BUILDING TRUST- Review
( A brand and web technology focus)
Hello Everyone!
Why should someone trust you and your business?
Let’s assuming you’re found by your SEM campaign or typing a query into search engines. Or perhaps they stumble across your business from a facebook ad or a backlink from someone else’s website.
At this point,the person is really trying to get informations about you and what you stand for (like we see strangers).
In reality, they’ve found their way to your landing page, but what makes you any more trustworthy than the person
handing out fliers for a meal delivery service at your local train station?
Friedrich Nietzsche said in his popular quote “ i’m not upset that you lied to me, I’m upset that from now on I can’t believe you.”
It is important for you to know that online and offline reputation and its management is not built overnight.you have to earn it.
According to my excellent teacher (Rojer Dooley), “trust is hard earned overtime and is lost much easily”.
The cxl’s digital psychology and persuation mini degree program that am currently enrolled in is really a platform to develop yourself if you consider customer aquisition and retention a core part of your business.
THE PYRAMID OF TRUST AND CREDIBILITY/TRUST INDICATORS
The pyramid of trust bears much similitude to the Abraham Maslow’s popular hierarchy of need. It bears resemblance because of its similar steps and explanations. The pyramid of trust as you can guess is the step involved before gaining access to people’s full trust and recommendation. Different brands command varying level of trust levels to us. As a business owner,it is outrightly wrong to assume that a visit to your site would guarantee revisit and loyalty overnight. Everyone should be treated with varied level of patterns because of their level of emotional attachment to your brand. What am I implying? I mean, before we ask visitors for certain type of informations( like asking for credit card details, referral, surveys,etc),we should be able to ascertain their trust level in the diagram and equally prepare them by moving them in the hierarchy else we’ll experience alot if balking and little to no conversions.
In simple term, we should match our ask to the trust level!
B.J Fogg and his friends at Stamford University discovered 10 indicators/factors that have continually improved website credibility over the years. They are;
1. Appropriate Design: The truth is that people are programmed to be moved by beautiful things. Who doesn’t like a well built and designed website? .In reality, First impression matters,even in websites and other social platforms. When. At every point, we are trying to make an impression (be it first or not) and continual improvement in our designs would yield maximum result as long as it resonates with your brand. For a corporate site, make sure to use high quality picture that depicts management expertise, good office environment,happy staff,etc. In a creative design site, you could use very colorful and animated designs/plugins( there are tons of JavaScript script and plugins to incorporate in your site ,but make sure it does not make it slower) E-commerce sites too should contain images that shows you have many stock of goods as in a physical store(good design is imperative too). Why must it resonate with your brand? Because it makes people believe that you’re like your design and you know what you’re doing.
2. Easy Verification: When brands make claims about what they can do and offer, it would be a good step if they can easily verify such claim. It would be awesome if you have live links to your brand testimonials, reviews, press mentions, articles, etc). It creates alot of proof to the customers or visitors and makes you respected more.
3. Show you’re real: This makes your brand resonate well with humans because you’re selling to humans not robots for God sake! A short behind the scene video or picture would not do any harm rather it would be a positive additive to your trust level. Display your physical address, demonstration of product capability, founder’s story,etc are good ways to show you’re real.
4. Proof Expertise: Everyone claims to be an expert when it comes to their business field (who would agree to their incompetence?) Because we all desire to be patronizes. Subtle and obvious ways we can get trust is by showing proof. Certificates, organizations you belong to, expertise of employees, etc. You would easily ascribe high quality to a brand that seem to have the most experience in the job.
5. Show the real human behind: it would not hurt to make boast with your employees and their stories. Adding their social handles is not a bad idea too.
6. Easy to contact: Contact forms in websites is usually used to get informations from visitors. We need to make their placement obvious. According to an eye tracking test, humans read/skim in an F-fashion. From the research, we can make our drop down menu more obvious if it is placed on the left hand side of the website. Nowadays livechat is very quick and efficient to get. Contact information.
7. Easy to use. This is one of the most common trust factor( if not the most common). A surprising research found that people prefer to use easy to use websites than trust worthy sites for medical information (an info as sensitive as health!!!!!!). This simply means easy would trump trust anytime and any day. When a Website is not responsive enough for cross platform viewing and navigation,people read big negative meaning to it. It forces them to think in the site too much ( thereby employing system 1 into their action). Cognitive load is bad when we have websites. Nobody likes to think all the time. We should eliminate frictions as much as possible to enable ease.
8. Update often: When a site updates it’s informations or designs often,it shows that they are presently in business and would promptly respond the queries on time. This is also a trust indicator.
9. Limit promotions and Ads: Niel Patel will always not shy away from telling the world why he dislike ads in his website (although it’s partly because the ad firm would benefit more from the advertisement than him that owns the platform). Many business will like to cash out from their organic and paid site visits. But it should not be at the expense of their brand. When ads are not well structured or too much, it causes brand dilution and makes for a situation where people no longer know if the site belongs to the ad or the brand. I have seen many popular website sell their credibility level for monetary returns. Everything that should be done should be equally done with caution.
10. Avoid all errors: Errors like typographical erros, ad load erros, design error, coding error,etc plays a huge part in discrediting a website.
WAYS TO BUILDING TRUST
Have u been found guilty from the aforementioned list? Have you made your quick corrections and are ready to building your trust level? Make sure to work on the following.
1. Reviews : 68% of site visitors rate it as a huge source of credibility. Although field have known that it influences their perception and trust level. Many firms do astroturfing ( creating a seemingly spontaneous and autonomous support for your brand without peoples knowledge that it was your engineering) and sock puppetry ( Opposite of astroturfing on your competitors). Why waste time doing it when you can make your brand more reliable by allowing the positive and negative reviews but with an efficient customer service to clear all doubt. Infact, without a research you’ll know that people become skeptical when the reviews are too perfect. That is why you need to leave it organic.
2. Domain Trust: People tend to trust easy to understand,recognisable,and easy to pronounce domain names than complex ones. Also domain names that resonate with their locality gets more trust (eg, .co.uk for Britain, .Ng for Nigerians . Etc)
3. Socializing: Social conversations increases conversion rate. Be it blog posts, emails, social media or any conduit,it increases your chance of being trusted and patronised.
Others are;
4. Improved Photographs
5. Using Trust Symbols
6. Using Trust Seals.
7. Videos, photos and animated phrases.
P.S: High trust comes from experience. We should be careful to treat visitors like visitors and properly guide them through a excellent customer journey and not giving them tasks that loyal customers are to do. How far do u suspect a site visitor to have gone in his trust pyramid determine how much you’ll reveal to them.
See you next time.
