Well-written and well-designed marketing materials can be a tremendous asset to your company. Poorly done marketing materials can be detrimental to your success. This month’s newsletter explores the role that your marketing materials can play in building credibility and trust with your prospective customers.

Which company would you rather do business with: An organization that has a positive reputation in the field and clearly stands behind its products, or a firm you’ve never heard of, that doesn’t even have contact information listed on its website?

No matter what’s going on in the economy, your prospective customers are always going to want reassurance that you’re reliable, stable, committed to quality, and not going out of business tomorrow. Your marketing materials can play a big part in communicating this message.

Smart businesses start building credibility and trust from their very first contact with a prospective client. Their marketing materials include as much as possible of the following:

• Contact Information – I, for one, will not do business with a company that won’t even provide a telephone number. A mailing address is also reassuring.
  
  
• Guarantee – Your money-back guarantee should be prominently displayed. Keep it simple, and avoid watering it down with legal fine print. People want to know: do you stand behind your products or not?
  
  
• Testimonials – What do others have to say about your products and services? When customers give you positive feedback, ask for their permission to include their remarks in your marketing materials.
  
  
• Privacy Policy – If you’re collecting any type of information online, a privacy policy is mandatory. Your offline customers might also want to know what you do and don’t do with their data.
  
  
• Ratings and Awards – Has your company won an award or received a favorable rating from an unbiased and recognizable source? Don’t keep this information to yourself!

Of course, there’s a lot more to building credibility and trust than simply providing information in your marketing materials. You also need to be honest in your business dealings, provide quality products or services, and give top-notch customer service!