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Build trust, build clients, build your agency.
Over the past few years, the digitalization of brands has become a major trend due to the pandemic that made people go online to search, review, and purchase. This transformation hugely impacted the digital marketing sector as a whole.
This is the environment where your social media marketing agency can really thrive. But before you start promoting clients’ businesses, you have to promote your own, right? Building credibility is crucial nowadays since people barely trust new businesses.
They want to build a relationship first to make sure they are giving their money to the right people.
So, if you want to get loyal customers and beat the competition, you need to gain not only the attention but the trust of the audience. This is one of the best ways to stand out
Your audience contains potential customers. And in this guide, we’ll outline the five ways your digital marketing agency can build trusty relationships with them.
Online Credibility and Trustworthiness: The Basics for Your SMM Agency
To be deemed credible and trustworthy, your business should take these qualities seriously and showcase them in every way possible. Your SMM agency should help companies to grow their social media presence with high-quality, active audiences.
You should present successful cases and talk honestly about your points of growth. Sincerity in communication will build trust between you and your existing and potential clients. The former will become advocates for your agency. The latter will become loyal customers first.
All businesses talk about how they are #1 in the industry. Be transparent and honest – and your statements will be more powerful than any pompous claim.
5 Steps to Building Credibility and Trust for a Digital Marketing Agency
Image credit: https://www.emarketer.com/content/marketing-advertising-agency-report-2021
By the end of 2020, digital marketing agencies' most crucial growth point was a new, more profitable business strategy. Many found the secret in audience trust, which has become more challenging to gain during the pandemic.
While agencies are wondering how to build credibility with clients, we have five answers ready for you. For companies to trust you with their internal data, social media, other digital channels, and marketing funds, that trust has to be fortified.
Create a safe, professional website
A professionally-made website packed with information adds to the credibility of your SMM agency. Make it your business card where users can find info about your services, pricing, contacts, social media accounts, expertise (through your blog), and trustworthiness (through reviews, awards, ratings, etc.).
Make your website as secure and user-friendly as possible. According to the Adobe survey, 84% of consumers think that keeping data safe and being transparent about its use are the most effective ways of regaining customer trust.
So, safety is a top priority.
To ensure there are no tech errors, use technical SEO audit software and tailor the program for agencies. SE Ranking has a whole plan catered to digital marketing agencies and their needs, where you can check your website and take care of clients’ websites as well.
With this solution, you can easily track your daily SEO progress, research competitors, find gaps in your strategies, audit your website and your clients' pages, and send them neatly, data-packed reports afterward. SE Ranking allows agencies to use their logos and colors for the platform to build a reputation every time a client accesses it.
In addition, they have a separate SMM feature that can help you automate your work when needed.
Another priority is keeping the site up to date.
Some pages need your constant attention:
- Landings
- About Us
- Our Services
- Pricing and Plans
- Contact Us, etc.
These pages must be optimized with the latest suitable keywords and contain up-to-date information. Monitoring the performance of these pages is crucial, and you can do it with a digital tool to save time, money, and effort.
Invest in high-quality content creation
Content is a way to create the right impression of your agency, assess your expertise, and see if you’re worth giving money to. Your articles, along with a top-notch website and active social media, can help you build a solid reputation.
Here are some ideas for diverse, trust-building content:
- Advice from top leaders in industry-specific news outlets to garner attention
- Case studies and customer stories to build social proof
- How-tos, tips, pro recommendations, mistake reviews, etc. to showcase expertise
- Data-rich articles with specialist opinions backed by statistics, trends, etc.
- Collaborations with outside experts to enrich your experience
Don’t forget about media content. If it’s a How-to article, consider creating a video with the same tutorial to offer the audience an alternative. A podcast will solve the problem if videos aren’t your cup of tea.
Enhance and expand your social media presence
How to build trust through social media? Be present there.
Organize your profiles, design them with brand colors, and be active. Communicate with your audience, grow your following, be social, and show how close businesses should be with their potential customers.
By building a community around your brand, you get loyal support, referred clients, and buzz, which helps boost brand awareness. Here are some recommendations for improving and diversifying the online presence of a social media marketing agency:
- Put effort into creating an informative and well-optimized profile.
Use hashtags, keywords, a name that is easy to remember, a creative bio, and an appealing profile picture and header. Consider being verified to get that small check mark near your name. - Stay up to date with news and events.
Always go with the flow of your industry. Be aware of all events and news, emerging trends, and things that should be left in the past. Update your audience as soon as you find out anything interesting. - Automate your social media efforts.
To increase brand awareness of your own agency as well as your clients, you can leverage the benefit of social media marketing tools that allows you to automate your social media game and cut down your efforts.
- Maintain a healthy balance of marketing and customer-focused content.
Many ads may be suitable for numbers (increasing following, etc.), but they can annoy the audience you want to build a relationship. Find and maintain a balance between media and text content to hook attention and PR that caters to your existing and potential customers. - Organize Q&As.
It can be an active hour on Twitter where you choose questions from the audience or an Instagram live with a separate function for Q&A sessions. You can also use Stories and leave a sticker that users can click on to ask a question.
Give enough attention to every question, as the smallest one may come from your most loyal future customer.
Let the customers build your reputation
Building social proof around your digital marketing company will help you eliminate the common uncertainty consumers face with the many choices the market offers. People are looking for peer proof. That’s why they read reviews and look for UGC (user-generated content). 93% of customers read online reviews before choosing a company to buy from.
For businesses looking for a digital marketing agency, it’s even more important since the agency will be in charge of how the company looks online.
But reviews aren’t the only way to build social proof. You can also work on reputation management by controlling the information people see about your company the moment they find it online:
- Register on listings – find local SMM agency listings and add essential information about your company or NAP (name, address, phone number) and additional info.
- Create a Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business) – it's a free opportunity to turn the people that find you on Google and Maps into leads or even customers.
- Post testimonials on the website and social media – it’s a nod to the customer, a success story for you, and social proof for future clients who want the same results.
Showcase your expertise
The last take on how to gain trust concerns the expertise of your team. Hire well-trained specialists, and the work you do will speak for itself:
- Certifications – Google Analytics IQ, Google Ads, YouTube Academy, and HubSpot Academy certifications will help you hire a good specialist.
- Awards – B2B Marketing Awards, Creativity International Awards, Webby Awards, Digiday Content Awards, and others will solidify your reputation.
- Trust badges – according to a survey, 48% of responders stated that trust badges persuade them that a website is trustworthy. Getting general or industry-specific trust badges will help you stand out as a safe, reliable, and experienced agency.
Image credit: https://www.yieldify.com/blog/trust-badges-boost-conversion-rates/
Showcasing all of this will establish your authority and make it easier for potential customers to choose your agency and not a competitor's.
Ready to Increase the Credibility and Trust of Your Social Media Agency?
Combine these five ways to build credibility and trust into a formula. As a digital marketing agency executive or manager, you know the importance of a high-quality website, clean content, client relationships, showing your expertise, and improving your online presence.
Before you do all that for your clients as a part of your service, do it for your own website and social media pages. Use your expertise to build a brand people will trust:
- Offer a neat website packed with concise, creative, clear information about your business, services, pricing, history, testimonials, awards, etc.
- Get closer to people on social media by updating regularly and keeping your profiles alive. Nobody wants to follow a 100% official page with one monthly post and no Stories, tweets, or other activities, regardless of the platform.
- Hit their pain and curiosity points with top-notch content.
- Creatively showcase your expertise throughout that content, keep people interested, release eBooks, and share customer stories. Make it fun and interesting.
- Present social proof by sharing reviews and improving the quality of info people find about your agency online.
Businesses will want to have the same activity on their pages. They will find a digital marketing agency that is transparent, light, great at communication, and takes care of its image- an agency that is definitely worth working with.
About author: Alina Tytarenko is part of the marketing team at SE Ranking SEO tool. I enjoy working on search optimization and testing new approaches to building brand visibility online. I practice animal flow and play hide and seek with my cat Siri in my spare time.
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