In today’s social media world, two of the most mentioned words are “sustainable” and “ethical.” Brands have started to realise that if they want to survive, they have to pay more attention to their impact on the world, and their messaging around that.
Over the years at Snowball Creations, we’ve worked with countless companies that are looking to make a positive impact on the world. Whether it’s google ads for nonprofits, Facebook ads for eco-friendly products, or LinkedIn ads for SaaS providers, we’ve helped them to scale their sales into the millions, and we followed a particular formula to achieve this.
The approach needed for companies trying to make the world better is quite unique compared to say the average online retailer focussed on offering the cheapest version of a product on the market, and so I hope this strategy helps you too.
How are you going to scale to the millions in revenue you want to achieve, and scale your positive impact at the same time?
What you’re doing wrong
One of the main things we’ve learnt over the years is that for positive impact businesses, you need to find new ways of connecting with your customers on emotional, rather than transactional levels. The problem is people write their own copy, they write their messaging with that positive impact in mind because that’s of course, their entire business. That’s the unique selling point.
For example, take one of our clients, a waste management company. They might start with the message ‘we help companies to shift from landfill to recycling’. This is an amazing positive impact story.
Or take another company we work with who are in the eco-product space, their message might be around their compostable sponges that are an eco-friendly alternative to what their competitors are selling. ‘You don’t have to waste all this unnecessary plastic, and throw away these disposable sponges over and over – We have a more environmentally friendly solution!’
So they focus on those two messages and they think that that’s how they’re going to achieve the best results because it’s the USP. For lots of reasons that should logically be the way forward. But it doesn’t work…Why??
The harsh truth
The harsh truth of this is that you need to focus on the customer’s selfishness first. Ultimately, with any positive impact business, you need to make sure that selfishly, it also still does improve that person’s life or give some kind of value to the entire process.
At the end of the day optimising your campaign and catering to your customer’s audience’s or user’s wants, no matter how selfish, is what is going to push your positive impact message further.
Any business that’s in the positive impact space that wants to scale and make sure that its impact is long term has to figure this out, and has to make sure that they have got value beyond just the sustainability factor.
The solution
So what is the solution to this problem? It’s all about looking at your marketing from a psychological viewpoint…
The solution is switching it around. You have the selfless value which would be, say, less landfill waste. But then there’s the selfish part to your offering. So for the waste management company, it could be actually just that they have the best customer service. They’ve completely reinvented the customer service side of things with their Business Model, and that entire industry is famous for having terrible, terrible customer experiences.
And so that’s actually one of their big wins, and they’re extremely affordable and reliable. Or maybe you sell sustainable products and the selfish side of your products is that they’re just way more aesthetically pleasing with nice pretty designs that your customers love, or maybe they’re kinder on your hands. Maybe they do a better job of actually cleaning up all of these factors.
So the way that we adjust things with our clients is really just switching this messaging around.
So rather than having your benefit, your mission as a brand front and centre in ads, you want to lead with the selfish customer needs or pain points.
Lead with the reasons why customers are going to be so happy and excited and choose to click on your advert in Facebook or LinkedIn or click on your responsive text ad within Google. Then incorporate the positive impact angle into that message.
Generally speaking, you’re going to have two parts to the message. So take the waste management company for example, their messaging might be something like:
“Beating Biffa and XXX for customer service reviews! Save money on your waste collection and send less waste to landfill!”
In conclusion, if you’re a positive impact company and you’re trying to scale, you can’t hide and just pretend that this isn’t a reality. We’ve got to this conclusion because we have run campaigns for many years now, across countless different brands.
We’ve AB tested this across Facebook, Google, LinkedIn and we’ve seen it consistently work better. And that’s AB testing, data-driven decision making.
So recognise this, embrace it. And actually, this will still lead to the biggest, best impact that you’re trying to achieve as a company. You’re trying to build a business that has this positive impact on the world. If your business goes under, you have zero impact on the world. If you’re not getting in front of the right people, your message isn’t being spread.
Understanding how you can write copy in a different way is going to be pivotal to your success with paid advertising campaigns.
This kind of messaging highlighting the benefit to your customer is what’s going to get people to click, and it’s what’s going to get people to change their actions and feelings and emotions. And once you’ve got that person, then they’ve become a customer.
You keep them, then you build a relationship with the positive impact storytelling because that’s what really gives them that good feeling in the long term. So selfish first. Selfless second.
Hopefully, this can help you seriously grow your ROAS, and most importantly, scale your impact in the world. Keep fighting the good fight!!
Max x