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Building trust with your audience

Submitted by Paul Rushing on Sunday, March 16, 20082 Comments

Building trust with your audience is a critical task if you wish to market anything online if it requires personal interaction or an increased trust level for consumers to buy.  In the Internet Marketing Arena inside of the Make Money Niche it is one of the first things that you learn, build a trust relationship with your list.

Some of the mistakes I see being made in the Automotive Industry in this respect would cause you to become a pariah in many other niches, but it is considered acceptable in Automotive Digital Marketing.  While it mainly is not the dealers making these mistakes it is the vendors inside of the industry.  I get spammed weekly from one automotive website provider.  In a previous post about Dealer Micro Sites, I asked a vendor to respond and all they did was drop a very caustic remark full of spam links without using their real name, so I did not approve the comment.  Lead providers try to end around me at the dealership.  Automotive classified providers screw up invoicing.  I asked a new social media site to correct their database info and they responded by deleting my dealership from their platform.

This does not take into account that most all of the products offered by vendors is overpriced  for the level of service they give or the real value of their product.  Unfortunately for the dealers they only measure things by the 30 day window in which they operate and do not look at the long term implications of some of the decisions they make in regards to their online marketing.  This is good for me in my local market because I am creating many different levels of online marketing materials to attract traffic to the dealership’s website and my own unique selling proposition and I do not worry about the 30 day window as much as the long term benefits.

The good thing for me is as long as the vendors keep screwing things up it makes my job easier and my only real competition is mediocre products from online automotive vendors.

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2 Comments »

  • BHoecht said:

    Paul,

    It has been a while since we spoke. As a dealer technology vendor specializing in assisting dealers in developing trust online… I’m curious (and it is just a question your readers may like)…

    “What things do you do at your dealership to inspire and generate online trust with your consumers?”

    If you don’t remember me, Ai-Dealer sells the Buy Direct / Shopping Cart for car dealers to add on to their websites. Consumer self-serve generates trust because online systems like ours have to be built so that consumers want to proceed… which requires easy to understand workflow + trust.

    So, on your website (and I haven’t been to it), what do you do to get your consumers to trust you?

    In your follow up responses to leads, what do you do to get your consumers to trust you?

    In your SEM/PPC (if you do that), what message on the banner ads do you use? What keywords do you buy that brings “right minded” consumers to you?

    What else do you do? Consumer focused blogs that speak a language of trust?

    It is your blog and I’m a tech vendor, so no answers or opinions from me…

    - 23 March 2008 at 9:17 am
  • Paul Rushing (author) said:

    Hey Brian,

    Wow it has been awhile since I have shown this blog any love and do apologize that your comment did not appear immediately.

    Unfortunately our store website is controlled by our corporate office and there is very little that I can do with it at this point.

    The biggest advantage that I have is that I have created many levels content across various mediums that generate many direct calls and emails.

    That content is targeted to specific regional keyword combinations and has proven invaluable at generating many direct inquiries.

    Also timeliness in a reply is critical and following through with customer expectations is critical. Don’t play the games they expect and it pays off in spades.

    Also I have a online “brag book” that I have just started which also will help with that conversation.

    http://www.squidoo.com/paulrushing

    Online customers expect their questions to be answered no matter how the lead is generated. Your customer has to identify with you as a person and once that is accomplished my job becomes easier.

    - 2 April 2008 at 9:02 pm

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