The Digital Networking Room

How do you build trust with your audience digitally

The online space is like a digital networking room jam-packed like rush hour in an NYC subway station. What was once a useful approach yelling through a megaphone no longer works as people rush by or scroll by your post? So how do you effectively reach out and connect with your audience?

It’s about connecting with your audience at the human level and seeing the light inside each person.

Inside every human and living organism, there is a shining light. What we care about when we get to know one another is to understand that light, that passion that burns inside all of us, but we’re often afraid to ask the big question “What is your real purpose in life?” So instead we ask the question “What do you do?” and people answer what they’re currently focused on right now. What this creates is a very materialistic question to only show the tangible effects of our work and not the passion that fuels all that we do.

So when you are passing by each other in this packed networking room, you have two choices:

Option A: Connect at the surface, materialistic level
Option B: Connect at a deeper level based on a common passion

If you choose Option B, you are connecting with your audience at a human level. Where they get to see you for who you are and you get to see them for who they are.

So when your audience squeezes past you, or scroll onto the next post, they’ll be so inspired by what you are doing that they’ll tell that next person about. By the time that next person comes to you, you’ll already have an interested person who’s curious to hear more about you. That’s the power of word of mouth and being top of mind in a conversation.

So how do you connect and build trust so that they become your biggest fan?

Your social media is a visual representation of the relationship, that unique human connection, that you are creating with your audience online. It’s creating a visual sales journey that reflects the basics of sales: know me, like me, buy from me, talk about me.

In this journey, there are two roles that Digital Marketing satisfies:

Credibility Checker: In this era where everything is Google-able, your social media acts as an ongoing infomercial so that your audience can get to know you beforehand.
Relationship Crockpot: After your customer works with you, it acts as a constant reminder to keep the relationship top of mind so they’re excited to come back through the door and bring a friend.

To create a visual representation that amplifies your brand, there are three types of campaigns that you would have rotating in your online presence:

Foundational: Ongoing infomercial of content that reflects talking points about your brand for your audience to know, like, and start trusting you.
Promotional content: Intentionally set content that creates specific offers to have your customers engage with you and buy from you.
User-generated content: The most powerful type of content because it’s not content from you but from your customers. It’s the visual representation of word of mouth and shows how excited your audience is to talk about you. This content gives you the social proof that you need to make your business seem legitimate.

When you create opportunities that allow your customer to talk about you, it lets your mission take flight.

It reflects the power of your brand in numbers too.

The average post gets about 500 reach
If you get 1000 posts that’s 50,000 reach
100,000 posts is 50 million reach
That means 50 million people have seen a post from a customer raving about your brand

So how do you design your content to get someone so excited to work with you and talk about you with their friends? It starts with designing their customer experience, feel free to reach out to me to learn more.