Cultivating trust, online and off
I’m the head of marketing for Latitude, the UK’s market leading search engine marketing company. In that role, I’ve organised several events - some exclusively for clients, some open to the public - in which I try to bring new, innovative, or merely interesting ideas in business, marketing, and customer service to the people attending. Trust is a theme that keeps emerging at those events. From a previous post:
Apart from aims specific to certain types of e-commerce sites - such as getting basic subscribers to convert to customers with funded accounts - any company that sells online needs to cultivate trust if they are to enjoy long term success. This goes beyond considerations such as the language used in landing pages and right to the core of how a business works…
The issue of trust is not going away. If anything, it is becoming even more important as people grow increasingly information-rich and technically-savvy. Those people are your customers and potential customers. Search can put you in contact with them...
Cultivating trust - and creating value for the customer and your company at the same time - is an art that many businesses would love to master. But it needn’t be that difficult. Marketing guru Seth Godin gives a very good example, in his post Bits are free, of how much better companies could be handling their customers, fostering trust, and improving the bottom line at the same time. Read the compare-and-contrast on offer and then ask yourself: Which way will our business go?