Building trust with your clients is a surefire way to keep them coming back, and a great practice if you’re looking to become a leader in your industry in the long run. Happy, trustful customers are also a great way to generate new business, as word-of-mouth is probably the most efficient marketing tool in your arsenal. Building long-standing relationships, however, is a matter of both your dedication and circumstance, but if you’re looking to inspire trust in your clients, here are some ideas on where you can start.
A clear Value Proposition
The first step and foundation of any trusting customer relationship is the offer of a clear Value Proposition on your part, so your target customer knows they have come to the right place to solve their problem. This includes the elements your customers will encounter within the first few minutes of visiting your website or otherwise interacting with your business, like your headline and illustration, three step process or an animation aimed at helping save time for your sales force.
Demos
Another way to keep things clear and keep everyone on the same page are demos. If you want to be sure your potential customer know what they’re in for, create demos to show examples of your product before they make their first purchase.
Free trials
Every purchase is a risk for your customer, so if you’re looking to make a quicker sale while keeping credibility, a good idea would be to assume a part of the risk yourself. You can do this by offering a Money back guarantee, which demonstrates how confident you are about your products’ effectiveness, or by providing a free trial for a limited amount of time or within a set amount of resources (like accounts, email, etc.).
Optimized onboarding
Once you’ve gotten to the initial purchase, it’s important to stay focused on building trust with your clients. A great way of doing this right after the initiation of the sales process is to add an “onboarding” walkthrough . This would serve to help your customers understand the new process and to enable your sales force to support the new customers in a more informed way.
Press coverage
Not only does press coverage serve as a great marketing tool for reaching out to potential customers, it also boosts your image within the industry you’re operating in and as a prominent name in your industry, you will have an easier time recruiting the best talent because having their name on their CV can advance people’s careers.
Awards
A great way to garner the right kind of attention and set yourself apart from the rest of the competition is to win awards for the work that you’ve done. However, it’s also important that you give any award you receive the proper amount of attention and make sure to showcase it, so that your customers know that they have made the right choice in doing business with you.
Testimonials
Gather testimonials from your previous happy customers and include them on your website, in our promotional materials and your portfolio. It is especially important you include positive feedback from clients that are in the same field or industry as the potential customers you are currently trying to reach out to. At the end of the day, it doesn't mater how much you praise yourself, until your claims are supported by your previous clients.
Case studies
Another great step would be to create case studies, preferably with eye-catching visuals like photos and videos, that are more likely to engage your audience. Make sure to also add flattering statistics to your site, for example, your number of customers, ROI, years in operation, reach across the world, size etc.
Client logos
To further flesh out your impressive body of work, make sure to add key client logos to your website and other promotional materials. This will serve as a more succinct version of a testimonial, and it is likely to attract similar clients to the ones whose logos you included, so be sure to take the time to make a careful selection of the logos you’ll include.
The Net Promoter Score
The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a management tool that is used to gauge the loyalty of a firm’s customer relationships. It serves as an alternative to traditional customer satisfaction research and is correlated with revenue growth. Conducting the NPS and displaying it if it’s high can be a great way to demonstrate your worth to your customers.
Referral programs
Word-of-mouth is one of the best ways to generate new business, but it’s also really important to track it accurately. You can do this by creating a referral program, so your word of mouth marketing is targeted & tracked.
Clear contact details
Transparency and clarity go a long way when it comes to building trust. One way to do this is to add clear contact details, including your physical address, email, phone number, a map with your location, and possibly an instant message option like intercom.io or drift.com.
Trade associations
Joining a trade associations will make networking and making contacts easier and including the trade associations of which you are a part to your website adds another layer of credibility. The trusting relationships you build with your fellow trade associates is likely to inspire trust among your customers as well.
Review sites
Joining review sites like TrustPilot.com, TestFreaks, Which? and others is a great way to showcase some of your product’s great qualities through the lens of its users or review experts. Getting praise from outside sources is a great way to establish credibility and build trust with your clients.
About section
Tell your story in your own words by including an “about/team“ section to show your mission and experience. “About” and “team” pages are some of the most visited pages on a B2B organisation’s website, so make sure they accurately display your vision.
A micro-niche
An amazing way to establish yourself as an expert in your field is to narrow down the field. Focusing on a micro-niche allows you to become the specialist for a certain subject matter. Find a segment within a segment of the market that is likely to support enough business, and try to find and share unique insights that pertain to the businesses within the micro-niche.
Partnerships
To further build trust with clients, invest time into creating win-win partnerships which help strengthen the brand and expand your offering to help reach new customers. Having other organisations practically vouch for your worth can mean a great deal to your customers.
Social media
A social media presence nowadays is paramount to building trust with clients. In addition to providing a less formal channel of communication, it allows you to stay in piratically constant contact with your audience. Staying active on social platforms, so potential customers can learn to trust your organisation in their own time, is very important, as it gives you a way to present the spirit and day-to-day workings of your business in an authentic way, which is important for building trust.
A newsletter
Add a mailing list sign up form, so potential customers can learn more about your organisation at arms length, without having to necessarily engage with you right off the bat. You can take this even further and up your newsletter game by adding www.mailmunch.com to catch users at the right time.
Content
Anything from blog posts, articles, white-papers, webinars, tutorials and podcasts can serve as a staple of your trust-building strategy. Not only does good content marketing present you as the authority on the subjects based on which you’re creating content, it also allows you to generate leads by asking for contact information, like emails, in exchange for access to the content.
For more information on how to launch your project and craft your message, join our CEO Michael Murdoch for a Workshop on telling a memorable story without exceeding the budget at the British Library.
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