From figuring out the best product mix and how to promote your services to making a profit and providing unmatched customer experiences, there is a lot that goes into managing a business today.
On top of that, one of the most important aspects that can significantly impact your success is your ability to create a trusted brand for your small business. How do your customers and prospects think, feel, and say about your business? Having a brand associated with positive qualities and traits can make the sales process widely more efficient.
While it can certainly be easy to feel overwhelmed and out of control when it comes to building a trusted brand, there are ways to take back control. Let’s discuss the top 7 ways to create a trusted brand for your small business.
What makes a business trustworthy?
For your business to be considered trustworthy, the people behind it must lead the way. A brand is more than just your business’s logo, tagline, and offerings. It encompasses the spirit of your business and the people that define it. Having a mindset with these qualities and traits will help get you on the right path.
- Be transparent – Do you pull back the curtains to show everything you do to help your customers?
- Be honest – Are you upfront when it comes to expectations of what can be accomplished and what might be a stretch goal?
- Be willing to answer questions – Are you there for your customers and prospects when they have questions? Are you answering their questions truthfully?
- Be accountable – Do you own up to mistakes? Are you acknowledging mistakes before your customer catches on?
- Be receptive to feedback – Are you listening more than you are talking?
- Be committed – Do you deliver on the promises you make?
Creating a Trusted Brand – 7 Tactics to Help
- Deliver Unmatched Customer Experiences: The first aspect to lock down when it comes to building a trusted brand is how you interact with prospects, customers, and your local community. From the very first sales call to long after their project is complete, are you delivering an unmatched experience?
- Consistently Deliver Quality Work: Part of being a trustworthy business is giving your customers the assurance that you’ll consistently deliver great service. That your customers can rely on you each time, and not sporadically.
- Get More Positive Reviews: Online reviews are the greatest social proof you can get to build a trusted brand. A customer’s perspective of your business will always carry more weight than your own perspective of your business. Not all review sites are created equal though. A great online reviews strategy places a heavy focus on Google with Google My Business, followed by Facebook and Yelp.
- Connect with Other Businesses in Your Local Community: Make connections and start relationships with other businesses serving your local community. Are there strategic alliances worth exploring? The more proactive you are in engaging others, the more your brand will be out there.
- Engage Online: Are you actively sharing helpful resources and information on your website, blog, and social media that answer questions being asked by prospective customers? Are you consistent in how often you share content, what type of content you share, and the message/tone of what you’re writing about?
- Submit Your Business for Awards and Recognition: Enter your business in local and national awards to receive the recognition that you may not have otherwise gotten. Add these awards to your website, business cards, social media profiles, service trucks, and other marketing and sales collateral to leverage social proof.
- Invest in Your Online Presence: Google and other search engines will continue to give you a greater piece of the pie in terms of your local search visibility if they trust you are taking care of your online presence and working to serve customers. That means keeping your business information updated and accurate across the web, consistently creating new content on your website, blog, and social media, getting more online reviews, and optimizing your website for local search – just to name a few.
Why Becoming a Trusted Brand Matters
These are some of the positive outcomes that creating a trusted brand can have on your small business.
- Greater online search visibility – A higher star rating will help your business appear in more search results.
- Higher conversion rates – A trusted brand does the selling for you before a prospect ever joins you on the phone.
- More referrals – Creating unmatched customer experiences inspires others to share their positive experience with others.
- More repeat customers – Showing your customers how important they are to you will keep them coming back whenever they need help.
Leverage Technology to Increase Efficiency
When you utilize the right technologies to aid your business growth, you’re able to accomplish everything more effectively and efficiently. That in turn, makes managing your digital marketing all that much easier. With an all-in-one local marketing platform, you have control over all aspects of your online presence and can take action and see results all in one place.
There’s power in having visibility into all the activities being done across the entire organization and transparency on the effectiveness of those activities. Local marketing software stores all data in one place, giving everyone the same access, whenever you need it.
A platform like the Surefire Local Marketing Platform takes things a step further.
- See a word cloud visualization of the most-used terms that appear in your online reviews. This data is crucial in determining any problem areas that should be addressed, as well as celebrating the positives.
- Power your sales team to respond to new leads quickly. Begin the experience off on the best foot possible by following up instantly with new leads and showing them how important they are to your business.
- Manage your business information everywhere from one place and make updates that act as beacons in the night sky that can help light up your online presence to reach more local customers.
Want to learn more?
Surefire Local has been helping small businesses build trusted brands and deliver unmatched customer experiences since 2011. With the most cost-effective and powerful local marketing software, you have the ability to manage your online presence and execute digital marketing campaigns all in one place. It’s an operating system to run your business on so you never have to worry about wasting money on marketing again.
