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Moving communication campaigns into action |
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The benefits of building trust and credibility with potential customers Here is a back issue of Marketing Booster, the email newsletter that Richard Groom writes and sends free every fortnight to subscribers. You can subscribe here or read over 60 back issues using the back issues index page. I recently ran a training course for customer magazine editors and writers that was fully booked. I learned (or rather re-learned) a lot from my experience of marketing the course. There was one lesson in particular that I want to share with you. I used three different ways to market the course: 1. A mass postal mailing to marketing professionals. Many of these were in my target audience, ie marketing people living within an hour of the training venue. But few of them would have heard of my business before the mailing. 2. Emails to Marketing Booster subscribers via a special email and small items in Marketing Booster itself. I estimate that only a quarter of these people live within easy reach of the training venue. 3. A postal mailing to a small number of local marketing people who have attended one of my 'taster' seminars in the past 18 months. The mass mailing reached three times as many people as the other methods. So you'd expect it to generate three times as many bookings, right? Wrong. ALL of the bookings came from the last two marketing methods. In other words, 100 per cent of bookings came from just 30 per cent of my marketing activity. And none of the bookings came from the 80 percent of my marketing budget that I spent on the mass mailings. The lesson is clear: because I had already built trust and credibility with people who I contacted via the last two methods, they were much more likely to respond. It's a longer-term strategy than some people are used to, but just imagine this scenario: * Over the next few months you work hard to build trust and credibility with prospective customers. Then you run a promotion targeted at these people and experience a much better response rate than you are used to. Sounds good, doesn't it? But how do you do it? Here are five ways: 1. By coincidence, it is the task of customer magazines (the subject of last week's training course) to build trust and credibility. A customer magazine has the added advantage of giving you a ready-made reason to keep in regular contact with customers and others. 2. Public relations is another of the best ways to build credibility. Readers perceive 'third party' coverage of an organisation as being unbiased. The public relations banner is of course quite broad, so doing some reading on possible choices might be worthwhile if you haven't considered it for a while. 3. One of the simplest ways to build trust and credibility is with product demonstrations and free samples. If you are in a business-to-business sector then what scope is there for running seminars to share your organisation's expertise with potential customers? Or can you work harder to get guest speakers onto other people's platforms? 4. Also, can you get more clients, industry figures and other 'opinion formers' to endorse your product? Often, people would be only too happy to do this. You just need to ask. 5. And finally, are you getting enough referrals through your customers? In my experience, asking for referrals is often left up to individual salespeople, and they often forget. So what about setting up a proper referral scheme with a managed process to make it happen? Note that none of these 'trust and credibility' methods are about asking for a sale. The idea is that you put yourself in a position where making a sale is a lot easier, because you have created the conditions for it to happen. I reckon that setting up a 'trust and credibility' project within the context of an overall marketing strategy would be a useful exercise for most organisations. In fact, for the past two years, building trust and credibility has been by far the biggest element of my own marketing strategy and the results - more clients and more valuable contracts - suggest that it's working. Copyright 2005 Richard Groom |