The number of ads an average online user sees per day is countless. How to stand out?
In this article, we’ll try to bridge the gap between being a part of the faceless marketing crowd and proving yourself as a trusted online resource with a strong reputation. We’ll show how social media can enhance your professional online presence and why the way your website looks and feels is essential in building your brand image.
Let’s get started!
The most trusted advertising medium
In 2011 and 2013, people were asked what type of advertising they trusted most. In both years, recommendations from other people, especially those they knew, were deemed the most trustworthy, with 68% of respondents stating they “somewhat or completely trusted consumer opinions posted online.”
In 2022, A. Guttmann published her survey, “Most trusted ad channels worldwide 2021,” where she asked the same question to 40,000 respondents.
The results were stunning: now, 89% of respondents stated that they trusted recommendations they got from friends and acquaintances as the most reliable source of advertising.
The 10-year-long trend is evident: people move from trusting ads to trusting people.
That calls for a completely different sort of marketing: a customer-centered one.
How To Get Spoken About In 2022?
Word-of-the-mouth is the most simple and complex type of advertising imaginable.
You can run a costly campaign to create your online presence with social media, but you can only get people to speak about you if you satisfy them.
From the quality of your products and services, customer support, and delivery times to the marketing emails, ads, and Facebook stories, how you work and look gets imprinted in the customer’s mind.
Customers’ positive experiences while interacting with your brand leave a lasting trace and desire to share.
So, where does the experience start?
Building A Social Media Presence
Social media is often your first point of touch with your client.
People post stories, share experiences, and retweet images of liked products. Thus, social media is a perfect platform to spread the positive (or negative) word of mouth.
Besides that, having an online social media presence is necessary to make your brand look sustainable. Your company will only seem reliable if a new visitor finds your shop online but can only see a social media page where real customers leave real reviews.
So, how to build a solid social media presence?
First of all, your page should be regularly updated with high-quality content. Even the design of the images you post matters.
Secondly, you should constantly interact with your audience by asking them to comment, share information, or answer polls.
You may also remind them of your brand with no-intrusive non-advertising information that might interest your customers, even if it doesn’t make them follow links or press buttons.
Managing your social media presence may be hard but pays off with time. It gives you a unique possibility to build a circle of friends that will be your advertisers, early adopters, and testers.
Companies with a destructive social media presence often must pay more attention to this factor. And pay their price. Once, British Airlines lost a customer’s luggage, and a dissatisfied customer paid for a sponsored tweet to broadcast to the company’s 302,000 Twitter followers. The company only answered the tweet eight hours after it was posted, explaining it with limited working time. That cost them a lot of time and apology interviews in the later weeks to restore the brand trust.
Yet even brands with a solid social media presence make mistakes. According to Forbes consultor Amy Leneker, “Trust is built in small actions over time, and each online interaction is an opportunity to build (or destroy) trust.” She also adds that we often forget social media’s “social” component.
That means more than having beautifully designed posts and SEO-optimized texts are required. The main thing is remembering to regularly get in touch with a customer. Timely answering questions in comments and messengers, asking for feedback, and expressing gratitude for loyalty give a feeling of connection between the business and its clients.
Better brand visibility, learning customer opinions, and building relations with potential customers are just a few benefits of social media presence.
Businesses today actively integrate their social media pages into customer support.
Customer Support
Nowadays, clients may ask a customer support officer about a product on the phone, send a note on Twitter, and finally request an answer via email. HubSpot gives eight channels that customers use to contact customer service: email, phone, live chat, social media, webpage, live video, in-person, and snail mail.
Companies prefer help-desk software with great integrability to keep these strings centralized and keep track of the conversation.
They allow customer support agents to track a conversation with a client via different media and, simultaneously, be prepared to provide any information needed: delivery time, product quality, or back-to-stock terms.
The importance of such an approach for brand trust is immense. Clients get into an environment centered around their needs and save time fulfilling their demands in a wink of an eye. According to Peter Booklah from Forbes, “At some stage, we all need to interact with the company we are dealing with, and those who make the process both simple and customer-centric are the ones who will win. In the end, we are all humans.”
Why is this important for building positive brand awareness? People are more likely to complain about a negative customer experience than express gratitude for the positive one. In the case of a now-defunct Australian fashion boutique chain, a client complaint went viral making the company’s manager issue a national television apology, which didn’t save the company from being closed three weeks later.
User-Friendly Website
A client comes to your website for information and an impression.
Customers prefer to avoid unappealing not-user friendly websites where it is difficult to find things they need. That is why every respected company builds an IT department or hires a software development company MLSDev to update its website with the latest user experience trends.
Wrong site mapping, invalid search boxes, missing search suggestions, and other imperfections frustrate users with the general website experience, impacting brand reputation.
Therefore, paying attention to every step of a customer’s online journey is necessary.
Also, a website is a great platform to sustain your company’s trustworthiness by posting testimonials and certifications. This information proves that your company can build strong relations with clients and is responsible for providing services against industry standards.
It gives space for building closer and more in-person relations with your audience. Jordan Caroll from The Remote Job Coach urges business owners to communicate with their customers by sharing personal experiences: “Tell stories, especially stories of failure… If you have previously been through the pain they [customers] feel, you’re much more likely to gain trust with them…” This may be done via the blog section or a note from a company’s owner on the home page, but this practice boosts customer trust and loyalty.
Policies and Compliance
Your company’s website and other communication channels should include links to clear, reader-friendly descriptions of your policies.
This is a great move to prove to your customers that you care about their safety and privacy and that your intentions as a service or product provider are crystal clear.
Moreover, the company’s policies should be easy to find on the site search or promptly explained by customer support in written or oral form.
Whether it’s a money-back guarantee, delivery safety, or the use of data policy, all this information should be available with a couple of clicks.
A company needs to provide this to ensure a company gets an accurate image.
Compliance with data protection regulations is another move to show customers their rights are respected. Since the internet penetrates different areas of our lives, some vulnerable information gets exposed easily.
Ensure you give customers complete control of their data, allowing them to use your resources with a minimum digital footprint (no-cookie practice) on their demand. Although this will make gathering statistics harder, it will reward you with increased customer loyalty.
Summing Up
Since the number of ads an average person sees every day is growing, turning into an annoying buzz, people tend to be simple and go the most natural way: asking people for recommendations. Building trust is an essential strategy in these conditions, as it’s the best way to get favorable coverage through word-of-the-mouth.
Building a positive online presence is a complex process that incorporates many aspects, each equally important. This includes social media presence, high-quality customer support, attention to the user experience on your website, compliance with regulations, and getting other people to speak positively of your brand.
These efforts may only succeed if they are consistent through different channels. Your customer support service should be as reactive as your Twitter or Facebook activity, and your website should always follow the heartbeat of your audience.
