| |
Posts Tagged ‘trust’
Monday, August 22nd, 2011
Ann Smarty is somewhat of an Internet marketing pioneer. She’s been online longer than most and shares a lot of insight into the subject of Internet marketing at her blog SEO Smarty. She recently featured a guest post that suggests online marketers might want to change their profile pics soon due to the advent of facial recognition technology. Your world just got less private, the story goes.
Should you be concerned? Yes and no.
I certainly agree that privacy is a legitimate concern. If you’re really concerned about it, however, maybe you should just leave the Internet alone. I mean, nothing you do online is going to be completely private. Ever.
On the other hand, if you intend to do any business online, then you have to accept the drawbacks and one of those is a little bit of loss of privacy. That doesn’t mean you should toss all caution out the window. You should protect your identity and put a wall around your privacy even if that wall isn’t completely impenetrable.
A key factor for business owners is the necessity of building trust. How much trust can you build with an impersonal avatar or social media image? Maybe a little. But a profile pic can go a long way to building trust with your audience if you can put up with a little bit of loss of privacy.
The question for small business Internet marketers going forward isn’t, Should you protect your privacy? Rather, it is, How much privacy should you let go of in order to maintain a presence that helps you reach the right customers?
Tags: privacy, small business, Social Media, trust
Posted in Small Business Internet Marketing | 4 Comments »
Saturday, September 25th, 2010
People who know me know that I put a lot of emphasis on e-mail marketing. Why?
It’s real simple really. E-mail marketing helps you develop relationships. It gives you a basis for a relationship in the first place. And it starts with information gathering.
One of the first things you hope visitors of your website will do is give you their e-mail address. If they do that then it means that you’ve built some trust with them. No one is going to give you their e-mail address unless they trust you to some extent. But that doesn’t mean they trust you enough yet to buy from you. That’s where your e-mail marketing strategy comes in.
E-mail marketing allows you to build trust among people who have only dipped their toe in the water. They’re curious, but they aren’t ready to buy. So you begin to build their trust by sending them e-mails periodically. Over time, if you are effective in your marketing strategy, they will come to trust you enough to do business with you. But a lot of things have to happen before then.
The value of your e-mail marketing isn’t in your message. Let me repeat that. The value of your e-mail marketing strategy is not in your message.
It’s in the list.
This is very important. Your e-mail marketing strategy is only as strong as your list. If you have 10,000 untargeted names and addresses of people who may or may not be interested in product or service then you don’t have much of an e-mail marketing strategy. Chances are, your conversion rates are low. However, if you have 3,000 targeted names and addresses of people who have purchased from you or bought similar products in the past then that’s a strong list. It says those people
- Do buy
- Have an interest in your product or service
- And aren’t afraid to spend their money
The rest is up to you. Build trust, convince them that your offer is worth their time and money, and close the deal. If you are effective with your e-mail marketing strategy then your conversions should be higher. The money is in the list.
Tags: e-mail marketing, trust
Posted in E-mail Marketing for Small Business | 3 Comments »
Friday, August 13th, 2010
If you listen Cynthia Boris, no one trusts you.
Actually, what she said was 15% of respondents in a particular survey said they don’t trust brand blogs (like this one). But the survey also says that only 12% of respondents trust their friends on Twitter. Hey, if you don’t trust your friends then who do you trust?
There’s the rub for us marketing folks. If the people we’re marketing to don’t even trust their friends then how are we going to get them to trust us? Should we stop Twittering?
I wouldn’t suggest that you stop Twittering. I think, for the most part, that the people we reach on Twitter have a completely different mindset than the audience we reach through our own blogs. But I also think that the mass popularity of brand blogs is leading to its own problems in trust. Audiences know that not everything said on most brand blogs is completely transparent. After all, they are being written by marketing types, right?
Or maybe it’s just that people online have a general lack of trust for other people online.
Whatever it is, it means that we’ve got to work harder to build trust. How do you do that? For starters, you’ve got to be totally honest about the way you represent yourself. Don’t pull any punches. Also, when you make a comment about your brand (or someone else’s), try your best not to misrepresent it in any way. If you don’t know something then say you don’t know it. Don’t make it up or pretend that you know something that you don’t.
I suspect that marketers will always have a problem with trust, but we don’t have to give people reasons for not trusting us. We should be giving them reasons that they should.
Tags: marketing, trust
Posted in Branding | No Comments »
Saturday, December 5th, 2009
Shopping cart abandonment is one of the biggest issues for small businesses online. And some small business owners have a fear of abandonment – shopping cart abandonment, that is.
Of course, you can’t chase your customer down to remind them to purchase the items in their shopping cart, or try to persuade them to. You can’t fine them or sue them. You can work to improve your business model to try and decrease shopping cart abandonment. But how?
It helps to know what causes shopping cart abandonment to begin with. It’s a matter of trust. People bail because they aren’t 100% convinced that your service is going to satisfy their needs. They may be sold on the product, but are they sold on you? Are they sold on your company? Do they really believe you’ll deliver the product?
In order to ensure that customers don’t pull a head fake on the buying process and leave your site with items still in their shopping cart, you need to assure them every step of the way that they can trust you. If you want to see what I mean, make a purchase from Amazon.com and see how many times they assure you that your privacy is a high concern of theirs and that they will ship your product inexpensively and on time. See how many times they ask you to trust them. That’s what builds trust. Constant communication and putting your customer at ease.
Tags: shopping cart abandonment, small business, trust
Posted in Small Business Internet Marketing | 3 Comments »
Friday, November 20th, 2009
What’s it take to become a top brand online? According to a survey recently conducted by Forrester Research, trustworthiness, helpful, and relevance are the three attributes that made Google, Yahoo!, and Amazon the top three brands online.
This actually makes sense. When I think of Google I do think of trust and relevance. When I think of Amazon I also think of trust and relevance. After all, where else would you go for books and music online?
Google built its reputation as a search engine on trust and relevance. And searchers still trust them over every other source.
When it comes to online branding, trust and relevance are two of the most important attributes necessary regardless of your niche. No matter how large or small your audience is – and few of us have the audience the size of Google, Amazon, or Yahoo! – you’ll need to develop trustworthiness, be helpful to your audience, and be relevant. If you don’t possess those attributes in some measure then I doubt very seriously that your target audience will pay you much mind.
Are you developing trust, relevance, and helpfulness in your online brand?
Tags: helpfulness, online branding, relevance, trust
Posted in Branding | No Comments »
Monday, June 8th, 2009
We’ve talked before about how valuable videos can be for your site and even how to optimize them well. But we haven’t talked about autorun videos and I think this is a good time to mention that I wouldn’t recommend autorun videos. There are three primary reasons why I’d stay away from videos that load automatically when a visitor lands on your site.
- Poor SEO
- Slows your load time
- They annoy visitors
Let’s examine these three reasons briefly.
Videos are difficult to SEO because the search engines don’t crawl. Only recently has Google announced that it can crawl text in videos, but that ability is still quite limited. The best video optimization involves the use of surrounding text on the page and if you have an autorun vidoe then you likely aren’t going to have much of that. But supposing you do, the other two reasons should be enough to convince you.
Page load time is very important for search engine trust and rankings. The slower your page loads the more the search engines themselves will cast a crooked at you. Visitors too will not stick around for long if your pages load too slowly. So there’s a double whammy.
Speaking of annoying your visitors, you stand a good chance of losing a lot of traffic if you force your visitors to view content they don’t want to see. Your video may be the best video in the world, but if you force it on your visitors then they will resent it and many of them won’t return. In general, if you annoy site visitors you lose them forever. Don’t use autorun videos because people just don’t like them.
Tags: autorun videos, page load time, SEO, trust
Posted in Video Marketing | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009
Credibility is perhaps the most important characteristic for any small business owner. Customers will not do business with you if they don’t trust you. They must believe in you if they are going to hand over their hard earned money. But how do you get them to trust you when they don’t know know you?
It’s a good question. And it really all boils down to one thing: Authenticity.
Don’t try to be something you’re not. Be who you are and be honest about it. Don’t tell tales, communicate through fables. Be a teacher and a mentor, not the class clown. Never give up, but give in every now and then. Don’t sell yourself (or your customers) short, but sell them on your expertise with honesty, integrity, and courage.
You want your customers and potential customers to see you as the authority in your niche. To do that, you have to build in certain habits to your daily routine. Always do what you say you’ll do. Follow through on all your promises. Under-promise and over-deliver. Encourage conversation. Take criticism well. Be the change you want to see in others. These traits build trust. Oh, and cut out the fluff.
Tags: credibility, customer, small business, trust
Posted in PR for Small Business | 5 Comments »
Saturday, August 9th, 2008
I’ve discovered over the years that the one thing that is most important for any business – no matter what industry you are in or how big or small you are – is to build trust among your target market. Regardless of the strategies you use for marketing your business, you’ll never get anywhere if you cannot convince people to trust you. Trust is very important for building relationships and maintaining balance. So how do you build that trust?
The most obvious thing, of course, is to be honest. Nothing builds trust faster than admitting a mistake. And nothing shatters it more than ignoring or denying a mistake that is obvious to everyone else. But aside from that, how else can you build trust as you go about marketing your business?
- Articles – Articles are a great way to build trust. By signing your name at the bottom of an article loaded with great (free!) tips about your niche, you are telling people that you are a trustworthy and credible business source.
- Blog - A daily blog can go a long way to building trust, but you have to give it time. Success doesn’t happen overnight. The way to build trust through a blog is to be consistent with your posting and to provide valuable information to your target market over time.
- Hold promises to a minimum – No need to get all excited about what you promise to your clients. Promise a little and deliver a lot is much better than promising a lot and delivering a little. Set your clients’ expectations low (but not too low) and exceed them. There is hardly any better way to build trust (except to be honest).
- Be confident, be competent, and overdeliver – This may be restating what has already been stated, but confident business people like doing business with other confident business people. Be proud of your accomplishments. If you are competent in what you do then that is easy. Oh, and deliver more than you promised!
Building trust is one of the most important things you can do in business. By being consistent in what you promise and deliver, and delivering more than you promise, you can build the trust factor into your business as you build your business from the ground up.
Tags: small business marketing, trust
Posted in Branding, Local Internet Marketing, Reputation Management, Small Business Internet Marketing, Traditional Marketing for Small Business | No Comments »
|
|
|
|
| |
|
