How to engage and win customer trust

At Audienz, we are all knee-deep into digital marketing, and have learned a lot of new things with each campaign. We’ve taken part in several automated thru-partner digital marketing campaigns and delved into some of our own trials and tactics, so we can experience first hand what works and what doesn’t. The common challenge we see businesses both large and small face—how do you get in front of more leads with a high propensity and willingness to buy?

Technology is making it easier for businesses to access and analyze massive amounts of data, making exposure to the right leads an improvement. But how does a business use that technology to engage with leads? We get so caught up in lead generating tactics and numbers that we lose sight of how our approach may have been flawed from the start.

Online users are very skeptical when businesses they’ve never heard of try to connect with them. They’re more intrigued about how you got their information than what you’re trying to sell. Can you blame them? Who isn’t creeped out when they see big brother-like ads targeting them based on recent searches? User activity and information is covertly being tracked, analyzed, and recorded whenever they’re viewing websites or accessing apps. These security concerns are only amplified when we hear about such cases as the recent one where the data of more than 50 million Facebook users was breached by being passed to a third party (Cambridge Analytica) without their consent.

Internet users just don’t feel secure, which is why Canada has strict privacy laws and the European Union is implementing the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) that goes into effect today, May 25th, 2018. Businesses are trying to clean up their act, not only for compliance, but also to win back trust, which is the basis of any lead conversion you can expect to get.

So, hit reset. Shift your focus from lead hits to actual results. Think, “What can I do to earn the trust of someone that isn’t familiar with my business?” Here are a few tips—

• 1. Assess your engagement style
     Let leads show interest first. Try to avoid contacting someone you have no relationship with. At that point, you’ve invaded their privacy and leads will catalog you as spam and automatically want to shut you out. Be personal. Customers don’t want to talk with a sales department, they want to talk to people that genuinely care about what their needs are and want to find a solution for their problem.
• 2. Provide evidence
     Eliminate the mystery. Share case studies and show who you are and what you do. You can embellish what you offer and make it sound like a very attractive choice, but if you don’t have actual results people can dig into and relate to, it makes it hard for them to want to invest time and energy into learning more. They’ll pass you up for a business that is more transparent. Get referrals. Nothing better than seeing or hearing firsthand how your offering made a difference for someone. That means more than all the catchy captions on a website or ad that you can muster.

     Offer a sample of your work. This can be knowledge-sharing with no strings attached, or a service at a free or reduced rate. Experiencing your product or what it’s like working with you can be enough to make someone a believer.

• 3. Establish a trustworthy identity
     People trust brands. They have history, expertise, differentiation, and a reputation to uphold. How you appear says a lot about how put together you are as a company and how well thought out your services really are. Take some time to invest in how you are perceived and it will pay off.

  There are a wealth of tactics and things to consider in marketing outreach campaigns, just ensure you’re starting off on the right foot so your message isn’t DOA.

  For additional tips to help you engage, check out:

  Breakthrough account-based marketing
  Are you connecting with your customers
  5 keys to promoting your brand
  Buddy up to amplify your reach