Referrals - Adding Value Through Social Trust Signals

How do your clients and, most importantly, prospective clients build trust in you? A prospect's level of trust is directly related to their willingness to spend money for your services and choose you over lower-priced alternatives. And perhaps most importantly, more trust from a client makes it more likely they will take your advice and receive maximum benefit from that advice.

There are two avenues by which prospects gain trust in you:

1. Time spent with you prior to money trading hands.
2. External trust signals, many of which you actually control even though they involve third parties.

The first item on this list, time spent with you, is important. But that really comes into play after you've been in touch with a buyer. What about building your prospects' trust before you are in touch with them? Let's look at those external trust signals, which come into play before your prospects become buyers.

The primary trust signals your prospects will use when evaluating you include:

• Information about you that comes directly from people they know. Example: referrals and recommendations.
• Information about you that comes from an objective third party. Example: news items and testimonials, even on your own site or in your own materials.
• The status of the people you are seen hanging out with.

Some of the items on that list of trust signals is difficult to change. We all know the saying, "You're the average of the 5 people you spend the most time with," but even if that is true, most of us would not be willing to or readily able to start hanging out with different people in order to raise our own income.

However, you can easily change the rest of the items on the list above.

Referrals and Testimonials

Are you using client testimonials effectively in your marketing? There might be more opportunities than you think to make use of testimonials.

But first, how do you get testimonials? Here are some easy "testimonial hacks":

• While clients generally dislike writing testimonials, they tend to be much more open to approving testimonials that you have written for them. So whenever the opportunity presents itself, write something your client has said into a testimonial and ask them to approve it.
• Speaking of opportunities… always be on the lookout for opportunities to take your clients’ words and expand them into a testimonial. This can include things they've said in email, on phone calls, or during meetings.

While you don't want to festoon your marketing materials with testimonials, you do want to make sure they appear at the following key places at a minimum:

• Adjacent to any calls to action on your website
• At relevant points in any sales copy either online or on paper

Referrals often "just happen". And when they do, they are the gold standard of new client acquisition. They can turn into substantial amounts of new revenue with very little effort on your behalf.

So how do you get more referrals? It's not as out of your control as you might think! Think about it like cloud seeding, which is not 100% guaranteed, but when the conditions are right, it does increase the change of precipitation.

• How often are your past clients hearing from you? Is it often enough to stay top of mind? There is a broad range of ways to stay in touch with past clients, ranging from "in the neighborhood" visits to low touch email-based methods. Make sure you are "seeding the clouds" by staying in touch with past clients.
• How easy is it for past clients to "sell you" to referrals? Do they have more than a phone number to pass along? How about this as a high-value alternative: Set up a personalized landing page on your website for each of your past clients. A landing page is a page that doesn't appear in your site navigation; it has to be linked directly. Make the URL to this page something easy to remember, like http://yourdomain.com/BigCorp. That page is a case study of the work you did together, the beneficial results that came out of that work, and an easy way to get in touch with you to get similar results as the case study described.
• Flat-out ask. Here's some great advice on how to do that.
• Ask more often, via scheduled follow-up emails. You never know where your past clients' contacts are in the buying cycle, and asking repeatedly for referrals (in a low-key way) will increase your "hit rate". The last time you asked might yield nothing, but this time, perhaps a previous client has just had lunch with a colleague who mentioned needing that thing you do.

Objective Third-Party Information

Another source of third-party trust signals is "the news". We have to use quote marks around news because only a very small part of the content appearing in both traditional and online news media is carefully researched, fact-checked, highly objective information. The rest is somewhere between filler and contributed content.

But guess what? That contributed content gets the same implied authority as the actual news reporting. So if you'd like to crank up the level of intangible value you bring to your clients, contribute some content to the news!

Doing this is as easy as setting up a free Help a Reporter Out (HARO) subscription. Every day, you'll get two emails with topics that reporters want to write about. You can become a source for these stories by responding quickly. Pro tip: set up an email filter to just delete any HARO emails that don't have topics you can speak to. (hat tip to Kurt Elster!).

The other thing you must consider is being a guest on podcasts. Podcasts have many of the implied authority benefits of traditional news media, but most podcasts are actually labors of love with almost no budget. That means they are desperate for good content. This article will give you the lowdown on how to approach media sources, including podcasters.