Consistency is the foundation of trust

TLDR:

• If you’re a service professional, in order to charge high fees, you need high trust

• Marketing is the first step in building trust

• All your sales and customer service touchpoints with prospects and clients need to maintain that trust

• And in marketing, trust is built through consistency, which means showing up again and again, in the same way

• How do you know if you’re consistent?

  • Is your brand visually coherent and consistent across your marketing channels?

  • Is your messaging consistent across all channels?

  • Do you have a strategy that your brand is based on?

  • Do you have a consistent flow of marketing or does it ebb and flow?

• How do you make it consistent?

  • Have a strategy

  • Have a system so it happens without you having to remember it

I said this phrase on a networking call with a prospect and he asked me to repeat it so I thought there might be something to it. I thought I'd unpack it a bit in a blog.

I am really good at getting into habits. If I form a habit and do something on a regular basis, it will get done, forever. I am less good at breaking habits though. And if something only happens sporadically, then I’ll soon forget about it and it won’t happen again. This means that I have habits around exercise, food, sleep, Duolingo, conversations with friends and family, work, and more. I used to think that made me really boring, but I think it’s a bit of a professional superpower in marketing that I harness. And this matters…

Because, consistency is everything in marketing. I believe that consistency is the foundation of building trust.

Let’s start at the beginning.

In order to charge high fees, you need high trust

If you are a service professional who demands high fees for your work, you need to establish a high level of trust before someone will want to hand over their hard-earned money. It makes sense. It’s not a big risk to switch toilet paper brands, but to invest in a service professional who you want a long term relationship with, that’s big! Some of these professional relationships last longer than marriages.

And if you’re a service professional, it probably means that you’re providing a service that your client may not completely understand, or even if they do and could DIY if they wanted to, there’s a cost to failing. If you pick the wrong lawyer, that could be a very expensive endeavor and result in you losing your court case. If you pick the wrong financial advisor, you may not be able to retire early like you want to. So they really need to trust that you are the one for them.

They need to believe that you will do what you say you will, when you say you will, before investing money in you. That’s where marketing comes in - it should build trust.

Marketing is the first step in building trust

Your marketing should give potential clients an insight into what it’s like to work with you. It paves the way for a sales/intake process, and then for the actual client experience. If it doesn’t, and there is a gap between the impression a client gets from your marketing, and how you conduct sales calls/consultations, or how you onboard a new client, then that is a trust-buster. So each time that a client interacts with you, whether as part of marketing, sales, or once they’re a client, they should have a consistent experience.

What does this look like in marketing?

I’ll break it down for you:

• In branding, consistency is showing up with the same message and visual experience, repeatedly. It’s having a consistent look so that your social media graphics look coherent, and it’s ensuring customers have the same experience of your company wherever they find you, be it your website, in-person, or on social media.

  
  

• In marketing, consistency is showing up, again and again. It’s building a rhythm and momentum around your presence so that your target audience is reminded you exist. And every time they see you, your consistency reinforces the impression they have of you.

  
  

Humans are creatures of habit and we like the psychological safety of thinking we know what comes next. We don’t like uncertainty and change. Nothing I’m saying here is ground-breaking and anyone in charge of a company’s brand has likely been saying this for years. A while ago I even wrote a blog from that perspective - trying to help the in-house marketers explain the situation to their colleagues!

How do I know if my marketing is consistent enough?

Here are some simple questions you can ask yourself:

• Does my marketing actually reflect what it’s like to work with me, or is there a gap between the impression I create and the real client experience?

• Is my brand visually coherent and consistent across my marketing channels? Or do my social media templates have lots of different fonts on them?

• Is my messaging consistent across all channels?

• What do my best clients say made them choose me over a competitor — and is that quality visible in my marketing?

• Am I creating content about the same themes consistently or is it random?

• Do I have a strategy that my brand is based on?

• Do I have a consistent stream of regular marketing activities or does it ebb and flow?

And if you have inconsistencies, where are they, and what message is that sending?

Like many of us, maybe there is room for improvement and you may be asking yourself…

How can I make my marketing more consistent?

My answer to this is simple, but not easy (and a good thing too, otherwise I wouldn’t have a business!)

• Have a strategy

• Have a realistic system so it happens without you having to remember it when you get busy

Creating a strategy

If you don’t have a marketing strategy, you don’t have a plan, and you don’t know where you’re going. I’ve written plenty on why a marketing strategy is crucial, and that will take up too much space here.

Equally, if your business is showing up incoherently online, you have a brand strategy problem.

Building systems

I don’t give blanket advice on “how often to post” and that kind of thing. There are lots of resources online to give you industry and platform benchmarks on what works well. But in my view, the best cadence is one that you can keep up for as long as possible.

Although I’m a habit-lover, I still need my systems to make sure things actually happen, otherwise when things get busy I’m also likely to drop the odd ball. Systems can be as simple as:

• Recurring reminders to get something done on a weekly basis

• Batch-creating content once per month so that it all happens at once and can be scheduled at once

• Standing agendas for team calls that always cover the same items so we don’t forget

• Standard Operating Procedures for set tasks that need to be done over and over again so that they can be done by different people if needed

But when these different systems work together, you have a marketing machine. That’s all there is to it - Simples! But not easy to do well, and over the long term.

Of course, the best system is to pay me to take it off your hands - so drop me a line!

PS: If you remember Compare The Meerkat, please comment so that I know I’m not alone.