Without brand values, who will value your brand?

According to Small Biz Genius Industry Insights, 89% of shoppers stay loyal to brands that share their values. And right now, although things are tight financially in the economy worldwide, finding a company whose values match your own is seriously attractive to the customer. 

So, getting your branding right means far more than making sure your colours and fonts all match - it’s making sure that how you look online is congruent with who you are as a Company. Get it right, and potential customers resonate with your message, your values and your ethos, then they’re naturally drawn to you - you’ve built trust for your business through your website before you've even met. And that turns a visitor to your website into a customer. 

Get it wrong, fail to get your values across clearly (or worse, give out the wrong message entirely), and you've lost more than a sale. 

I can speak from recent experience about this as this is something we've done a lot of work on in the FAT team in the last few months. It's been a good time to reflect on what our values are and what we stand for. As a team, we sat down and worked through an exercise to help us collectively agree on our core values - what do we really stand for, and what will we not stand for, as a team. 

Having agreed on what our core values are, we're now applying them across all our marketing material and promotion (i.e. our Branding), to share them with the world. If you’re interested, our core values are defined as:

1. Start in service - we are responsible trustworthy and approachable at all times
2. Always learning - committed to improving and growing as individuals and as a team
3. Process driven - to maintain our high standards or accuracy and our organised approach
4. Embrace a challenge - we’re hard working, tenacious and we show up
5. Bigger thinking - always adding value, generating new ideas and innovating as we go. 

Having set that out in our own company vision, it’s now important that we update our website to reflect these values because, just as you wouldn't hand out a business card with out-of-date details, your website should always reflect who you are right now, and what you stand for. That in itself attracts the right sort of customers you want to work with. 

Make sure your branding doesn’t just coordinate with your existing promotional materials, but reflects your ethos and values. That will attract customers with the same ethos and values, and that's exactly the sort of customer you want to work with. If this is something you're struggling with, reach out to me and have a free discovery call or a strategy session so we can get you on track, clarify your message, and make sure it’s represented beautifully on your website. Because we do websites, it's all we do and we do it really, really well.