Recent studies show that 89% of people are likely to trust personal recommendations from friends over any sort of advertising.

Advertising platforms like Google and Facebook, are becoming more and more popular with brands advertising.

As a result, there are a lot more adverts appearing on news feed. The cost of advertising is inflating on nearly every platform across the planet due to the amount of advertisers and the problem is only going to increase over time.

What does this mean to the consumers?

They’re being bombarded with marketing messages left, right and centre. They’re also being pitched to multiple times a day in their news feed over and over again from your competitors and other brands that sell to your niche. It’s never been easier for brands to get in front of consumers but never been harder to make a conversion.

The other side of the story is that your consumer does not trust marketing.

“It’s probably too good to be true” is a constant theme with consumers. From being swamped with marketing messages, they’ve become numb and this is exactly why they’ll trust a friend over any marketing

So, what can marketers do to connect with their customers ?

Your marketing has to have meaning and by meaning it has to build trust. Trust is the most powerful emotion you can elicit when connecting with consumers. Your marketing has to convey trust and clearly demonstrate to the consumer that you solve their problem.

When it comes to consumers making purchase decisions, we believe the emotional investment should always comes before a financial investment. Every purchase that is made is to solve a problem.

For example, buying some clothes to feel more confident, keep warm or more comfortable, or buying a new phone to keep connected to friends and have a status around having the latest “cool” apple product. The list could go on and on.

We always come back to the main point. Social media is a platform for sharing emotions.

When people share a video on facebook they’re not just sharing the video but the emotion they have attached to that video.

This means you need to connect with consumers on an emotional level before asking for a financial transaction.

How can you solve this?

You can do it by taking individual consumers on their own journey through a personalised eco systems, via their own behaviour and their own emotional needs. (You can gain a deeper understanding on eco systems by clicking here.)

Connecting with your consumer and building trust is imperative. Turn your marketing on it’s head and instead of always asking people to click a link, try to give a little bit more about your products before you ask them to make any purchase.

Give content without asking for anything in return and start to learn about your consumer.

We always think of marketing as dating. For example If you (the brand) was to walk into a bar and there will be 10 people there (the consumers). You walk up to every person and ask them back to your place (asking them to buy).

You might get lucky and get one of them to say yes…however the quality might not be the best.

However, if you changed your approach and firstly bought somebody a drink then over a series of time dates and got to know them, their behaviour, their needs, fears and desires, your success rate would be much higher plus the quality would be much higher.

It’s the exact same with your marketing.

You need to stop treating your audience as just data, click through rates or conversion rates. Start to understand every piece of data you collect, is a person who has emotional needs. Why someone click or not click is down to their emotional behaviour.

Get to know your consumer over time, build trust and authority, demonstrate your understanding to the problem they have and that your brand can solve it.

Even better than this, is the results. It will yield to a much higher percentage fo your audience to sale at a much lower cost per acquisition in which we’ve proven such as IELTS, One Year No Beer or Happy Pear and more.

Next time when you review your marketing activity, remember that people trust friends over advertising because of that key word trust. Start to build trust in your marketing and always remember you’re talking to people that have needs and desires.