Developing a strong rapport with your audience is an essential step for businesses. You want audiences to trust your brand and what you have to say – without trust, your marketing might not be as effective, and the result could be that you’re less successful overall.
Due to the varied nature of audiences and brand intentions, it’s difficult to be specific about how exactly you should engage with your own audience. That being said, following certain general principles can lay down some groundwork for your strategy.
Intentions and Sincerity
At the end of the day, everyone knows that your aim is to make money. Trying to convince your customer that this isn’t what you want will simply come across as insincere, but that doesn’t mean that you have to make that objective a central part of your marketing.
It’s about developing an honest depiction of the relationship between you – what are you offering them? Why should they give you their business over your competitors?
It’s important to keep in mind how exposed customers are to marketing on a daily basis – they see ads absolutely everywhere they turn, and that makes standing out from the crowd much more difficult. It also means that you have to strike a difficult balance.
Do you go for a self-aware approach and draw attention to this, or do you feel as though that’s out of step with the tone of voice you’ve established for your brand?
Be Reliable
‘Actions speak louder than words’ is advice that you might find to be relevant here. Desperately trying to convince customers through your marketing that you’re the best choice for them might run contrary to their previous experiences with you, meaning that you have to work to establish yourself as a brand that is reliable.
The most obvious area to apply this is just in the general customer experience – providing the best customer service you can while delivering a standout product or central service.
However, it’s also important to think of other ways of retaining trust, such as bolstering your security so that you never give way to data breaches. A managed detection and response security system could help you stay on top of all the potential online threats, establishing your brand as one to be trusted.
Responding to Criticism
Blaming the customer in a situation where you’re receiving some criticism is a surefire way of amplifying that criticism. Learning how to respond to tough feedback is a skill that takes time to finesse, but it’s important to see the value in what you’re receiving: information on how you can improve.
This in itself isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it does hinge on how you respond. Companies are bound to make missteps from time to time, but talking through the issue with the customer so that you learn from it and they feel as though you listened and took the appropriate action (such as a refund) can mean that they feel less negatively about you by the end of the discussion.
