Are you the owner of a small business looking to increase your customers? How do you build a trusting relationship with your customers? Here is a proven strategy to build and maintain trust in your business, and in turn attract both customers and profits.
There are many different sources of trust, and sometimes people trust for the wrong reasons. By understanding how people actually come to trust, you will be able to earn maximum trust.
People have an underlying anxiety about and distrust of nearly everything these days, especially when it comes to all things foreign.
In this environment, trust is a huge advantage. But few advertisers, marketers, or sales professionals focus on this advantage. Instead, they drift to cute advertising, low prices and discounting, or rely on product-centric presentations. This is why trust-based social media marketing can be such a powerful tool.
Even small purchases are affected by trust. People tend to trust ‘Made in America’ products more than foreign manufacturers. Is there a difference in quality or safety? Perhaps, there’s just a perceived difference in our minds. Of course, the more significant a purchase is to buyers, the more consciously they seek a trustworthy seller or provider; but you can’t ignore the role of trust in just about every act of shopping, online and offline.
One of the main sources of trust is peer recommendations. You trust that a product is good because somebody you know recommends it. This reveals something very powerful about selling inside the walled garden of a closed community of people. Their walls are their reliance on peer-provided information. They trust each other and distrust all others.
And the harder it is to gain the trust of anyone in such a community, the more viral it becomes through word-of-mouth marketing. If you encourage your best customers and others to talk about your business, then you don’t have to say anything or spend a lot of money on marketing. This is why it is so worthwhile to gain the trust of influencers within any target group in which you seek to gain customers.