Trust Is Half Of Success
Every successful company I’ve ever seen has had two things in common.
They’ve all had great products. No advertising budget, whatever its size, can compete with experience and word-of-mouth. When a company creates garbage, people talk. They don’t buy. Companies that don’t create great products soon find that they’re not selling.
But that’s the easy bit. Ideas are cheap. Production is tricky but once you have a development system in place and quality assurance that looks for flaws, moving from concept to product is just a matter of time, investment and hard work. There are no secrets to creating a good product. You just have to find the right people to help, put in the effort and keep going, without compromise, until the features are working just the way you want them to.
Much harder is the second item that’s essential for success: trust.
That’s something that has to be won constantly, maintained permanently and protected all the time.
Advertising won’t do it. An ad will tell a lead what your product does and why they need it. Good copy will build desire but it won’t create trust. Trust only comes after you’ve delivered on the promises you made during the marketing. It’s maintained when you continue to create good products. And it’s protected by acting quickly when problems do crop up and by showing that you care about your customers.
That’s one of the benefits that social media has brought to marketing. By making producers available to buyers, it’s allowed them to build personal relationships that foster trust and enable it to grow.
But just as trust is essential so is it fragile. It doesn’t take much more than a single broken promise, a recommendation of a sub-standard affiliate product or single poor customer service experience for the trust to be broken. And it’s very difficult to put it back together again. It’s much easier to create trust by delivering the goods and to keep it by being responsive and reliable.
Trust-building isn’t a regular part of marketing. It’s not something you can buy with an advertising budget or create in a development lab. It something that comes from attitude and behavior. And when you’ve got it, you’re already halfway to success.
