The 3 R’s of the Trust Formula – R#1
Peter Brissette • March 30, 2018
Hello, Peter Brissette here, Digital Marketing Dude. I’m putting together a series of videos on what I call the Trust Formula. This Trust Formula can really work for a local business and it can work for almost any type of business. It really works whether it’s a business that’s a mix of online digital or if it’s offline, and parts of your business are offline as well. That’s really typical for most businesses, there’s some mix. There’s the online and the offline and how you mix those together.
I want to talk about the Three R’s of the Trust Formula and I’m going to share my screen with you here in a second, we’re going to start to break these down over the next series of videos. The one thing I want to take to you about first is kind of a key principle that’s a basic foundation that we have to remember and make sure that we’re understanding where it fits in the mix. That has to do with what you own and what you rent. This is really specific to your digital assets, your digital properties. What do you own and what do you rent?
Let me see if I can explain: For your website you own that. Now, you might have it hosted on another company but that’s your website. You own it. You control the content. You control the information that is there. You own that. That’s your property. Your Facebook page, your business Facebook page. Do you own that? Technically no. Technically Facebook owns it, they’re letting you rent it. Okay? They’re letting you use that Facebook page and be on their platform to do marketing of your business. At any point in time Facebook could take away that access. They could shut you down and not allow you to market anymore on their platform.
That’s a couple of basic examples. The other thing that you own that you own that so many businesses that I talk to, and I consult with dozens of businesses every few months, and I find it as a common thread. They don’t own and don’t have a really good email list. Excuse me. I’m leaving that in. They don’t own their email list and they don’t have real control of their contacts, their customers, their past clients, their database. That is one of the key most important assets that you do own, that you have control of and you have to keep it in a really good system that’s easy to use, easy to track your contacts and easy to create follow up systems that you can stay in touch with them.
The two main properties that you own are your website and your email list. Just remember that as key principles of this overall of the Three R’s of the Trust Formula. Now, I’m going to share my screen with you and we’re going to dig into the first R of the Trust Formula. Again, we’re going to keep this out here as this reminder of our owned versus rented properties. That’s really your website and your email list. That’s what you own. The things that you rent are your social media profiles; Facebook, LinkedIn, and maybe some other various marketing tools. I am just going to put that right there so that’s part of our set up here.
Now, the first R that we’re going to talk about is reviews. Actually let me go in here. There’s a few key aspects for reviews that we’ll talk in this video and the next video’s coming up we’ll get into the other R’s. When it comes to reviews, a couple things to remember, these are super important. People trust more about what others say about you than what you say about yourself. This is really critical to build trust quickly with someone who doesn’t
even know who you are, maybe that’s never heard of you, maybe wasn’t a referral. They’re just coldly looking at who you are. Your online reviews and what people say about you is super critically important.
How do you get more reviews? How do you get better reviews? The first thing you have to do is make it easy for them. You must have some basic system that makes it easy for people to leave you a review. That’s something that we offer as a tool and a service, so regardless if you use our tool, someone else’s tool, or you just come up with a way to make that easy for them, you have to make it easy.
The reason for that is that when there’s a negative thing that happens, I’m really highly motivated. I can’t wait to go and say something about you negatively. I’m very highly motivated. When I’m really happy with the service that I got, I might be really happy with it but I’m not necessarily as motivated to go express that somewhere in a review online or send you an email, a testimonial. Now, it can happen but it’s just not as a strong a motivation.
That’s why you got to make it easy and then you got to do step two, which is you must ask for them. You have to ask for reviews. You just do. Because there is such a pent up reviews sitting there just waiting to be given, if it was easy and someone asked them they would do it. That’s why you need to do those two things. Finally, I’m not going to share on this video but there are six key questions for amazing testimonials. It’s from a guy named Sean D’Souza that came up with this, out in New Zealand who’s brilliant. We’ve used this for creating some of our key testimonials. If you sell a very high dollar service or product, if you really need to build a high level of trust to really connect to your audience on a much stronger level, then you need to take the next step and do the six key questions for amazing testimonials.
A couple key principles with that is that you need to schedule time with that person to sit down with them and go, “Here’s the questions. Please go through these and answer these.” Give them a way to type it up or write it up right there. It could be a phone interview or a Zoom web meeting, something like that. You want to have that individual actually set some time aside and make an appointment with them because this is really going to be critical to the kind of testimonials that you can have that you can share on your primary properties; your website or via email, or even on the rented properties that you have out there.
That’s the six questions. If you want the six questions, please message me on this post or on Facebook or wherever you see this, and let me know. We’ll shoot you an email with that. In fact, you can just email me if you want: peter@dmdude.com. That’s peter@dmdude.com. Just put subject line: six questions for amazing testimonials and I’ll send that back to you so that you have that.
That’s number one of the Three R’s of the Trust Formula and we’ll be working on R number two and R number three here in the coming weeks so that you can review those and get some help for your marketing for your business. Thanks for joining me on this video. I hope you got a lot out of it and if you have thoughts, questions, comments, please leave them below.
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The last question that should we follow our competitors on social media? Sure, why not. You know, you want to see what they're doing and see what's happening there. You know if you're going to be active and you're really trying to use social to build your business then having a good idea what's what your competition is up to is probably important. And you know sometimes what I find with so called competitors is that we you know often times find people that we can collaborate with. It doesn't necessarily mean they are competitors so we work with a number of other marketing agencies and provides some services for them for their clients that they don't necessarily do, but they hire us to do it for them. So like I work with other marketing agencies, so they're not necessarily, you know, your competitor and everything. So but yeah, see what's going on you know, investigate, read up on them, see what they're doing, check out their websites, see what they're ranking for. You know, the more you understand the competitive landscape, the more you know what you should be doing and what you need to do.
And the last question that we have is, can you say more about running a test on TikTok yeah, I so I'm not on TikTok I'm not using tiktok. I wind up watching a lot of TikTok videos on Facebook and the Facebook reels. I think it's fascinating. I find it very interesting. But it's not a platform that I've taken the time to jump on at this point. Again, based on where I'm at with strategy and so forth, it's not a fit for me. But anytime you're using any platform, if you're going to do something, you want to come up with some means of measurement. How am I going to measure success? What does success look like? Is it I, you know, posted a video and I got a thousand views. Is that success you know or is it actually driving traffic and are you tracking how much traffic and then are you tracking what happened to that traffic? Did they fill out a form, did they make a phone call? Like what's the, where do you want that to go? So we really need to step back and think about that whole process. Of creating content, I'm pushing this through to, you know, to my website. And this is what I want to have happen. This is what I wanted the results to be. And then how am I going to track it? How am I going to measure it and do that so anytime you're spending, anytime you're doing something new in particular. Or you're spending any money you need to track it all the way through. All the way through.
The next question that we have is if you have a GoDaddy web page already and are having some issues, are you able to switch over somehow? You can build your website on any other platform and then just you just change the domain where the domain points. So yeah, you can do that anytime. Thank you, Peter.
Next question is how powerful are paid plans to things like Google Adwords or whatever it is called now regarding driving traffic, how can you possibly compete when you don't have the cash to put towards such programs? Yeah, so that's where you gotta get creative. So again we're small businesses and we don't have you know, unlimited funds to you know, just throw a bunch of ads up and you know compete with some other big companies so. Again, this goes back to what are the things I can really do better, because chances are your website is getting some traffic and it could be getting good traffic, but if your messaging isn't clear on your website, you're not getting them to take the next step. They're not making a phone call or filling out a form. So where I can put energy and effort is in that messaging and that and being very clear about who I'm working with, the problem I solve, how I solve it. So that whoever does come across my radar, I have a much higher chance of converting that person then someone else. So you know it's not the best product that always wins, it's who's the best communicator. And so that's why I talk about what you own and what you can't can control and making sure that is dialed in. And doing what it's supposed to do so that if you do go I, if I'm dialed in and I know everything is working well with my website and it's communicating clearly now, I can spend a small amount on ads and drive a small amount of traffic knowing that I'm probably going to get a decent amount of conversions because my messaging's on point and so I don't have to spend as much as the big guy. But I can be more effective because I've spent time working on the stuff that really matters. Thanks, Peter.
The next question is, we have a couple more here. What is your choice for a website hosting platform? So if you're going to host WordPress, my number one choice would be sitegroundsiteground.com That would be my top choice for WordPress hosting that, great support and all that. And again, you can have your. Domain on GoDaddy and it can point to wherever. It can point to Squarespace. It can point to site ground wherever it needs to go. But yeah, for WordPress site ground would be my top choice.
The next question is, can other businesses similar to mine attach to my website and then their ads show up on their Facebook page? No, I don't see how that can happen. Thank you.
The next question that we have is I used to utilize local provider gizmo to be able to personally update my website due to its ease of use. If you knew word you could do gizmo. Do you know of a website editing platform that would be as simple. I don't need an online store so our website just needs to be simple clean design that I can update content. So any of those platforms we talked about we believe with Squarespace can do that. Our platform that I mentioned can do that as well. So that's something that I know someone that was asking about that, I'll just give you my contact info. You guys you know can provide my contact info. If you're interested in looking at that, we can we can talk about that one-on-one Thanks, Peter.
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