Top 10 Ways to Build \”Know, Like & Trust\” into Your Marketing Strategy

How to strengthen \”Know, Like & Trust\” around your brand

If the goal of marketing was boiled down to three words they would be “Know Like Trust.” These 3 elements are the muscles of your marketing strategy. Exercising these muscles and building them over time will be a major factor in the overall success of your marketing campaigns.

Get your audience to “Know” your business and your brand.  Then get that audience to “Like” your business and your brand.  Finally, build “Trust” between your audience and your brand.

With Know, Like and Trust being established from the start, life for your sales team gets exponentially easier.  Now asking new leads to try or buy your product comes more naturally and is easier for those new leads to digest.

So how do we establish that Know, Like and Trust?  What type of content is best suited for each stage?

In this article we will walk through each stage and review some of the best ways to establish Know, Like and Trust.

Know:  How to spread the word about your business and brand!

Although first on the list, developing “Know” within your target audience will be the most difficult piece of your marketing strategy.  Getting in front of the right people and establishing a recognizable brand will be an ongoing challenge.  This step requires a mix of conventional and non-conventional methods. 

In our quest to bake Know, Like and Trust into your marketing efforts, here are the first three ways focused on building a “Know” relationship:

1.) Consistent Branding – First of all, if you are to have a recognizable brand that sticks with people, it’s important to keep everything consistent.  Old logos, colors or taglines can easily throw people off and cause confusion.  That’s the last thing we need.  So before you dive into a whole new campaign, take a beat to audit your brand guide and make sure the whole team is on the same page when it comes to branding.

2.) Advertising – This is a conventional avenue most businesses are at least experimenting with.  Through advertising, a business can control the narrative of their brand and focus on specific pain-points of their target audience.  This stage does require a budget and should be planned out based on your business goals.  However this tactic done properly can get you in front of the right audience quickly.

3.) Networking – Get out there!  Maybe you have a sales rep or a business development executive who can get out in the community, shake hands at industry events or set up a booth at a convention.  Maybe this person is you!  This type of outreach and involvement is the most personal way to spread the word about your brand and the ways you can help!

LIKE: Ok, so they KNOW who you are, but why should they LIKE you?

This is the difference between Fame and Infamy.  Developing Like elements in your marketing strategies is a delicate process.  Here we move from an objective, simple “yes or no” phase with KNOW (i.e. Do you know ____ brand?) to a more emotional and nebulous phase with LIKE.

How do you want your target audience to FEEL when they see your logo or your name mentioned out loud?

Building LIKE is about building an emotional reaction, a feeling.  This is where mood elements, imagery, voice all come in to play.

Here are four of the best ways to get started building the emotions to elicit LIKE:

4.) \”About Us\” page – Aside from the homepage of the website, our research has shown that the most visited page on a website is usually the About Us page.  People want to know who they are working with and what they are all about.  Avoid stock imagery and canned copy.  Personalize this page, provide a backstory and your reasoning for why you do what you do.  This page done right will help to set the tone of the entire website and overall experience with your brand.

5.) Social Media posts – Social media provides for a quick and easy outlet to your audience.  Informal updates and news about your brand are a great way to develop Like with your customer base.  As a reminder (and this goes for all items on this list) avoid generic content, the public is becoming too savvy for copy/paste type techniques. Make your posts meaningful.  

6.) User Experience – Aim for a frictionless experience.  Make sure that working with your business, whether online or off, is a simple process.  If links are broken, buttons don’t work, or no one answers the phone, potential customers will inevitably develop a negative attitude toward your business.  So aim to make every interaction a pleasant one.

7.) Content – It doesn’t matter if you are writing a blog or creating content for a service page on your website, remember to keep your audience in mind.  Providing value and solutions to their problems is a big part of building those “Like” feelings.  Think about common questions your target buyers ask, then answer them in a blog or a post.  Providing solutions to your audience before they’ve even paid for anything is a great way to develop Like emotions.

TRUST: Why should potential buyers TRUST your business? Why should they TRUST your services?

We all have that one friend that we really like, but would we trust them to park our car or watch our baby?  When it comes to making the jump from the Marketing stage of the customer journey to the Sales stage, building Trust elements is the last essential piece.

In order to build Trust elements, start with these three pillars:

8.) Content (again) – Adding valuable, barrier-free content to your target audience is a great way to build trust.  The goal is to be the expert, the resource that your potential customer base turns to when they have an issue.  Be the authority they can turn to for answers.  When they know you have the expertise to help, it becomes much easier for them to open up their wallets.

9.) Reviews – Reading through reviews is now a normal part of the customer journey.  Whether those reviews are on Google or Amazon or other platforms, developing positive social proof is a huge part of establishing Trust online.  Reach out to current, valued clients to request reviews.  And be sure to establish some time of review gathering strategy (i.e. Ask for a review after a positive support call or ask for a review at a certain stage in the customer’s life-cycle).

10.) Case Studies – Building on the social proof aspect of your business, case studies are a stronger exploration of specific instances your business has helped another.  It can seem like a lot of work, but it isn’t:  To develop a case study, pick a successful client and answer these four questions:  How was the client situated when you connected?  What problem was your client facing?  How did you solve their problem?  How is the client situated now? Now have your designer dress that up, and you can publish your first case study!

After working through these 10 items, you have established a solid “Know, Like & Trust” foundation for your business and brand.  Now when your sales rep asks this pool of leads if they would like to try a sample or a free trial or maybe sign up for an introductory offer, they are not going in cold.  You have already laid the groundwork for the rest of your team.

And remember to keep building, keep your tactics up to date.  Developing “Know, Like & Trust” is not a one-time exercise, this will continue throughout the lifecycle of your business.  Set times to review and refine your strategies.

At First Call Digital Agency, we have plans in place to help you identify the right avenues for KLT and can help you start building Know, Like & Trust today. Give us a call or schedule a free consultation today! We are here to help!