By Klaus Hansen on Sep 19, 2022
You want your company to be top of mind when people are trying to decide where to buy a product or service you offer. You want your prospects to not only think of your brand, but to feel positively towards it. And once they buy, you want them to come back again and again. For those things to happen, you must constantly strive to build trust in your company.
Building trust is not just a one-off, and it’s more than seeking good reviews, though of course that’s important. Your entire company culture should be aimed at building trust.
In this quest, there are some things you can control such as your website content, your marketing messages and what you information you include in online directories. But today, everyone can also easily see what your customers have to say about you in reviews, testimonials, comments and social media. Even in local business listings that you painstakingly craft, people often can leave comments. You need to work for good evaluations but also prepare for bad ones.
Your reputation is perhaps your company’s most important asset. Seek to build trust and positive feelings from prospects, customers, employees. Investors or potential investors, stockholders if there are any and the public at large.
Your clients want to feel that you have their best interests at heart. If you sell B2B, each of your clients wants to feel you will help them further their own business. Businesses want to put their money where they get great value, top expertise and low risk. They are going to feel a lot more comfortable doing business with you if your good reputation precedes you.
Often B2B vendors and clients can partner in endeavors where both companies are elevated in the eyes of the public. For example, high tech companies with complementary products could hold seminars instructing potential customers how to achieve first-rate results by using the products together.
If you sell B2C, consumers want to feel you want to provide them with the best possible experience whether it’s providing reliable dry cleaning services, healthy fresh food or the best laptop on the market.
Of course, everyone isn’t in the market for a product or service you sell all the time. But if you build a good public reputation and general goodwill, people will consider your company when the time comes that they need such a product.
It’s not only customers that you need to impress. When seeking new employees, if you have taken the time and effort to build trust in your company with the public, you will find you have a larger pool of qualified, interested applicants.
Finally, companies that have focused on their reputation have an advantage when it comes time to seek loans or investors. They have already paved the path to a positive public image that results in getting needed investments or favorable loan rates.
When you work to build trust in your company as a whole, you will also want to showcase the credibility and expertise of individuals within the company. Owners and executives can set themselves up as experts by publishing thought leadership articles and white papers on their company websites, posting them on LinkedIn and other social media, and placing them in respected industry publications.
The company and its experts can also seek to educate and add value in many other ways such as giving webinars and seminars
Such articles, webinars and seminars should primarily seek to educate on issues important to the audience rather than to make immediate sales. Build connections before you try to sell, particularly in B2B. After all, when you are selling you are not bonding. Of course, that doesn’t mean you can’t call your audience to action at the end of an educational article or webinar.
It’s understandable that people find praise from a company’s customers more credible than pronouncements from the company itself. In fact, 94 percent of people are more likely to buy from a business due to positive online reviews.
If you are not following up with your happy customers, you are leaving money on the table.
Actively encourage people to give you testimonials. This can be done any number of ways. For example, you could email your customers a very short survey of no more than a few questions after they make a purchase. Ask for permission to publish their comments on your website. Testimonials are generally more important for B2B businesses, but they aren’t limited to them.
At the same time, routinely ask your customers for referrals after you finish a project for sell them a product or service. This of course, is more of a B2B move. For example, you can do this when you are talking with them at the end of a project or sale, or when you send them a follow-up email.
To help build trust in your company, be sure to have your local B2C business on review sites such as Yelp. You should also list your business on local business listings such as Google Business Profiles. If you haven’t read it already, you will want to check out our blog post, How Online Local Business Listings Optimize Revenue. Google Business Profiles and many other business listings enable customers to provide public reviews.
Regularly engaging directly with customers is a great way to establish connections and trust. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social media platforms provide valuable opportunities for your company to show its human side as well as its responsiveness and expertise. See our recent blog post, Use Social Media Authenticity to Connect and Bond with Your Customers for some tips on forging those connections.
Whether it’s a review site, a local business listing or social media, it’s critical that your company actively participate and engage with its customers. For example, respond to a good review to show your appreciation. Respond to a bad review by trying to resolve the problem. When someone asks a product question on social media, answer them.
If you need help with building your online reputation, Umbrella Local experts can help you to manage your online reputation and also to distribute your company’s information in over 70 business listings, leading directories, websites and search engines.
Contact Umbrella Local Experts for a free consultation.
Use our free tool to get your score calculated in under 60 seconds.
