The Trust Return on Investment, Part 2

In our previous article, we looked at the extremely interesting study by Nielsen who measured Consumer Trust in Advertising Channels. Essentially, they looked at the various ways that a business delivers its message to prospects, and determined the degree to which that prospect trusted that message. In other words, they measured the retu in terms of trust.

Another interesting aspect of the survey was the contrast between people I know (which the report explains as people viewed by the respondent as a peer) and Consumer opinions posted online.

Trust for People I know, that is someone who is similar and recognized to have similar needs is 91% while for Opinions, trust drops to 70%.

This data demonstrates that we need to align testimonials to the prospect. For example, if someone comes to your web site, the more the testimonial is from someone similar, facing similar challenges, the more effective it will be.

When thinking about this from a web context, the challenge is to sort out what you know about a visitor and then align the testimonial to the characteristics of that visitor:

Business to Consumer	Business to Business
Example factors for alignment: Geographical location Demographic (age, income) Pain / Benefit being sought	Example factors for alignment: Geographical location Industry/Vertical Size Pain / Benefit being sought

The challenge with these factors is that some you do know when a new prospect arrives on your web site (like location as determined by simple geo-location tools) and many you don't. There are two ways of dealing with the ones you don't know:

1. Self-Selection. For those factors you don't know, provide the ability of the prospect to navigate to content that best aligns with them. For example, you may have specific web content for a particular company industry (e.x. banking, government, etc...) or benefit (reduce costs, increase revenue, etc...). Then testimonials specific to that alignment can be shown with that content.
2. Database Marketing. As you market to prospects, you can use information you already know about prospects to align content with them. For example, if you are sending out a marketing email, include links back to your site with personalized information (most marketing email services can do this). So if the prospect is in a small company, then that information can be included in the link back to your site and the testimonials from like small companies can be shown when that prospect arrives.

By categorizing your testimonials and then using these strategies for aligning them with prospects, you'll be able to move your trust return to that 90% level. And that will translate into more sales.