You Must Win Every Moment of Trust to Win the Moment of Truth

Do I have your trust? As he says: (N)othing is as fast as the speed of trust … In a high-trust relationship, you can say the wrong thing and people will still get your meaning. Made famous by P&G in the early 2000s, they are the key times when customers make an important determination: First moment of truth – when the customer is confronted with the choice of which product to purchase Second moment of truth – when the customer uses the product and has a good or bad experience Third moment of truth – when the customer makes the choice to provide feedback/reaction about the experience And then there is the zero moment of truth made famous by Google – when a person grabs a laptop, mobile phone, or other wired device to start learning about a product or service they’re thinking about trying or buying. Depending upon the context of the question the consumer is asking and the product or service desired, hundreds or thousands of cumulative moments of trust influence how (or if) there is a moment of truth at all. But the consumer’s level of acceptance – or skepticism – to the question and the answer depends on their level of trust of the brand. Bankable trust through content marketing Trust is our goal as content marketers. The best way to get data that can be trusted by your brand is to deliver that personal experience that encourages the audience to willingly and trustingly give its information to the marketer. In a customer-touchpoint mindset the marketer seeks to ensure that an audience will be satisfied with each interaction with the brand’s content. In many companies we’ve worked with, a salesperson has no idea which content a new inbound lead interacted with. And, in fact, this can ruin both the relationship between the customer and the content, and between the prospective customer and the salesperson.

Author: Robert Rose / Source: Content Marketing Institute

May I have your attention?

Do I have your trust?

The answers often are not the same. And yet marketers often conflate them.

Grabbing a consumer’s attention for any length of time is seen as a proxy for “engagement.” And “time spent” is equated to the depth trust of the brand by a consumer. Of course, this is just not true.

In fact, researchers have found, as “trust increases, attention decreases (in proportion).”

Think about it. As people feel more safe and secure in a situation, they need to pay less attention. The guard goes down and openness to anything new or unknown goes up. When your best friend suggests something new, you immediately say, “Yes, I trust you implicitly.” That’s the concept at work, which author Stephen Covey calls The Speed Of Trust in his book of the same name. As he says:

(N)othing is as fast as the speed of trust … In a high-trust relationship, you can say the wrong thing and people will still get your meaning. In a low-trust relationship, you can be very measured, even precise, and they’ll still misinterpret you.

Trust in moments of truth

You’ve probably heard of the moments of truth in the buying process. Made famous by P&G in the early 2000s, they are the key times when customers make an important determination:

First moment of truth – when the customer is confronted with the choice of which product to purchase
Second moment of truth – when the customer uses the product and has a good or bad experience
Third moment of truth – when the customer makes the choice to provide feedback/reaction about the experience

And then there is the zero moment of truth made famous by Google – when a person grabs a laptop, mobile phone, or other wired device to start learning about a product or service they’re thinking about trying or buying.

But, the truth is no single “moment of truth” exists for any of those human decisions. Depending upon the context of the question the consumer is asking and the product or service desired, hundreds or thousands of cumulative moments of trust influence how (or if) there is a moment of truth at all.

To satisfy any moment of truth, marketers attempt to target messaging in earned, owned, and paid media to raise awareness of a provocative question (e.g., how do you get your shirts so clean?) or provide the answer to the consumer’s known question (e.g., I get my clothes clean by washing them in XYZ soap).

But the consumer’s level of acceptance – or skepticism – to the question and the answer depends on their level of trust of the brand. And trust is cumulative, not based in any one moment.

Bankable trust through content marketing

Trust is our goal as content marketers. Wherever the moment of truth falls on the customer journey, we want the fastest and deepest acceptance of our proposition as possible. Put simply, our job is to have to spend less on attention and receive more intuitive action.

Think about it. Why have we marketers historically advertised in one publication over another? The simple but incomplete answer is that’s where the target audience is. But the more important reason a marketer chooses one media brand over another is because of the trust their audience has in that media brand. We want that same halo around our brand.

We live in a world where we now can create that trust and where the bar of trust in media brands is low. Put simply – in varying degree – we no longer need the media to create that familiarity and trust for us.

Every digital experience we create should not only reflect our focus on winning a moment of truth – where the customer is paying attention – but in deepening the trust gained (or regained) in every step that precedes or follows it.

How do we do that?