Writing for a purpose-driven brand: 3 steps to writing with purpose

As audiences become more value-conscious when making purchasing decisions, it’s becoming even more crucial for writers who are working with brands or organizations to learn to effectively communicate their purpose in content marketing.

However, if you’re tasked with writing for a brand or cause that represents a strong mission or purpose, you might find it difficult to adapt your writing style to represent these values. I have a few tips that might help you out:

Step 1: Understand your purpose

When you are writing for a brand, you are stepping into their shoes. Your work reflects them, so you have to have a solid understanding of what the brand represents. The best way to do this, especially if you are trying to make your work much more purpose-driven, is to familiarize yourself with everything they stand for.

Gaining a solid understanding of your client includes much more than just their story. You need to submerge yourself in the brand’s mission, values, and purpose.

Maybe the founder of a financial coaching company came from a home where their family struggled to make ends meet and lived paycheck-to-paycheck. While this story helps shed some light on the founder’s background, it doesn’t fully represent the purpose of their brand. It’s when you dig a little deeper that you can find the brand’s purpose.

Say the same financial coaching company helps their customers free themselves from debt and plan for emergencies and retirement. This could be their purpose. From the founder’s story, they might have a mission to help keep others from the same situation they escaped from.

Learn as much as you possibly can about what the brand believes in, fights against, works toward, and values. This is how you set yourself up to create pieces that are aligned with a brand’s purpose.

Step 2: Understand your audience

With any form of writing, it’s always a good rule of thumb to know as much as you can about your audience. The same goes for purpose-driven writing.

When you sit down to write and envision your ideal audience, you have to know as much as you can about their situation. You have to know what they struggle with, what they hope to achieve, and especially what they like.

When you are writing with your purpose, you have to take this one step further and understand your audience’s values. Ideally, your audience is going to have the same values as your brand and will want to support their cause. In other cases, your audience might take a little convincing.

You might have to let the audience know why the brand’s mission is so important and what an impact it can make on the world. In either case, you need to know your audience’s values and their level of understanding as it relates to your brand’s purpose.

Step 3: Align your content with the brand’s values

This last tip might seem pretty straightforward, but you might need these few tips to really embody your brand’s purpose when you write that you should keep in mind as you work through your piece.

1. You want to make sure that you are representing the brand’s mission in your tone and messaging. If the purpose of the brand is to fight against climate change, it might be necessary to take a much more aggressive approach than a brand that is trying to raise money for cancer research. You want to light a fire under your audience and move them to take action, so your writing should do just that.
   

2. You need to inform your audience throughout. In order to make sure that the brand’s values are aligned with your audience’s, you might need to do some educating. You can’t assume that your audience has the same understanding of topics that the brand is passionate about that you do, so it might take some breaking down for the concepts and ideas to really stick.
   

3. Show off your impact and progress. It’s important to showcase the brand’s efforts relating to its purpose when you write for them. You want to be transparent about the actions that the brand has taken to fight for the causes they stand for, with real-life examples and an emphasis on their success stories relating to these issues. An organization can claim to support an issue all they want, but it's their actions toward change that their audience will really care about.
   

These tips aren’t a front-to-back manual for purpose-driven writing. There are so many ways that you can shift your writing to be more purpose-driven, but if you are struggling to write a value-backed piece for a brand, these tips will help you start on the right track.

If you want to hear even more from Becca Rose on purpose-driven writing, drop a comment so she knows how useful this article was!