By: Neritti Lakshman
The first lesson we learned as a startup is the starting point for a customer to engage with your product or service is trust. We saw that leads who believed in our brand early, were more likely to convert into loyal customers, and even help us improve along the way. At Hoamsy, we are an all-in-one platform to facilitate every step in the moving process. As a startup, marketing requires building brand trust before you can promote your product. It is not easy to build trust with your consumers. It takes time, effort and a positive attitude. These six strategies helped us build our brand:
1. Tap into your network
Use your network to gain early support. The best way to build visibility in the early stages of a business is to market your idea within your own network. Ask friends and family to spread the word to others — hearing from a known source helped us build credibility for our business.
2. Don’t just sell
Content is more important than promotion. Give people a reason to trust you with your ideas and advice, and they are more likely to trust your product. Put out relevant content to create brand visibility. At Hoamsy, we started a Guide Blog to help people moving to Boston. Every time a new blog is published, we use social media channels to gain more traction, and use the blogs as a conversion tool to get more users.
3. Make yourself accessible
One of the most important methods in establishing trust for us was connecting personally. We found it was very powerful to interact with our target audience directly via individual outreach to potential customers. We tried to customize our services as much as possible, adding in a live chat so people could reach out to us any time, and personally guiding people through our product that we interacted with. Startups can get in contact with their target audience in ways that Google probably won’t. Use it to your advantage, we did!
4. Focus on your audience
It is impossible to build real trust if you don't really know your target audience of your brand. Take the time to know what your audience really cares about and what value they want to get from your product or service. At Hoamsy, we are constantly taking surveys and talking to our audience. We continuously reevaluate our services based on our customers' feedback, and have built in multiple channels for them to give it to us.
5. Post Customer Reviews and Testimonials
Customers tend to trust people who already purchased your product/ experienced your service more than they trust what you say about your product/service. As a startup, it may be hard for you to get customer reviews at the beginning. At Hoamsy, we would reach out to successful customers and directly ask for a review. We post testimonials on our social accounts weekly to show our potential customers real voices, as well as our site, and our Google Business account.
6. Leverage the trust of other brands.
It may be hard for startup companies to establish the trust at the beginning. So integrating your brand with other well-known brands may help startups take the first step on building trust. For payments, we integrated Stripe instead of building a system from scratch. This allowed us to build our promotion feature and add payment processing in as little as a week. Using a trusted platform also gave our customers the sense of security they needed to use a paid service.
These six concepts were the building blocks for Hoamsy to create a solid customer base as a startup. They are crucial when marketing for a startup to earn a long-term trust from customers. We hope this insight can help you start your business!
Hoamsy is a Boston-based technology startup that makes your search for people and places faster by using custom filtering and matching algorithms.
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About the Author:
Neritti Lakshman; Marketing& Operations, Hoamsy
Nelly leads Marketing and Operations at Hoamsy. She oversees online and social programs that build brand awareness and manages the design and content creation process. She also administers the operations and recruitment side of the business.