Marketing is all about creating and fostering relationships with your prospects and your clients. A big part of achieving this is that people need to know, like and trust you before they’ll engage in a relationship with you or do any business with you.

Before a person will commit to making a purchase from you, they need to trust that your products and services will do what you say they are supposed to. Also, if you want to keep your profitable clients, they have to continue to trust that you’ll deliver on your promises.

Trust is the basis of any relationship, be it personal or strictly business. Take a look at the following ways that you can build trust and credibility into your small business marketing strategies:

1. Provide examples

Give lots of case studies and examples that outline how you’ve helped clients and the difference it has made in their business and their life.

Real examples are much more powerful and credible than simply making claims about your service or products.

2. Seek out referrals

We all ask our friends and colleagues to recommend good places to eat or a reliable plumber, because we trust the opinions of people we know.

It’s the same for your business; actively seek out referrals from satisfied customers. Implementing a marketing system to generate referrals is one of the most overlooked marketing tactics for small businesses.

3. Get testimonials People always pay more attention to what others have to say about you than any claims you make about yourself and your business. Make it easy for your customers to provide testimonials. Create some marketing systems to facilitate this and then use the testimonials in all your marketing tactics: website, sales pages, direct mail, email communications, brochures and so on.

4. Offer guarantees

None of us like “buyer’s remorse” and providing a guarantee of service or results of your products and services will go a long way to help alleviate any concerns people have in handing over money to you.

Make sure you act promptly and with no hassles when you have to fulfill your guarantee. Keeping your word is a huge part of building trust with people.

5. Share your contact information

Nothing raises a red flag more with me than when I cannot find a business’s contact details – address, phone number, fax, email address, website, name of their assistant, customer service number, etc.

By listing your contact information on all your marketing materials, you go a long way in showing people you exist, you are a real legitimate business and you’re available if they have any concerns or questions.

6. Write articles

Write and submit articles to establish yourself as an expert and to help build a reputation that shows you know what you’re talking about, you’re willing to share your expertise, and you’re “here to stay” – all components towards building trust.

7. Stay in touch

Regular and consistent contact with people helps facilitate trust – they know you’re around and interested.

Contact your prospects and clients regularly (via email, phone call, card, etc.) to get feedback, follow up, and provide useful tips.

8. Be a resource

Provide information that is timely and helpful to your prospects and clients. Post articles on your website, send them an applicable, interesting report or magazine clipping, forward an email with details about a great teleseminar or workshop they might benefit from.

9. Let your personality come through

People do business with people, not companies. Help prospects trust you by letting them get to know you. Share your personality and passion in your marketing strategies and communications – for instance, have a picture of yourself on your website, share some tidbits about your personal life (hobbies, likes & dislikes, pets) and don’t be afraid to express opinions in your writing.

Take a look at your day-to-day marketing tactic and determine if you are doing all you can to build trust with your prospective and current clients.

If not, try incorporating a couple of the suggestions above and once they’re running smoothly and are part of your marketing system, then add a couple more. Keep doing this and you’ll be rewarded with long lasting, rewarding and profitable relationships with many people.

Having a keyword list is an essential component of any internet business marketing strategy but there’s more to it than compiling a bunch of words and phrases! Keywords are important in terms of helping you or your business get found online but in order to get more traffic there are 3 objectives this list must first meet!

Relevance

To make the best use of keywords in your business marketing strategy your selection of words and phrases MUST reflect a relevance to what you do! It is this relevance that helps you get more traffic that is highly targeted and therefore most effective for your needs! Remember, if your choices in terms of words or phrases are not relevant, search engines will disregard your content and you will NOT appear in any search results! How else do you intend to be discovered on the world wide web otherwise?

Demand

Relevance is very important when compiling a keyword list but of equal importance is the ‘demand’ reflected in the search results for your choices! What good are words or phrases that nobody is searching for on the internet? Remember your intent with this strategy is to get found online but if nobody is looking for the choices you’ve made how do you expect to do so? The keywords you use MUST have good search results if you expect them to generate traffic for your site!

Proper Use

How you utilize keywords in your content is the last step in making this particular business marketing strategy work best for you! Proper utilization begins with selecting your primary keyword and/or phrase, based upon relevance, and using this in your title and also in the opening and closing paragraphs! Secondary keywords being those that still have relevance to the content they’re found in, should be ‘sprinkled’ throughout the first and last paragraphs as well as the body of the text! Always remember to NOT be too liberal in your use and to only place words where that make the most sense!

Your keyword list is an important part of your internet business marketing strategy and is a great way to get more traffic to your site! However if your list is not compiled or used correctly, as our discussion above focuses on, you will NOT get found online which, of course, is the main intent of this strategy! Optimizing any content you use properly starts with your list having relevance to what you do and than correctly placing your words or phrases to get the maximum results! Done correctly most entrepreneurs will find that this particular business marketing strategy is a required MUST in their efforts to get more traffic to their site!

Do you ever wonder how people search for things on the Internet? What if you knew exactly what words they typed when using a search engine? If you’re marketing a product or service it’s extremely insightful to know what are the most popular search terms relating to whatever you’re marketing.

The Overture Company

Overture.com is a Yahoo! company that supplies the Pay Per Click infrastructure for Yahoo! and other websites on the Internet. If you do a search on Yahoo! you’ll see anywhere from 1-3 paid promotions appear at the top of the search page and then others at the end. These are paid advertiser listings and they come from Overture.

The Overture Search Tool

In order to maximize the number of clicks on their network, Overture supplies a keyword tool so that their customers know which are the most popular keywords relating to their product of service. This way when an Overture customer selects keywords to advertise on, they can pick the ones that are most popular or the ones that most precisely relate to their product or service. This generates more revenue for Overture and more clicks for advertisers.

Anyone Can Use the Search Tool

Fortunately you don’t have to be a customer of Overture to use the search tool. Go to http://inventory.overture.com to find the search tool.

How to Use the Search Tool

The best way to get started is to type in a major word associated with your business. For example if you’re in the marketing business, here’s the top 10 search terms and their search count.

Search Count Term
1253354 direct marketing
460115 internet marketing
380450 marketing
76542 business marketing small
48494 email marketing
44160 marketing web site
43064 advertising marketing
42613 network marketing
42414 business marketing
31484 health care marketing

This search count number represents about 20% of the Internet so multiply it by 5 to get an approximate number of searches for the entire web, i.e. the total searches for email marketing are 48494*5=242470 searches across the Internet every month.

How to Use the Data

The value of this search tool goes far beyond just determining popular search terms. Here’s a few ways to use the tool for market research:

Type in your state or city to find out the most popular searches

Compare the number of searches for your product compared to those of your competitors

Use the most popular search terms relating to your business for your web site domain names to increase their visibility in search engines.

Use it to brainstorm new products or services, especially if something is being searched for but is not widely available

Considering a celebrity endorsement or joint venture partner for your next Internet promotion, compare the various candidates and make an informed decision.

Use it for determining market size or segmentation information for your business plan.

Use it to drive all your web content, from web page titles to Meta Tag keywords and descriptions.

Use it to determine which categories to list your business, from Internet to Yellow Page listings.

Use it to determine important searches relative to your business in foreign cultures and countries that you are unfamiliar with.