Promote Your Values, Not Your Product
Values are a hot topic right now.
LinkedIn articles proclaim the importance of knowing our personal values when looking for jobs.
Tech start-ups highlight their values as a way of attracting compatible employees.
But no one really talks about how values directly relate to a business’s brand and marketing.
As someone who loves to explore the vastness of her own inner workings, I’ve spent a lot of time reassessing and recalibrating my values, year over year. By proxy, I’ve become highly attuned to the values of this business and those of my client’s businesses.
“A highly developed values system is like a compass. It serves as a guide to point you in the right direction when you are lost.”
— Idowu Koyenikan
One thing I’ve noticed about entrepreneurs who are really great at what they do is that they tend to shrug off the milestones of their journey and discount the vastness of their experience. That lack of self-recognition can block them from recognizing their own value. And if it’s not a matter of modesty that blinds entrepreneurs of their values, then it’s being so deep in an industry that they forget that most people would be absolutely astounded by their expertise.
The secret sauce at The Mix is the uncovering of values that drive entrepreneurs and then communicating that to the world through marketing. The process for getting there is lengthy, detailed, and nitty-gritty (which is why it works) -- and ultimately results in revelations about the deepest reasons for an entrepreneur's mission, the motivating forces behind their passion, and why those things matter to their consumers.
In the same way that an authentic person displays and acts on their personal values, a business should constantly display and act on theirs if they want to be perceived as authentic.
According to Small Biz Trends, 71% of consumers prefer buying from companies aligned with their values.
Sharing your values with your customers is an important part of relating to them and building trust. And trust is what makes people purchase. So rather than trying to carve out a niche for your business in an industry that's saturated, instead, make your values your niche.
Defined below is the process for uncovering your values as an entrepreneur which inform the values of your business and consequently, your marketing strategy. Follow along to get a new perspective on how you can bring more authenticity to your brand by revealing your truest values.
Step 1: Research competitors
A simple SWOT analysis will give you a basic understanding of where you land in the market. Think about what you love about similar businesses, what appeals to you about their brand, what you dislike about industry as a whole, and what you envision for the future of your business. This is important for fleshing out the next step:
Step 2: Ask yourself big questions and dig deep for the answers
Why do you do what you do?
What about your life, desires, and judgements has influenced the services you provide? What characteristics do you admire in others?
What are you proud of yourself for?
What do you wish most for others?
What conversations make you feel the most alive?
These questions will reveal your personal values, which as we’ve learned, will align with the values of your brand evangelists. The things that matter most to you as a business owner should parallel the values of the market you’re serving.
Speaking of audience:
Step 3: Put yourself in the mind of your consumers
What you, as the business owner, want and think are important.
Equally important is how your wants and thoughts translate to consumers.
But listen closely: the things you want and think do not necessarily deliver solutions to the wants and thoughts of your consumers.
ie: a health coach
You want and think about health
Your consumer wants to fix their problems and thinks about their shortcomings
ie: The Mix
We want and think about marketing
Our clients want and think about meeting hitting certain goals
Business owners and consumers are each one side of the same equation. They look and sound different, but they want the same things. It is our job as business owners to help them bridge the gap between what they feel they lack and what solutions exist.
Some concepts like “nutrition” or “SEO” do not exist to our consumers. What exists to them are their problems. So we have to translate “health” and “marketing” to “freedom from problems”. Speak their language.
Discovering all of this information leads to an inundation of words. You’ll probably notice that a lot of the same words keep coming up.
Step 4: Make sense of your findings
Take some time to think about your offerings and how each aspect of your business relates to these new words. Do your best to categorize these words into related groups. From there, distill this list of words down to five that best describe the lens with which you view the core purpose of your business to reveal your core values.
These values play an important role in how you craft your content strategy and set your marketing goals.
Step 5: Create your content strategy
Once you are clear on your values, you can begin using them to inform your content and connect deeper with your audience.
Be sure to relate your content to your values, always.
For example, at The Mix, we assign at least one value to each piece of content. This one that you’re reading being Autonomy & abundance as well as Personal & technical development. Our hope in sharing this value-discovery method is to empower entrepreneurs to create their own content strategy that authentically relates to their purpose. We give you the tools, and now it's up to you to not only implement, but also flourish.
If you’ve gotten through this exercise and are eager to start aligning your marketing strategy to your newfound values, refer to our brand development and social media pages to see how The Mix can streamline it for you.
