What is trust marketing (free lesson)?

Trust has to be the cornerstone of every marketing effort, because without it, sales won’t happen. Sales only happen if trust happens first. You can’t skip straight to all the revenue.

Your audience has to believe in who you are and what you do.

Trust has to be earned. You can’t buy it on Google AdWords or increase it through popups. It’s built through open and honest dialog, over time. Being a trustworthy human with transparency isn’t a quick growth hack, it’s a longterm path to growing an audience.

Trust needs to be part of the following three things:

1. Your brand. How you (or your company) are perceived as a whole.
2. Your authority. The expertise, experience and/or training you’ve got.
3. Your solution. The product or service you’re selling.

“Trust-based companies have higher customer retention & more stable revenue streams”Dr. Glen Urban, MIT Sloan School of Management

Trust can come in many forms: expertise, communication, social proof, testimonials, security seals, media mentions, free training, interviews, guest posts and even design. Every lesson in this course has elements of building trust baked into it.

Hand in hand with trust, empathy is also required. Empathy means walking in your audience’s shoes (or flip-flops). Understanding their motivations, problems, pains and then the language they use to describe yourself and your products.

Empathy happens when you listen and notice your audience. Not just what they’re saying but the reasons why they saying things.

“Empathy is feeling with people”Dr. Brené Brown

Marketing isn’t slime-ball tactics or continually pitching/selling.

Marketing is simply building trust and empathy with a specific group of people by consistently communicating with them.

(This is the sentence that ties this entire course together.)

Breaking down this definition of marketing:

• Trust. Being yourself and being transparent.
• Empathy. Listening and noticing, so you can feel /with/ your audience.
• Specific group. You can’t market to everyone.
• Consistent communication. Two-way dialog is how business relationships are built.

Regardless of how great your product is, if you aren’t reaching the right people with marketing, it won’t sustain your business.

No one is too good or has a product too good for marketing. I’m sure not. That was my biggest mistake early on, I thought my products would market themselves, which is why they failed. Then I figured out the trust can play, and developed a system to have long-term product success.

That system is Grow Your Audience. I hope you’ll join me in the course: