7 Web Design and Optimization Strategies to Help Create Trust With Your Audience

Building trust between your organization and your audience is one of the most important marketing plans to ensure growth in your business. First impressions matter and your website is often the first place your audience gets an idea of your business and whether they would want to do business with you or not. Having a solid understanding of the ways to design, optimize, and integrate your website to build trust and loyalty with your audience can benefit your business immensely. 

Good Website Design

It may not seem like something that could help or hinder trust and loyalty with your business, but websites with bad design, navigation, or content can turn a tech-savvy person away from your business quickly… A good website requires mobility, versatility, and ease of use. 

Having a mobile-friendly website is of the utmost importance. This year, more than eight in 10 Internet users will use a mobile device to access the web regularly.  Not to mention nearly 15 percent of Internet users, or 40.7 million individuals, will use only a mobile device to surf the web. That’s an increase of 11.2 percent, and that will continue to grow. 

Aside from being mobile-friendly, your website needs to be designed well. To ensure a positive user experience, your website should house simple navigation, easy to read fonts and color combinations, interesting graphics, and appropriate white space. Working with your design, your content should be easily understood by your target audience, well written, and relevant. Doing a yearly website clean up to keep your content fresh is a good idea. A responsive design is also absolutely crucial. Below is an image that shows how responsive design works from DesignModo:

Be Forthcoming and Transparent

Honesty is the best policy, as they say, and in order to build trust and gain loyalty from your audience, you’ll want to be as open as possible. Transparency is key in most industries to really gain the trust of your audience. To state the obvious, if you want their trust, you need to be trustworthy. 

The key to being forthcoming is to share as much as possible through your website, social media accounts, financial statements, and press releases. Share as much information about what your company stands for, who your employees are, what you’re selling, and why. A transparent company also expects its executives, CEO, and president to be visible and involved in the communities they live and work. It’s important to make that connection with the community through meetings, volunteer work, sponsorship, and events. 

Workshops for Warriors offer audited financials, both current and from years past, right on their website. This is the perfect example of a business being transparent and leaving no questions unanswered for the visitor and potential donor.

Use Statistics and Case Studies

In order for your audience to understand what you do and how you do it, you need to provide examples of your work and the results. Case studies are a brilliant way to showcase your products and/or services and the positive results they conclude for your customers. Showing current and prospective customers how you work toward positive results will only benefit your business. Sharing case studies will show customers you are results-driven and prepared to help them succeed. 

It is also beneficial to use statistics to tout your work. Showing positive increases or specific areas you’re working to better your business proves to prospective customers that you’re focused on results. And those statistics really put facts behind the claims. 

Use Customer Reviews

Providing positive customer experiences is important, and it’s beneficial to request reviews from customers. While seeking a need, people often rely on peer reviews to choose a business they can trust. Asking a customer to review your business on sites like Yelp and Google My Business is a simple way to get positive content on your website as well. You can also highlight customer reviews on your website to bring more color and quick peer reviews to the forefront. 

You should also reply to customer reviews whether they are positive, neutral, or negative. This will increase customer brand recall the more they see your interactions – which shouldn’t be strictly saved for review-specific sites but can be implemented across all social media as well. Interacting with customers can also turn a negative review or experience into a positive one. People like to see businesses humanized, and conceding to a bad review and offering ways to help the customer in the future can turn that around.

Showcase Awards

Another way to win the trust of customers is to showcase your awards and certifications on your website. Entering industry contests with your best work is another simple way to show your results. Although it does take a lot of time and manpower to pull together content for contests, an award for great work is impressive for current and prospective customers. Below is an example from Honest Body Fitness:

Certifications show you are a company that appreciates and supports constant education and knowledge building. Every industry goes through changes and it’s important to stay up-to-date and current with classes, conferences, and webinars. Investing in your employees’ industry knowledge can only be a positive for your company.

Develop Your Own Voice

In order to connect with your audience, it’s important to develop the voice of your brand in an interesting, relatable way. Your brand should have a personality, and it’s important to find that through your business’s mission, vision, and values and connecting the brand to those through your website content, social media, and customer service.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is a great way to create initial trust and continue to build that trust over time. Providing your audience with industry information, business updates, coupons, and advice through email marketing shows you truly care about the business you’re in and providing solutions to those in need. 

Constant Contact shares four types of emails that build loyalty

• A compelling, friendly, and engaging welcome email
• The useful, informative auto-responder series
• A check-in and feedback request email
• An email offering an exclusive benefit

It’s that easy!

The Takeaway

Building trust with your audience starts before you ever come into contact with them. People judge brands based on their research and how they connect with a company’s website and social media content, so it’s important to find a voice for your brand to build that trust. With great website design and content, companies are building loyal customer bases. Share your work, results, and awards to be as transparent and honest with your audience, and trust will soon follow.