Why bother to communicate your company values?
Well, there are two very good reasons: attracting customers, and attracting talent.
Let’s start with talent. According to LinkedIn’s Workplace Culture Report, 86% of millennials (24 – 40 year olds) would consider taking a drop in salary to work at a company whose values aligned with their own.
When it comes to attracting customers, the story is much the same. Over half of UK consumers are attracted to buy from brands who’s values are aligned with their own, according to Accenture.
Why is all this important?
In a world of ever-increasing competition, any competitive advantage is one worth talking about.
But more importantly, the truth is, every business has a culture and set of values, regardless of whether they are stenciled on a wall or not.
Culture is about what you tolerate as a business. Those businesses which have taken the time to refine, define and implement systems which manifest those values will continue to attract the best talent and grow their market share… if they talk about it, that is.
That’s right. Having a company values is great. Having them manifest through systems within the business is even better. But to truly reap the rewards you’ll have to communicate them, both internally and externally.
This is where most companies fall short! As we’ve already mentioned, we’ve all seen the offices with values stenciled on the wall, with a shortlist of values placed on the website, or perhaps a list of values at the start of a sales presentation. This is great, but it’s not nearly enough.
So how do we communicate those values to a wider audience?
The power of video
We know that video is one of the most effective forms of communication in general. This is largely due to one simple fact; it’s extremely easy to consume! It’s a very passive experience, and the more we can do to remove friction from information consumption, the more is consumed.
The other great feature of video is it’s ability to deliver a lot of information in a very short amount of time. This can be really helpful if you want to back up the values with information, examples and evidence. If you tried to do this via a leaflet, brochure or other written means, it could very quickly turn into a short novel…
We could go on and on about the benefits of video, but we’ll end it with this simple point: using a video to communicate your values means you can show the result of those values.
You see, communicating the values alone is great, but what’s the end result? With video you can show the happy workforce, you can showcase the impact on the community, you can really communicate the ‘why’ behind the ‘why’!
But now the question is, how do you leverage video?
How to leverage video to communicate company values
There are a number of video strategies you can use to communicate values, and you’ll have to choose the one which best suits your organisation, budget and time restraints. We’re going to focus on four different strategies in this blog, but there are many more, depending on how creative you want to get!
The Company Presentation Video
In this strategy, you communicate the company mission, value statement and core values. It’s more traditional in approach, but still produces great results. It’s akin to the face-to-face presentations that were/are common place in business, but in a much more engaging, exciting and real form.
We’d advise you to reverse engineer a set of questions which lead to the core messages you would like to communicate. Also, choose a mix of senior execs and team members to tell the story of the company; this mixture of staff will provide a more authentic viewing experience.
The ‘Day-in-the-Life’ Video
This is a more employee-focused video, similar in style to a video blog, which focuses on a day in the life of an employee. It’s a great way to communicate values, whilst also proving it!
You can use a mixture of user-generated content and more ‘set-up’ footage to communicate what it’s like to work at your company, what your company values are, and what is important to your team. When it comes to talent attraction, these films work incredibly well.
The Graphic and Text-Led Video
A graphic and text led film is a simple way to communicate and illustrate company values. These films work really well as short snippets on social media, and can focus on one value at a time – or perhaps the entire collection, depending on how much detail you want to include.
They can be a really punchy way of showing what’s important to your brand, and don’t take a lot of time or energy to create.
The Values-Manifested Video
This has to be one of our favourite video strategies. To put it simply, it’s a video strategy which showcases the company values being manifested in real life. This could be an event, a charity push or a real life story.
The company itself will take a back seat in this film, and the focus will be entirely on the value which has been manifested visually.
This is a compelling way to communicate your brand values. Providing this level of visual evidence and weight behind your company values, and really showing that you ‘live and breath’ your values as oppose to just verbalising them, is a phenomenal way to build consumer trust.
This is the type of film that wraps a layer of authenticity around your brand, in a way that other forms of marketing will struggle to do. However, please be aware that the content of the film must actually be authentic… if you mock up an event or try to recreate something which supposedly shows your values, but isn’t real, it’s likely you’ll be exposed!
What next?
So what next? Well, the first thing is to ensure you have your company values defined and ready for communication.
Next, decide what your goal is: talent attraction or customer acquisition.
Finally, decide on a video strategy(ies) that you want to use. Will you go for the company presentation style, or perhaps the real life story? Once you’ve picked, you can start planning and getting ready for success!
If you want a hand choosing an appropriate strategy or want to just pick our brains on what could work for your company, drop us a message today!
We’ve got video production hubs in Bristol and Manchester, allowing us to work with clients across the UK; we’d love to show you what video can do for you.
