Marketing isn’t just about getting your product or service into the client’s hands, and there's one more vital thing.

trust

 

Being well entrenched in the Digital/Internet Revolution we are in today, one thing has become more important and paramount than ever before in history... TRUST. The other name for this period of time we are in is "The Customer Revolution"... and for the same reasons. If your customers don't trust you, you are at high risk of extinction in the not too distant future.

TRUST has become the ultimate prize for businesses today. If your customers trust you, they are choosing to work with you over anyone else in your industry... even if they have to pay a higher price. And one of the biggest reasons Trust is so critical to people is because of TIME. As I have talked about in several earlier posts, Time is the most valuable asset for people today (according to Forrester Research and others). People don't feel they have enough of it and they can't afford to waste it. Those that can help them keep more of their time are more trusted and become the winners in the new Revolution.

If your customers Trust you, they don't have to spend the time searching around and checking out other options... they can simply buy from you. And they are proving this by their willingness to pay more for the same products/services. This is a HUGE COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE for businesses today.

But how do you create more trust with your customers?

The underlying core of this answer is very simple... yet many businesses seem to ignore this simple message. The underlying foundation of Trust is PROMISES MADE = PROMISES KEPT. While this is an easy concept to grasp and understand, it appears to be an incredibly difficult formula to execute on a consistent basis throughout one's business. I refer to this often as playing the "Whack-a-Mole" game... where you have a bunch of holes in front of you and a different mole pops up randomly out of each hole... when you hit one, another one pops up. This is the same situation many companies face on a daily basis... having several things under control but another one pops up for you to deal with.

This isn't any more evident than in the area of CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE. One of the biggest challenges businesses face today is delivering a CONSISTENT AND REPEATABLE customer experience. Look at your own business and you can see exactly what I am talking about. There are areas that seem to be doing OK and areas that area a disaster when it comes to delivering an awesome, incredible, amazing experience. I can almost guarantee you that there isn't consistency in your customer experience throughout your company... and if there is, you are in a very small minority today.

The CUSTOMER JOURNEY is the collection of customer experiences throughout your company... all working together to deliver an "overall experience" to your customers. The Journey is the "sum of all experiences" you offer to your customers. This includes the experience from your call center, sales, accounting, shipping, marketing, distribution, and every other area of your business. The customer touches each of these areas to some degree at one point or another throughout their overall experience with you when purchasing and/or using your products/services.

So here's the big problem for the majority of companies and why TRUST becomes an issue.

There are usually areas in your business that do better than others when delivering a customer experience. Some might knock it out of the park where others cause great pain for your customers. A good example of this is the Sales group vs. the Accounting group. The Sales department is usually the most "customer centric" in how they treat their customers... it is usually required as part of their role. Accounting, on the other hand, probably doesn't even have it as part of their job description/processes. Their role is to get the bills out, pay the invoices, and make sure all the money is accounted for within the company. Providing an awesome and incredible experience to the customer when they call isn't probably high on their list even though it should be. Regardless of how they treat the customer, they are part of the CUSTOMER JOURNEY inside your company.

When you deliver an awesome and incredible and remarkable CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE... demonstrating how much you care about helping your customers... you build TRUST. When you don't deliver this level of an experience you erode the trust you have with your customer or don't establish any if it is the first interaction.

And when you make PROMISES to your customers through your marketing and advertising, in addition to what your employees tell your customers... and you don't keep them... you lose/erode TRUST. When this happens over and over, your customers lose TRUST IN EVERYTHING YOU DO... not just the few areas that are causing the issue. To the customer, it is a JOURNEY OF TRUST.

Customers don't segregate out the departments in your business... they view their entire experience as a Journey. When different departments don't deliver this incredible experience and don't keep their promises the customer simply says, "They promise things they can't or won't deliver... I don't trust them or anything they say or do." This is even the case when you have one or two departments delivering a experience. The ones that aren't delivering this experience are the ones that bring the company down to the lowest common denominator... a low level of trust for the entire Customer Journey.

If you want to INCREASE THE TRUST OF YOUR COMPANY, YOU HAVE TO DELIVER ON YOUR PROMISES AND DELIVER AN AWESOME CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE THROUGHOUT THE COMPANY. This is the core behind building trust with your customers.

Change the JOURNEY to one where every area of the company is honoring and delivering the promises they make and give your customers a WOW Customer Experience and you will change the level of TRUST. The concept is simple... the execution isn't. If it was, everyone would be doing it. The research wouldn't be telling us that customers don't feel they get an awesome experience. The customer is telling us loud and clear what the answer is to EARNING THEIR TRUST... the question is whether or not we will listen and change our CUSTOMER JOURNEY to one that creates TRUST rather than erodes it.

I would encourage every leader to take inventory of their company's customer experience and how consistently they are delivering on the Promises the employees are making every day. If the experience isn't awesome and you see promises being made that can't be delivered, you have your answer as to how much your customers really trust your organization. This is one of the most valuable "audits" of an organization a leadership team can do to truly understand the level of trust they have with their customers. Give me a call if you have any questions and I would be happy to steer you in the right direction.

Author:  Blaine Millet

If you found this helpful, please share it with your friends so they can also learn from the material. It not only means a lot to me but it helps other people see the story. And if this resonated with you, please visit my http://www.WOM10.com site and read more posts like this one.
We used to get excited about moving our companies from being GOOD to being GREAT... but today, being GREAT isn't good enough... it's a commodity. Today, if you aren't on a path to move your company from being GREAT to being REMARKABLE and MEMORABLE, you don't get talked about.
My PASSION and MISSION is to help INSPIRE, GUIDE, and HELP you move your company from being GREAT to being REMARKABLE... and create Word-of-Mouth on STEROIDS so you get talked about... a lot.
I have a model that helps get you to REMARKABLE. In the core of the model is creating unbelievably incredible amazing and awesome Customer Experiences... you can learn about it in my book, "Creating and Delivering Totally Awesome Customer Experiences." With this as a foundation, you are well on your way to being REMARKABLE.
I get to SPEAK about it, WRITE/BLOG about it, and HELP leaders understand it, aspire to it, and achieve it. There are four key components to help get you to being REMARKABLE... getting talked about in the market... and ultimately letting your CUSTOMERS DO YOUR MARKETING FOR YOU.
Are you ready to become REMARKABLE? Shoot me a message... we'll have an awesome conversation!

 

1. Size matters.

The purpose of a headline or subhead is to seize the reader's attention. Larger and bolder heads generally seize attention better than smaller, lighter ones.

2. Dazzle 'em with color.

The judicious use of color can add big impact to your headlines and other attention-getting copy. Entire libraries of books have been written on color psychology. In a nutshell, most say that cold colors - blues and pastels, for example - tend to relax us. Hotter colors - highly saturated oranges, reds, and earth tones - warm us up.

3. Look him in the eye.

Since we were kids, we've been taught to look at people who are talking to us. And we've been taught that people who do not look us in the eye are not to be trusted. Including a photo of a person talking to your reader - and putting the headline in that person's voice - is a powerful way to seize a prospect's attention.

4. Less is more.

Too many graphic devices will only serve to confuse the eye. When everything is emphasized, nothing stands out. Create a focal point - the main headline - and drive the reader's eye to it.

- Clayton Makepeace

[ Clayton Makepeace offers help in reaping maximum profits through the Internet, direct mail, and print advertising every week in his e-zine The Total Package. Learn his surprising secrets that have doubled and quadrupled his clients' profits in his Quick-start copywriting system.]

When most self-employed professionals think of marketing, they think of "hype." And they believe that it's impossible to market themselves without some kind of hype. They think they must stretch the truth or exaggerate the results they produce for their clients. And this is simply distasteful, if not unethical.

No wonder most self-employed professionals avoid marketing! 

But here's the good news: You CAN attract clients without hype. You can market yourself with both dignity and integrity. And the even better news is that this kind of marketing is more effective in attracting the kind of clients you want to work with. It results in less resistance, better client relationships, and more enthusiastic word-of-mouth.

Robert Middleton will show you how you can attract more of your ideal clients in this webinar.

You will learn:

How to turn marketing into a step-by-step game that you can win by learning the rules and implementing commonsense actions.

How to develop the right marketing mindset that will help you attract the ideal clients who pay you well and who are great to work with. 

How to develp marketing messages and materials that get the immediate attention and response from your ideal clients.
How to package your services with extra value so that your prospects will instantly see how your services will benefit them.
How to implement the most effective marketing strategy to attract your ideal clients. No other strategy works more effectively.

In 90 minutes he will outline these essential parts of his Action Plan Marketing system for attracting more of your ideal clients that will give you a solid foundation for learning, and ultimately mastering, your marketing.

 

Learn more about this free teleclass here =>   http://bit.ly/Ym2zxb

Whether you are a professional in a solo-practice or own a small business, chances are you feel overwhelmed when it comes to marketing. While you may be an expert in your field, consistently attracting new clients probably isn’t one of your strengths.
Here is just a short list of "marketing culprits" that are likely keeping your business from reaching its full potential: => http://bit.ly/bZDdDa

 From Knowledge @ Wharton

Suppose you work at an organization -- like a public radio station or library -- that offers a free service of value to society, such as quality radio programming or the ability to borrow books at no cost. And suppose you decide to launch a fund-raising drive to help cover your organization's operating expenses. How would you structure that drive? Are there steps you could take -- besides offering gifts or other incentives -- to increase the amount of money that individual donors commit?

 

Wharton operations and information management professor Rachel Croson and Jen Shang, a PhD student formerly at the University of Pennsylvania and now at Indiana University, set out to answer this question by examining the influence of social information on contribution behavior. Their specific goal was to find out whether individual donors to a public radio station will give more money if they are told the amount of another donor's contribution. Their paper is entitled, "Field Experiments in Charitable Contributions: The Impact of Social Influence on the Voluntary Provision of Public Goods."

 

The researchers chose public radio as a representative example of an institution where individuals benefit from a service but are not required to contribute to it; at the same time, the community is better off as a whole when the service is funded. Other examples of "positive externalities" include environmental groups, which enable others to enjoy the benefit of cleaner air without themselves making any donation; or town watch committees, where the whole community benefits from reduced crime, including those who don't contribute time or money to the town watch effort.

 

Croson notes that social information affects behavior in a variety of economic situations, such as labor markets (when you are trying to decide what a reasonable wage is, you look at what other people earn) and investing (when making decisions about how to allocate your portfolio, you look at what other people with similar assets have done). Her research adds to this area, she says, by "providing evidence that social influence [in this case, data about what another person has donated to the radio station] has an impact on charitable contributions as well."

 

The 'Right' Contribution

Croson and Shang worked with a public radio station that has three on-air fund drives per year during which DJs and volunteers ask for donations and propose particular contribution levels in amounts ranging from $50 for basic membership on up to $2,500. According to Croson, research suggests that individuals are more likely to be influenced by social information when the situation is seen as "ambiguous" -- i.e., there is no obvious or correct answer -- and when the information received is seen as "relevant or appropriate." The public radio station experiment meets these criteria. Â

 

First, "the range of recommended contribution levels means that callers have relatively little idea of what the 'right' contribution might be," says Croson. "It's not entirely clear how much they should donate. Pure self-interest says zero. But people don't want to do that. They want to do the right thing, whatever that is."

 

Second, the station "could tell you how much it thinks you should give. But that's probably not appropriate. Or a volunteer could say, 'Bill Gates gave us $10 million.' That's not relevant. So in order for this information to have an impact on my behavior it should be relevant to me, and it should be appropriate," Croson says.

 

In their experiment, Croson and Shang analyzed past contribution data from the station and focused on three levels -- donations of $75 (the 50th percentile, meaning half the donations were above that and half below), $180 (the 85th percentile, meaning 15% of the donations were above that amount and 85% were below) and $300 (the 90th percentile; 10% of the donations were above that amount and 90% were below).

 

Once a person called into the station and indicated he or she wanted to make a donation, the volunteers manning the phones were told to say: "Are you a new member or a renewing member?" Once the donor answered, some donors were then told by the volunteer that: "We had another member" who contributed $75 (or $180 or $300; these amounts were randomly assigned) -- or the donors were told nothing (thereby constituting the control group.) In both cases, the volunteer then said: "How much would you like to pledge today?" No deception was used in this experiment; there had indeed been members who had contributed these amounts on the first day of the fund drive.

 

The question the researchers wanted to answer was whether those donors who were told how much another donor had given were more likely to pledge a higher amount than donors who were not given this information. During the length of the experiment, 538 donors called the station.

 

"Our primary result is that social information can influence contributions," the researchers write. Those members who were told that another donor had contributed $300 gave an average contribution of $119.70 while those in the same group who were not told about the other donor's contribution (the control group) gave $106.72. This $13 difference "would translate into a 12% increase in revenue for the station had all callers been offered the $300 social information," the researchers note.

 

In discussing the long-term impact of this strategy, one concern is whether the increased contributions come at a cost. "Do higher contributions this year crowd out future contributions from these donors?" the researchers ask. The answer is no. They examined the renewal rate and the amount the donors contributed in the subsequent year, and found that the renewal rate is higher when donors are given the social information than when the donors are not given this information (the increase was 12%). "We can conclude that providing social information significantly increases the renewal rate," the researchers write. In addition, the contribution amount one year later is higher in the social information conditions (ranging from $93.97 to $121.13) than in the control condition ($86.11)

 

The $300 figure given out to donors was especially influential, the researchers found, leading to a higher probability of contributing one year in the future (31.9% vs. 12.3% in the control group) and a higher amount contributed ($93.97 vs. $86.11).  Multiplying these together yields higher expected contributions ($29.95 in the $300 condition vs. $10.62 in the control condition).

 

The researchers conclude, based on this experiment, that social information has the potential to "influence real-world decisions in the voluntary contribution to public goods. Providing social information significantly increased contributions. The size and significance of these effects varied, with the most effective social information level representing the 90th percentile of the distribution of contributions. In addition, the increase in contributions due to social influence does not crowd out future contributions. In fact, it generates higher expected revenue than the control condition."

 

Same Sex Donors

One natural question arises: If the $300 social information increases contributions, wouldn't higher amounts work better? Croson and Shang investigated this "boundary condition" for the influence of social information. "The social influence research suggests that individuals conform only to relevant norms. A contribution that is too high, such as Gates' $10 million, might easily be seen as irrelevant or inappropriate." The researchers used only renewing donors calling into the station and compared social information of $600 (which had previously been demonstrated as effective) with social information of $1,000, the 99th percentile of contributions.

 

The experiment was conducted in the same public radio station and involved 280 renewing donors. The results: The $600 condition produced higher contributions than the $1,000 condition ($172 in the $600 condition and $140 in the $1,000 condition). These findings "support the social conformity explanation for the influence of social information rather than an alternative cognitive reference-point explanation," the researchers say. In other words, the boundary effect suggests that using the $1,000 "anchor" did not increase donations.  Instead, contributions increased because of the appropriateness of the number offered.

 

Aware that their results could be affected by the way the experiments were set up -- using the telephone, for example -- the two researchers participated in a renewal campaign by mail, and found that donors are influenced by social information presented in that setting as well.

 

Croson and Shang cite other research this year showing that callers who were told that another donor was the same sex (as they) gave significantly more than callers who were told that another donor was the opposite sex -- i.e., women give more if they know other women are giving more. "This result is again consistent with the social conformity story. If another person like me gave a particular amount, then it is more likely to be relevant or appropriate than if another person unlike me gave that amount," the researchers write.

 

The authors, in their two field experiments, demonstrate that social information influences contributions, with information drawn from the 90th to 95th percentile of contributions being the most effective. Lower social information has little or no influence, while higher social information (the 99th percentile) actually decreases the level of contribution. "Our research provides a deeper understanding of what motivates individuals to contribute to the funding of public goods and other charitable organizations," says Croson. It is also "a first step in understanding where social influence is likely to be an important factor to consider in our attempts to improve predictions and explanations of economic behavior."

Whether you are a professional in a solo-practice or own a small business, chances are you feel overwhelmed when it comes to marketing. While you may be an expert in your field, consistently attracting new clients probably isn’t one of your strengths.

Here is just a short list of "marketing culprits" that are likely keeping your business from reaching its full potential:

Unclear Target Market. It absolutely makes my marketing blood boil when I hear "our service can help everyone". How on Earth do you find everyone?
Confusing, Self-Centered Marketing Message. Since the early 1900 marketing geniuses like Claude Hopkins have been telling us that shouting "we are the best, come buy from us" doesn't work - no matter how loud you scream! Amazingly, over 90% of all marketing materials out there are doing exactly that!
'Hop-And-Drop' Approach. Any worthwhile skill takes practice. Yet most small business owners abandon each marketing tactic after just one try, without giving themselves a chance to get good at it. It's like a running rabbit - switching direction with every hop!
On and off approach. Spending a lot of time and effort on marketing when the business is slow, but then giving up on almost all promotional activities when business gains momentum!
Not Preaching To The Choir. Most businesses make the mistake of chasing new markets all the time instead of maximizing profits using their existing database of current and prospective clients.

If you can put a "yes, guilty as charged" checkmark next to any of those statements, chances are you are not profiting from your business as much as you could. To help unleash the extra profits currently hidden in your business or practice here is a simple Five Step Marketing Model.

Initially he was angry...
He just received a $500 bill from a plumber and the plumber was in his home for less than 10 minutes.
That's when he questioned the plumber...
"How can you charge $500 for less than 10 minutes of work when all you did was bang a couple pipes?"
The plumber's response was simple...
"Well sir, it's $5 for the 10 minutes I was here and $495 for knowing exactly where to bang the pipe!"
The lesson is simple...
The difference between failure and success is sometimes very small.
However, knowing exactly what to tweak can be the difference between making a few hundred dollars or a few thousand dollars.
Here's a few real-world examples:
When you click that link, you'll find a detailed video presentation where you'll hear how a few simple (but very powerful) persuasion techniques can very quickly translate into thousands of extra sales.
Little tweaks... big returns.
It's about knowing "what" to tweak in your sales presentation and how to tweak it to get the absolute best result.
Some of the stories you'll hear about are fascinating...
All they did was tweak a few minor things but the results were dramatic...
One person went from selling zero one week to $82,000 the next.
Another person averaged over $250,000 from each of his next 5 presentations.
One student did over $500,000 in one of his very next sales presentations using these "tweaks".
Please understand something...
These aren't major changes to the content of their presentation.
They are subtle selling techniques that have an enormous difference to your bottom line.
In fact, after this training, countless students  are now averaging over 20% in their closing ratio.
If you have ever wanted to sell more of your products and services then you need to go watch this video as soon as possible.
I know you'll enjoy it.
Take care.
P.S  Click on the link below right now, because the seminar offer expires soon.

with Ed Primeau and Ben Potter

We’ve hit “The Video Revolution” with millions of new videos appearing on the Internet every day. One colleague’s YouTube video drew nearly 100,000 viewers within 3 weeks of posting, resulting in thousands of book, DVD, and speech sales. How can you similarly create a quality video that is watched and passed on to your target market — with no cost of distribution?

Your video has to stand out from your competitors’. You have to provide high value. So, what can make your video unique? How do you create and utilize video in ways that will bring you more business? Where can you place your video (besides YouTube) to bring you customers?

Ed and Ben of Primeau Productions, Inc, will share their success on how to create high-quality video and properly distribute it for maximum exposure.

You will learn:
• What goes into a great video these days
• How to begin a video-casting series
• How to make your videos interactive, engaging, and profitable using annotations
• What are some of the many networks you can post your video on
• When to use video clips and when to use your "demo"
• What software programs to use to create video
• How to track the success of your video
• How to get your video seen by millions

Get all the details here

Zern Liew writes

The seven deadly sins were designed as a guide to keeping on the straight and narrow. But sinning can be constructive too – especially in business!

And there they all are, the whole seven - each one related to your business - a great, fun read.