Building Trust with Marketing Strategies

By Robert Middleton - Action Plan Marketing

Last week I outlined the three main marketing activities to attract new clients:

1. Marketing Message
2. Marketing Strategies
3. Selling Process

As I think I may have done marketing messages to death in this eZine, I'll be focusing on Marketing Strategies in several upcoming More Clients.

A Marketing Strategy is an activity that gets the favorable attention of an ideal client for your service and builds enough trust that they will want to explore doing business with you.

Remember, a Marketing Strategy doesn't sell. Only the Sales Process can do that, but it can prepare the ground by building that trust.

One of the biggest areas of confusion in marketing is which marketing strategy to use and in what order. This is solved by this chart on Building Trust Through Marketing Strategies:

There are four primary ways to build trust that are represented in the first column: Visibility, Credibility, Intimacy and Reliability.

And then for each of these categories, certain marketing strategies are employed. You want to implement one or more marketing strategies for each of these categories. This is not what is usually called the "marketing mix," which is only a random implementation of various strategies.

It's really a system designed to build trust step-by-step. Let's look at these categories one at a time.

Visibility - The primary marketing vehicle here is written (and graphic) materials. This forms the foundation of your marketing as it simply gets your name and message in front of your ideal clients on a consistent basis.

This includes your web site, blog, ezine, articles, and social media such as Twitter. It also includes things written about you (P.R) and even advertising.

Most professional services businesses should do a little of all of these. The hub is your web site which is connected to your blog. More active outreach is your eZine, Twitter and articles posted online.

Often this is as far as Independent Professionals go. Visibility starts to build trust, but not completely. Just think, do you buy a product or service after seeing an advertisement or someone's Twitter tweets only a few times? Of course not.

And the solution isn't to do more and more of this. The solution is to move to the next stage of building trust, by increasing Credibility and that's through presentations.

Crediblity - A presentation is any opportunity you have to communicate your ideas or the value of your service to a group, in an audio and/or visual format. Talks, intro workshops, keynotes, teleclasses, webinars, podcasts, CDs and video all build your credibility.

But it's also hard to do this if you don't have the feeder mechanism of an eZine, blog or social media.

The combination of Visibility through written materials and Credibility through presentations is often enough to get an ideal client into a selling conversation. But it often takes an additional step that is more personal.

Intimacy - This is the big "X Factor" in building trust. When you meet and connect with someone in person, you convey things that can't be communicated through the written word or through presentations.

You've seen this happen hundreds of times. You meet someone and they tell you about their services. Their enthusiasm, knowledge and commitment build almost immediate trust.

This is why all Independent Professionals should also take advantage of opportunities to network, meet with prospects face-to-face, follow-up with teleclass participants by phone, attend conferences, brainstorm and mastermind, etc.

When you implement all three marketing strategies you create Marketing Synergy. The result of marketing synergy is Knowing/Liking/Trusting. When you are at that point, it is relatively easy to set up selling conversations with ideal clients.

There is one last step that may be the most important of all. It's actually the one that the majority of Independent Professionals rely on more than any other. This is Reliability, which is conveyed only by working directly with a client.

Your efforts to provide quality, consistent work, to keep your word, to follow up as promised and to communicate clearly and confidently can also be seen as marketing strategies.

After all, it's Reliability more than anything else that is responsible for clients referring new business to you. No matter how well you do with the first three, you can undermine all of those efforts if your degree of performance falls short.

In the next few weeks, I'll discuss specific marketing strategies in all four of these categories.

Thanks to Mark Slatin of www.truecolorsconsulting.com for his trust model and for being the inspiration for today's eZine.

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The More Clients Bottom Line: When you think of marketing strategies, you need to remember that their ultimate purpose is to build trust. These marketing strategies can be broken down into four distinct categories that build this trust step-by-step.

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Which category of marketing strategies do you need to work at implementing next? Please share on the More Clients Blog. Just click on the Comments link below.

Comments

[Anders Online Marketing]

I am working with marketing in Denmark and is searching for inspiration in the digital world.

Thanks for inspiration.

[Secured Loans]

Your grib (for me) explains things better than your text. More visual.

[Kristin Abele]

Robert,

I wanted to congratulate you on the selection of your post "Building Trust with Marketing Strategies" in this month's Carnival of Trust, hosted by Scot Herrick.

The Carnival of Trust is held monthly and highlights the top blog posts touching on the subject of trust in business, politics and society. We think you have tapped into a very real concept here and think it helped to make this month's Carnival great.

Best,
Kristin Abele
www.trustedadvisor.com/trustmatters

[Mark Slatin]

Thanks for expanding on our "expert interview" conversation and for giving me props. The message of trust building can NOT be overstated.

Food for thought: the trust equation includes a denominator of self-orientation - how the client perceives us, either other-focused or self-focused; there's an inverse correlation to trustworthiness-the more they think our motives are self-serving, the less they trust us.

When we attach to our agenda, when we dominate the talking, when we move to quickly to solution - we come across with a high self-orientation.

According to the trust equation's author, Charles H. Green, self-orientation is the most powerful of the four components (the others are credibility, reliability, and intimacy).

[Maria Pinochet]

Robert,
In answer to your question, I am working on “credibility”. I am just beginning to learn about the technology that I can use to produce podcasts and YouTube materials and other multi-media materials.
Thanks for asking and developing such easy-to-use tools.

[Dennis]

Like the structure. I would like to add one more thought: Inimitability? (:-))

But being unique and standing for something is a way of stating a belief. If people understand what you believei in and if they see that you believe in something, I think it helps build trust.

It is harder to trust someone who is simply part of the flock. (More than visibility - but being unique.)