Trust.

Do you have it?

It’s a simple question. Yet you’d be surprised at how often mortgage companies and insurance companies—two industries in which trust is an absolute must—have no idea.

There’s a reason for that.

It’s one thing to have a good person-to-person interaction with a new client. But your web presence is a different thing entirely.

Just how do you establish trust with someone when you haven’t even met them before?

Fortunately, the way that people shop around for insurance and mortgages has changed.

No matter what business you’re in, you can use online tools and strategies to build credibility and trust with your audience.

The only question is: how?

And once you know how, you’ll be able to leverage specific tools for building trust. Here’s what you’ll need to know:

Tool #1: Social Sharing

When do you feel confident that you should trust something you’re buying?

Simple. When you first heard about it via referral.

The social referral is how many of us operate. How often have you heard “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know” when it comes to landing a job?

The same is true online.

Potential clients and customers may not know you, but when they know someone who knows you, it changes the trust factor considerably.

Consider that 92% of buyers trust referrals from people they know.

If you can get some of these referrals for your business, then you’re instantly more trustworthy in the eyes of your leads.

You might be skeptical. How are you supposed to get an “in” with customers if you can’t build trust off the bat? How do you get referrals when what you really need are some new customers?

The first step is to provide the infrastructure that your customers need to share your services. Without that, you’ll have trouble building referrals.

Said Hubspot:

After a positive experience, 83% of customers would be happy to provide a referral. But salespeople aren’t asking — just 29% of customers end up giving a referral.

That means you don’t need an extensive list of customers and clients to start building these social referrals.

But you do need the right tools.

Here are a few suggestions:

• InviteBox helps you reach new customers with a social referral program.
• Ambassador helps you turn customers into “brand ambassadors.”
• leadPops helps you build referrals specifically within the mortgage industry, making them more highly targeted for building more trust.

Tool #2: Visual Cues

Because you’re building trustworthiness with someone who might be encountering you for the first time, the visual cues are going to be vital here.

In short, you want to look trustworthy.

There are a few elements you can optimize here to make sure that you meet these standards:

• A professional website/landing page. If your website looks like it was designed by someone over the course of fifteen minutes, or a subpar web builder, then it’s going to reflect poorly on your team. If you look like you can’t afford a good website, then why should someone trust you with something as powerful as a mortgage?
• Visual elements. Even if you use stock photos to demonstrate what your company is about, you should be able to give a visual sense of what it’s like to work with your company. You can also enhance trust by including a professional photo of yourself on your “about us” page. No selfies, please!
• A consistent brand. You don’t want one page to look different than the next. You’d be amazed at the negative effect this can have on how a customer perceives your company. You’ll help convey a sense of trust by keeping your web sites consistent, especially if you use the same tool to build landing pages as you do for the rest of your content.
• Avoid cheesiness. You might do everything above, but if you ever venture into “cheesy graphics” territory, you can lose trust in a hurry. This is especially true for anyone in mortgage or insurance marketing. You have to convey a sense of professionalism if you’re going to make the most of your online presence. Customers have to know that you take your business seriously.

Once again, leadPops is a tool that you can use to help with the visual cues. But here are some other tools to help give you a visual presence that establishes trust:

• Unsplash. Find high-quality, high-resolution stock photos that you can reuse without having to pay royalties.
• Canva. Canva helps you build unique visual elements for blog posts, email newsletters, web pages, and more. This is especially great for building trust-building visual elements like infographics. They also feature a “Brand Kit” to help you ensure that your branding is consistent across multiple visual elements.

Tool #3: Social Proof

Social proof is a key element of building influence and trust. While it’s not quite the same as social sharing, it does include some of the same principles.

How does it work? Social proof is simply the idea that using social elements to “prove” your trustworthiness will instantly change your customers’ perception.

Think of social proof like this: we tend to flock to certain merchandise because we see celebrity endorsements. Those endorsements help imbue a sense of credibility and familiarity that otherwise wouldn’t exist.

But rather than focus solely on social referrals, there are other ways you can build trust using the concept of social proof:

• Testimonials: When your site is littered with testimonials from happy clients and customers, it’s an active demonstration that there are indeed other people out there who can vouch for your services’ quality. It’s not essential that your new customers and clients know who gave the testimonials. They only need to see that there are other people out there using your services.
• Visual elements from happy customers: If you can get a video recommendation or testimonial from happy customers, it combines tools #2 and #3 for an even more effective trust-building tool. The easiest way to do this is to ask clients for testimonials and ask if they’d be willing to have a photo or video included on your website.
• Trust badges: If you have any sort of certification or qualification that makes you more appealing from a trust perspective, display them on your “About” page. This is a great shortcut into demonstrating that you are, in fact, a professional. The same principle is at work with the doctor who has their diploma displayed in their office—they want to demonstrate that they have expertise without having to come right out and say it.

The tools here include trust badges—and publishing your content with leadPops will make it easier for you to display testimonials. Simply make a point of collecting testimonials from your clients and include them in your relevant blogs, landing pages, and navigation pages to ensure that people notice them.

Better yet, go with leadPops to streamline many of these tools into one, easy-to-use function. You can sign up to a leadPops free trial to give them a try and see how easy it is to make your web presence much more trustworthy, helping you land those leads you’ve been trying to get.