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The Trust Gap in Marketing



Have you ever given thought to "Why do you buy the things you do" ? Do stand in front of the mirror and give a thought to how you make choices about your own purchases. 

 Trust is one of the main drivers of that process. Higher the trust, more likely it is that someone will do business with you or you will do business with someone. This is one important point many business owners fail to recognize, especially in service industry. One of the biggest challenges is – how to get someone to try your service for the first time ? You need to offer ways to get them to try it, without risk. Often, this is perceived as giving away something for free. Yet, it does not address the issue of trust. 

 Many companies and their websites offer a Free Consultation of their potential customers’ business needs / problems, to try to get a foot in the door. If they simply focus on price, as an incentive to make that first purchase, they are sure to miss something crucial. Price can be a legitimate reason for many but for most, it is a case of a tremendous trust gap. This means that a minimum amount of trust has to be earned before your potential customer will consider buying from you. The trust gap can be fairly wide for many services–based businesses. The gap may be as wide as the Indian Ocean. So, simply focusing on price as the only gap, is a serious case of marketing myopia.

 Let’s look for other ways to decrease this trust gap. Any potential client, really wants to get to know and trust the company before making a buying decision. For a start, if you post / share on a regular basis, great tips / tricks / traps, on a blog or eMail (which is subscribed for), then the potential customer has a much better chance of knowing the company. Can you reduce the potential customers’ hesitation by doing some of the above or even a sharing small eBook about the subject ? They key is to have content that will be useful to the customer and not something that you want to push. 

 Putting a Free Consultation Offer ! on the back of your business card, is a gimmick, most will see through. You go to a networking event, not with the goal of bagging client, but with goal of building relationships. The goal always needs to be engagement. Business will naturally result. The same applies for solopreneurs – the one–man army company. Only a solopreneur knows how much overworked he is. He knows that he needs all the help he can get. Yet, while going for your product, he is bound to be protective about any potential damage. He won’t let a person who offers a 1–Hour Free Consultation Offer !, influence his decision. 

 Companies need to understand that their entire focus, when trying to attract new clients should be on how you they can build trust to reduce that gap ? 

 We can work together on this, if you like.

 About the Author
Dr.  Sunil Pevekar  is a PGDM from IIMA and  a PhD from USA. He is an expert on  10X Business Growth and Non–Traditional Marketing Tools & Techniques. He can be contacted on marketing@drsunilpevekar.com or +91 7983826309.


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