What is the trust metric?

Bet you’ve never heard of trust metrics huh?

Don’t worry.. You’re not alone. Most people haven’t, and yet trust metrics are one of the most fundamentally important principles in business. Especially when it comes to doing business online.

Think about the last time you bought something or engaged a service through someone’s website. Even if you didn’t realise it at the time, you made that decision in large part based on trust.

The problem is:

Most websites and marketing campaigns (most likely your current one included) don’t focus on the trust factor.

You’re a cool person. You’re not a spammer. So why wouldn’t people trust you? But unfortunately that’s not the way it works in today’s digital world.

Online, you have to build trust first, and make sales later. No trust = no sales, no new customers or clients, no repeat business.

The mistake so many marketers make is that they conjoin the urgency of making another sale with the timing to earn the right to make that sale. In other words, you must build trust before you need it. Building trust right when you want to make a sale is just too late.
~ Seth Godin

Just think about all the times you’ve closed websites as soon as you opened them. Clicked through an ad to find something completely different to what you expected that gave you a weird feeling. Or didn’t buy from someone online because you weren’t sure if they’d carry through.

Instinctively as human beings we know whether something can be trusted, and when we should run the other way.

And that, according to wikipedia, is the trust metric:

In psychology and sociology, a trust metric is a measurement of the degree to which one social actor (an individual or a group) trusts another social actor.

Here’s the clincher:

It’s not just potential customers or clients we need to trust us. If we want to get traffic in the first place, then Google needs to trust us too.

People asks questions in search engines, looking for sources that seem authentic and trustworthy.

Google tries to give the best answers to people’s queries – that’s what you see on page one.

How do they determine whose websites to show? They use an algorithm to determine which websites look most trustworthy. Which in most cases is built predominantly on two main factors:

  • Relevancy of content and how trustworthy and authoritative a website looks (eg. is it obviously a strong, legitimate brand that’s trying to help people)
  • Number of “votes” (links) from other trusted and authoritative sites

Ads are similar. In Adwords there is a “quality score”. It measures how much the content you’re sending people too matches the ad copy you’re using and the keywords you’re bidding for.

Build trust with Google and it can send you more traffic than you know what to do with.

Build trust on your website to transition cold traffic into warm leads that are ready to engage and buy from you.

So how do you build trust online? There are some very specific approaches to doing it. You’d think they’d be obvious. But to be totally honest, barely anyone seems to know about them at all.

And that’s good for you.

If you work with us, or read the articles we publish on our blog or through our email list you’ll learn how to build trust (or we’ll do it for you). And when you know how to build and maintain trust your business will grow exponentially. Both on and offline.

The new era demands a focus on ignition, not just content, on trust, not just traffic.

~ Mark Schaefer, Schaefer Marketing Solutions

“If people like you they’ll listen to you, but if they trust you they’ll do business with you.”

~ Zig Ziglar

At Trust Metric, we know how to build that trust. It’s at the core of everything we do.

Authentic marketing is a bridge between your products / services and the people who need them the most

This may not be the commonly accepted definition of “marketing”. But here at Trust Metric, we like to think of authentic marketing as a bridge.

Imagine your business on one side of a chasm. Your ideal customers who desperately need your product or service on the other. That chasm is fear, doubt and uncertainty (or just having no idea you exist, whichever you prefer).

Our job as authentic marketers is to bridge that chasm. To get your business in front of the right clients, in the right way so they trust you from the beginning. Then to maintain and build on that trust right up to the sale.

Relationships are built on trust. Trust drives revenue.

~ Andrew Davis, Monumental Shift

In this day and age 3.2 billion people are online. More than a third of those are also on Facebook. Two thirds of adults have a smartphone so they can also access your information on the go. 81% of people do online research before committing to buy. That’s a whole lot of potential customers on the other side of the chasm.

Which begs the question:

Are you reaching the people who most need your unique product or service? And do they trust you enough to buy from you?

Where to from here?

If you’ve read this far, we’ll probably get along pretty well 🙂

So here’s where you have a few choices.

If you want to learn more about our background and the kind of things we focus on in digital marketing, start off with checking out our core digital marketing blog post series:

Or, if you like what you’ve seen so far and are ready to take a leap of faith and work with us… Then check out our services here, or get straight to it and apply to work with us directly.

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