The 3 R’s of the Trust Formula – R#3
Peter Brissette • May 31, 2018
Hey, guys. Peter Brissette here, Digital Marketing Dude. And we’ve been working on a series of videos called The Three R’s of the Trust Formula. And what is the trust formula? Just a quick reminder, the trust formula is something that’s kind of come together just from my years of experience in consulting with hundreds of businesses about their marketing, and how can you make your decision making process easier, so that you can make the decisions that you need to about your marketing?
The trust formula really narrows down the most effective and most efficient ideas, strategies, and tactics that will help you in making the right decisions when it comes to your marketing so that you get the most bang for your marketing buck. That’s really the idea behind trust formula.
And what I’ve found in consulting with so many different types of businesses, is that these things become foundational. These are the things that every business needs to be thinking about, and working on, and focusing on. So that’s kind of the foundation of where the trust formula came from and why I think it will help you in simplifying your decision making for your marketing.
So I’m going to share my screen here, so we can catch up with where we’re at on all of this. So we’ve talked about reviews, make it easy, ask for them. The six questions for amazing testimonials. If you haven’t got those six questions, you can email me, peter@DMDude.com, with the subject line six questions for amazing testimonials, and I will send that over to you.
The second R is Referrals. Or, another way to say it is the network effect. What are the referrals that you’re getting from existing clients? What kind of strategic alliances and partners and lumberjacks do you have? And you can watch the second video in the series to learn more about those. And then how are you caring and nurturing for your referral network?
Before I talk about number three, I just want to remind you once again, what are your owned versus rented properties? So this is a foundational principle of trust formula, is that you own your website, and you own your email list, your CRM, your contact database. So what are you doing to keep the most relevant information on your website, and make the most use of that?
Then what are you doing with your contact database? How are you building that list? How are you nurturing that list? That is foundational to making all these other things work effectively. Rented properties are things like Facebook. You can be on Facebook and use Facebook, but you don’t own that. Facebook could take away that access at any point in time.
So let’s talk about number three. This is called RFP. And RFP is three elements, Recency, Frequency, and Proximity. So what does that mean? So when you’re deciding, “Okay. How often do I do anything?” What you have to do is go back to, “What’s the end result that I want? Do I want a referral? Do I want a client out of this? How do I take a prospect from point A to all the way through to point Z? From being prospect to a client?”
So a couple of ways to think about that is when it comes to let’s say, dating. The first time you go on a date, and if you’re the guy with the girl, and you go on one date, and at the end of the date you’re like, “I think we should get married.” That’s probably not going to go over too well. Probably not going to get a yes out of that. If you do get a yes out of that, you might want to run away. That might not be a very good thing.
So marketing is a lot like dating in that there has to be a certain number of contacts, so you can go back through your database and look at your client’s history, and kind of go, “Okay. How long did it take me to land this client? What were the number of contacts I had to make, either in person, on the phone, via email? What was the number of contacts and when did they have to happen in order to land that client?
The question of recency and frequency are really super important to getting to proximity. So when you go, “Hey, I sent an email out. Why didn’t anybody respond?” Okay, well, how frequently are you sending emails? And when was the most recent time that you had sent an email? So if it’s been months and you’re a stranger now, you’re probably not going to get as much of a response. But if it’s more recent and it’s frequent in the sense that it’s consistent.
If they know once a month they’re getting an email, they can follow that. If it’s once a week, whatever that frequency needs to be. You need to look at, “How often should I post on social media?” Well, again, how recent do you need to be? How frequent do you need to be to move a prospect along to become a client? So you can determine some basic numbers to do that.
Because we all want proximity. What is proximity? How close can we get? So if you are dating somebody for months or years, and there’s recent and frequent interaction, you’re going to build a closeness. The proximity is going to close and become closer. What you’re moving towards is, “I want to get close enough for a hug.” Chuck Blakeman, one of my mentors, who talks about this. “So what do I have to do to get close enough to get a hug?” And entirely HR appropriate hug, okay. Let’s be clear about that. HR appropriate hugs only. So hopefully you get that joke.
So RFP determines when do I send emails? When do I post on social media? And so you just got to work back from existing clients. Think about the number of contacts, how recent and frequent did you have to be to get those clients? And then just come up with a plan. And this really ties into your marketing calendar. If you’re going to be doing social media content, you should have a calendar that says, “We’re going to post on these days,” and then you can make up a content calendar, and plan out the type of content that you want to do. And then we can always get into how do you choose the content that you should be doing? Actually, I think I’ll do another video on that. That’s a great idea. Thank you.
So that’s really it. This is the Trust Formula. The Three R’s of the Trust Formula, Reviews, make it easy. Ask for them. Use the six questions for amazing testimonials. Work your referrals and your referral network to build partners that will send you clients, month after month, year after year, to help you grow your business on autopilot.
And remember, RFP, Recency, Frequency, and Proximity. We want to move close enough to an HR appropriate hug, and be able to do that. So what’s the recency and frequency needed to accomplish that? And, of course, remember, what’s your own versus rented properties?
Spend the most time, most money, most energy, and effort on building and developing the properties that you own. And that is my advice for you. And the advice I’ve given to many different types of businesses over the last eight or so years.
So again, it’s Peter Brissette, Digital Marketing Dude. Thank you for joining me in these videos. I hope you found them useful. Please take a moment to like, comment, and share. If you have questions, please post those, as well. Remember, sharing is caring. We love to get our message out, so if you can help us do that, we really appreciate it. Thank you and have a great week.
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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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