OC’s Three Magic Words Part Three: Finding Your Purpose

by Justin Difazzio

Part Three: Finding Your Purpose

At last, we’ve come to the final part of our trilogy on OC Creative’s three magic words, and it’s a doozy. We talked about the impact of knowing your audience. We explored various channels for distribution. Now we come to what is arguably the most important of our three magic words: purpose. Your purpose should initially answer the question of what you want the viewer to do, think, or feel after seeing your project. People spend their whole lives and often thousands of dollars trying to find a purpose. Wouldn’t it be great if you could just proclaim your purpose? Well, in a project, it’s that easy.

Okay, maybe there’s more to it than that. It can take a lot of trial and error to determine what an effective purpose is. But determining the purpose of your project is the simplest way to make sure it has results that are measurable, focused, and effective.

Purpose Equals Productivity

Without a clearly defined purpose, everything loses focus. Think about this: you’re in a room full of boxes, and you’re told to separate and stack all the boxes into different piles. Do you stack them by size? Maybe you’re supposed to group similar contents together. Perhaps the boxes should be arranged alphabetically by label. How do you know where to start? You can only do what you think is right. But if everyone is doing what they feel is the right thing to do, there is no system, no goal, and no teamwork.

Now, with a clearly defined purpose, say, knowing these boxes contain gear for the next six upcoming videos your company is doing, you can group them in a way that makes them logically accessible and smartly grouped. The focus that a purpose gives a project leads directly to higher productivity and smarter processes.

Purpose is Power

There is a great deal of power in determining your purpose. It can be the deciding factor in what you say, who you say it to (audience), and how you say it (distribution). If your purpose is to make people aware of your upcoming fundraiser campaign, you might want to reach out to past donors in email and on social media, let them know what their funds go towards, and maybe pull their heartstrings a little. If you’re trying to get people to buy your snazzy jewelry, you might decide on flashy photography, a video with fun and catchy music, and a campaign designed to show how your snazzy jewelry will change their life. So you see, purpose can even determine your audience and your distribution.

Purpose Makes Measurements Possible

When you release a video, a print marketing piece, or a website, you’d like to know what kind of return on investment (ROI) you’re getting on that. We’ve got another trilogy of blog posts all about determining your ROI, and one of the points made there is that there isn’t any way to measure ROI without focusing on the purpose of your project. Narrowing your focus makes for a more measurable return.

If you post a video on social media and you get 1,000 views and 50 shares, is that a success? Maybe your purpose was to get exposure. If that’s the case, then it may have been successful. But if your goal was to generate leads and no one called, then it might not be considered successful. Those two purposes lead to two very different measurements of success.

Do You Know Your Purpose?

It really is the most important of our three little magic words. Without a purpose, your production is afloat, unfocused, and maybe even a little lost. We’ve all met those people in our lives. Just think how much those people’s lives would change if they could just proclaim their purpose. Your project is no different. Find the focus, the message, and the through-line by discovering and naming the purpose. With that narrowed down, and with the tips contained here, both your audience and your distribution will appear like magic!