Values. We'll see them no matter what

The truth is no matter whether you decide to identify your values, or just not bother, people will see them regardless.

Values are not an ASPIRATIONAL thing. As a business, we don't define them to then hope we've got them. (and some businesses DO DO THIS. We all know they do!)

But there is huge merit in defining your values when it comes to business. It helps you make more conscious choices about what you offer, who you offer it to, and how you'll offer it.

The following is an excerpt from my new book BE A SPIDER, BUILD A WEB: Sticky Content Marketing for Small Businesses. If you enjoy the segment, read the rest of the book for free! Enter here to win a copy

Here are several steps you can take to define your own values?

There are piles of books written by values experts that can take this far deeper than me. However, here are a few simple steps we used to determine ours

Most values coaches start by asking you to sift through a long list of words to find the ones that pop out. I used to carry bags of four hundred words into my seminars to do the same process and I would still do this with someone who had no idea about what values were most important for them.

When it came to us working out our values as a business we skipped this step because we’d both sat through enough of these sessions to have an awareness of our own personal values. It is a very good way to filter your ideas if you have never considered your values. So do this first.?

As we were already aware of our personal values, we jumped straight into how we’d convey these to our ideal clients.?

How to check your offer fits your values:

Look at what you do best. What is it that you can consistently deliver to people over and over again??

For us, it was straightforward marketing strategies, clear action plans, explaining things without jargon, and helping people learn how to do marketing themselves.?

What do you find difficult to deliver consistently, or have little interest in focussing on??

For me it was making everything super pretty with fancy graphs. This means we don’t create epically colourful pretty plans, which saves us extra design time and keeps our costs down, which we can pass on to our customers.

We also didn’t enjoy spending hours in commuter traffic. I also didn’t enjoy losing touch with our clients as the team grew.?

If it was only ever you in the business, what would you want people to say about you and your work?

We didn’t want to build a business on skills that Rod or I couldn’t do ourselves if needed, incase we needed to jump in and help at some point as the business grew

We also knew that it was up to us to determine what good looked like. Identifying this also helped us work out how we would show we were delivering that to our customers. We couldn’t add value if we only understood the basics.?

Look at the businesses you love and why. What makes the experience with them so enjoyable? Is it something you also know you can deliver?

For us it was people who delivered when they said they would, who followed a brief, showed up on time, were easy to talk to, didn’t make us feel stupid and added a little extra that surprised and delighted us.?

Look at the customers you’ve done your best work with.?

We noticed that our best work was done with people who liked direct, straight-up feedback, who were ready to put time aside for their marketing, liked paying us, and wanted to understand how it all worked

Take a look at the clients who didn’t work out.?

As we did this exercise when our business was broken, we had more of these than we wanted. Instead of looking at them all, We looked at the people we knew we had delivered our best work to and it was still not well received. We found these people often had a long list of people who had also not made the grade, found it hard to trust us, wanted a plan but weren’t ready to change habits to make the changes.

Action: It’s your turn.?

If you know you need to define your values, to help find a better anchor point, block out time to work through your values. Your conent web will not be strong unless you work this out.

(THIS IS an EXCERPT from "Be a Spider, Build a Web. - Sticky Content Marketing for Small Businesses." You can win a FREE copy?HERE, and one winner will also win a one-to-one content strategy session with Rachel, valued at $995+gst)

Rachel Klaver is a marketing strategist who teaches small businesses how to create effective content marketing webs. She's the founder of?Identify Marketing,?where she teaches, coaches, and creates marketing strategy for clients. She's also the host of the popular marketing podcast?MAP IT Marketing. You can find out more about her?here