If trust is the most important word in  marketing, you’d better know how to establish and maintain trust with customers and potential customers.

Trust once lost is hard to regain, so don’t lose it. Maintaining trust is simple. Be honest and keep your promises.

Trust isn’t an all or nothing thing. There are many things which build trust, the more you do, the more trusted you’ll be. Here are some of the main ways to do it:

1. Proof. The number one way to build trust is to prove your claims. A test drive works for “our cars are really quiet” as does “Try it for free” but if they have to give you their credit card and cancel not to be charged, you’re already asking them to trust you quite a bit, right?   In many cases proof is out of reach. It’s still the best if you can find a way to do it.

2. Third party endorsements take many forms and are quite effective if the endorsers are themselves trusted. A magazine called “Consumer Reports” is widely trusted because it is well-known that you can’t buy or influence their reviews.

3. Google Reviews are worth mentioning separately. The most important things are the average rating and the total number of reviews. If your business has more reviews than any competitor, that’s money in the bank – if  you have a respectable average rating.

Some industries are notorious for low ratings so you’re okay so long as you don’t do worse than your competitors, though an average rating of 4.5 or above is great for any business.  It may not be ideal to have a perfect 5.0 rating as some people will think it must be done with faked up reviews – though Google leans over backwards to try and weed those out.

Google Reviews can also help your search engine rankings.

4. Awards, memberships, and certifications.  In some industries there are specific certifications that are necessary or very valuable. Any contractor is usually required to put their license number on their website and other marketing materials. It is a definite plus to be able to show off a whole bunch of awards, relevant memberships and certifications.

5. Another important special case of third-party endorsements is testimonials. By our test, a longer testimonial – especially one that amounts to an entire story – are more effective than a bunch of short ones. By the way, long Google Reviews are also get more credit by Google than short ones.

6. Case studies and statics. A detailed case study – especially if it is paired with a testimonial – can be very effective. The more similar itis to the prospect’s situation, the more effective it will be.  Case studies with specific numbers and graphs showing improvement over time increase the effectiveness of a case study, and can be used by themselves.  Numbers should be specific: Not “more than  100” but “113% increase in sales.”

7. Professionalism. This is  not what you communicate but how you communicate it.  You don’t advertise law schools in comic books. Typos, grammatical errors and poor design are all trust killers. If you can’t spell “pancake” correctly they’ll think you can’t cook pancakes correctly.

This isn’t a complete list of ways to build trust, but these should get you off to a good start. And you’ll probably think of more.