Building trust: it’s important in your personal relationships, but surely it’s equally as valuable when it comes to conducting business relationships.
If you can develop a relationship with your consumers potential beforehand, you’re more likely to entice them to buy from you. But if you can go beyond that and include the element of trust in your relationship, you have a much better shot of getting long-term, loyal customers.
This is vital for businesses in today’s marketplace where there is lots of competition for all of us. It helps retain your customers and produces referrals for more business.
How Should You Build Trust?
The best way of building trust is by proving you have expertise in your field and of course, ensuring that your audience get to hear this.
OK. so how can you go about doing so? A content marketing strategy, if handled correctly can be one of the best ways to solidify yourself as an expert in your field and engage your prospective audience.
Posting valuable, insightful, useful content to your website is the key to attracting more visitors. Making sure that this content is relevant to your target audience will help you attract the right visitors to your site who are most likely to make a purchase.
The key is proving to these potential customers that you know what you’re talking about and that you can provide them with sufficient expertise and value. This should make them select you over your competition.
Be Consistent with your content
Another way to build trust is through consistency. We all need to be consistent in terms of the quality of content we offered on our blogs and websites and the interaction that we have with our prospective customers on social media. This social media activity needs to be done on a daily or certainly regular basis.
And, of course, you need to back up all this ‘expertise’ by providing consistent quality in the products and services you offer. This simply means training your staff appropriately and ensuring they perform well.
Be Transparent with your message
If there are too many secrets or unanswered questions, your customers won’t trust you.
You need to be as transparent as possible and willing to answer consumer questions honestly. Maybe you should have an FAQ section on your site and a great customer service team on hand to answer inquiries about where your products are made, where you source your ingredients, etc.
Again social media comes into the mix here. If your customers have questions or even make complaints, they may nowadays use social forums to do this. You need to react quickly in all cases – showing yourselves as caring, responsive and on the ball.
As you build trust with more consumers, you’ll be able to build a reputation for yourself in your industry, and this will help you succeed long term.
David Lomas
M3 Media Publishing
