How to Establish Trust with Potential Customers on Your Website

Hey, guys, Matt Paulson here. In this video, we are going to talk about how to establish trust with the people that are visiting your website. So when consumers are researching companies online to do business with, they're going to have a naturally healthy level of skepticism just because of the sheer number of scams that exist online. Anybody with a little bit of money can make a professionally looking website. So you shouldn't expect consumers to trust you and your brand just because your website looks nice. The reality is that the average consumer just isn't going to know if your website was made by a solid company with years of history and a sterling reputation, or if it was just put together by a teenager in Eastern Europe that's looking to make a quick buck off a gullible American consumer. These days, the default perspective of a typical online user is that they shouldn't trust your brand because they don't know who you are and they don't know what your company's reputation is. So if you want potential customers, customers that visit your website to trust you and do business with you, you really have to actively work to prove to them that you are a trustworthy company that's just safe to do business with. You need to prove to them there's a real company behind the website and you just have to show them that you are going to deliver on what you promise and that other people like them that are already satisfied or that there are other people already like them that are already satisfied customers of your company. So by demonstrating your company's trustworthiness and track record, consumers will be kind of less risk averse and just more likely to do business with your company. So how can you do this? How can you instill trust in potential customers? I'm going to walk you through some of the things we do on a MarketBeat website. So I'm going to switch over in just a second to a screen capture thing or a screen recording. You'll see and I'll be right back with that. Okay. And now we are back. So this is the MarketBeat website. Same thing that everybody sees when you visit our website. And I just want to show you some of the things that we do on MarketBeat to kind of show people we are a trustworthy brand. The first thing should be kind of obvious, but here on the bottom, you'll see our office address. You'll see a contact email address and a phone number. You should always have an address, a phone number and an email address on your website. That just gives people an address to look up so you can Type that address in in Google Maps and see, hey, that's a real office building that there might be a real office in. So that kind of shows you're in the United States or whatever country you're in, that you're a real company and have a physical address and a real phone number that people can call. The second thing I want to show off is the site seals. There are a number of different companies that you can buy these seals from, but when you click on them, it will just kind of show that this company has been vetted by a third party. SafeSight certified and Privacy verified. Or they're actually the same brand but different seals. Bbb, we'll talk about that in a minute. But that's also another trust seal. But having these on are always a good thing because it just kind of proves to people that some third party has vetted you. If we go, I'm going to click around really fast here, but if we go to our payment page, you see we highlight these very prominently. This is kind of the last step that people have to take before they become a customer. So we always want to show those cos right at the last minute to say, yep, you can trust this company. The next tip I want to show you guys is something we just did at MarketBeat, but it is called an EV SSL certificate. So your SSL certificate is what allows you to have a secure connection to your web browsers. But there's kind of a more advanced version of an SSL certificate called an EV or extended verification SSL certificate. And when you have that, it will actually show your brand name up in the URL bar. So most people know that this little box thing is that's your website. But in a browser, the browser control is the URL bar. If your brand name is up here versus just the standard security seal. That kind of maybe gives the hint, even if it's not true, that the browser company or somebody else has checked you guys out, they are a little bit more expensive. They're a couple hundred dollars a year versus free for the regular SSL certificate. But if you're a six or seven figure company spending that little bit of extra money, it's just well worth it to show your audience that you've had that extra level of check. Even if there may be some validity to it or may not be. Another thing that we like to do is to be accredited by the Better Business Bureau. Costs us about $500 a year. But you can go on there, you can say, yep, lots of people have reviewed MarketBeat. It's certified or accredited by the Better Business Bureau. We've been around for eight years, kind of a trusted third party saying, yep, marketbeats a real company. Yeah, we've had a couple complaints of people that tried to email us and didn't get a response because they probably emailed the wrong address. But I think these complaints, where we even respond to people's complaints and answer them, that ultimately shows that we're a responsive company and get back to people. The next thing you can do is post customer reviews. So we do this on. Go back to our sales page. This is the sales page for Market B Daily Premium. It's kind of the whole long form sideways sales letter thing. But one of the things on our sales page are testimonials. These are things that actual customers, their full names have told us about our business. So we put those on our sales page to kind of reduce the amount of risk that customers perceive when dealing with our brand. The sixth thing that we like to do is we like to put on logos of media outlets that have mentioned our brand. So all these different financial brands and news organizations have written about MarketBeat or said MarketBeat reported on this at some point or another. So if I go to Google and I just type in Barron's magazine, sorry for the typing on my clocky keyboard and type in markerby be able to search that and where is that at? I'm going to find it because I'm determined. Barons.com marketbeat and it even typed it wrong. Yeah, there we go. So like here's this article that mentions MarketBeat. It mentions a couple other sites but you know, it shows that we've been featured by Barron's magazine, very reputable financial outlet. So then we're able to stick their logo on our website saying these sites have featured us at some point in the past. Even if it's just like the local TV station or local radio station or local newspaper. Put those logos on your website because they will instill trust. Another thing you can do, this is item number seven is on your about page. Put a nice picture of you and kind of tell your story, have your name. Hey, this is a letter from me, Matthew Paulson, the founder of MarketBeat. My picture kind of shows there are real people behind this company. Another thing you should do is, I guess this is item number eight, but have your company blog, leave it up to date. And honestly, I haven't done the best job of this because we just posted our first blog post since last August. But kind of an easy way to tell if a company is not doing business anymore, even if their website is still up, is if they don't post anything to their blog or their social media channels. So I would post at least one thing a month on your social media channel, on your company blog or press room. We're going to try to do a better job of that moving forward. But always keep those up to date. Number nine is to keep your, you know, I guess build a real social media following. So here on Twitter We've got 6,000 followers. We haven't done a whole lot with our Twitter account. We just post content to it, kind of using some programming. This thing's going nuts. But then, same thing for Facebook. We have several thousand followers there. If you have a Twitter account, a Facebook account that has 7,000 people that follow that. So if you have only 20 Twitter followers or 20 Facebook followers, people are going to look at that and see, hey, maybe this is a business that only exists in theory and doesn't have any actual customers. I think that's kind of it for what I can think of off the top of my head. But if you spend some time on a Markerby website and you really start to think, what is MarketBee doing to instill trust, things like the EV SSL certificate, all these company logos, these trust seals, the address, my picture, customer reviews, media mentions, keeping your website up to date, all these things will just subtly help people understand that Markupee is real business run by real people in the United States and it's a company that you can trust to get financial information from. So hopefully this is helpful to you on your website and I would love to hear any other ideas about how you can instill trust into people that are visiting your website. If you have any ideas that I didn't mention, feel free to comment on them below this video, either on my blog or on YouTube video for this channel. I'd love to hear your ideas. Thanks guys. I'll see you in the next video.