Making a customer trust when they don’t know us is difficult, but there are things you can do on your site. Put them into practice!
When it comes to running business online, trust is one of the scarcest and hardest resources to earn, especially when your business is small, you are an entrepreneur or personal brand, and you don’t have a well-established reputation or brand awareness. No amount of money can buy trust, and it is very difficult to recover once it has been lost. Trust can be a deciding factor that drives potential customers to choose your products or services over your competitors, so you can’t afford to overlook it.
To establish trust, we are going to examine some simple tips that you can start to incorporate into your marketing strategy. These seven techniques involve educating consumers, personalizing marketing messages, and providing an inspiring user experience.
Keep a consistent style in your design
Consistency is a trait that will help your customers feel comfortable with your business. Help them improve your brand recognition. If they remember your company they will be much more likely to buy your products.
Crafting a style and design outline is one of the most important things you can do.
When that scheme is implemented, your design will be consistent across different mediums, helping to build brand authority and increase recognition. A style and design outline should include:
• Consistency of colors and fonts in all marketing materials.
• Logos, including variations, that can be used on promotional items.
• Taglines, slogans or statements.
A good example is UCLA. Look at the header of your website, your Facebook and your Twitter.
People no longer remember ads, but they do remember experiences.
Introduce yourself to your clients
Your website must have at least the following elements to ensure that your customers know who you are, what you have to do with them and thus open the door to engagement.
• A simple introduction.
• An “about us” page that can even be very human.
• A contact page with the address, phone number, and online contact details for your business.
• A privacy policy.
Make it personal
Customers tend to trust companies that interact with them on a personal level. This can include simple things, from social media engagement to personalized service.
Testimonials, interaction through social media and making posts referring to common questions or concerns are just a few examples of how you can make a personal connection between your company and your customers.
Incorporating compelling stories on your page about situations your company has been through can also help your visitors have a better relationship with you. If potential customers can relate to the challenges you’ve experienced or connect because they have similar backgrounds, they will start to see you as a friend rather than just another faceless company.
As current and potential customers begin to realize that your business is a collective of like-minded, customer-oriented people, they are likely to start to trust you more. Knowing that they can contact you at any time and receive a personalized and sincere response will also make them more likely to buy from you.
Implement a great web design
Your website must be agile, responsive and easy to use, and users must be able to quickly load pages, find the content they want, and have a place where they can find answers to their problems. You can even incorporate elements that allow your website to foster an online community, such as comments on your blog or an FAQ section.
One thing you can do to evaluate your current website is share it with family or friends outside of your industry. If they can navigate through it and quickly find the information they are looking for, then you probably have a good initial design.
Repair faulty pages
Broken links, error messages, and slow widgets can make a professional website look very unreliable. These issues can make your website more difficult to use, which in turn hurts trust.
Do your best to minimize those mistakes. Make sure the automated error messages include your contact information so you can address any issues your visitors may have. Having someone check the links on your website on a routine basis can help prevent frustrations that visitors may experience while browsing your website. If you don’t have the resources to tackle this task yourself, you can hire a company to fix the links and test your site regularly.
Optimize for mobile
More and more people are accessing the internet through smartphones and other mobile devices. This makes having a mobile friendly website a must.
While some companies implement different mobile websites, they often fall short on one of two crucial points: Either they can’t test their mobile site or they don’t use a universal design, forcing them to update multiple versions of their mobile site. site. Updating more than one version of a website can take a significant amount of time, lead to inconsistencies, and increase the risk of errors.
A responsive web design is generally the best way to make a mobile version for a website due to its simplicity and compatibility. Responsive sites automatically adjust to screen size so that they can easily be viewed on different devices. They simplify content management and site maintenance by allowing you to design a website that is responsive on all devices.
Create useful content for your users
Of all the techniques listed here, creating useful content is probably one of the simplest, most reliable, and most of all, cost-effective to gain trust. The strongest type of trust is built with content, helping your online business skyrocket.
You should focus on creating strong articles that you use as pillars, and then creating a more relaxed style post. You can link those articles to product or service pages of interest to encourage visitors to spend more time on your website and learn about what you have to offer. It’s no secret that we do that here occasionally to promote our marketing and customer experience services , and on the same page that we do we have various comments of what people have posted on their social media when they have attended … but we don’t try to sell these services in every post you visit. We are more interested in the solid and lasting relationship with you. We are interested in our content appealing to you.
It is also beneficial to provide free downloadable content such as tip sheets, guides, PDFs, and e-books.
Of course, you must understand that you are not a saint and that you are in a business, and therefore you must include a call to action within your pages to generate opportunities thinking about the future, but make sure that the way you do it also serves to your audience to maximize the generation of trust (have you seen on our site that we always offer you to send the content to your email if you provide it to us?).
Of course, you have to be subtle, you don’t want your website to be presented in a purely promotional way, because nobody likes a cute seller. If you can provide useful and educational content on your website, your visitors will come back for more and won’t be able to consider buying from anyone else when it comes time to make a decision.
Conclusion
Building trust online is very similar to building trust in person. It’s important to genuinely introduce yourself so that people understand who you are. To establish trust in your online business, your website must deliver what consumers expect – and more. If you want to be seen as professional and trustworthy, you can’t let customers wonder why your website has broken links or why you never reply to messages. Building trust is all about building relationships. If you follow the techniques outlined above, consumers will know that they can trust you.
