Building a values-based brand
Know your values, to create a brand that feels right, lures quality clients, helps build better customer relationships, creates connections, boosting the know like and trust factor and makes us money
Your brand values are the deeply held beliefs that have been your guiding north star.
Whether you’ve known them well or are only vaguely acquainted, they’ve guided you to where you are now, by being your business filter, your magnetism, your efficiency and your income generator.
Read on to find out how brand values are a roadmap to good clients and a financially and intellectually rewarding, whole hearted business
Values: why, what, how, who cares?
Values are your rudder:
- They help you live a life guided by what feels best, easiest, most natural and efficient.
- They satisfy needs that are a deep driver in us all.
- These shared, common needs guide clients and customers who recognise a safe harbour and reflected, respected values.
- As you shine, doing your best work with those with whom you’re aligned – new conversations, projects, possibilities flow.
My brand: values are the framework to what I do
Within this, in my life as a parent, partner and member of a family and community, the following principles guide me:
- Listening: consciously listening for what’s said aloud and in the silences – read more about listening as a business value
- Curiosity, which makes listening easy and feeds my business and my drive to keep going, delivering and moving forward. Read more about curiosity as a business value
- Joy: living with passion, enthusiasm, humour and gratitude. Read more about joy as a business value
- Kindness: actively practicing a kind heart and generous spirit. Read more about kindness as a business value
- Resilience and patience: to wait for things to come to fruition and for clients to understand, explore, push back, reframe and take guidance, within my expertise and their exploration of what they need.
- Financial Security: Essential to continue to deliver a mindful and purposeful service to clients and support my family and community. Read more about financial security as a business value
- Expert, hand made, personalised: While it’s ‘hand made’ it’s built through my signature system so that while the solution may look different for each client, it’s a framework tailored to them, and this efficiency ensures the resilience and financial security of my business
My values translate to my signature system
The IP that only I can deliver, because it is the way I operate in the world: The love-shaped piece in the puzzle.
My unique value is to Problem Solve in my way. To force that shape into another form, that isn’t me, that doesn’t fit, creates inefficiency.
How do values impact your bank balance?
Values help build Clarity and Connection. Working with values aligned clients help business efficiency. People who recognise and are attuned to these values are more likely to be your ideal client:
- someone you like working with
- someone who can afford you
- someone who can afford to implement the advice and service you deliver
Values can help filter out non-aligned time wasters and tyre kickers, making your business strong.
Your role in your business is to stay healthy and afloat for your clients. Staying happy, well served and energized by the clients you’re working with and the work you’re doing, because they’re aligned with your values is good business
Values and keyword value
SEO keyword value will depend on what the data shows us for the search term and whether people are searching with it (eg phrases such as curious business coach, communicative children’s doctor. Both of these ‘long tail’ phrases, with value qualifiers, will help you reach users already a way along their research journey and are close to making a decision to engage services)
In short, using value terms can help establish, explain and give personality to a brand, even if the value term isn’t going to add much SEO value.
Weave value terms in to create a brand around your service:
LinkedIn expert, John Espirian, calls himself the ‘relentlessly helpful’ LinkedIn nerd. While there’s not much search volume for the term ‘relentlessly helpful’ if you google it, John comes up all over page 1 and it’s become a value term he’s known for. The people searching for it are searching for his Personal Brand. He’s instantly associated with this valuable phrase, and in creating this narrative, it reveals he’s probably funny and the experience will be warm, rewarding and personal.
Knowing your value and values, your expertise and how your solve problems is what makes you unique.
This holds you, your products and services in a defined shape thats easy to recognise: a Brand.
Understanding your values and drivers gives you confidence and self knowledge that is applicable across all aspects of your life
A recap: Values help you create your ideal business
Aligning to values helps filter clients, reduces retail returns, and feeds your ideal work, ideal client, ideal persona and ideal day.
This doesn’t mean that you need to exclude everything outside of your values. Use them as a guide to be open to opportunities, to find the easiest way to make your business work well.