Build for trust, not sales
I have a friend who works with social media, that routinely tells me how many sales he has been driving with his latest campaign. That is fantastic, and he’s always a good resource when I need a second opinion on how to optimize one of my own campaigns for sellthrough. A few months back the brand he works for, ended up in a tricky situation where one of their products received a storm of complaints from their customers.
When I met him after that incident, I asked him if they used their community to help them out, as an influx of negative reactions often spur brand ambassadors to help repel what they see as an “attack” on their favorite brand. His reply left me completely speechless:
“We don’t have any brand ambassadors that will step up for us. We don’t build that kind of relationship with them”.
When I followed up on that, I realized that my friend’s very sales-driven approach had succeeded in moving goods, but failed to create any form of trust between the brand and their community. When I told him that, he protested and argued that “they had tons of activity and engagement on their posts”. But trust doesn’t come from engagement, it comes from being loyal to your customers.
My (very simple) advice to my friend was that he should look through the negative reviews and see if he could turn them around. My point was that each customer he could turn around, would be a voice of support for his brand — telling other people that they would indeed rectify the situation.
Why trust is important
If a friend of yours asks for a recommendation on what brand of car to buy, would you rather recommend them a brand that you 1) know because you’ve heard about them or 2) know is trustworthy because you have done business with them and never been disappointed?
Yeah, that’s going to be option #2, right? Who would recommend a brand they don’t know? Even more, if you have not only been treated well, but received service that exceeded your expectations, chances are you might even try to persuade your friend to buy the same brand all by yourself.
According to a new report by Boston Consultancy Group, utra-loyal customers or ‘apostles’ as they call them, only take up 2% of a brand’s customers, but can attribute upwards to 80% of total volume via recommendations. Oh and they aren’t price sensitive either, so their profitability is way higher than your normal shopper which always looks for the best deal possible.
Creating brand apostles is impossible without trust though.
If a consumer doesn’t trust a company, that consumer will rarely, if at all, recommend them to anyone. Just like you wouldn’t recommend your friend to go with a car brand you are dissatisfied with.
And thus we’re back with my friend and his problem. His customers did not trust the brand, because they hadn’t been trying to exceed expectations — or even thought about what those expectations were. They had just been steadily increasing sales, without a longer strategy for the customers.
Making your community trust you
I find that there are three core concepts that are intrinsically tied together with building trust:
The simple run-down is this:
Be truthful in your marketing and own up to faults and issues that arise. It only gets worse if you deny it, because face it; the truth will always find a way.
Be loyal to your community. No matter how big or small a company you are, a customer is usually worth more than a single purchase. If you are loyal to them, they will stay loyal to you.
Understand your customer’s needs and desires. If you understand what people want, you are far better of when you communicate with them. And hitting the right tone, when talking to a user that has just had one of your products break down on them, is absolutely crucial.
With that in mind, here are my 5 pieces of advice on how to start building trust.
1 — Never oversell
This is my first rule of engagement for anything community-related and one that you must absolutely abide. If there’s something that breaks trust and destroys your chance of creating a brand apostle, it is if your core marketing message oversells a product or its features. In short, don’t write cheques your product can’t cash.
2 — Own (up to) your mistakes
Did you put out a product with an inherent issue? Is your marketing material still showcasing a better build than the final version? Did you screw up a tweet and angered a bunch of customers? Own up to it. In the eyes of your community, there’s nothing worse than a company trying to sweep a bad story under the rug. As long as it’s legally advisable, you should own up to your mistakes. We are all human after all, and that humanity can turn into a considerable upside if you manage it correctly (no, you should never purposefully create a situation where you have to apologize, stupid).
An added bonus is that by admitting your fault in something, you own or at least heavily influence, how the discourse about it is being shaped. Some of the biggest PR disasters of modern time are due to companies not wanting to admit fault (did someone say British Petroleum?)
3 — Do good
This is such a simple concept, yet an incredibly overlooked one. When I bring this up, people always shake their heads and ask how to do it. My response is usually “What would your community consider a good deed?”. In its simplest form, doing good is responding to people when they contact you. In its most elaborate form, it is helping the needy or breaking down prejudices. Coincidently doing good deeds usually provides you with a load of cool stories to tell customers, partners and media. Just sayin’…
4 — Take your community by the hand
Has someone got an issue with your product, or just can’t seem to break through to support? Normally this kind of case would go into the “disgruntled customer”-slab and receive a formal reply in a measly attempt to appease them. While you could do that, there’s also a case for viewing this as an opportunity to create an apostle. I’ve found that unhappy customers with a support case, can actually be turned around and become brand ambassadors ‘quite easily’. It takes a fair bit of empathy, in order to know how to address the issues, and then it takes some personal help and fixing the problem. But if you manage to do that, you have wowed the customer with service that far exceeds their expectation, and put them on the road to become an apostle. It’s simple, yet super effective.
5 — Listen and care
What are most members of a community looking for? Confirmation and recognition. They want to be confirmed that you are taking them and their opinions serious, and they want to be recognized for their ideas and opinions. Do that. It takes some work, especially if you have a loudmouthed or large community, but it’s worth it in the long run. When you reply to their comments, share their inventions and confirm that you’re listening and caring, they will return. And they will defend you.
Originally published at phedemark.me on December 18, 2015.
