Marketing Behaviors that Build Trust

As we strive to become customer centric, there's a lot said about establishing trust via your marketing efforts. But, what does that really mean? Can you define the steps or principles your company is applying to this effort to build trust with your potential buyers?

I was reading a post over at Anecdote that discusses a small experiment they did about trust building behaviors. I found it interesting and have taken a stab at extrapolating it to B2B content marketing strategy.

The Top 5 Trust-building behaviors from their survey results:

1. Keeping the promises you make. This one translates directly, whether company or person-to-person. In a marketing sense, this means you need to pay attention to, and deliver on, the expectations your content and communications set with your prospects. If you promise a monthly newsletter, deliver. If you promise when they click on the link in your email that they'll learn how to solve problem A, then make sure you tell them.


2. Open and honest intentions. This behavior translates to authenticity and transparency in our marketing behavior. It's also a Catch Factor. Be sure to consider how your prospects will interpret your intentions. Clarity is critical here. It doesn't matter if you think your intentions are open and honest. Do your prospects and customers agree? When you send them an offer of information they'll find valuable, do you give it to them or ask them to jump through hoops to get it? Or have a salesperson call when all they've done is download a white paper?


3. Giving credit. What occurred to me here is applying this one to success stories. Instead of writing about the problem and how your company performed a miracle to get the customer to success, why not include some insights about great ideas that your customers contributed to the project that helped achieve that outcome? Think about the impact that would make for your prospects trying to figure out how the journey of the project might impact them.


4. Be generous with what you know. This behavior translates directly to sharing education and expertise information that adds value to the dialog and interactions you establish with prospects. Give them information that goes beyond the feeds and speeds of your products. Help them think strategically. 


5. Support during tough times. Given the state of the current economy, embracing this behavior provides a big opportunity for marketers. Helping your prospects see a path through the downturn and back to more successful times can go a long way toward building rapport needed to create future customers.

These seem pretty intuitive and related to the "treat others as you would have them treat you" doctrine. What surprised me the most was that doing consistently good work fell at the bottom of the chart. That's one that companies cannot afford to slide on.

But the upshot is that building trust isn't rocket science. Take the principles that matter on a personal level and apply them to every communication and content resource you develop. The better you know your customers, the better your focus will become--and the more trust you'll build. The thing I see companies struggle with the most is flipping their perspective to put themselves in their customer's shoes.

Perhaps the trick is in scaling it down to a personal level instead of thinking of your leads as a bunch of other companies in one clump. Which is why personas and segmentation come in handy...well, you know, since everyone is not the same.