Why trust is undervalued in marketing

In this blog post, author and marketing expert Darren Hignett talks about the importance of building trust as part of the sales and marketing process.

How to build trust and generate more business

​Would you buy from someone you don’t trust?

With so many scams and businesses not delivering to expectations, we have learned over time to buy only from people and brands that we trust.

This makes sense. The problem is that, as marketers and business owners, we often underestimate how important it is to acquiring customers and generating sales.

As customers ourselves, we don’t buy a product or service unless we trust the person or the brand, but when we get busy running marketing activities, we forget or ignore how important it is for generating sales.

Take a simple one-off marketing campaign. Many businesses are often disappointed with email, telemarketing or advertising campaigns that haven’t got the results that they had hoped for.

Like all good marketers, they start to look at the insights to see what’s happened.

Maybe they got plenty of impressions and clicks in their ad but no conversions, so the website isn’t getting results. So they start making changes to the landing page.

Or maybe their email campaign had high open rates but no clicks, so the call to action in the email isn’t working. More changes are needed.

This is all good stuff, but while we are busy looking at the metrics, it’s easy to overlook what is potentially the real reason the one-off marketing campaign didn’t work.

The real reason their campaign failed (drum roll…) was due to a lack of trust.

But how can that be, I hear you say? How can a business with a professional brand and quality products suffer from a lack of trust?

When I say trust, I’m not suggesting that their campaign looked dicey or deceptive, or that they were promising something that looked overly exaggerated.

The lack of trust I’m referring to is simply that the potential customer, who received their marketing campaign message, doesn’t know the brand or the person selling well enough to want to buy from them.

You might call this familiarity – “sorry I don’t know who you are, so I’d rather not buy from you”, but it’s very much about knowing enough about the business, the seller and/or the brand to trust them.

You hopefully noticed earlier how I used the wording “one-off campaign”. That’s for a very good reason. You can’t build trust with one email shot or within 2 minutes of talking to someone at a business event.

A business might send out an email campaign to a thousand recipients from an email list that they bought from a third party.

Those thousand recipients have either never heard of the brand or know very little at all about them.

Sending a single email to someone who doesn’t know the brand has got a very low chance of being a success, even with the best content copy in the world.

Whether it’s networking, social media, telemarketing, email marketing or something else, trust needs to be built up.

There are various articles as well as research that show that most potential customers need to interact with you or your brand on average 5-7 times before they commit to making a purchase.

Let’s think about that for a second… how many times do you approach or interact with a potential customer before giving up?

There’s no point beating on the door of someone who isn’t going to buy from you, but that doesn’t mean you should give up after the first point of contact with them.

If you aren’t sure how many times you approach or interact with someone, let’s look at what others do…

80% of purchases are made after 5-12 interactions*
48% of salespeople never follow up after the FIRST contact
And only 10% of salespeople will make more than 3 ‘contacts’

These numbers show how businesses (or in particular, those in sales and marketing) aren’t doing enough to build trust.

80% of the business comes after 5 interactions, yet around half don’t even interact twice with a customer.

And that’s the real reason why a one-off campaign might have failed.

And then there’s the other form of trust…

Trust builds over time, but it also builds with credibility.

If your product has an average rating of 1-star on a website after a thousand reviews, no amount of time is going to give the consumer the confidence that your product is a must-buy for them (“Look Cassandra, this product has a thousand poor ratings, let’s by that one!”).

On the other hand, you can speed up the process of building trust by using social proof such as positive reviews and recommendations. The more positive reviews and social proof you have, the more someone is going to trust you.

Another way to build up trust is by offering a trial or a sample of what you offer. This reduces barriers to sales by allowing potential customers to see if what you offer is genuine, and in line with their expectations.

Here are some ideas for ways to build trust:

- Use words in your marketing such as ‘proven’ or ‘money-back guarantee’
- Grow your 5-star ratings and communicate it to your audience
- Offer a trial or a sample of what you offer
- Ask for recommendations
- Tell people how long you have been established or how many customers you have served

Summary

As you can see, trust is key to someone buying. Before you go live with your advertising campaign or click send on your email campaign, ask yourself if you are doing enough to build and develop trust. After all, it could be the primary reason you didn’t get the results you expected.

Need help?

In my book Psychology in Marketing and Sales, I talk about building trust as well as the use of various tactics that you can use to increase sales. Make sure to grab a copy.

If you need help with your marketing and building trust with your target audience, get in touch with Think Twice Marketing.

Thanks for reading! I trust you found it useful…

*https://jmjdirect.wordpress.com/2010/01/14/how-many-contacts-does-is-take-to-make-a-sale-follow-up-is-the-key/