One of the best sales tools that you can use as a service-based business might surprise you. It’s trust.
When your potential customers feel like they can trust you, they’re far more likely to buy from you.
Building trust – or credibility – with your clients is easy when they can see you and shake your hand. You’re a real person! You have a real office they can visit!
But what about building trust with your online audience? How do you build trust with someone who has to interact with you in a totally different way?
If you want your entire sales process to be easier and get more leads, then you may need to take a look and see if you’re doing these 5 things that help build trust in your business.
1. Buy a Domain and Use a Domain Email
One of the quickest ways you can erode trust in your brand? Giving out an email that’s @gmail.com
Seriously.
A domain itself can cost as little as $10/year at places like GoDaddy or Namecheap (though I’d always recommend adding privacy protection, which is about $10/year more). That small investment goes a long way in showing your ideal client that you mean actual, literal business. You’ve invested $20 in yourself! For at least a year! So you plan on sticking around. Whether or not they know the cost of what you’ve spent on your domain is irrelevant; just having your own .com makes a huge difference.
The trickier part where I’ve seen a lot of small business owners get stuck is having an email account that matches their new .com.
The easiest solution is using Google Workspace as a place for your email to live. Starting at only $6/month and working on a month-to-month basis, you can have a new email for your .com email quickly, plus get all the benefits of having a Google-managed email. Their setup even walks you through and can change your domain settings for you, so it’s easy, too!
Why Does This Matter?
The reason a .com email means so much to your target client? It shows that you’re not going to disappear tomorrow. If you’re investing in your business as much as a few dollars each month, they’ll know that you’ll be around if they have any issues.
Seriously, of anything on this list, this is the quickest and least-costly item that adds a huge amount of trust to your business.
2. Be Consistent Across Your Marketing
When you’re Nike, everyone knows you’re Nike. Because Nike does a great job of being consistent in their brand messaging, commercials, social media ads, and even with their influencers. But how do you have that same consistency and recognition when you’re a smaller business?
Consistency is one of the best ways to get people to recognize your business, no matter where they meet you. That means simple things like using the same colors (your brand colors, preferably), talking about the same things in the same brand voice, and even being consistent with showing you.
It doesn’t mean that you have to post the same things to every marketing channel (in fact, you should change it up), but it does mean that you need to post things that all work and flow together. If you’re sharing wildly different content on Facebook to what you’re sharing on LinkedIn and Instagram, someone might not realize you’re the same business.
This also means getting similar usernames/handles on all these platforms is key, too. Then people know exactly where to find you when they’re looking for you on a different platform.
3. Show Your Face
This one requires a little work upfront (and for many of us, stepping out of our comfort zones) but is so beneficial to showcasing the human in your business.
Show your face!
If you’re the leader of your business, then people on your marketing channels should be getting to know who you are. Do that by getting pictures taken of you, working, out and about, with clients, at a coffee shop, whatever makes the most sense for your business and customers.
You might be wondering why you need to show your face. I mean, there are plenty of businesses out there who just post random graphics on their Instagram and only use stock photography on their websites.
Here’s the key: it’s all about authenticity. Authenticity builds trust because people know it’s real. Pictures build trust because they’re putting a face to the name and feel better like they know you.
When you use even just a couple of real, actual headshots on your website and jump in your own stories, you’re showing up as the business owner authentically.
No, your marketing doesn’t have to be your face all the time either. You can incorporate your team, your clients, your dog (Mac says hello!), or whatever works best for you.
4. Share Testimonials
There is no better way to show how you help your clients than by letting your other clients sing your praises! Those testimonials that you get might get put on Facebook, on Google My Business, or sent directly to you, but however, you can make sure you ask for them!
When you ask for a testimonial from your clients, you want to ensure that you’re guiding them, too. A big reason many of even your best clients won’t leave you a Google review is because they don’t know what to say.
Give them a few talking points when you ask for feedback. Ask them why they chose to work with you, what progress or transformation they saw, and what they feel made you different from others.
Give really specific instructions and you’ll get a much better testimonial back that speaks to your other prospects.
When you have those high-quality testimonials, you’ll want to use them throughout your website, social media posts, email marketing, and more to let your main characters (your customers!) tell your brand story and how you help.
5. Have a Website
I know you’ve probably seen a lot of people lately talking about how you can build a six-figure business without a website, but really, can you?
Think about the people you work with on a regular basis. Even local contractors, do you feel better knowing the person you’re investing money into has invested into their own business with a website? Probably! It shows that they’re sticking around for the long haul and that they’re not going to just take your money and run.
If a decision comes down to picking two different lawn guys, I’m going to go with the guy who has a website (bad or not!) vs the one without because I know I can count on him to come back every week throughout the summer.
The other part of this? Your website is 100% the foundation, the hub of your marketing! Every single piece of marketing that you put out there has to lead back somewhere. If you’re sending customers to a wide range of landing pages you’ve built through Click Funnels and other services, you’re losing out on that consistent, seamless experience. And you’re losing out on the ability for them to find out more about you later.
Yes, it’s the biggest investment on this list, but it’ll also jump that Trust factor up like 150%. (My stats are totally legit, just FYI).
