Why do people use Google to search?

Why do people walk into a McDonald’s they’ve never been in before.

TRUST

People trust Google to give them useful results.  They trust that McDonald’s will be clean and the burger properly cooked and the fries will taste good.

I know there’s more to it. But without trust, your marketing isn’t going to work – no matter how clever you are.

This subject gets far too little attention. You could devote half your marketing effort to building trust and it would be time well spent.

If they trust you, they’ll buy from you. If they don’t trust you – they won’t.

Of course this isn’t an absolute. It requires a lot more trust to buy a house than to buy a pen. The so-called “impulse buy” simply means the item is cheap enough that very little trust is required to spend the $15 to buy one of the many items you  pass by on the way to checking out at Office Depot, DSW, and many other stores. One reason bargain sales work is because if something costs less, it doesn’t take as much trust to get you to take action.

There’s another key point. Trust comes into play at every point in the “sales funnel.”

Let’s take a sale that starts with an online search and ends with a purchase from a website. Look at the many points where the trust is required to turn a prospect into cash.

1. Google has to trust you enough to display your website high in search rankings.
2. The searcher has to trust Google to give them reliable results.
3. The searcher, seeing your listing on Google’s results display, has to build enough trust from seeing that, to click through to your website. After all, it could be dangerous.
4. The prospect has to trust what they see on your website enough to add the item to their shopping cart.
5. The prospect has to trust enough to complete the checkout process and give you their money.  Most purchases are abandoned before completing the purchase. In some cases a very high percentage of shopping carts are abandoned.

If your marketing isn’t working, it just might be your prospective customers don’t trust you…… enough.