When engaging with customers, there is one thing you have to get right: trust. SEGRO director of marketing and communication Nick Hughes explains why
Trust. It’s the golden ticket, the hallowed ground, the Holy Grail, nirvana, the very apogee of the marketer’s desires. Trust is what all products and services – brands – seek from their consumers.
There are libraries full of research that prove the correlation between trust and sales. Trust is the reason you are more likely to eat a Big Mac meal in Prague rather than seek out a burger from a Czech restaurant. It is the reason you keep going to the same hairdresser rather than find a cheaper option. And it is the reason you still use Colgate when there are other brands of toothpaste that keep your gnashers just as pearly white.
The issue of trust is one of life’s great conundrums. Anyone who has ever heard the words “trust me” is likely to run for the hills, keeping one hand on their wallet. Trust has to be earned and marketers know this.
To earn trust, brands have been unleashing cunning tactics on poor, unsuspecting consumers for decades.
We’ve had price reductions (“Bless them, they’ve knocked 3p off a pint of semi-skimmed”), celebrity endorsements (“Whoa, that’s Iggy Pop playing in the advert, I’ll get them to quote on the Yaris”) and any number of other emotional devices that are designed to make us walk inexorably towards the bright white light of trust.
But it is engagement that draws a straight line to trust – consumers want brands to talk with them, not at them. And currently the most powerful armoury we marketers use to achieve customer engagement is digital marketing.
Our weapons of mass engagement include websites, social media, video, blogs, electronic direct mail, PPC, SEO, apps and webcasts. And if you’re sat reading this thinking that these aren’t relevant to you and your business, think again.
There’s a group of Don Draper lookalikes in London’s Midtown that go by the name of Hatton Real Estate. These guys have only been around since 2010 and yet they have a substantially higher Klout score (the gold standard measure of online influence) than a century-old global real estate firm that, for fear of reprisals, I’m not going to name here.
“So what?” I hear you cry. Well think about it this way: Hatton Real Estate has, from a standing start, carved out a very successful business in a highly competitive marketplace and it has done so because it has used digital marketing tools as the bedrock of its marketing activity.
The company tweets (to around 6,000 followers), it blogs, it vlogs on YouTube and Vimeo, it uses EDM and it has a very fresh and user-friendly website.
All of these are designed to engage with, and not broadcast to, their audience. Engagement brings trust. Trust brings sales. Ker-ching. Well played, Hattons.
At SEGRO, digital is front and centre in our marcoms activity. As a publicly listed property company we have to engage with a number of disparate audiences, and digital channels allow us to determine our audiences’ perception of SEGRO through reach, sentiment and action.
Does this help our bottom line? I can’t prove that with 100% certainty, but our research suggests that our audiences trust us in every key area of our business.
But to say that “digital marketing is here to stay” is both tedious and misleading. The truth is that good marketing and good marketers will use the most appropriate channels and devices available to them to deliver the results their businesses need.
Right now people want engagement if trust is to develop, and digital channels are the ones most likely to deliver that.
And, yes, you can trust me on that one.
Connect with Nick Hughes on Twitter @MarcomsMan
