How to earn trust at scale with marketing

Effective marketing, the kind you find enjoyable, requires significant effort. In contrast, bad marketing, which stays with you and leads to online complaints, often requires minimal effort.

The connection between the effort invested and the success of your marketing is clear.

Earning trust at scale is essentially the practice of becoming someone trustworthy and worth following.

It’s having to reverse engineer what makes someone trustworthy worthwhile, what are those characteristics practices and principles and how can we use those and develop those for ourselves to become worth following.

This came from Alex Hillman’s book called 'The Tiny MBA’ where he said "audience building’ should be called
“earning trust at scale”

I love this as it outlines this paradigm shift in this movement where marketing used to be about tricky, tactics and growth hacks etc. However, now it’s about trust.

“The last 20 years of marketing have been about persuasion, the next 20 will be about trust” - Sam Shepler

Why Marketing needs to be a trusted source of information

What is trust? 

Trust is the belief in the reliability truth or ability of someone or something

• "Is this person knowledgeable?"

• "Does this product live up to its claims?"

• "Will this solution address my issue?"

Those are the questions that people ask themselves when they’re evaluating how trustworthy something is, and if you think about it, every time 

• A product is bought 

• A contract is signed 

• Or even when a link is clicked 

People are demonstrating trust because both personal and business relationships are continuous exchanges and exchanges require trust exchange. 

I give you this thing, and then you give me that thing in return and that requires a level of trust to be able to do that synchronously right.

At the same time, and the interesting part of this whole thing is that trust can’t be bought. 

It has to be earned - it’s a really hard to earn and can be easily lost. If you think about it, it’s a brand's most valuable asset - reputation. 

Reputation is what a brand is as the association of the trustworthiness, the reputation of a product and it has to be protected at all costs

What is ‘At scale’

With the Internet with age that were in ran the age of infinite leverage. 

Media creation is now democratised and easily accessible, offering credibility without boundaries. Internet adoption is at an all-time high, transforming levers into powerful force multipliers.

Breaking away from a linear relationship between effort and impact is crucial for growing your audience. With leverage, you can embrace a nonlinear or exponential connection between effort and impact:

• Sales: 1:1

• Marketing: 1:many

Leverage also initiates compounding effects, allowing significant benefits from seemingly modest actions. 

For instance, increasing your landing page conversion rate from 1% to 3% isn't just a 2% improvement; it represents a 300% improvement. 

Regularly writing articles might initially generate modest traffic, but over time, consistent effort can result in substantial overall growth.

Small Choices + consistency + time = significant results

When it comes to marketing, earning trust on a broader scale is the key focus. Questions to ask:

• Whose trust are you working to secure?

• How will you earn it?

• Which strategies will you prioritise to achieve this?

So what builds trust?

Authority: If you have expertise and experience in something people will listen to you

Example: If I want to find a good book, what comes to mind is Alex & Books on Twitter.

Endorsement:

Social proof, reviews and influencer promotion. When you say it, it's marketing. When your customer says it, it's social proof.

Credibility builds trust and is used to prove that your claims are true and prove the cause-effect relationship between your solution and the customer's positive outcome. 

Value:

This is having a ‘give first’ mentality. If you’re always making asks, you’re going to deplete and exhaust your audience. But If you’re always giving more than what you’re taking from your audience, you'll never lose them as they are always going to get a good deal.

Ask ‘How much value can I provide?’ Demonstrate big value as fast as possible and give yourself a downhill battle by giving away something crazy. Give away something for free people would normally pay for and they will want it. 

A good example is Alex Hormozi, where he packs a lot of value into his books and social content that he has an avid group of raving fans from the trust he has built.

Consistency:

Showing up over time. It’s building a reputation over time and letting people know what to expect from you. The Internet rewards prolific people.

For example, Seth Godin has now published more than 7,000 blog posts. By doing so, he’s built relationships with hundreds of thousands of people. You can directly control the luck you receive.

The harder you work, the luckier you get. For example with content, it’s not enough just to do good work just publish. 

• You have to promote it

• you have to tell it

• you have to publish it

• you have to get it out there

• you have to distribute it

Commonality:

Communities are a way to have a group of people who have shared interests

Empathy:

If you can talk about someone’s problems, they’ll trust you to provide the solutions. Put into words what customers feel is an "unwritten taboo" is a perfect descriptor that signals the messaging is clear.

Other examples, Showcase personality and rich media like audio and video allow personality to shine through.

Transparency:

We trust people based on what we know and also don't know about them. Opening up about yourself, being personal with stories, being relatable and being more transparent builds trust.

People are afraid of the unknown, the less you’re unknown, the more trustworthy you become 

Example: Interactive Demo, which showcase your product or service "in the wild."

Leaving people better off than when you’ve found them

In today’s day and age, the market is filtering who should listen and scepticism is at an all-time high. 

You’re met with resistance to turn a stranger into a client. You need to erode all of that scepticism and build certainty by providing as much value to your prospects in advance. 

Showing them your knowledge in the field and how can help them by providing value and educating them.

Provide so much value to your prospects in advance. Just think about how you can help the prospect to get to where it is that they want to do.

People will appreciate the amount of value, as you're helping them by educating them to make the right decision.

When people have a high level of certainty that's when a transaction takes place.

When they're certain that they're making the right decision.

80% value, 20% pitch.

So, in a world where everybody wants results yesterday. There is value in playing the long game. This is called Planting Seeds.

There will be people who will like you and your business, have a problem of some sort and goals. They aren't quite ready to do business with you yet.

Don't focus on the instant gratification of getting that next customer. Don't disregard prospects who said they're not interested Or are not a fit.

Instead, build a relationship over time.  Then 6, 12 months even 2 years later... That person can then be ready to do business with you.

Instead of thinking of the short-term, people with a long-term mindset, think long into the future.

Where they're planting those seeds today with people they can do business with in the future.

Be in the long game, as it's the most valuable thing you can do.