All good things in life take time. From growing your garden to building a house or a relationship. The basic principles which can be extracted can also be applied universally. Trust takes an era to build up and only a second to lose. Modern audiences are trained, for a lack of a better word, to filter and ignore false and misleading messages. In today’s business, honesty, being upfront and brief, get you noticed and respected. By respecting people’s time, you get a chance to be part of their life. And the best moment to start is right now!
Table of Contents
1. Consistency
We’ve all heard the phrase “Day in, day out.” We don’t wish to discourage or bring your spirit down but adapting this to your daily practice is how you get noticed. Producing quality content regularly lays the foundation for your future success. Once you’ve found what works, what type of content people respond to and found your niche, it’s up to you to produce consistent products for it.
While it may sound like tedium, it’s imperative to keep your marketing techniques up to the standards you’ve set. Your customers easily adapt to better content and products, which you are responsible to churn out regularly. Going below what you’ve set for standard only undermines your entire effort so far, which shows you how important consistency is.
2. Brand presence
Try to name three car brands or soda drinks. That’s the kind of power and recognisability every business on this planet craves. Associating your brand with quality products or services is how you get inside your customer’s heads and stay there. When people look at your brand, you want them to think of certainty, quality and respect towards customers.
By reaching out to a branding agency you could get a head start. But there is also a plan B. Establishing your presence on different media and doing offline presentations. Yes, everything is online today, and your business needs to exist somewhere on the web. By finding the right platform, or a few more but not too much you can establish your digital foothold.
But, by going out in the world and doing real, physical promotions, presentations or community work, people will notice what your brand stands for. Just like consistency, brand building takes time and effort, consistent mind you, but the results can hardly be measured in money.
3. Reputation thru association
Each beginning can be a rough one since you have to compete with well-established brands with strong customer bases. We all need a little push from time to time, and all is fair in love, war and modern marketing practices. By doing extensive and careful research, and you need to be extremely careful with your research, you can find and reach out to influencers in your desired field. Influencers have a well-established presence, audience and brand.
As such, they are often highly sought experts whose opinions on any product or service serve as the de-facto standard. When you reach out and collaborate with influencers, you are effectively renting out their customer base, and reputation. Your products, or services, become instantly presented to a wider audience by a reputable influencer. Which is a great head start or a boost to both sales, and securing a reputable threshold in the market.
But again, we must advise caution when collaborating with influencers. Once you link your product or service to them, people associate the influencer’s actions with your brand. Good and bad. And as much as the good actions go towards your benefit, any bad actions from the influencer can hurt you greatly.
4. Building a customer base
It’s not anything new, because we all know each business needs a strong customer base. A solid customer base provides the foundation for your future operations. Think of a customer base as a business asset that can be put in a perpetual mobile after a certain point. When enough people (and what “enough” differentiates from field to field) start talking about your brand and content, all you have to do, is keep the ball rolling.
The cycle goes something like this: you create quality content that brings in more audiences, they respond to your content, and then you interact with them. Google loves such interchangeable actions coupled which produce top ranking and quality SEO results. Such results will put you on the first page of Google, and the cycle can begin anew. Treating your audience as a living organism will put you in the correct mindset.
People love attention, and any company that gives them deserved recognition, also builds trust. Trust leads to customers valuing, believing and trusting your product and services. But more importantly, trusting your word of honour.
5. Hire a good crew
Quality results require quality people to create them. In this item, we take a step back from directly building your reputation and trust with customers and take a look inward towards your company. No company can expect good results from anything we mention if they don’t have the best in their respective fields.
Finding and retaining good employees is equally important as finding and nurturing your customer base. When you have a good team on your side and are on the same page, you can start building your brand and reputation. Paying, training and respecting your workers go towards higher employee retention, which is connected to consistency in your work. People love certainty, and once you accustom them to the certain of your work, you still need the same people that produced it.
One employee may better resonate with your core goals and audience. Once that person is gone, you may be able to replace them, but that will get noticed, and people don’t want turmoil. Build trust inside your business, and it will reflect outward.
6. Bring proof of concept
Why should anyone take your word for it? Automatically trusting everything you say comes later, once you are well-established in the branch. But until then, you need the materials and social proof that your claims are legitimate. These can be case studies, peer reviews, expert claims, testimonies, and anything else you can think of that will put some weight on your claim.
When there is no proof any potential customer can easily dismiss your articles. Putting links that add reliability to your claim also produces added value. People want good and accurate info, so when you link several sources of information within your article, you are creating something of value.
And Google loves to bring value to everyone. Which means that you are also practicing good SEO techniques. Your article can build trust, appear reliable and be on the first page with more links that add to your claim. When you connect with proof, you become one in the process.
7. Tidy up your site
One more in-house item to check is your site performance. Reliability and trust can hardly form when you have a non-functional site with bad links, broken pieces and shoddy design. Reliability and trust come with quality in all forms. You can have the best content in the world, but if it is hidden under a bloat and non-functioning site, no one will see it or believe it. First impressions matter in the digital world, as well as in the real one.
Make sure your servers have consistent uptime, and that there are no dead links or unfinished pages. Optimising your site performance is also a priority because when your page takes a minute to load, that’s a minute too long. You only get two or three seconds before you lose your potential customer forever. If this sounds harsh, that is because it is. Diligent work will make sure you have nothing to worry about.
8. Google Business is good, more is better
In the same way, a shady person brings unease because you think he is hiding information or is sketchy, and so too, are businesses that are nowhere to be found. Google Business account is a step in the right direction, but why stop there? You need to establish credibility and make people feel comfortable interacting and buying from you.
Using social platforms to build trust comes thru reviews, comments and being active. An active business is a healthy and real one, just like a healthy human. People frown upon automation, bot replies or getting ignored when they try to reach out. Taking that extra step and interacting with your customers, showing them the different ways, they can reach you and share their opinions about your content and products, help build trust and opens up the doors to communication.
There is no time like today to get started with change. A fresh start, one that is aimed towards a brighter future, starts with your first piece of content. Step by step, day by day and you will see users responding to your efforts. People notice companies that care and being genuine requires no effort. But it does bring incredible results that add fuel to that entrepreneurial flame! A flame that will shine brighter than others, and attract your future, lonely customer base. One trusty link at a time.
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