Trust Potential – Medium – The Monthly Marketing Message
Peter Brissette • March 31, 2017
I have been talking the last couple months about trust potential. Trust potential is that basic idea that everything that you do in your marketing has a certain inherent built-in trust factor.
There are four main criteria that we look at inside of trust potential, that’s the Message, the Medium, the Moment and the Measurement. Last month, you can check out the video we did that talks about the Message. This month, I want to talk to you about the Medium.
The Medium actually matters. So what is the Medium? The Medium is how the message is delivered. For example, you could do an ad on a commercial on TV. You can run ads in the newspaper. Maybe you send out a postcard or letter in the mail. There’s a number of different ways that you can deliver the Medium. That might be email messages or text messages. It could even be your website or a Facebook post. All these different forms of Medium that are out there are ways to deliver your message, but are they all trusted the same? The fact is they’re not.
Nielsen does a study every couple of years and measures consumers’ trust in advertising and they look all these different factors and ask people how much they trust certain aspects of marketing messages. For example, an email message that you signed up for is actually only trusted 50% of the time. I find that very interesting. Text messages are not trusted all the time, even if you signed up to receive text messages from a company. Then what we find is, there’s really just a couple that are trusted the most. So what are the most trusted forms of marketing and advertising? Well, first of all, it’s one that you might not think of as a Medium for your business in terms of delivering a marketing message, but the number one most trusted is actual personal referrals. That means somebody who has engaged with your business before, telling someone else about your business.
Now, this is a really overlooked piece of marketing, I think, in most businesses. It’s really about how well of a job you did working with your existing clients to help them in their business or help them however it is that you deliver your service. The better you do that, the more they’re going to tell other people about you. That planning in your business becomes really critical on how well we deliver, actual impact how well we can get more customers, because our existing customers are always going to refer more business to us. So, that’s the number one that’s most trusted. It’s like over 90%, 96%, 98% most trusted. People trust those personal recommendations.
The second most trusted form of Medium, if you will, is reviews posted on third-party review sites. these are reviews that your clients give you to say how good a job you did. It’s not quite the same as a referral, but it’s really, really close. There are different studies out there, but basically online reviews are trusted about 70% or so. It varies depending on the study that you look at. The key that’s important there is that if you’re not getting online reviews, you’re missing out on a real big opportunity to help get new clients into your business, because people do trust those reviews. Reviews can make all your other marketing better. So, two things, one, where are these reviews? These reviews are on Google, they’re on Facebook and they’re on Yelp. Those are the most common places that we see for most businesses. And then whatever your particular niche is. A lot of my clients are in assisted living, so sites like caring.com are really important sites for collecting and showing reviews because that’s a very prominent site that is used by families who are looking for communities for their loved ones. That piece is really important.
The second reason why this really makes the rest of your marketing so much more powerful and so much more effective is a relating sample that I’m seeing from somebody named Tom Shane. You’ve probably heard Tom Shane in his radio advertisements. Tom Shane with the Shane Company. “You now have a friend in the diamond business.” (That was not a very good impersonation!) One of his ads that I really, really like that he talks about, in particular he’s talking about engagement rings and where to get those and why you should pick him. He references a site, I can’t remember the name right now, but he references a site that a lot of people use who are about to get engaged or getting married. He says, “Go check out our reviews on that site.” They have literally thousands of them on there. But what a powerful message. Say, “Hey, I’m saying I’m a great company, but don’t take my word for it. Go take the word of all these people that have tried us and used us and actually posted their name and their information and said, “Yes, I put a stamp of approval on this company.” That’s really, really powerful.
When you do send out a postcard you can say, “Hey, we think we’re pretty great, but you know what? You don’t have to believe what I’m saying in this postcard because you only trust this 30% of the time. Go check out my reviews.” So, now you’ve got a postcard with only reviews combined together and you put together a really powerful way to get your message out there. The message is important. The Medium and how you deliver that message is also important. If you need help with your online reviews, if we’re not already doing that for you, we’d love to talk to you about that.
So, that’s this month’s marketing message. Hope you enjoyed it. Please like, comment and share. Sharing is caring. We appreciate that. Thank you and have a great month.
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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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