Is your business suffering from severe customer alienation? Are you attracting customers who aren’t buying from you? If you are, then you need to start working on building credibility in order to earn your customers’ loyalty.
One of the major challenges brands and businesses face when it comes to customer relations is how to earn their customers’ loyalty. As businesses continue to hunt for ways to keep their customers from leaving, struggling to convince new prospects that your business is worth a try can turn out to be a pain in the butt. Without the right approach, your business could remain in this dilemma while you watch your competitors leave you behind.
After studying what methods can help businesses break customer-alienation, the following are the best tactics you can employ to make your business a star before your consumers.
#1. Let Others Talk about you, While You Do the Show
In an age when customers can easily weigh your business offerings against that of several of your competitors on a phone, there are only a few ways to make them stick with your business. Testimonials have been in place since long ages, and as the Wikipedia Image below shows us, its power is put to more use when an authority of greater reckoning endorses another business provider.
The image above is an image of Pope Leo XIII endorsing a drug called Vin Mariani.
Is testimonial a new thing? No! But are people using it effectively? I’d say, No!
To cement the trust your customers have for your brand, by using perception to shape their image of your brand through testimonial, it will be easier for your potential customers to forget that other brands exist outside of yours. Their brain is saturated with the feelings of how to make you accept them instead.
Image from AudienceBloom
A more practical example of using testimonials to act on customers perception is in the case of AudienceBloom where Neil Patel does a video testimonial for the brand. This totally eliminates the major challenge with testimonials, which is the issue of skepticism. A written or rather, text-based testimonial is susceptible to fraud, but a video certainly is not! Good job, AudienceBloom!
[youtube height=”HEIGHT” width=”WIDTH”]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avcmbMaO4r4#t=23[/youtube]
The Showing Part
So you’ve seen that testimonials are great, but let’s face it, if your services are bad a good testimonial from top celebs won’t save you! You need to keep to the show, do it well while you let others do the talking. If your show is bad, then it’s not only going to affect your business negatively, but it can also affect whoever is vouching for your business.
#2. Target Only Customers that are Interested in Your Offering
Are you targeting customers that are not interested in your offering just to attract a wider user-base? While this might work for some, the negative impact it may have on your business may take a while to wear-off. A case study of an attempt by sports entertainment brand ESPN to impress the female audience by creating a different, flashy and less saturated spin-off of the original ESPN.com website triggered a backlash from the audience they were trying to attract.
The truth is, the new audience ESPN was trying to attract wasn’t at all interested in ESPN’s business. There were female viewers who were originally really into ESPN and they loved it the way it was, but creating a separate website for women only infuriated their existing female audience.
#3. Design Your Website to Taste
A great website design is as important as a brilliant office complex is to a business. When customers are on your business website, their subconscious carries information on the layer of what your website tells of your brand. If your website design looks too cheap to the eye, they are going to be expecting your price to be damn cheap and if your website design looks sophisticated, they think you deserve higher figures.
But overall, the website design is only just a part of what shapes customers perception of your brand. However little it impacts, it should not be taken for granted.
The most important thing when it comes to your design is to make sure the design matches what your business stands for. If you’re a luxury brand, then you cannot afford to have a website design that looks too simple.
#4. Don’t Lose Focus of Your Target Audience
Who are your audience? Your business was created with the aim to create a solution for a particular set of people in your market. For instance, at Effective Inbound Marketing, we provide content marketing and ORM related solutions for small to large businesses. Losing focus of your target audience is like going into the wild to search for what is not missing. It will make your existing customers feel ignored, while customers you’re pursuing will feel patronized.
If you’ve be guilty of losing focus of your target audience, this is a wake up call for you to get back on track and put your acts together before your brand identity wears off.
#5. Be Passive and Yet Aggressive
You know the saying “slow and steady wins the race”? Well, it’s kind of and old saying that has always proved true, only that it has never worked in the business world. You see the fact is that bad things sometimes happen to guys that wait in business, because the aggressive ones tend to pick the best options.
But when dealing with customers either in your sales or conversion process interactions or in a bid to woo them to try out your newest offers, you need to be passive. Study shows that being aggressive or pushy sends off the wrong signal and causes your customers to either smell a rat or totally distrust your brand. To put it short don’t continuously pester your customers with sales emails.
#6. Lose the Traditional Company Image and Go Personal
Yes, you read that right! Since blogs have started springing up all over the web and people have begun to trust what they read on blogs better than what they read in newspapers and TV ads, you will be positioning your brand to be perceived better by starting a blog with a real personalty.
And if you’re running a blog for your brand, it will be more effective to get your customers involved if you employ a personality that they can relate to without withholding anything. People trust those that they can exchange feelings with.
#7. Don’t Hesitate to Tell People Why You’re their Best Choice
What’s the best way to make your customers know that you’re their best option?
Telling them you are!
This is the part where you get to be Donald Trump. You will have a better chance convincing prospects to close a deal with you if you make them realize you’re their best option. This method is an approach that requires tactical application of self-confidence.
You can even point at a few methods your competitors are using that will only make the delivery process longer and cost more money and then let your prospects compare those methods with your more-efficient methods.
TIP: This is not the time to bad-mouth your competitors. Bad-mouthing your competitors will only present you as a weak shady businessman before your prospects.
#8. Roll-out Hard-to-Beat Offers
Finally, there’s nothing that shape a brands image and make it more popular in the market than hard-to-beat offers. Seriously, if your customers think they are saving big by buying your services, their loyalty to your brand will shoot up quickly.
Have you ever wondered why big stores usually offer huge discounts on their products? Because they know that irrespective of the situation, customers will choose to buy from them when the offer is very good over those selling at the normal price.
So these are my tips on how to use perception to boost credibility for your brand. What other methods do you know of, share them with me in the comment section below!
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