Trust in New Media (image by notsogoodphotography)

Does your digital marketing strategy bring you closer with your prospect or current customer? Does it create a bond of trust with them?

Does your digital communications bring your target market closer to trusting you or your company? A check for trust might just be the one check you do in your digital communications.

I was at a meeting the other day and the speaker asked everybody to look around the room and put a number 1 thru 5  above the head of people in the room based on how much you trust them. 1 being you barely trust them and 5 being you would trust them with the keys to your house and your kids while on vacation. Pretty good exercise.

Then he flipped it around and told everybody to look around the room and place these same numbers based on how much this person trusts you.

You Do Business with Those You Trust

His point was that you do business and you refer business to people you trust. One of your goals in meeting people and interacting is to create a feeling of trust between you and the people you meet. Yes networking 101 but is this relevant in new media marketing?

This exercise works great in person. You can look at the person, imagine how much time you’ve spent, your shared experiences, etc. and come to a trust conclusion. What got me thinking was whether or not we could take this same concept to the digital realm?

Can you look at your audience from Facebook to email and can you create a metric that would track trust? Before I answered that I asked myself if this was something that was relevant to someone looking to market in digital media… and I concluded it is. This also plays a role in to the post I made yesterday with Priming in Social Media.

What is Trust?

First I really wanted to understand if trust was the right word I was looking for. So I did what anybody would do–I searched. Here are the top four definitions I think are relevant:

• reliance on the integrity, strength, ability, surety, etc., of a person or thing; confidence.
• confident expectation of something; hope.
• confidence in the certainty of future payment for property or goods received; credit: to sell merchandise on trust.
• a person on whom or thing on which one relies

Those are all great and convinced me that we need some form of Trust Metric similar to the KLOUT score for twitter.

Let’s Get This Out of the Way

One important element worth mentioning is that your overall communications and strategy in digital marketing should reinforce trust. Trust in you, your team, your brand, and your products. What we are really are talking about is the backbone of permission marketing.

For example, you form trust in email marketing by delivering a newsletter as scheduled and making it relevant to what you promised. This trust is created by value and consistency.

So one important element here is that you think strategically and tactically about your communications and see ways you can create bonds of trust.

Can We Measure Trust?

I’ve done the research and the answer is no. The best overview I have found to why is from Wikipedia on the Trust Metric:

There is no generally agreed set of properties that make a particular metric better than others, as each metric is designed to serve different purposes, e.g. [3] provides certain classification scheme for trust metrics. Two groups of trust metrics can be identified:

Empirical metrics focusing on supporting the capture of values of trust in a reliable and standardized way

Formal metrics that focus on formalization leading to the ease of manipulation, processing and reasoning about trust; formal metrics can be further classified depending on their properties.

The bottom line is trust is subjective.

Thinking in Trust

Even though trust cannot be measured I believe it is an element that you should include in your communication plan. In this post I really don’t have any answers but here are some questions I think that might be important to consider:

• How that picture or graphic you release enhancing your trust within your audience.
• Can you create a video or add an element to a video that will increase trust in your or your company? What actions can you do within a social platform that enhances trust?
• How does the stream of conversations or updates within your wall or profile enhance trust?
• The big question… what things, if any are you currently doing that could be eroding trust?

Finding Your customers channel (image by Vocab)

It’s time to break out the candles, dim the lights and start chanting… then in an ominous voice ask how well do you know your customer or prospect? When the room starts to shake–the candles flicker then continue and ask the questions that’s going to spin your head completely around… what is the most effective channel to reaching your customer or prospect?

Most likely your choices are vast and deep from search based ads, content networks, email, direct mail, mobile, and social just to name a few. You might be using all but are you using all to reach all your market or are you segmenting out your channels for greater effectiveness?

Hope for Haiti and Mobile

At the beginning of 2010 do you remember the Hope for Haiti campaign? To donate $10 you would text to the organization and they would place a charge on your phone bill. A Pew study found that 14% of donations totaling $30 million where made by Americans using their cell phones. This compared to 12 percent by telephone. Nearly 23 percent said they donated via the Web, and 5 percent did so by e-mail.

This campaign was vastly successful across multiple channels but I want to highlight the mobile channel. The mobile outreach was successful because the people behind Hope for Haiti understood that these consumers wouldn’t donate $10 by sending a check,  on the web or over the phone but would donate given the channel that they understood. They made it easy and perfect for this American Idol generation.

Twitter Moms and Your Channels

Are you making it easy for your customers to do business with you in a channel they prefer?

Next is a study from EMarketer.com that gave a little more insight into Twitter moms. Noting that several studies from MarketingSherpa and Razorfish have found consumers follow brands for deals and special offers– Emarketer.com found there is more to this channel for this vertical market. The “Twitter Mom’s” top reason for following businesses on Twitter was because they provide useful content. While about two-thirds said they liked to see businesses tweeting links to sales, moms most wanted companies to share links to interesting articles or news.

Even more can be gleamed from this study. For this channel (Twitter) if your market is a mom then you should be interesting to them, have personality, and not post to frequently. While great advice in general it wasn’t what the general thought was surrounding this group.

How to Figure Out Your Channels

Ask. Ask your best customers. Where do they spend time. What technology do they use and why? Go deeper, not so much as what they tell you but what do they show you.

Market Research. Today as a business owner or marketer your opportunity to find information and demographic data is more available than ever. The key with market research in today’s world is understanding that one source never tells the whole story. The study from Emarketer.com above exposed that a core what was a common reason why a consumer followed a brand or company–instead it showed that you can make a case and strategy for driving awareness and word of mouth marketing. I would suggest that you schedule time in your calendar to do market research.

Test and Verify. Every time I think I know a consumer or a target market I’ve been surprised. Without real data and real interactions you have just a guess and assumptions. Create a strategy that enables you or your company to test new channels. You might not think that you customers would respond to a mobile coupon–this is the main reason why you should try and test it out.

In Conclusion

Going forward think about your channels and segmenting out your audience. I’d go further with some channels as well. With social you have Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, and much more. Search you have Google, Bing/Yahoo (as the merging happens here over the next few months). Mobile you have direct, text, and the ad networks like Admob. My main aim of this post is to hopefully help you get focused on thinking about segmenting your market and testing different channels of approach to reach them.

Then I like to work on creating touch points and emotions around these eight core motivations.

These ultimate motivations are what people “really” want. Your product or service is the vehicle to providing these benefits (or it should be).

Read further or watch the video below.

1. To be wealthy

Pretty obvious here. People have a love hate relationship with wealth. Generally you can say that people hate other people’s wealth but love their own. What is your target market’s feeling toward wealth? Do they have an expectation to someday be wealthy? Does your product, service or what you offer give help them get close to wealth in any way?

2. To be good looking

When you look at the total cosmetic surgeries are up 3% at 12.1 million procedures a year you know that we are a culture focused on looks. So bring it down to one person, what do they do daily to be good looking? Is it more important to them or they really don’t care? How much of a factor does it play into their daily life? Think time, energy, and thoughts.

3. To be healthy

How much is spent on healthy food, exercise, vitamins and supplements? How many times do you or your target market think about being healthy in a given day? 1-5… think about it, on the way to work, should I get that double latte and bagel. At lunch should I go to fast food or if I go out should I get a salad. On the way home do I pick up something or eat light. When am I going to get time to fit in my workout… or I really should be working out, or maybe I’ll burn calories watching TV. What drives the healthy desires of your target market?

4. To be popular

We all want to be liked. We want our opinions to matter. How many things does your target market do a day that helps them to be liked? Is it the clothes they wear? How about the car they drive? How about the area they live in?

5. To have security.

Security in relationships, financially, even feeling safe at home. What types of things does your target market do to become secure? What decisions have they made throughout their life to reinforce this security? How does this affect their daily choices? How does your product or service fit into their need to be secure?

6. To achieve inner peace

Don’t we all want to be up high in the mountain hanging out with monks? Well maybe just me… but who wants turmoil? Does your target market secretly long for inner piece but hasn’t achieved it? Will what you offer give some form of closure to a nagging issue they have?

7. To have free time

Isn’t this why you do everything else in life so you can have time to do what you really want to do? These days it seems people are obsessed with finding the fastest and quickest ways to do things. What does your target market do with their free time? What if they had more time would they do? What do they secretly day dream about doing… writing a novel, traveling, spending time with family?

8. To have fun

Wouldn’t it be great if we all could be Ryan Seacrest? Well maybe not because that guy works a ton. Most of us long for the time when we can have fun, the weekends are our escape. What types of things does your target market do for fun? How do they enjoy themselves? What are the hidden things that they do to have fun?

What to Do Now

Using the 8 Universal Motivations will allow you to create copy, content, and products that get right to the core of your target market. Spend time fleshing these out, making them real and connecting what you do with as many motivations as you can.

Are You Spending a Day With Your Prospect?

I know what you’re saying… they are a prospect they don’t know me yet.

Like Einstein used to do let’s go on a thought experiment.

First on Einstein’s thought experiments… many of his greatest breakthroughs came from him piecing things together through what are called thought experiments. Or what you and I refer to as day dreaming– just that he was Einstein and we are not, so he does thought experiments.

Let’s day dream and spend a day with our prospect.

But Why Would I Want To Do That?

The purpose of this day with your prospect is it helps you get into the daily life of your target market. Before you create content, network in social media, or spend any time advertising this one day will make all of this more effective.

Even if you sell to a business to business this is still relevant. Typically behind these decisions are one or two people. You sell them; you get the right ally to sell the organization. So knowing them in and out will allow you to connect and find them that much easier. Effective sales in this realm can go beyond the needs and solution your company or service provides for their organization.

Your goal here is to get to the daily challenges, the conversations, the wants, and needs of that person you are working on selling or doing business with.

Come On Does This Really Work?

Just Like Christopher & Banks create your own Mary and Tracy

Have you heard of the clothing retailer Christopher & Banks? They have spent a day with two people, Mary and Tracy.

In the mid 90’s recognizing that the fastest growing demographic group in the market was women from age 35 to 54, the leadership took steps to further define its primary customer and weave her character into the fabric of the company.

The typical customer was determined to be Mary, age 39, who worked full time and had a family income of $55,000 or more. She preferred a more business casual look that she could wear to both work and to community meetings, or to her children’s events later in the day. Discussions about Mary’s needs pervaded all aspects of the company. She lived in the suburbs and drove a minivan.

The company went so far as to have an actual picture of ‘Mary’ and place it in their corporate offices. They asked themselves often if the strategies, products, and marketing that they did fell with the needs and wants of Mary.

In 2000 they then spent a day with Tracy. Tracy is Mary’s younger sister, who had the same lifestyle and tastes. Christopher & Banks launched a new division of stores called CJ Banks for size 14-24 women, this was for Tracy.

Both Mary and Tracy have helped Christopher & Banks remain a very profitable company in a crowded space. With current sales at 530.7M and a one year growth of 7.8% they have proven that dialing in your target market down to one core person can be one element of success.

So How Do I Do This?

Simple, create your own Mary. Go beyond the married, have kids, age, and income stuff. I’m going to assume you are going to nail that down and want to get to the good stuff.

Wake up with your prospect. What time do they get up? What do they do next? What do they eat in the morning if anything? Do they listen to the radio on the way to work? Do they work? What time do they leave for work? Why do they work? Do they drink coffee? Make it at home or pick it up on the way? Do they bring lunch to work or eat out? What time do they get home? Live the day with your prospect.

Then go deeper. Okay, I know getting creepy now… but now it’s time to get into the mind and conversations. What do they talk about at work? What do they talk about with their spouse? How about what types of things are discussed when they are at their kids events? What phrases do they use?

This is just a start but there are a 1,000 more questions you can answer about your prospects day.

After Your Full Day Here’s What to Do Next

Give your prospect a name. Craft what you do, your content, and your communications to this one person. If you have a product or service craft your product offering to your own Mary or Tracy.

Get as detailed as you can possibly can.

How does your product, service or what you sell fit into their life? How do they perceive what you do or your product? How does their daily life affect you attracting them to what you do?

The questions are endless and spending this day with your own prospect will make sure you and what you do is in alignment with your most valuable asset, your customer.