ve probably taken the hint to not just “rainbow-ify” your organization’s profile photo logo or chuck a Pride flag on your Instagram feed and call it a day. Ensure you bring value and awareness to your social media posts. 

Hopefully, you have a wider Pride campaign that you can push through your social media channels (i.e. new partnership, product, or donation plans). Otherwise, why not post about the history of Pride month, important LGBTQIA+ figures, or your favourite LGBTQIA+ activists?

Make it a Year-Round Commitment

Pride may be just one month for your organization, but it’s a lifetime for individuals in the LGBTQIA+ community. Consider making your efforts an always-on commitment. One way to ensure you incorporate inclusive content regularly is to work backwards from Pride the following year. If you were looking back over an entire year, what would you want to see in terms of LGBTQIA+ positive initiatives or content from your organization? Once you’ve determined that, you can schedule these efforts in your content planning strategy.

You can also ensure your organization is an inclusive workplace (there are even certificates for this), become an “equal opportunity employer” to attract new LGBTQIA+ hires, ask your current LGBTQIA+ employees how to better support them, evaluate your marketing efforts, and continue to donate and partner with LGBTQIA+ organizations. 

Important note: LGBTQIA+ conversations often centre white cis gay men, so it’s important to acknowledge diversity and intersections of privilege (i.e. gender, race, religion, ability, etc.) in your efforts. For example, showcase LGBTQIA+ persons of colour in a marketing ad.

Three Examples of Organizations Doing Pride Right

1. Kiehl’s

Kiehl’s is an American skincare retailer headquartered in New York. Not only have they sponsored NYC Pride since 2010, in 2020 they announced a partnership with LGBTQIA+ youth suicide prevention non-profit The Trevor Project with plans to “make a positive impact through funding, awareness and resources that can help change [LGBTQIA+ youth’s] lives for the better.”

2. IKEA Canada

Have you ever gone to IKEA and needed one of those giant blue shopping bags for all your candles, pillows, or Swedish meatballs? Well, the beloved furniture company made these shopping bags rainbow for 2019’s Pride month and donated all profits to Pflag, “Canada’s only national organization that offers peer-to-peer support striving to help all Canadians with issues of sexual orientation, gender identity and gender expression.”

3. Lyft Toronto

While Pride has been affected by COVID-19 in 2020 and 2021, rideshare platform Lyft was an active participant in Pride Toronto in 2019, including being their official rideshare platform. They had a parade float, offered discount codes, and donated $1 to HIV/AIDS hospital Casey House for every ride taken during Pride Toronto using their code. What’s more, Lyft didn’t just show their “pride” during June, they also became the first rideshare app to let passengers choose from a wide range of pronouns, as launched with their #TwoIsTooFew campaign. 

What Sparx is Doing 

In addition to embracing the rainbow flag on our website and our social media profile pictures, this Pride month, we will be:

  • Rolling out pronoun transparency with the internal team, so Sparx employees can disclose their pronouns on all communication channels (this includes a discussion about the importance of disclosing pronouns),
  • Highlighting on our social media channels mission-aligned organizations in the LGBTQIA+ community that are working to make the world better,
  • Amplifying Pride by posting on our social media channels, including a post about the history and facts about the Pride flag,
  • And of course, posting this blog!

Get in Touch

At Sparx, our mission is to create content to make the world better.
If you need help securing your website, creating great content, building experiences to delight your customers, marketing your business, or you simply have questions, the experts at Sparx Publishing Group are always available to chat. You can reach us here.

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Purpose-Driven Marketing Tips

4 Reasons a Company Blog Might Be Wrong for Your Business

While it’s important to have a strong digital presence, starting a corporate blog might not be the right strategy for every business. The digital landscape is already crowded with content, and creating a blog puts your company in competition with many other content producers.

It’s important to take a big picture approach to your business objectives when it comes to communications and marketing. Analyze the time and effort that your business will need to invest to make your corporate blog successful. If you’re already stretched for time, a blog might not be right for your business and you may want to consider alternatives, such as paid advertising, to getting your company noticed by digital audiences.

A Business Blog Requires Commitment

For a company blog to be successful, it needs to become part of your business processes.

Some successful bloggers, such as marketing expert Seth Godin, strongly recommend posting every single day. Hubspot, a leading content marketing firm, recommends three to four new posts every week for a smaller blog, and four to five posts per week for a larger blog, in order to drive organic traffic. For purposes of brand awareness, they recommend one to two times a week for small blogs and three to four times for large blogs.

These numbers aren’t a hard-and-fast rule, so it is important to learn what your desired audience is interested in tuning into. If your business publishes too many posts for the type or size of your brand, it can lead to a diluted audience and burnout for your team.

However many posts you intend to publish, it’s important to integrate content creation into your business practices. If the time commitment isn’t accounted for and scheduled, then a company blog is often the first project to get pushed back, leaving your audience wondering what happened.

Maintaining Continuity Is Difficult

For any type of media, from magazines to TV shows, audiences have a set of expectations for consistent content. If a reader picks up an issue of Forbes magazine and finds articles about plumbing instead of business or entrepreneurship, they likely won’t read the magazine again.

The same is true for blogs. Readers expect thematic and narrative continuity, and they won’t become return visitors if you don’t provide that.

Depending on your business, having enough variation in your content to keep it interesting, while still maintaining thematic continuity, requires investing the time in planning.

If your business addresses a niche market, your corporate blog might struggle to find enough new or interesting things to talk about. Conversely, if your business addresses too broad a range of topics, your blog might risk alienating your desired audience.

Your business blog also needs to be published consistently. If you set a schedule for posting but start missing weeks or months, your readership will drop off considerably. Audiences have short attention spans, and if you don’t stick to your schedule, they will move on quickly.

Audiences also look for narrative continuity. A series of posts on a particular issue keep readers engaged and coming back for the next installment. If you want to court return readership, you have to plan your content calendar strategically, which requires, you guessed it, time and attention.

If time is something your organization can’t spare, you won’t be able to maximize the return readership of your corporate blog and might be better off scaling back or going without one – at least until you have time or resources.

Competition in the Blogging Space Is Fierce

It’s tempting to think about the internet as a space with infinite capacity for more business blogs. And while that may be true in theory, in reality your audience does not have infinite capacity.

Each reader can follow only so many sources of content, and your company’s blog is simply one node in a vast digital ecosystem of content. To put it simply: You are competing for the attention of your audience against a whole world of digital content – more content than anyone could possibly consume in a lifetime.

Adding to that, the world of blogging constantly changes and evolves, requiring you to learn new tools, new rules for SEO, and new best practices for web development. If your company already struggles to stay on the cutting edge of technology or digital change, your corporate blog will quickly get left behind.

To make sure people read your company’s blog, you may need to promote your posts. It’s not enough to simply publish on your website. You may need to push out notifications to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other social media sites meaning that your small blog project scope will be larger and more costly.

You might want to consider promoting your corporate blog with paid advertisements. It might sound counterintuitive, but acquiring ongoing readers who will expand your reach by sharing your content on social media often requires an initial monetary investment in ads.

Beware of the Hidden Costs of Blogging

Even if you do everything right, plan your content months in advance, post regularly with interesting content, and promote your corporate blog appropriately, it still might never generate interest or become “popular.” It might fail.

Internet audiences can be fickle, and they may simply not resonate with your work. If this happens, you will have invested a lot of time and money, with little to no upside.

At the end of the day, your corporate blog will take time and effort to cultivate. If your company doesn’t have the time to build it up slowly, you’ll be disappointed by early failures and potentially pull the plug on the project before it has a proper chance to take off.

Being aware of the challenges your business blog might face and the costs it might incur, will help you maintain hope if success doesn’t come quickly.

Learn More About Business Blogs

Be sure to read our next installment in this three-part series, where we will compare the pros and cons of having a business blog and ultimately help you decide if starting a blog is right for your company.

If you have questions about getting the most out of your corporate blog, or any other content marketing inquiries, feel free to reach out to Sparx Publishing Group here.