Donate to Science & Enterprise

S&E on Mastodon

S&E on LinkedIn

S&E on Flipboard

Please share Science & Enterprise

Make Your Business More Credible

– Contributed content –

Shopping by phone

(PhotoMix Company, Pexels)

29 Mar. 2023. When you run a business, you need to ensure you are as credible and trustworthy as possible. If you can do this, you’ll gain many more customers, and not only will you directly be able to persuade them to buy from you, but if they have a good experience and feel you’re credible, they’ll pass on the word about your business to their friends, family, work colleagues, and so on. In this way, your business will grow organically, and although it’s still wise to do more advertising, these combined efforts will help your business grow faster.

Yet when you’re a new business, and you don’t have a lot of history to prove to people that you can be trusted, what can you do? You need more customers to show your credibility, but you need to be credible to get more customers; it can sometimes feel impossible. The good news is it’s possible to break out of this cycle and make your business more credible from the start. Read on to find out how this can be done.

Honest Advertising

Have you ever seen advertising that made a product or service look wonderful, and it seemed to be exactly what you needed, only to discover that once you had bought it, it wasn’t what it promised to be after all? This happens a lot, and it could be that you have experienced it yourself. How did you feel? No matter what the outcome or how you handled the situation, the likelihood is that you wouldn’t trust that business again, and you will no longer spend your money with them. You might even actively warn other people away from that business because the advertising was not right and misled you.

When it comes to advertising for your own business, you need to bear all this in mind and ensure that you are as honest as possible. You won’t want to talk about the downsides to anything, of course, but make sure that whatever you are saying is the truth and can be substantiated. When people see your ads and are persuaded to buy from you because of them, they’ll be pleased that whatever it was they bought lived up to their expectations, and they’ll know you’re a credible and trustworthy company.

Of course, sometimes you can make a mistake in your advertising, and although that can be problematic, if you fix the error as soon as possible and even apologize if it has caused any distress, you can salvage your reputation.

Think About Your Website

If you want to come across as credible, you need to have a good website. This should be more than just a single page with your contact details on it; your website needs to look professional and have plenty of details about who you are and what you do. It needs to show that you intend to be around for a while and that you have put effort into creating your business. If you can do this, people will trust you much more than if you quickly design a website that doesn’t offer any value.

Another way you can ensure your website shows you to be a trustworthy and credible business is through your payment system. If you run an eCommerce business, you’ll need to take payments online, but this can lead to problems if you store customers’ credit card details. If you use a hosted checkout system, however, this is no longer an issue, and customers can feel much safer inputting their data. By implementing this kind of system, you can show you are trustworthy.

Offer Great Customer Service

It’s easy to forget about customer service when you are so busy ensuring that your website is running smoothly and that your products work properly. It’s easy to forget about customer service when you are focused on making profits and growing your business.

However, if you don’t have good customer service, you won’t come across as a trustworthy business, and it could be that people start to avoid you if they can. This is the last thing any business will want, especially since good customer service is actually easy to achieve.

To give good customer service, it’s as simple as offering people a friendly welcome when they come to your store or restaurant or giving them plenty of information on your website if they are an eCommerce customer. It’s about responding to queries in a timely manner and fixing problems before they get out of hand. Doing these things means that even if you do make a mistake, you can still keep your customers happy and show you can be trusted.

*     *     *

 

Comments are closed.