What Is Authentic Marketing?

Authentic marketing to me means obvious intentions in your sales and marketing outreach. This may seem very obvious but more times than not, I see business owners and marketers trying to pull one over on their potential customers with false claims, forced participation, unprofessional results, and gimmicky tactics.

These days are long over. Consumers are now more connected, more aware, and more accustom to better service. Technology is also more aware of unauthentic practices. Take Google’s algorithm for example. If you use a headline for clickbait but don’t address the problem you suggest you may be solving on your website or post, you won’t get ranked. Or email marketing. If you buy a list of your target consumers and mass email them. You may get through to them the first time, but your chances of hitting their inbox again a second time goes down by approx. 50% and you will get blacklisted eventually. Not to mention the distrust you will receive from those people that you have just violated. Yes, violated.

Our access to knowledge, service, products, and entertainment is at a level never seen before. With that comes higher expectations. We, as marketers or business owners must meet our customers expectations to build their trust.

Trust is a major component in a buyers decision making process. 

As we all know, building trust in our personal relationships takes time. The same rings true for your clientele. The amount of time that takes depends on your industry, product or service. If you’re selling a product online, the sales cycle will be a lot faster than selling a high ticket service like a marketing program, but you still have to build trust. This can be done through your marketing collateral, your website, your testimonials (social proofing), your user experience (UX), your customer experience (CX), your follow-thru, and your follow-up. Selling one product is great but having a lifetime customer is much better.

Trust and authenticity is the reason content marketing is becoming more and more popular as a means to reach your potential consumers. Content marketing allows you a chance to build trust and awareness before you even pitch your product or services.

If people trust you and your product or service, they will not only do business with you, they will continue to do business with you, they will tell their friends and contacts about you, and they will forgive you if you make a mistake.

Honesty and authenticity is always the best policy. Let’s do better.

Thanks for reading! Be sure to check out our other posts on A Big Digital Hug.

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