Gone are the days when you had to sit through TV commercials just so you can see the cliffhanger of an episode. Today, you have the choice to ignore those ads/marketing campaigns. You can pay a monthly fee [Netflix] to get unlimited ad-free content. This is the reason why 95% of the businesses out there that are marketing themselves online, are focusing on getting as much attention as they can.
What they don’t realize, is that gaining attention is only half the battle. In order to build a successful business, they need to build trust by providing value up-front and building a successful customer-brand relationship.
You can become the next the Tai Lopez of your industry, but if you fail to build trust with your audience, you will end up being no one.
Without Trust, Digital Marketing Breaks Apart
Let’s be honest for a second. I know it is hard just to get attention. You literally have seconds to get it, and if you do not manage to do everything right, you will lose it faster than you captured it. Your business would end up becoming a meme that will be used to poke fun at you and will be forgotten within 2 weeks (that’s true. The average lifetime of a meme is 14 days, or whenever PewDiePie covers it in his Meme Review videos. That’s when the memes die.)
So what should you be seeking to get with your advertising campaigns? If it’s not attention, what is it?
Trust should be the #1 thing you should be looking to get. Even if that means you end up spending a bit more than you expected on your ad campaigns. At least you know that the people that entered your funnel, trust you and would give you a second chance if something goes wrong.
Remember, attention is not personal. People are already browsing Facebook/Instagram , etc. They just want to have fun and pass their time. They don’t care what kind of ads show up. And if you manage to get a couple seconds of attention during that time, it’s not a big deal. Everyone in their timeline is getting that attention as they keep scrolling.
But if your ad manages to make them stop scrolling for a while, makes them want to watch your entire video, or if it manages to make them want to watch more videos on your Facebook page or your YouTube channel, then that’s a great sign.
That means that you have managed to get more than just their attention, they now have shown that they trust you at least 1% to check out your other videos. 1% is better than nothing.
And that’s where you start taking advantage of your position. You know that they trust you enough to watch your free content. So why not be consistent, be strategic and provide them with immense value upfront.
Here’s a thought experiment I do to make sure that I’m doing the right thing. I try to think about all the absolute worse ways of achieving the goals I have. Let’s imagine that I was in your shoes. You just started a business but you’re unsure about what you should be doing to attract more people to your website and to start building trust around your brand.
What would my goals be?
1. Make the website easy to navigate
2. Make sure that people on Facebook & Instagram trust me
3. Make sure that my website is ranking on page 1 for the keywords that the customers would be searching for
Let’s skip the 1st goal because that’s about website development. Let’s talk about building trust on Facebook & Instagram.
What would be the absolute worst way of doing that?
Let’s think about it.
1. Not having video ads so people wouldn’t know my personality. They also wouldn’t be able to associate a face to a brand.
2. Use a sub-optimal image that is very grainy and is just not good to look at.
3. Do not post any content on my Facebook Business page or on my Instagram profile besides the ad.
4. Even if I post something more, I’m not consistent with it.
5. Not focus at all on on-page/off-page optimization of my website (this is the SEO aspect of the goal).
Now that we know the absolute worst things to go about achieving our goals, we can do the opposite of them. We can:
1. Create video ads that are customized to the audience we are targeting. And it also has social proof about how other people are already benefiting from your brand (it is very easy to create social proof).
2. Create or pay a graphic designer to create top-notch images that you can consistently post on Instagram and Facebook.
3. Regularly go live on both Facebook & Instagram to make sure that your followers are getting immense value.
4. Hire an SEO agency to handle everything related to SEO to make sure that your website is well optimized and ready to beat your competition sitting on page 1.
That’s how easy it is to come up with a rock-solid strategy to build trust.
I see a ton of marketers brag about the number of likes, their engagement rates, etc. in groups and forums. All they see are numbers and they fail to realize that there are real people behind those numbers. That is the reason why you’ll rarely see any marketer create a multi-million dollar marketing agency.
It’s just not possible to do it if you remove the human aspect out of marketing. Because at the end of the day, you are delivering value to a customer and getting paid in return. It’s an exchange of value.
But that exchange is only possible if the customers trust you that the value you’re providing will improve some aspect of their life. And if you’re not doing that, then you really should get back to the drawing board and start remaking your products/services from scratch.
Conclusion
So, if you’re a local business, or even if you’re a giant with multiple franchises, you need to make sure that you are building trust. That’s the only way you can make sure that your business will survive any recession, lawsuit or disaster. You can be a marketing genius, but if you don’t have the trust and loyalty of your customers, your brand won’t have anything.
So, don’t make gaining more attention your goal, building trust should be the biggest goal.
