Defining Your Brand’s Purpose: The Power of Crafting a Compelling Value Statement

If you want your brand to thrive, it has to inspire trust in the minds of consumers.
This is of the utmost importance, regardless of the size or nature of your business, because in today’s trust economy, people are more concerned than ever about whether a brand can be trusted, and whether its values are aligned with theirs.

But if you want to inspire that trust, establish an emotional connection with consumers who share your brand’s values, and gain an edge over the competition by showing consumers that your brand is more trustworthy than the rest, then you have to understand brand positioning.

If you’re not sure what that is, brand positioning refers to the process of establishing a unique identity and image for a brand in the minds of its target audience, particularly when it comes to how it’s perceived in relation to its competitors.

And one of the best ways to connect with consumers who share your values, and position your brand as one that can be trusted, is by publishing a value statement.

But what is a value statement, and why is it so important to the success of your brand?

In this article, I explain what a value statement is, why it’s so important for your business, and offer some advice to help you come up with one of your own.

What Is a Value Statement? In the context of brand positioning, a value statement is a concise declaration of a brand’s guiding principles, beliefs, and priorities, defining what it stands for and communicating its fundamental purpose and vision.

Value statements typically include a set of core values that guide a brand’s behaviour and decision-making.

These values may include ethical considerations, social responsibility, customer service, teamwork, innovation, or other key areas that are important to the brand and its stakeholders.

A well-crafted value statement is a powerful tool for defining a brand’s identity, setting it apart from its competitors, and, as I already mentioned, gaining the trust of consumers, and establishing an emotional connection with them.

READ: How to Determine Your Unique Brand Positioning

Defining your brand values and creating a value statement can help you to define what your brand is all about.

But after you’ve determined what those values are, and communicated them to your target audience, you need to ensure that every single aspect of your marketing reflects those principles.

So, if you’re wondering how to inject the values of your brand into your marketing efforts, then this article is right up your alley.

It explains how to promote your brand values across several aspects of your marketing, including your website, blogs, and more.

Keep reading on our website.

Why Is a Value Statement so Important for Your Business? Aside from what I’ve already explained, it’s important to note that after everything that’s happened over the last few years, trust in major institutions has significantly eroded.

According to Edelman’s 2022 Trust Barometer, since 2020, trust in government and the media has plummeted. But what is it that’s eroding the public’s trust in these institutions?

Well, from my perspective, this has a lot to do with the way our lives were altered during the pandemic.

As the restrictions imposed during the pandemic disrupted our daily lives, pushing everything online, face-to-face interactions became increasingly scarce, cyber criminals were having a heyday, and as a result of these factors, and many others, a pervasive paranoia seems to have decreased our trust in many things, including each other.

All things considered, it’s clear that consumers are looking for institutions that can be trusted in a world where everything is becoming more and more uncertain.

But surprisingly enough, while trust in many institutions has been on the decline, trust in business has held strong, and at least according to Edelman’s survey, it’s practically unchanged.

What’s more, this survey found that while most respondents consider government and the media to be dividing forces in society, they also believe that business is a unifying force.

Much of this trust and admiration can be attributed to the fact that many businesses never stopped running, despite the risks posed by the pandemic, providing much-needed products and services to consumers in an era characterized by fear and uncertainty.

At this point, you might be wondering why I’m talking about the pandemic in an article that’s supposed to be about value statements, so let me explain.

First of all, in order to comprehend how the branding and marketing landscape has changed, and why trust has become such a crucial factor, we’ve got to consider what’s influenced these changes and understand how we got here.

It’s also important to point out that while the world of business seems to have retained a significant amount of trust, not least due to what it was able to accomplish during the pandemic, that doesn’t mean business owners can assume that consumers will have implicit trust in their brands.

If anything, it’s becoming more and more difficult to get consumers to trust your brand, and from my perspective, this effect was created in large part by the sequence of events that played out during the pandemic.

How Can a Value Statement Benefit Your Business? In our post-pandemic world, consumers are increasingly concerned with ensuring they can trust a brand, and are more likely to give their business to brands that share the same values that they do.

That being said, one of the best ways to gain the trust of consumers, and make an emotional connection with those who share the same values as your brand is by creating a value statement.

Aside from the advantages I’ve already mentioned above, a value statement can offer many other benefits for your business, including:

Guidance: A value statement serves as a guide for decision-making and behaviour, providing clarity on what is important and what is not. This can help you to make consistent and principled choices for your business, even in complex or challenging situations. Alignment: Value statements can help you to ensure that everything your brand does is aligned with its goals and mission. Having this sort of consistency helps to position your brand as reliable, credible, competent, and professional. Culture: A value statement can help you to create a strong culture in your business, as it helps to communicate what an organization stands for and what it expects of its employees, which can help to attract and retain talent that shares your brand values. Transparency: Publishing a value statement sends a message to consumers that your brand knows what it’s about, can be trusted to act in alignment with its values, and isn’t afraid to have its actions scrutinized, which helps to position your brand as honest, principled, and genuine. Accountability: A value statement provides the basis for accountability. When values are clear and consistently applied, organizations can be held accountable for their actions, and performance can be measured against these established standards. Reputation: Value statements can help you to build and maintain a positive reputation for your brand. And when your brand acts in accordance with its values, it’s more likely to be trusted and respected by consumers, which can help you to gain more leads and sales, and take business away from the competition.

How to Create a Value Statement Ideally, a value statement should be a clear and concise expression of the fundamental principles of your brand.

But there are a lot of things to consider, and you’ve got to get it right, or else it could end up embarrassing your brand, and doing more harm than good.

With that in mind, here are some principles I follow when helping our clients to create effective value statements for their brands:

Identify your organization’s core values: Start by identifying the fundamental beliefs and principles that guide the actions and decisions of your brand. Ask yourself, what is most important to your organization? And what do you stand for? Be clear and concise: Your value statement should be clear and concise, preferably with no more than two or three sentences. You should also make sure it’s easy to understand and remember. Make it meaningful: Your value statement should resonate with your target audience, and it should reflect what they care about and what they expect from your brand. Use simple language: A great value statement will use simple and straightforward language that is easy to understand. Make sure to avoid using jargon or technical terms that may be unfamiliar to your target audience. Be authentic: Your value statement should reflect your organization’s true values and beliefs, so make sure it’s authentic and genuine. Because this isn’t something you can fake, and more than likely, you will get outed for having a value statement that doesn’t accurately reflect your brand. Now that you understand what a value statement is, why it’s so important for your business, and how to go about creating one, I’ve included our value statement below as an example.

At eVision Media, trust is at the heart of everything we do. We believe that trust is the foundation of strong relationships, and we strive to earn and maintain the trust of our clients, team members, and communities every day. We deliver reliable, transparent, and high-quality services, while always acting with integrity and honesty.

As you can see, our value statement is clear and concise, putting a focus on building trust, while using simple language that’s meaningful for our target audience, and identifying the core values of our organization in an authentic way.

Are you having a tough time creating a value statement for your brand? For more than 20 years, we’ve been helping business owners create strong brand positioning that helps elicit trust, build community, and attract customers. Contact us today to find out more about what we can do for you.

Promote Your Business Online With Techniques That Will Boost Your Sales and Profits

If you own or manage a small business, what do YOU do to promote your business online with a focus on using the internet to generate sales or sales enquiries?

When I ask this question to business owners and managers, the most common answer I get is “we have a website”. Perhaps your answer to the question is similar.

So how much does your website contribute to your sales? What else do you do to promote your business online with success?

In the past, simply having a website was the perceived pinnacle of modern business marketing. Not anymore. The internet offers a massive world of opportunity for your business, and if you aren’t maximizing the opportunity then you are losing a fortune in lost profits. But YOU have to MAKE it happen – if you develop the know-how then you can promote your business online with techniques that will skyrocket your business opportunities.

Here are four very practical ways to promote your business online with techniques that will have a hugely positive impact on your business sales and profits.

ARTICLE MARKETING is a great way to establish your business credibility on the internet, and it’s a FREE way to promote your business online with great potential to make lots of profit.

How does article marketing it work? Well you already have expert knowledge in your own area of business, and people use the internet to search for information about things they need or want. So you write an informative article about something related to your business, and when someone reads your article because it relates to their problem or need then you direct them to your website to “find out more”. Online article marketing can be massively successful.

The second way to promote your business online with effectiveness is SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION(SEO), which is another way to get free visitors to your website.

So what is SEO? It is the process of getting your website ready to be listed well in search engines. Several factors are involved in making a site search engine friendly including the design and content of the site, Meta tags and Link Popularity.

SEO has been around since the inception of search engines, and can be an effective way to promote your business online with good results for those who succeed in getting listed high in the search engines.

The third way to promote your business online with great potential returns is PAY PER CLICK Advertising (PPC). Pay per click enables you to reach people instantly who have a direct interest in what you are offering, in a way that was never possible before.

Imagine advertising in a magazine where you only pay for the people who actually read your advert. Well that’s how PPC works, you only pay for those people who actually read your advertisement, and you are able to measure exactly the effectiveness of your PPC advertising. So if you pay $10 per day in PPC advertising, and you earn $20 per day profits, then that sounds like a good business proposition.

PPC advertising has the potential to generate huge profits for your business.

The fourth very practical way is to promote your business online with EMAIL MARKETING. I am astonished at how many businesses neglect this easiest way to keep in touch with customers and potential customers on a regular basis.

I am NOT talking about spam emails, you need to get people’s permission and build an opt-in list. There are different ways to do this, and it enables you to send valuable information, promotions, reviews etc – it is such an easy way to promote your business online with email opt-in lists.

If you are running your own small business then you have my utmost admiration for having the courage to be an entrepreneur. I fully understand the challenge you face in balancing your time, resources and money when it comes to marketing your business.

This article gives some ideas based on what works in practice – as opposed to theory. To try and implement all four techniques at once is not what I recommend, better to learn and perfect one technique at a time. That is likely to be much more achievable for a small business, and much more successful.

The Power of Building an Internet Marketing Business

With a good website, you can open your Internet marketing business to all around the world and then continue to upgrade and tailor your website or blog to attract more traffic to it. Having more visitors to your website or blog will increase your chances of selling something for profit. Each click is another chance to earn a commission from your affiliate. So, you need to constantly find ways to increase traffic to your site.

Being the world’s most effective medium of the moment, the Internet can reach a niche market for your product quickly and easily. Try to be the first one in a niche market in order to win a large share of it. Do the research, understand your product well and then show how it is unique in order to promote it in a niche market. Do not limit yourself by thinking small. Carefully consider your niche when building your Internet marketing business in order to develop and deliver your expertise to attract your clients. No matter how unique or specific the niche product, the Internet would be a great market for it.

Core products are determined usually by your own core experience or skill, your personal exposure and familiarity to some skills, products or technologies which you are most comfortable with or which you have confidence to market with some positive results. For example, an accountant familiar with accounts would be happy to apply this skill online to create Net services related to accounting or financial services. He would have a better chance at succeeding if he found a niche related to his core skill.

The following are some suggestions of products or services that are widely transacted. Some have only recently become popular, but they have a lot of potential to grow in demand among customers.

1. Physically trendy or trend-setting products
2. Affiliate products
3. Digital information based products
4. Net services
5. Sponsorship and donations for your blog or website
6. Using blogs as promotional tools
7. Offering advertising space
8. Offering membership with resale rights
9. Productivity platform for online investment
10. Internet web-hosting reseller

The latest Internet marketing techniques you should take note of are blogging and social networking. Blogging allows you to express your opinions and thoughts, and release your creativity while communicating with a mass audience. For online social networking, blogs or websites are commonly used as social sites. Social networking blogs work like an online community of internet users. Depending on the type of blog, many of these online community members share common interests such as hobbies, religion, or politics, and therefore socialize among themselves. They use social networking sites that allow them to put their blog in social networking accounts like Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Delicious, Digg and Reddit which allows blogs to be incorporated into their account. Socialization through a social networking website may include reading the profile pages on blogs of other members and possibly even contacting the. Online socializing can increase traffic to your blogs or website.

Social networking is the in-thing now. Today, even mobile phones can access the Internet and you can easily access your email or latest tweet or Facebook update at any time. People generally will listen to people they know or trust, so letting your contacts and contacts of your contacts know about your product through social networking can help your business grow by leaps and bounds. This is why Internet marketers and network marketers are turning to Facebook and Twitter. They don’t cost a thing to use as free marketing tools.

Once you have built up your list of friends or followers, respect their privacy. Avoid sending them too many ads as they may classify you as a spammer! Build a friendly relationship with people you network with and try to help them. Inspire them with motivational quotes or send them free help and advice that can help them solve problems. In time, they will support your site and accept your comments and ads. This interactive friendship will boost traffic to your site tremendously. Social networking is a valuable Internet marketing technique that you can use to connect with millions of people worldwide.

Eight Elements of Internet Marketing

Internet marketing or online marketing is transforming into wider mixes of elements any company can use to increase sales. Internet marketing can be utilized whether a company is running a business totally or partly online or totally offline. Today internet marketing is becoming an increasingly important phenomenon of every company’s marketing mix. Here we bring you elements of internet marketing which we believe in order of importance.Website: Website consists of text, images, audio and video elements used to explain the company’s products and services. Capturing leads is one important feature in any website without which a company may lose potential customers. Website is an equivalent of brochures or mail order catalog and they are a great way to establish your business identity.Email marketing: This element directly related to website which captures name and email addresses. Information on products and services can subsequently be distributed. It is sometimes called inbound marketing.Banner advertising: This is placement of ads on a website for a fee. The similarity of this internet marketing element is traditional ads in newspapers, magazines or other electronic media.Article marketing: You may write or hire online writer to write articles related to your business and having them published online on syndicated article sites. Articles have a viral probability to spread around the internet as article services permit re-publication while maintaining all back links. This is one way to boost traffic to your website and to promote brand to a wide audience.Social media marketing: It has become an important part of marketing involving social networks like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and social bookmarking sites like Digg.Blogging: Blogging is part of marketing involving the act of posting comments and opinions, making announcements in a forum. These activities can be accomplished either by hosting own blog or by posting comments and URLs in other blogs related to your online products or services.Search Engine Marketing: Search engine marketing is simply marketing a website on the internet through search engines. A company may improve its website’s ranking through search engine optimization, purchasing pay-per-click ads or purchasing pay-for-inclusion listings in website directories. These are similar to yellow page listings.Online press releases: Online press releases involve placement of newsworthy features about a website, the company, its management team, its products and services with on online wire service.The internet marketing has tremendous impacts on home businesses to exponentially prosper due to its reasonably lower cost to start, and has enabled home business owners to maintain internet presence. Internet marketing should be part of your business plan and your marketing strategy.