7 Ways To Build Trust With Customers Online

Business

Becoming a successful entrepreneur in today’s highly competitive business space requires the use of integrating technology, social media platforms, and constant thoughtful marketing strategies. Your internet presence can be used in many ways to build a vast customer base, but to achieve that, you must make a lot of effort to catch shoppers’ attention, impress them, and gain their trust in the hope that they will become customers. Here are seven effective strategies to build trust with potential customers online.

Remain Authentic to Your Brand

Being genuine is a recipe for social media success. Internet authenticity involves avoiding deceit at all costs and embracing originality and realism. For example, people will trust you faster if you keep posting real, everyday photos and videos relevant to your business as opposed to sharing generic content. Lean in to what makes your business interesting and unique as opposed to pandering to your target audience.

Brand identity is equally important, and it starts with embedding your logo and unique business hooks on your social media pages, preferably as profile and cover pictures. Beyond that, you should:

Define your business colors,
Come up with and stick to a tone with your content
Use the same templates across different platforms
Brand your hashtags

Potential customers will perceive more professionalism from your business and will be more likely to trust you.

Be Human

Internet shoppers like to chat with real people. They want to actively engage the individuals behind what they buy and feel like they are a part of the business. Simply integrating an automated chatbot to reply to every comment and invade inboxes does not cut it. Robots are frustrating, monotonous, and they often give half-baked answers to user concerns.

On the other hand, making real interactions and answering critical questions comprehensively goes a long way towards building trust. It also helps to set customers’ expectations before a purchase. In this line, it is wise to hire a dedicated social media manager with the primary role to engage, reach out, and answer questions as they arise, giving your business’s social media presence a sense of life and relevance.

Respect Customers’ Money

As the wealth gap between the world’s super-rich and the middle class continues to grow, so do potential customers’ needs to save money. The modern shopper shows more financial literacy than in previous generations which raises the standards for businesses in return. Most consumers are always looking for lower prices and when they do make a purchasing decision, they expect to get “bang for their buck” and for the seller to protect their funds and payment information during the transaction.

Quality eCommerce platforms and customer-facing digital marketplaces promise a certain level of responsibility. It’s important to be transparent in the way you offer your goods or services so that customers are less frequently disappointed by the end product. This is especially important if your business operates in a high-risk industry, most of which, by the way, are booming under the umbrella of modern consumer wants and needs. Partnering with a reputable payment processing business like High Risk Merchant Pay in addition to your eCommerce/marketplace provider helps ensure that customers’ payments are processed quickly and safely to reduce errors and customer refund requests.

Share Existing Customer Testimonials

A healthy consumer base is made up of new, first-time buyers as well as satisfied repeat customers and friends or associates of theirs who have been referred to your business. All marketing strategies should be concocted as if the viewer is a first-time customer. Statistics show that over 90% of potential first-time customers believe online reviews as if they were direct recommendations from real-life friends.

Put your best foot forward to these potential new buyers by showing them real success stories and other forms of positive client testimonials. Have a system available that encourages your satisfied customers to rate their good experiences with your services, or to positively review a product you sold them. This helps build a positive perceived reputation online and gives new viewers a sense of comfort that could affect their decision to buy.

Be Fun In Your Engagements

As complicated as many modern social media platforms have become, the main draw of them remains the same: fun. The new digital space is filled with fun-loving millennials and Gen. Xers, and there’s nothing they hate more than when that fun is interrupted by a boring or overly-promotional business or site sponsor. Your way of interacting with these users carries a lot of weight, so your social media managers need to be able to integrate light forms of entertainment into your business’s voice. This could be in the form of:

Daily contests that people look forward to
Polls and statistics
Pertinent images and videos with a humorous angle
Colorful, easy-to-read infographics
Personalization in the comment section
Live events

Using Only the Relevant Networks

Over the last few years, there has been a rise in the number of social media sites, with new platforms sprouting up every year. This calls for critical thinking when it comes to selecting the right platforms for your business. If you want to reach out to a specific group of people, you have to go where they already are. For instance, there are businesses more suited for Instagram than for Snapchat, possibly because their advertising is heavily based on attractive images or they sell aesthetically-purposed products. Some of the factors to consider when choosing your ideal platforms include:

The nature of your business
Demographics of target customers
Your competitors’ choices of platform
Advertisement prices on various sites

Rather than trying to master every social media platform out there, it’s best to focus on the few that propel your specific business forward the most.

Persistence is Key

Consistency has a significant influence on the success of any kind of endeavor, and social media marketing is no different. Social media platforms have millions of users who are always hungry for new content. Therefore, the day you stop marketing is the day your business starts to deteriorate. It would be best if you kept posting and engaging users every day to stay relevant, otherwise, consumers will replace you with a company that appears to be more “in the know”. Remember to keep up with the ever-changing dynamics of social media to maintain your competitive edge.

Social media platforms have many users waiting to fall in love with your business, but gaining their trust and converting them into customers is a delicate art. The tips discussed above are great stepping stones as you plan to embark on your social media marketing journey. With the right approach and strategies, any business that offers a sought-after product can find success online and build a legacy.