How to Use Shared Values to Attract and Retain Customers

These days, it’s no longer enough to be affordable and high quality. The best brands also align themselves with specific beliefs and responsibilities that their customers also hold. Whether it’s a focus on luxury and craftsmanship or an eco-friendly edge that uses recycled materials, today’s brands double not just as companies selling a product, but as social stalwarts that are aligned with the priorities of their audience.

So how can you cultivate these shared values within your audience and use them to attract and retain customers?

Make Customers Feel a Sense of Belonging

People are loyal to brands because those brands make them feel as if they’re part of a larger community with a more singular focus. They want to be around like-minded people. When you communicate your values from the standpoint of the big picture of what you support (for example, humanitarian causes, environmental causes, etc.), be sure to do so with authenticity.

For example, if you sell bath and body products and you promote sustainable causes, yet your products don’t reflect that, in that they use questionable chemicals or ingredients, cannot be recycled and so on), people will see that as fake and as an affront to the very things your brand aspires to unite with. You want everyone to be on the same page with regard to the broad shared values and live it through your brand and products.

Communicate Your Values on Social Media

When you share important information on social media, whether it’s a new product reveal, a sale and much more, make sure to highlight and weave in a mention of the causes you support through the content published. Use hashtags, join relevant groups, donate a portion of your sales to a specific cause and more to further reinforce your shared value alignment.

You can also connect with micro-influencers who support the same causes and encourage them to share your products and messages through their specific networks. This is a great way to build up your community and leverage social proof to further reinforce where you stand on a given cause.

Whichever cause you choose, make sure that it’s something that aligns with your company culture and your values as a business. You don’t want to spread your business too thin supporting everything under the sun, but rather whittle it down into those causes that are most central to the core reasons why you started your business.

Content with a Mission

As you can see, each piece of content you create should have a goal and a mission, and one of those missions is to ignite a sense of shared values and social responsibility between yourself and your customers. This, in turn helps to cultivate lasting brand loyalty, which beyond price, features, selection or other features, is something that your competition can’t easily take away from you.

Contact the experts at Workdom today and let’s look at your brand’s shared values with your audience and create a content-centric strategy that helps align your brand with causes that matter to you and to your customers.