More and more I see brand strategists and other thought leaders talking about the importance of having great content on their sites to improve traffic and drive consideration. I’m of the belief that simply isn’t enough. Yes, great content, keyword strings, sound coding and SEO are all really important for getting people to your site. But once they’ve made it to your property, read your pitch and have begun the consideration process, what are you doing to engage them?
And thus, we have to address the dreaded customer relationship marketing thingy. I’m not going to lie to you. I believe most companies flat out suck at this. You might have something that totally interests me. I love what I find on your Web site and you might give me a channel to talk about how much I love both those things, but if you don’t talk back to me and acknowledge the fact that I’ve actually taken the time to give you my feedback, I won’t interact with your site again or bother to respond to your survey etc. And it’s in that assurance that you’ll converse with me that perhaps the most important key to blogging comes out: Establishing Trust.
Unfortunately, there isn’t a top 10, top 5 or even a top 2 list of ways to guarantee that people visiting your site will trust you. It’s a subjective thing, and damn is it ever frustrating when you can’t establish it. Building Trust with readership takes time. You have to be absolutely congruent with what you’re writing about and when you do converse with readers/consumers, you have to be and portray yourself as a person of authenticity and character. Even more difficult is getting those readers to perceive you as such and then connect with it.
Yes, you’ll fail. You’ll piss some people off and yes, a lot of people simply may not enjoy the person who happens to be the voice for your product, service or brand. But if you’re not interacting with consumers to make the attempt to build trust, you’re falling into the old way of marketing… shouting from the rooftops until someone hears you, blind to the fact that you have absolutely no real control about what people perceive your brand to be without talking honestly with them about it. If you go that route, let me know how that works out for you.
Photo: Dora Pete
Daniel, your right, but there is more to it. They can trust your data and content, but that alone does not get them to sign “the line that is dotted.” We are living proof, being sales guys, we were afraid people would not take us seriously if we pitched them while delivering content that educated them on our subject matter expertise. We spent months and months developing content, developing landing pages, creating adwords and micro-sites, all the while our mantra was “build it and they will come”. Our average time on site was over 12 mins, 60% of visits were repeat, our content rocketed to the number 3 and 7 organic placement, statistically we were doing great. But something was missing, it’s not only about providing great content and building trust, but giving clients a road map on what’s next. Our lesson we learned? The visitors to our site may buy next week, next month or next year, our new mantra is lead them and they will buy!
Seamus:
I agree with you 100 percent. I’ve said the same thing in posts I’ve worked on about SEO. Great content builds traffic, but unless it’s informing and leading to conversion, it’s not really worth a damn is it?
Good point.
Daniel and Seamus: great post/comment! Great content can help build trust from the earliest stages of the customer/brand relationship, and is an integral part of ‘moving the relationship forward.’ Just like in interpersonal relationships, trust (that of a customer trusting your brand) is developed over time, and is in lock-step with elements like consistency, honesty, transparency, and mutual value.
As marketers, we must be upfront about pursuing a fiscal transaction with the customer as one of our several goals; educating, entertaining, informing, listening to the customer are additional goals. Just as the shared hope in a meaningful interpersonal relationship is to ‘transact’ (commitment, marriage, etc.), so it is in content marketing. And trust/relationship continues to grow after transaction, where more personalized content can grow the budding relationship into one of a lifetime (nee life time value).
Measure the migration from stage to stage in the lifecycle, and don’t be afraid to ‘propose’ the sale. If trust has indeed been established, the answer will (hopefully!) be yes.