Here is a brief excerpt from an article written by Nadia Goodman for Entrepreneur magazine. To read the complete article, check out others, and obtain subscription information, please click here.
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Every startup and small business has a story to tell, something that will connect potential customers to your brand. As a business leader in the social media age, you have an opportunity to draw devoted customers by rethinking the way you express your company’s core value.
Foodily, a new online recipe database, set out to brand themselves as the largest recipe aggregator on the web. But after hiring LoveSocial, a Vancouver-based social media agency, they realized that wasn’t the story to tell.
Founder Azita Ardakani redefined Foodily’s core value, saying it gives you the opportunity to spend more time eating at home with family and friends. On social media, she asked consumers to share their favorite dinner table memories and what it means to them to eat at home. “We saw a natural conversation erupting,” she says.
What made Ardakani’s interpretation of Foodily’s core value so much more successful was that it created an opportunity for human connection. “Human connectivity is the DNA of social media,” Azita says.
In order to engage customers, strive to create that emotional pull.
[Here is the first of her three tips to articulate your core value and humanize your brand.]
1. Expand your idea of value. To stand out in today’s market, define your value in human terms, not in business terms. “[Companies] often look at their core value in direct correlation with sales,” Ardakani says. “That commercial carrot is very distracting to who they are and who they could become.”
Your real value is about what you believe in, what you’re trying to do in the world, and how you make others’ lives better. “You need to drill down to why you matter,” Ardakani says.
You might ask: How is your product being created? What is your office culture? You’re looking for the value or issude that your organization truly cares about — an aspect of your business that makes you unique and valuable to the world around you.
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To read the complete article, please click here.
Nadia Goodman is a freelance writer in Brooklyn, NY. She is a former editor at YouBeauty.com, where she wrote about the psychology of health and beauty. She earned a B.A. in English from Northwestern University and an M.A. in Clinical Psychology from Columbia University. She blogs at Birds with Brains. To read her other articles, please click here.