The Trust Factor: How Inbound Marketing Builds Credibility and Accelerates Sales

Inbound marketing establishes your business as an industry authority, fostering trust and confidence   among prospects, leading to smoother and faster sales processes. Because inbound marketing helps you build trust and credibility with your target audience, it's a given that providing them with helpful content that solves their problems will instill trust in your brand.

Trust is essential in marketing because it's the foundation for successful relationships between customers and businesses. Trust helps to build loyalty and encourages customers to keep coming back. It also helps businesses to create a positive reputation and develop a strong customer base.

Some call it the Know-Like-and Trust factor because if you know a brand and like it, you are 99% more apt to trust it.

We all know that your customers need to know, like, and trust you before they will buy. Learning how to translate this in a digital world takes a closer look.

Any successful salesperson will tell you that your customer needs to know, like, and trust you before they will buy. But how does this translate into a digital world where our first points of contact are typically not face-to-face?

A lot of businesses and marketers struggle to get this right. Even if you are publishing great content, you won’t really connect with your audience and make meaningful connections unless you start to move your website visitors and followers up the ladder of engagement. First, they have to know about you, then they need to like you, and finally, you need to earn their trust. When this happens you’ll start to turn your visitors into customers.

Here are some ways for you to reach out to your users and start building trust.

Are you known online?

Whether you have a new business or you’re just updating to build your audience for an existing business, getting known online can be tricky. Producing high-quality content for your marketing helps you attract a better level of attention. It also helps you build your reputation as an authoritative source worth listening to. Here are some tips that work.

• Know your customers.

In the digital world visitors are looking for specific solutions to their problems. Don’t try to be all things to all people. Understand who your customer is. Know what they need and want. Create Personas for your customers to help identify their unique buying habits. Create content that speaks to that buyer, offering insights and recommendations.

• Create content that speaks to your customer. 

Understanding your buyer and their challenges is the first step. Turning this concept into content is up next. Do your research and really understand your clients. Ask them questions, do keyword analysis, and above all make sure that you create content that your potential customers want to read. A post that is SEO optimized for Google that doesn’t resonate with your customers isn’t helpful, make sure people want to read what you are putting out there.

• Leverage your expertise.

Building on the concept of creating engaging content – we know that people want to read advice from experts. Take your real-life experiences, customer business cases, and other knowledge you have gathered to write from a position of authority. Providing evidence-based examples in your writing further entrenches you as the go-to expert on your subject matter.

• Building your online likability.

Why do some salespeople make selling their products seem easy while others struggle? A lot of it has to do with likability. Even with exact products and prices, we prefer to do business with some people over others, it is just human nature. 

• Put a face on your business.

I’m always amazed at the number of businesses that don’t have any pictures of themselves or their team on their websites. What a missed opportunity. People like doing business with people, not your website. It adds a degree of trust to see who you're doing business with.

• Always be authentic.

Your website and content should reflect who you really are. Is your homepage engaging, and does it fit with the brand you are trying to portray, and does that brand reflect what doing business with you in person looks like? More importantly, when you are creating content for your blog, social media posts, and e-newsletters, you should be authentic in the advice you are giving and the stories you are telling. Be authentic. Be trustworthy.

• Build your community.

A low effort high return way to build your likability is to build and promote your online community. Rather than posting about ourselves over and over, take the time to share content from and promote other people. It could be your customers, business partners, or a local charity. You may be surprised at how much traction this tactic can have if you become known as a builder.

How to build trust online.

Being known and liked are important, but they are the two bottom rungs on this ladder. Being viewed as trusted makes things a lot easier when you are ready to make the sale. These 3 steps will help you become a trusted entity online.

Consistency can mean a number of things when it comes to digital marketing – consistent quality, consistent frequency, consistent platforms. Having a regular cadence and delivering on the same channels with high-quality content builds trust in our customers. Humans like consistency and things we can depend on. 

We can do it all right as rain, but nothing helps build trust like having an existing customer or client say how much they enjoy working with you. If you’re just getting started, ask your happiest/best customers to provide a testimonial for you. In most cases, they are delighted to do so.

Telling about your service is one thing, showing how your service has helped another customer is even better. It is much easier to trust a business that can show they are capable of delivering what they promise.

When a customer learns to trust you, it’s almost like magic. Not only will they buy from you again, but they also become far more inclined to recommend your business to others. As business owners, it is important for us to remember that it’s cheaper to sell again to our existing customers than it is to attract and convert a brand new lead. Like the adage from days gone by: Make new friends but keep the old: One is silver and the other is gold.

Let Witmer Group help you build trust, credibility and accelerate sales through our Inbound Marketing and HubSpot management services. Contact us today for more information or schedule a discovery call.