Showcasing a company’s “fun” values with whimsical videos online has become popular as employers fight to attract good employees and entertain potential customers.

If your company is truly fun, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with presenting those moments. However, if you’re not expressing your company’s essential and enduring principles, you’re not giving your customers, employees or other stakeholders a true understanding of what makes your company special.

While your company’s culture may develop over time with employee interaction, events and community participation, your core values should be born from your vision as an owner or leader. Employees also want to see their values reflected in their work.

That’s why your guiding principles should be definitive and included as part of all your company communications.

Defining your Values

When you first started your plumbing company, you certainly had a vision for what you wanted your business to become after one year, five years and even 10 years.

However, between applying for business licenses, hiring your team, setting up shop and rounding up customers, you may have never written down or revisited those values since you first opened.

If you want to grow and scale your company, it’s important that you not only define your core values but also communicate your vision to your team. Your values light the way for your team and help them focus on what is important.

Defining your values also helps you create a repeatable and scalable system that you can use to build processes to help you achieve your goals. A home service business needs well-developed processes to empower the people in your organization to make informed decisions.

However, your values aren’t something you build and keep in-house. Having core principles you share more broadly also helps you find loyal customers who want to do business with you. According to a Harris Poll commissioned by Google Cloud, 82% of shoppers prefer to do business with a brand whose values align with theirs.

That means you need to tell customers what your values are, why they are important to you and why they should be important to the customer.

Writing the Right Content

In today’s digital world, home service companies have a plethora of methods to get the word out about their values. 

However, if you don’t do it correctly, it could create misunderstandings, target the wrong audience or fall flat.

For example, your marketing team probably relies on a carefully crafted search engine optimization campaign to drive traffic to your website. While your SEO needs certain keywords to be effective, your content needs to be well-written, entertaining and informative.

You may have all the keywords correctly aligned, but if your press releases, blogs and social media posts are riddled with misspellings, context errors and boring anecdotes, you hurt your reputation more than if you simply didn’t put out anything.

Think of your own research. How much stock do you put into someone’s written opinion if it has constant spelling errors? If the content concentrates more on keywords than communicating, do you continue reading the piece?

Chances are you’ve run into these situations. It’s frustrating to need information but feel that the writer has put up far too many roadblocks because of poor spelling or grammar or appears to be more interested in meeting marketing demands than communicating correctly.

If you want to attract an audience, you need to consistently put out quality content that engages them.

Sharing your Values 

Making sure your brand has a meaningful story and telling it well is one of the most important aspects of public relations. 

In its purest form, PR is the act of building relationships through the art of well-composed content. It is important to humanize your brand so it fosters emotional connections with your clients and potential customers.

Your company’s press releases, blogs, social media posts and guest articles should not only address the topic at hand but should also be “on brand.” This means you need to include all or some of the following components in your content:

Authenticity: Your content should ensure your brand is positioned as genuine by sticking to the facts and avoiding overcompensation. You want to come across as helpful without bragging.

Relatability: Be sure to include anecdotes your customers have experienced. If you’re providing tips for homeowners to avoid clogs, draw on real-world examples of issues your company has solved.

Purpose: Let readers in on your vision. Let them know why you do what you do.

Engagement: In addition to providing real-world experiences in your content, you also need to interact with your audience.

Consistency: Finally, make sure your content is in keeping with your brand. Stop trying to latch onto flash-in-the-pan ideas to make your content “go viral;” stay consistent with your message.

Avoid industry jargon and corporate buzzwords; they don’t mean anything to your customers. If you stay focused on your value systems and respond by providing well-written content your customers can understand, you will stand the test of time.

Customers want to find solutions to their problems, and trust the people they hire to do a job. A quality blog post providing them with tips, a well-researched press release with important information or a heartfelt social media post helps you to connect with the outside world.

So, instead of simply relying on your marketing message to reach your target audience, your home service company needs to provide content that is informative, authentic and allows your brand values to shine.