Before anyone decides to buy from you, they need to have trust in your brand’s ability to make their life better with your products or services.
Building trust with your ideal customers can help you make more sales, increase brand awareness, and develop more customer loyalty.
Showing that your business is trustworthy isn’t always easy, but, if you do it correctly, you can reap a lot of benefits.
Let’s take a look at 7 techniques you can use to earn your customers’ trust and make more sales for your business.
Word-of-mouth recommendations are very powerful, and you can replicate them by providing social proof on your website.
Here, we’ll outline what kinds of social proof you should be publishing on your website to show you’re great at what you do.
This will help you to earn your customers’ trust and could lead to a lot more sales for your business.
People place a lot of trust in the reviews of other customers, as they can help to give an insight into how your products or services have made people’s lives better.
They can also give more context about the likes of delivery times and your customer service.
If you’re looking to collect reviews from previous or existing customers, it can be as simple as sending them a follow-up email after their purchase to ask if they were happy with the service you provided.
You could also regularly send out customer feedback surveys with specific questions, or collect reviews from social media, as there might be people who post positive comments on your profiles after shopping with you. Look out for them.
You’ll also want to display your customer reviews on your website to get the most out of them. Let’s look at an example of a website that has done this well.
GroomsShop specializes in presents for groomsmen, and they proudly display their customer reviews on their homepage.
They have a whole host of reviews, which are presented in a carousel.
Not only do these include positive comments from past buyers, but they also have eye-catching 5-star ratings, so people can see that this company is worth trusting, even if they’re just quickly scrolling by.
One thing you can learn from this example is that you have the freedom to display different forms of reviews on your website — in fact, we’d encourage it!
Some people might be interested in reading a few lines about your delivery times, but others might just want to see that past customers have given you five stars.
Incorporating reviews like this into your website’s design will help you to earn the trust of your prospective customers, so they’ll be more likely to spend their money with you.
Testimonials are similar to reviews, although they tend to be longer and work best for service-based businesses.
They act as a stamp of approval from previous customers and, when potential clients see positive testimonials from other people, they’ll be more encouraged to use your services because it shows that you are credible and trustworthy.
Let’s take a look at an example of a business that has done a great job of incorporating testimonials into their service pages.
Bay Property Management Group is a company that handles full-service property management for clients. And, on their Manassas location page, they have a section that showcases testimonials from their past clients.
Their Google review rating is 5 stars and they have several positive comments from various satisfied customers who mention how the company helped them save time and properly manage their homes.
These testimonials act as an assurance for prospective customers who need these services and can lead to more sales for the business.
To replicate this for your company, you can share Google reviews from your Google My Business listing and display them on your website for potential customers to see.
You can have them at the end of your homepage, or add a slider right at the top of your service page so it’s the first thing people see when they land there.
Adding a “featured on” section to your website is also a great way to display social proof. By showing prominent places where your business has been featured — like on popular blogs or online newspapers — you are not only showing credibility but also displaying expertise in your niche.
Check out how Manhattan Tech Support does this. They offer IT solutions to businesses in New York and, on their homepage, you will find a section that shows places where their work has been featured for their expertise in cybersecurity and technology issues.
They highlight websites like FinTech Weekly and Recode, which are popular blogs in the financial technology world.
Anyone looking to hire Manhattan Tech Support would be more motivated to do so if they saw the caliber of websites that they are associated with. Displaying these sites will also increase the trust customers have in their brand.
If your brand is associated with notable sites in your industry, it would do you a world of good to highlight these sites on your website.
You can use their logos or even list out the names of the organizations. It might also be beneficial to include links to their pages if the features were expert articles written by people at your company.
Your customers will want to feel listened to so, if you receive questions or your customers have concerns, you need to handle them quickly and professionally.
Even if you have a great product, terrible customer service can affect your sales and lead to you losing customers. Particularly with high ticket closing cases, where the value of the product being sold is high.
You should also invest in multiple service channels, as different people like to communicate in different ways.
For example, some customers may find phone calls most effective while others may prefer sending an email or using a live chat option.
To ensure you are offering the best customer service, try to take note of the following:
If your customers feel like you understand them, they’ll be more likely to trust you. And a way to show that you understand their concerns, needs, or pain points is by creating valuable and relevant content that answers the burning questions on their minds.
This means you have to identify the questions your customers have to create content that answers them.
To do this, you can carry out keyword research using tools such as AnswerThePublic or Ubersuggest. Keyword research is the practice of working out what kinds of queries your target audience is typing into search engines.
This can help you to ensure that you’re satisfying their needs and will boost your search engine rankings.
You can also source customer questions by paying attention to the comments in social media groups or forums like Reddit or Quora.
If you follow the conversations your customers are having, you’ll be able to pick out areas where they need more information and then create content in the form of blog posts or articles to fill those gaps.
Let’s take a look at an example of a company that is creating great content that answers their customers’ questions so you can get some inspiration for your brand.
iSpring Solutions is a software company that allows people to create quizzes, e-learning courses, or video presentations in PowerPoint. On their website, they have a blog post on how to write a course description that converts.
As a company that gives people the chance to create video tutorials, they understand the need for their customers to craft course descriptions that motivate people to buy or register for a program. So, they’ve created a post to give practical steps on how to do just that.
They also include real examples of course descriptions and outline what the authors should have done differently.
This post can answer a lot of their customers’ questions and help iSpring Solutions build more trust with its audience.
One thing you can learn from this company is the importance of using real examples when it comes to showing your audience what to do and what not to do.
You should also make sure you add practical and helpful steps to your content to help your customers take action immediately.
If you’re active on social media, your target audience will feel a stronger connection with your business and this can help to build trust.
However, running several social media accounts can be challenging, so you will definitely need a tool to manage all social media in one place and schedule posts efficiently.
If you’re not sure of how to engage with your audience on social media, these tips can help:
Now, because it can be a challenge to stay active on multiple social channels, you should leverage the use of tools that let you bulk schedule your social media posts to make sure you are consistently posting relevant content that can attract your target audience.
If you need some help in this area, SocialPilot has a great guide to the best Facebook publishing tools that will support you. And the great news is that they also work for other social media platforms as well.
Your website is the virtual storefront of your business, so it needs to give prospective customers the best possible impression of your company.
Regardless of whether you are a small startup or a multinational firm, a professional website is crucial to your company’s success.
To make sure your website comes off as professional to visitors, you want to make sure it has a clean and organized design that can give the best user experience possible.
This means your website shouldn’t be cluttered with too many elements, and it should use simple, easy-to-read fonts. Your website should also have an easy-to-use navigation.
Without this, it will be hard for visitors to move from one page to another, which might lead to them leaving your website without making a purchase.
You should make sure that your website is accessible so all people, including those with disabilities, can understand and use it, too.
You can ensure this by using appropriate alternative text for your images and making sure that your headers are clear and descriptive enough so screen readers can follow the right structure of your content.
You can read more about how to make your website accessible in this guide from DreamHost.
Another thing to focus on is the use of high-quality images of your products and services. This will help establish your professionalism, which is key to increasing the trust customers have in your brand.
And it goes without saying, but your content should also be free of any spelling or grammatical errors.
People will start to lose faith in your brand if you regularly publish content that contains a lot of errors or grammatical blunders.
You can ensure this doesn’t happen by making use of tools like Grammarly to help you proofread your content before making it live.
If you allow customers to see behind the scenes of your business, they’ll feel a stronger connection to your company and will be more inclined to trust you.
You should show your audience and customers what it’s like to work at your company or the process that goes into creating the products and services you provide.
Here are some tips on how you can create great content to show target customers behind the scenes of your business.
To provide you with some inspiration, let’s take a look at one brand that does a fantastic job of creating behind-the-scenes content that will help them earn their customers’ trust.
CoLab Software provides a program designed to help software engineers and designers collaborate better.
On their Instagram page, they have a post that tells their audience about how things are going in preparation for a new project they are launching.
They’ve used this post to build excitement and also introduce one of their developers who is currently working on the project.
It’s a great way to show a more human side to their business and build more trust with customers. To make the post more relatable, they even mentioned how Jack, the employee in the picture, has a particular fondness for drinking tea.
To replicate this for your business, you could tell your customers about new product launches or even get them excited about new features that you are adding to existing products.
If you highlight the benefits of these new features, it could even lead to more sales than expected when you launch.
If you can show customers that you’re an expert in your field, you’ll earn their trust and potentially make more sales.
You can show expertise by creating authoritative and relevant content that provides answers to some of the common questions your customers have.
Another way to let your audience know you are an expert is by highlighting your credentials or accolades on your website.
Or you could make out time to write guest posts and talk at speaking events in your field to share your knowledge.
Whatever your niche is, the best way to show you are an expert is by publishing expert content that can boost your website’s E-A-T ratings. E-A-T stands for expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness, and it’s something Google pays a lot of attention to when deciding how to rank websites on its results pages. So, making it clear you’re an expert in your field can be good for your SEO.
Now let’s take a look at an inspiring example from a brand that lets customers know they are experts in their field.
Biteable is an online video platform for creating professional videos that can be used for advertisements, commercials, or presentations. To show their expertise, they have created a comprehensive and expert guide on video marketing for their readers.
The guide outlines everything you might need to know about video marketing, from its history to statistics and the different strategies people can use to get results from their video marketing efforts.
They also include internal links to other resources that can give people more information, as well as case studies that show how they’ve helped companies achieve success with video marketing.
You can do the same for your business by creating well-detailed content that can answer all the questions your target audience has about a topic that is relevant to your business and industry, so they will see you as an expert in your niche.
People will only spend their money with you if they trust your business, so you need to put work into earning that trust.
Ways you can do this include providing social proof, offering first-class customer service, and creating relevant content that shows expertise and authority.
With these strategies, you’ll be on track to winning the loyalty of your customers and increasing sales for your business.