Steps to Align Your Company Values With Your Brand

Building your brand and promoting it to your audience can prove challenging and might be one of the least quantifiable things you will do as a business leader. Your brand goes beyond the logo, color scheme and tagline, and, while those are all important, understanding what motivates clients to work with you and aligning them with your company values is one of the keys to growing your brand.

People want to give their money and time to people and companies they like, identify with and trust. Capturing the human element of your company story and brand is more important in the age of social media engagement (i.e. retweets and shares) than ever before.

Do you know what it takes for your brand to stand out? Download the Establishing and Evaluating Your Brand Identity eBook to learn all the elements in creating a brand that will stand out among the rest.

Consider the following four steps that can help you start aligning your company values with your brand while simultaneously attracting new prospects and opportunities who fit under the same values.

Solidify Your Company’s Brand Story

Even if your company has been around for decades, a compelling origin story is key. B2B companies often advertise “what” products and services they offer, but it’s much harder to find the “how” and more importantly the “why” that make up the interesting and impactful details of the company’s history. For a further explanation of what it means to define the “why” of a company, check out this article that provides takeaways from Simon Sinek’s book “Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action.”

Dedicate some real estate on your website to share the journey that led to your company’s creation, bumps in the road and how they were overcome and your vision for the future. While the ‘About Us’ page is the traditional location for this information, consider using header images, videos, or landing pages to communicate your story.

Contemplate including a mission statement or core values page in which you outline what is important to your company and how those values are translated to align with customers. Clients place a lot of importance on working with companies they know, like and trust. Your company story might be the element that decides if they want to work with you.

Incorporate Customer Values into Your Buyer Personas

If you haven’t updated your buyer personas in over a year, it is well worth your time to do a reassessment, whether it be formal or informal.

If you find that your buyer’s needs have shifted upon reassessment, this blog can provide guidance on how to address the needs that may have surfaced. Read more here!

You can begin by evaluating your social media followers. What sort of interests and content are they sharing on their own social feeds? If you are trying to reach your target audience but find that most of your followers are irrelevant to your business, figure out why. Are you producing valuable and engaging content that speaks to your audience? Is your messaging aligned with your customers’ interests?

Another way to ensure your buyer personas are aligned with your customer values is to conduct a survey with your existing customer base. Surveys can act as a powerful tool to collect information on how to better satisfy clients and receive feedback on any internal issues that you may not be aware of (i.e. customer support responsiveness, lack of product updates, etc.). In addition, customer surveys can be a great way to collect raw data on how customers perceive your brand.

Align Your Company Values with Customer Values

Once you’ve identified your core values and updated your buyer personas, it’s time to align your company values with your target audience. You don’t have to change your company values to perfectly match your customer’s in hopes to positively impact brand awareness; instead, you can find out how your brand and values complement your clients’ needs and develop actionable steps to win their business.

For example, Launch Marketing lists “results-oriented” as one of our core values, stating that we are 100% dedicated to doing whatever it takes to deliver exceptional results to our clients. Therefore, we know that we want to work with companies who value high-quality work and are prepared to partner with us to create a realistic timeline to achieve their goals.

By aligning your company values with your customers, you will begin to weed out the prospects who may not be a good fit to work with.

Promote Your Commitment to Your Core Values

The authentic representation of your brand and company culture via your online presence can not only help you build trust with prospects, but it will also help recruit talent that is well aligned to your values.

Humanizing your brand by focusing content efforts on showcasing who your employees are and what your company culture is like can add a new, relatable dimension to your content and help your leads and potential employees see what your values are.

One way to achieve this is through your social media channels. Social platforms are great for promoting articles and blog posts, but it’s also a good tool to create two-way communication between your brand and your audience by sharing visual content such as SlideShares, videos and images that highlight your company’s culture and core values.

Your company values are an integral component to your business and leveraging them well can provide a major boost to your brand awareness. As the technology landscape becomes more crowded, accessing products and services becomes easier and filled with more choices via the Internet, establishing strong brand awareness is more important than ever.

Taking the time to think about how your brand values can support and align with your clients is essential for long term success and growth.

Need some assistance with aligning your company values with your brand or creating B2B messaging and branding that makes an impact? Request a free 1:1 consultation and learn how our B2B marketing consultants can help you!