Re-post: “The Role of ‘Trust’ in the Re-launching of the Importers.com B2B Marketplace”

August 24, 2011| By John Lyotier

The following is an excerpt from a Guest Blog post that I wrote for Elliot Silver at Elliot’s Blog. Click here to read the full post.

– John

First off, thank you Elliot for giving Left of the Dot the opportunity to tell you a bit more about our re-branding and our re-launching of Importers.com.

Whenever we take on a brand, we look at several factors before we begin development: what is the natural business model implied by the name, what is happening within the name’s specific vertical, and who are the big players within the domain’s market category.

With Importers.com, we discovered a market that was filled with fraud and uncertainty. Trading partners did not trust trading partners. Scandals were plaguing the incumbent market leaders (See: The Economist “Alibaba and the 2,236 Thieves”). And the brand perception among potential consumers was that they “all look the same and seem sketchy”.

For us, this spelled opportunity, and it was clear that if we were going to differentiate Importers.com in this market (and resurrect what should have been a dominant global brand before being abandoned by its previous owners), we needed to emphasize the concept of ‘Trust’ first and foremost.

Many Domainers already know that a good generic carries with it a certain amount of implied trust. If you have a category-owning concept — be it Importers.com, DogWalker.com, or Villa.com — your name provides you with multiple benefits, each of which stems from this implied trust:

• You get better click thru rates on your paid search advertising. This increases your quality score and lowers your cost of new customer acquisition. And if it costs me less to get a customer on Importers.com than it does for an upstart brand that nobody has ever heard of… I win.
• You get ranked higher in search engines. Initially, this was entirely dependent on keyword match, but with the Panda release, how customers or peers perceive your site has become much more of a factor (think of the +1 as a trust endorsement).
• Customers (and strategic partners) are more willing to listen to you and give you the benefit of the doubt.

With this knowledge in our back pocket, we decided to play to our strength. The name “Importers.com” conveys a trusted brand in a market that is screaming for somebody to trust…
Click here for the full post.