How to Build Your Business’s Reputation and Establish Your Brand

How to Build Your Business’s Reputation and Establish Your Brand

Whether you’re just starting your business or are looking to grow, it can be challenging and intimidating to grab market share from the giants in your industry. How can you, either by yourself or with a small team, compete with the vast resources and brand awareness of these giants? Although you are the underdog, there are ways you can break in and convert people to being your customers. If you can build trust, convey value, address objections, show proof and separate yourself from your competitors, you can persuade people to do business with you. If people have a great experience with the product or service you provide, you will inevitably build your reputation, establish your brand and continue to grow your share of the market.

Build Trust

Well known salesman, author and speaker, Zig Ziglar, is quoted as saying “If people like you they’ll listen to you, but if they trust you they’ll do business with you.” It’s crucial to build trust, both in the short and the long term, in order to continue to grow your business. There are different elements of trust needed to obtain a customer and to retain a customer.

Obtaining New Customers

To obtain a customer there are 4 elements of building trust: Transparency, Empathy, Expertise and Verification. The more of these elements you can implement into your interactions with potential customers, the better. Transparency is crucial to showing people that you are not trying to swindle them because it indicates openness and accountability. A couple simple ways to show transparency would be to make your contact information easily accessible, have real pictures of staff on your website (avoid stock photos), provide your physical address if possible, show professional affiliations (like the BBB) and generally just make it clear that you run a legitimate business run by real people. Clarity is key, people are less likely to trust ambiguous or complicated language, so use language that is clear and informative

Zig Ziglar is also known to have said “People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.” People are less likely to feel like you are trying to take advantage of them if they feel that you care about them. Knowing your ideal customers and empathizing with them will help you create effective marketing messages and tailor your interactions with potential customers. It’s important that this isn’t faked, people generally have a good sense of what’s genuine. Use market research to understand your ideal customers on a deeper level.

Why should people trust what you have to say, let alone do business with you? You need to make it clear that you are an expert in your field and have the authority to be in the business that you’re in. While diplomas or awards will help, it’s not enough. The best way to establish yourself as an expert is to show instead of tell, create content that puts your knowledge on display. This can come in the form of blogs, videos, webinars, etc. People are more likely to trust people who are clearly experts at what they do.

Show what your product or service has done for others so that people know that you are not selling snake oil. This gives potential customers a way to verify the benefits of your product or service. This can come in the form of testimonials, quotes, reviews, statistics, links to studies, etc. These need to be authentic and preferably from a trusted third party to drive home reliability.

Retaining Customers

Once you’ve established a relationship, then you’ve already established most or all of the above elements of trust, and the elements shift to Consistency, Communication, and Character. If you provide a service, then you need to provide results consistently. Set goals and use tangible ways to measure results, such as key performance indicators. This will help make progress and results easier for your customers to recognize. If you sell a product, you need a consistency in quality. Communication is how easy it is to get in contact with your business and how good your customer service is. Problems inevitably arise when conducting business, and character is how you handle these issues. Does your business do the right thing, even when it’s hard? Granted things aren’t always black and white and sometimes it’s hard to see what the right move is, however, if you strive for strong character when doing business, then it will be apparent to most of those who work with you.

Convey Value

The value of what you provide needs to be quickly and easily visible. However, most of the time a picture and a few words aren’t enough to convey this value, especially if you provide a service. You should know your product or service inside and out, don’t be afraid to give people as much information as needed to convey the value of your product or service. Some great ways to do this are videos talking about your service or showing off your product, informative and well written descriptions, photo galleries and reviews.

Take Care of Objections

Naturally people will be hesitant before jumping into something new, and you should be prepared for this. Think about as many possible hesitations people may have in regard to your product or service by itself and in relation to your competitors. Keep track of common objections from potential, former and current customers. Try to proactively address these concerns on your website and other places that you may do business. For example, one of the most common objections is cost. If your competitors sell something similar to you at a lower price, then you need to justify and prove the added value for what you’re offering.

Show Proof

The burden is upon you to show that your product or service works well. Testimonials, reviews, demos, case studies and scientific studies can help you show potential customers that your product or service gets results. One great way to get the word out about what you’re selling is to send your product or a sample of your service to high profile YouTubers and bloggers to review. Just make sure you’re following Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. This can show that your product or service works, while simultaneously giving it lots of exposure.

Separate Yourself from Your Competitors

With so much competition out there, it’s important to show people why you’re different. This could come in a number of ways, from expertise to charity. Toms, the shoe company, saw great growth because of their charitable business model, inspiring other companies, like Warby Parker, to follow suit. One of the most effective ways to differentiate yourself from your competitors is to find a niche. Giants like Amazon are really difficult to beat in the common goods arena, they’ve built their own distribution network and offer goods at prices that are difficult to undercut. Instead of playing them at their own game, you could go the other direction and focus on not so common items, such as high end or custom merchandise. There are many ways to differentiate, brainstorm and pick what’s right for you and your company.

Although the industry giants may hold a huge part of the market, there is still room for your business to grow and flourish. The keys are to build trust, convey value, address objections, show proof, and differentiate yourself from the competition. A great website is essential to hitting these goals and Direct Placement can help you build your online presence, helping you with everything from launching your site, to site security, to advertising.

Direct Placement, LLC is a digital marketing agency that offers a variety of digital ads and services. Our trained and certified team of Account Managers and Internet Marketing Advertisers is dedicated to helping your business achieve its advertising goals. They will work diligently with you to help ensure our advertising efforts are tailored to your specific needs. Contact Direct Placement, LLC today or visit our website to discover how we can start transforming your business one click at a time! You can also follow us on Facebook, Twitter, or Blogger for more online marketing related content.

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