By this point, you may have created an awareness. You may have even cultivated a connection. But, the buck will stop right here unless you’re able to establish trust.
When a print buyer is debating between two print companies, it’s not pricing, quality, or delivery that they’re deciding between. Ultimately, they’re deciding on who they trust more. This is because trust is the necessary thing that needs to exist to draw your print buyers from the point of consideration to doing business with you. As David Horsager says,
“Trust, not money, is the currency of business and life.”
It’s your mission to usher your print buyers to that point of trust, so they have ZERO hesitation in placing an order with you.
So, how do you get there? How do you build trust with print buyers you might not ever see face-to-face?
4 Ways to Establish Trust with Your Print Buyers
Trust is easily built when you obsess over your print buyers’ needs and satisfaction.
Consider this: How do you think your print buyers would feel (and what do you think the results would be) if you obsessed over their needs and fought for their satisfaction?
Here’s how to get started:
1. Become More Transparent
Transparency simply means making something accessible.
There’s been a shift in marketing, especially as content marketing has gained traction, and your print buyers expect answers at their fingertips. If they have to talk to a salesperson to find the answers to their questions, it creates that line of thinking that your print company must be trying to hide something.
Learn to be transparent. Get things out in the open. Here are some examples:
List your pricing on your website.
Don’t hide your pricing behind a phone call. If a print buyer can’t find the answer to their question, not only does it create the appearance that you’re trying to hide your too expensive prices, but it also means you didn’t answer their question. More than likely, they’ll quickly move on to find a printer who can.
Invite them into your world.
Transparency means showing your print buyers a part of your world. What does the back of your print shop look like? Who are the people working on their print job? It’s essential to show your print buyers that your company consists of a group of actual humans who have lives and families and are working every day just like them. Using social media video is a great way to be transparent in this way.
Address questions openly.
Don’t shy away from the tough questions. Instead, answer them honestly but in your own way. For example, if you’re fighting the paper kills trees argument, instead of ignoring it, create content that addresses your recycling practices and how the paper industry plants more trees than it harvests. Or, are you more expensive than others? Instead of hoping your print buyers won’t notice, address it and tell them how you bring more value.
2. Stop Trying to Praise Yourself
Some Biblical wisdom found in Proverbs 27:2 offers some sound business advice as well: “Don’t praise yourself. Let others do it.”
To market your print company successfully, it requires social proof (and sticking a cork in the whole tooting-your-own-horn approach). Claiming you’re the best and talking about yourself all the time only makes you unrelatable.
Here are some ideas to get previous or current print buyers advocating on your behalf:
- Send surveys with every order.
- Do follow-up calls to ask if everything went well with their print order.
- Advertise where and how they can place a review. For example, “Love the way your print job turned out? Share your enthusiasm with others by leaving us a review at…”
- Create case studies around frequently-ordered products.
- Start collecting testimonials.
And remember, collected reviews mean nothing unless you use them and put them to work for you.
- Put them on your website with a “Here’s what our customers are saying…”
- Add one or two to emails or other correspondence.
- Create an arsenal of testimonials for your sales and marketing team to pull from and categorize them by pain point. For example, maybe you’re trying to market your private portals to a business, and their biggest hang-up is the time involved. You can then pop over to your review bank and find that review from Jim that talked about the time-savings he enjoyed after getting all of his franchises using private portals.
3. Be Sure You’re Using a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) Certificate
An SSL Certificate or Secure Sockets Layer provides the layer of security expected by your print buyers.
Having that certificate means you have private communication between your customers and your website. It’s a small data file that is installed on your web server, and it activates the padlock and https protocol that your users are looking for. Ultimately, it authenticates the identity of your website and encrypts the data that’s being transferred.
By adding this certificate, it’ll add that “S” in https, which stands for “secure.” Really, though, it’s more about what the certificate takes away. A website without an SSL Certificate creates a scary warning message that says, “Your connection to this site is not secure. You should not enter any sensitive information on this site (for example, passwords or credit cards), because it could be stolen by attackers.” In other words, it yells to your print buyers, “Don’t order printing online from this website. They can’t be trusted!”
Adding an SSL Certificate to your website not only adds credibility and builds trust, but it’s also just good business. So much so, that we supply SSL Certificates with all of our websites at no additional charge.
4. Provide Assurances
There are several little things you can do to help provide trust assurances when your print buyers are looking to work with you. Here are a few places to start:
Email Sign-Ups
What’s the number one fear of signing up for an email list? That they’re going to spam you, right? So, assure your print buyers by adding a sentence on your sign-up form that says something like, “We hate spam too and promise not to spam you.” Take this idea even further by letting them know exactly how often you intend to communicate with them.
Account Registration
Doubt or fear can also creep in when being asked to create an account on your website. To alleviate that, provide assurances by reminding your print buyers what the benefits are in doing so and why it’s a good thing.
Affirm their Choice
Sometimes, all that’s needed is a little validation. You can do that by merely adding statements on your sign-up and order forms that say something like, “Thanks for choosing Acme Printing! You’re in good hands!” Another tactic along these same lines is to use data to back up their purchase. For example, “Over X customers satisfied every week!” or, “Over X quality print jobs created every day!”
Remember, when your print buyers place an order online with you, they don’t get the benefit of seeing you face-to-face to gauge if you’re trustworthy, so you need to provide these types of assurances before, during, and after print production.
A Different Approach to Building Trust
Unlike the marketing content of the past that came from a sales or promotional standpoint, content today needs to be authentic and educational to win the trust of your audience.
This means that the focus of your content and marketing should be entirely on your customers and building trust with them, not on selling your products or services.
Remember, trust is the tipping point that will catapult your print business to the top.
