For your business to grow, consumers have to trust your brand. Traditionally, many entrepreneurs have leveraged third-party validation from the media to earn that trust. But media coverage alone isn’t enough anymore. Today’s brands must have to win trust in other ways, and they have to do so at scale.
3 types of trust signals that win you more clients
According to Scott Baradell, the best way to do this is to build trust signals into your business. Baradell should know. Author of the bestselling book Trust Signals: Brand building in a post-truth world, he grew his PR agency, Idea Grove, into one of the top 25 tech PR agencies in the United States. Idea Grove is a three-time Inc. 5000 company and was an Inc. Best Workplace in 2021 and 2022. Before Idea Grove, Baradell was the chief communications officer for two billion-dollar companies, as well as the co-founder and CMO of a venture-backed startup.
“Nothing is more important for the growth of brands today than systematically and intentionally securing trust among customers,” Baradell explained. “Strategically employing trust signals is the best way for virtually any company to do this, and thereby build, grow and protect its brand.”
Inspire confidence in your brand
According to Baradell, there are three main categories of trust signals. Website trust signals encourage visitors to complete a purchase or take action. Inbound trust signals drive visitors to websites via inbound marketing. SEO trust signals help Google rank companies in search results.
Within these broad categories, specific trust signals include anything that inspires confidence in your brand. They can be planned or unplanned. They can be organic or paid. They can be direct or subliminal. They can also be found almost everywhere.
“We don’t often think about it, but we spend our lives disseminating and processing trust signals,” Baradell said. “We seek out realtors and inspectors before deciding to buy a house, we scrutinize company reviews to find a job we want and we check out would-be soulmates on social media.”
Becoming conscious of trust signals is an important step in building trust, he explained. That’s because, when a customer trusts your product or service, they are more likely to buy from you. If they don’t trust you, nothing else matters.
Align your signals with your goals
With so many trust signals to choose from, Baradell emphasized that you must use research to identify the ones that best align with your brand’s goals. Calibrate them carefully for risk versus reward.
As you do, ask yourself four key questions. Who are your brand’s core audiences? What values do they share? Which sources of information do they trust? What stances or sources might alienate them?
“To answer these questions, it’s not enough to gather a group of executives in a boardroom, compile their conjectures on a whiteboard and call it a strategy,” Baradell said. “You must first conduct research to ensure your trust-building plan is solid.” During this research, keep in mind that your objective is largely to discover what messages and sources inspire trust and distrust in your audiences.
Build your company’s trust profile
Once you’ve conducted research into what inspires trust and distrust among your audiences, you are ready to build a trust profile. To do that, Baradell recommends following a three-step process.
First, determine which audiences are important to you. Next, perform sentiment-and-language analysis to understand how these audiences talk and think. Finally, conduct quantitative surveys to understand your audience’s values, views and trusted information sources.
Once you have completed these three steps, take time to understand how your audiences talk and what’s important to them. “We use software that analyzes the words and language that audiences use in customer reviews, on Twitter, in online forums and elsewhere,” he explained. “This helps us understand how audiences talk about our clients’ brands relative to their competitors, while surfacing the words, phrases and ideas that resonate most.”
Among its many uses, this information is invaluable for creating a website that makes your visitors feel at home. If your content reads like your visitors talk, chances are they’ll step right in and stay a while.
3 types of trust signals that win you more clients
Lay a breadcrumb path to trust
Once you have built a trust profile, it’s time to lay a trail of breadcrumbs for your audience. To do that, create a multi-faceted, unified plan.
“We use the Grow With TRUST approach,” Baradell said. “This system includes five solutions: third-party validation, reputation management, user experience, search presence and thought leadership.”
Consistently securing third-party validation and showcasing it at every marketing touchpoint is crucial, because people want to hear what other people say about you, not what you say about yourself. Viable third parties include the media, influencers, analysts, experts and other customers.
When it comes to reputation management, he said, you must listen and respond to what customers, employees and others say about you. As you do, also consider user experience. Are you creating experiences that build brand trust? That is key to breaking through the noise.
At the same time, take steps to improve your brand’s visibility and trust online, specifically in terms of your search presence. Finally, share interesting and helpful information online to establish yourself as a thought leader.
Personalize your buyer’s experience
Finally, Baradell recommends that every entrepreneur take steps to harness the power of personalization. Personalization is about taking what you’ve learned about a buyer to create a better experience for them. Done well, this goes a long way towards building trust.
“Being treated as an individual, not just a potential purchase, resonates with buyers,” he said. “It not only makes the shopping experience easier, it also creates an emotional connection.”
There are several simple and highly effective personalization strategies you can employ. You can add a welcome message for returning website visitors. You can personalize your emails and have them come from a real person. You can change your website and email content dynamically based on the buyer’s interests. You can even create a full-funnel strategy that communicates a real understanding of your audience.
Taking steps like these will satisfy a deep craving for your buyers, Baradell explained, and they will reward you for it.
Create customers for life
No matter what industry you are in, trust is both more important and fragile than ever. But Baradell says that creates opportunity for entrepreneurs who understand how to use trust signals. Learn to build trust among your audiences, and you will have a customer, employee or fan of your brand for life.
The benefits don’t end there. “When you build a trustworthy brand, you are doing more than attracting new customers and growing your business,” Baradell said. “You are helping create a more trustworthy world.” Let trust signals guide your way.