Values-Based Marketing

As we continue to develop the reality that your behavior is dictated by your core values, it becomes clearer that your marketing efforts should mirror your values hierarchy as well.

While on a coaching call with Dr. Olivia Joseph today, we were discussing her love of lecturing in her community. She shared with me that she works very hard to get the most “bang for her buck,” meaning that she prefers to speak to large groups of 30-50 people. When she speaks to smaller groups, she does not tend to have the same level of enthusiasm and admitted that she doesn’t feel the same impact. Also, if she speaks to smaller groups, she has to do more events, and this requires more time.

The interesting thing about speaking to these larger groups was that she had many interested potential patients that consulted with her after her presentations, but she could not fit in the time to do effective reports of findings. This resulted in a less than ideal conversion ratio and a high level of frustration.

At this point, most consultants would start telling Olivia what to do to improve her ROF or give her some advice on communicating more effectively with her patients. Here’s what she and I discussed…

I asked Olivia to remind me what her top values were (we previously did the values exercise to create awareness,) and she recalled that Family was her highest value. Wow, what a conflict. If she did smaller, more focused lectures, more often, she’d be able to connect with the attendees and have the available time to educate them properly in the ROF. But, since we know that overt behavior is dictated by your higher value, and Olivia values spending time with her children more than anything, it became clear why she chose a self-defeating process.

Here’s the clincher. As an exercise, I asked Olivia to tell me how doing the smaller, more intimate events benefits her family. I watched her eyes light up over the video conference line as she spewed her response with the “I GOT IT” written all over her.
You see, if you can create a neural link between your office procedure and your core values, you will get much more consistent behavior. For example, if your core value is integrity, and you are using seductive, bait and switch advertising to lure people into your office, you will always sabotage your results.

Know yourself, be true to yourself, and create procedures and marketing efforts that honor not only who you are, but what you value. Olivia is working on it…and so should you.