Quickly find opportunities to build trust in your business, to make it easier to get new clients, even if it is new or faces past issues

What could your business become if more people trusted you?

“People aren’t interested in you. They’re interested in themselves.”

Dale Carnegie

Are you losing business because your brand is not trusted?

Brand trust derives from past performance and perceived benevolence. i.e. Being well-meaning and helpful.

The Brand Trust Builder helps you create a string of clues that suggest your brand’s benevolence.

These clues highlight your client’s concerns about a variety of perceived risks. Then you get to show your solutions to those concerns.
These may be concerns that they are currently facing that you can address for them. Or, concerns about doing business with your organization, your category, or your industry.
It takes the concern, which has an emotional basis around perceived loss. Then it helps you show how you lower that risk.
All in a framework you can transfer to your brand’s communications.
So that the trail of clues you leave behind will create a positive emotional connection.

This means your brand has an easier time getting and keeping clients. And will likely have more pricing power.

Access The Brand Trust Builder

Available to use anytime you need to build brand trust.
When you have to show why your brand is trustworthy.
Useful when you need to come up with many new ideas.

Intelligence built-in

Designed to do the heavy lifting for you.
So you can move past the obvious trust-building messaging used in your industry.
Pull together the essential details for trusted communications

Ideas on demand

Pre-built checklists to save you time.
Processes to guide you.
Get ideas you may not have considered.
Make your task easier, faster, insightful and more comprehensive

No trust

=

No sale

Brands that are trusted are often loved.

They have proved they are different and therefore have fewer perceived competitors.

As a result, they get to charge a price premium.

The Brand Trust Builder helps you link trust-related concerns with solutions you can incorporate into your communications with prospective and current clients.

The Brand Trust Builder can be used for:

A brand that has no issues, but just needs to build additional trust.
A newer brand with limited brand trust.
A brand with a troubled past having brand trust issues.
A brand coming from an industry with a poor image, where the category or industry is not trusted.

Provides a researched list of thirty-three issues people care about that you can use as trust-building opportunities.

So you can know their emotional “hot-buttons” that they may not share with you.
So you can identify opportunities and solutions to start to build trust.
This means you can focus your time on building a comprehensive list of brand trust messages that are more relevant, at a deeper level, for faster results.

Helps you think about what really matters to your clients. Then links your trust-building solutions to the emotional benefits you wish to associate with your brand.

So the process becomes easier for you. And it becomes possible to be seen as different.
This means an opportunity to build brand trust, uniqueness, and pricing power in areas that your competitors may not have considered.

Develop trust-building messages using a structured approach inspired by brand persuasion specialists.

So you are guided to focus on the message content that really matters when it comes to being seen as credible.
So you can build trust more effectively, rather than just turning out more messaging that may not be relevant.
This means you have less work to do when using the output for building a brand trust framework in all your communications.

Helps link each of your trust-building ideas to one or more client segments.

So you can direct your trust-building message to those who are concerned about how you manage that specific issue.
This means that you have more confidence in targeting the right people with your brand trust messaging.

Provides an easy way to develop your trust-building ideas and review them as you put all the bits together.

So you can build a brand trust solution in one sitting if you have the time.
Or, plan brand trust messages one at a time, as and when you need them if you only have 30 minutes to spare.
This means you can work around your schedule while being reassured that what you are working on makes sense.

Where you can use this

Email

Develop a variety of ideas to create email messaging.
Allows you to get closer to a sale by showing why you are trustworthy.
Allows you to have a higher client retention rate by reminding clients of the trust-building mechanisms you have in place.

Whitepapers

Show the benefits and rationale for the trustworthiness of your brand and your solution.
Helps you through the thought process of content for a complex document so you can address issues that affect trust.
Spend less time to build the perception of trustworthiness where it matters.

Video content

Address specific concerns that affect trust.
Helps build a structure for approaching issues in a way that builds trust.
Consistently build evidence that enables trust amongst your followers on an ongoing basis.

Live streaming topics / Webinars

Achieve a higher webinar sign-up rate by being able to make an appeal at an emotional level. This could include discussing issues that prevent potential clients from signing up with competitors.
It allows you to think about a variety of issues that will assist you to build trust.
Create the perception of someone that is trustworthy.

Website content

Address issues of concern that impact on trustworthiness.
Plan for how trust-related triggers and solutions need to be a part of your messaging.
Useful to develop relevant messages when prospects compare you to competitors on your website.

Unpaid posts

Constantly show how you are trustworthy when prospects and clients read your posts. An approach to achieve this can be through solutions that have an emotional value to clients.
Is a useful way to have sufficient relevant content ideas that do something useful, rather than just building awareness.
Build on trust triggers you might be using in sponsored posts to keep demonstrating why you are trustworthy.

Storytelling and case study material

Reassure through content, showing the problem a client had, and how you went about solving it.
Shows evidence of how you solved a challenge like the one the prospective client may be facing right now.

The research behind this

How we make the task easier for you

We have worked on over 70 global and local B2C and B2B brands over a period of over 20 years.

Clients have included Fortune 500 companies across a variety of industries.

When consulting with them in the areas of brand development, sales development, and loyalty development, we noticed that trust-building communications were often developed with some degree of difficulty.

We researched the topic and combined it with our own experience to define 33 concerns that people typically have. These may be concerns that they are currently facing that you can address. Alternatively, they may be concerns they have about doing business with your organization, your category, or your industry.

If you are able to resolve these concerns, you are in a better position to build trust.

Getting this to work from strategy to execution

How we make the process easier for you

Having a great idea to build trust does not help if you do not execute the idea.

To this end, we have built-in a process to make this easier. So that you can identify areas of opportunity, and approach them with a practical communication.

Each of the 33 areas where you could build trust includes 4 examples. That will help you get started to customize this for your own situation.

Then we take you through a process of a few questions for each trust-building opportunity. Designed by a strategist, it assists you to make notes on what and how to communicate your idea. There are also checklists included making this faster and more comprehensive.

The idea is to be able to take this thinking and transfer it into communication with relative ease.

How the process works

Define the options you prefer before starting

Add in the names of products, services, and segments you will be working with.
Relevant details help you find your information when editing previously submitted data.

Choose from a detailed list of trust triggers

Go through the list of what concerns people most. Then choose the concern you wish to address with a trust-building solution.
These may be concerns they are currently facing that you can address and build trust in the process.
They may be concerns they have about doing business with your organization, your category, or your industry.

Explain the direction you will be taking

Show how the concern would apply to your business practices or the challenges the client faces.
Helps you confirm you understand the challenge fully in terms of perceived risks that affect trust.
Helps to show empathy when creating your messaging.

Explain the solution you could apply

What form would your solution take?
Makes you consider how to connect the challenge with your proposed trust-building solution.
Use this to structure the wording you will use to explain how and why this will lower the client’s perceived risk.

Focus on the core of your solution

Summarize your solution in simple terms.
This is important when developing headlines that attract attention.
It is useful when the trust-building solution is easy and comfortable to grasp – rather than creating further anxiety through your messaging.

Choose the range of emotions you would want to inspire

Trust relates to the fear of some perceived risk. This may be financial, social, or performance-based.
Showing how this risk can be lessened or eliminated is essential. It should result in a positive emotional outcome you wish to create.
Linking an emotional outcome to an offer in your messaging can make it easier to sell.

Products or services that could address this specific client concern to build trust

Associate the client’s concern with the products or services that could assist with the trust-building solution.
Useful when filtering through the final output to associate specific concerns and trust-building solutions with specific products or services. Makes it easier to develop a product or service-specific communication.
Also useful when developing portfolio strategies to show how your products and services can be used synergistically to build trust through greater peace-of-mind. This is to provide a unique solution that your competitors may not be able to offer.

Client segments likely to be looking for a trust-building solution

Associate the concern with client segments that would benefit from the trust-building solution.
Useful when filtering through the final output to associate specific concerns and trust-building solutions with specific client segments. Makes it easier to develop segment-based communications with associated trust-building solutions.
Also useful when developing a bundle of trust-related offerings at different price points. This would assist in identifying client segments that may be interested in specific bundles that offer certain levels of “security” to enable greater trust and peace-of-mind.

Back up your claims to grow your credibility

Show the aspects of your business that will create trustworthiness.
There may be more than one reason. It may even be a process. It may be an outside party.
You are providing “proof points” to show the basis for why you can lessen financial, social, or performance risk.

Define your social credibility status

You say you are trustworthy. Do other people agree with you?
What proof can you show when you make the claims you are making?

Choose the communications channels you will use

Check off the channels you will be using to communicate this.
Include groups and affiliates too.
This helps identify the messaging in place.
It also helps you identify gaps you need to work on.

Save your work

Save your draft in case you need to do this over more than one session.
Depending on how you work, this can help you record your high-level ideas first, and then fill in the detail later.

Some frequently asked questions.

Will this do my entire communications job for me?

No. You still need to customize your thinking for your specific situation. But, it does do a lot of the heavy lifting for you to make this customization process easier.

Is this approach realistic?

After developing communications strategies for over 20 years, we wish we could have had this tool at the outset. Several insights were developed over this period:

A good framework is essential to develop many ideas and do it faster.
Most of our clients found it easy to customize for their situation. But they needed a practical process to work within areas where they lacked expertise.

There are over 120 examples to draw inspiration from. Each example was drawn from experience when consulting with our clients (You can see a list of a few of the industries we have consulted to over the last 20 years at the bottom of the page.)

Is the list of concerns comprehensive?

Much effort has gone into developing this list. Anything can be improved upon over time. But we are certain that this will give you ideas for many communications opportunities to build trust.

What do I do with the results once I have them?

We are strong believers in executing on an idea.

Until a communications idea is executed, it remains just that – an idea.

To this end, we have created a framework containing the essentials we know you need for good communication.

You can then export this information and either work with it yourself, or pass it onto the people managing your communications. We know that they would appreciate the information rather than spending hours trying to develop it.