The 3 R’s of the Trust Formula – R#3
Peter Brissette • May 31, 2018
Hey, guys. Peter Brissette here, Digital Marketing Dude. And we’ve been working on a series of videos called The Three R’s of the Trust Formula. And what is the trust formula? Just a quick reminder, the trust formula is something that’s kind of come together just from my years of experience in consulting with hundreds of businesses about their marketing, and how can you make your decision making process easier, so that you can make the decisions that you need to about your marketing?
The trust formula really narrows down the most effective and most efficient ideas, strategies, and tactics that will help you in making the right decisions when it comes to your marketing so that you get the most bang for your marketing buck. That’s really the idea behind trust formula.
And what I’ve found in consulting with so many different types of businesses, is that these things become foundational. These are the things that every business needs to be thinking about, and working on, and focusing on. So that’s kind of the foundation of where the trust formula came from and why I think it will help you in simplifying your decision making for your marketing.
So I’m going to share my screen here, so we can catch up with where we’re at on all of this. So we’ve talked about reviews, make it easy, ask for them. The six questions for amazing testimonials. If you haven’t got those six questions, you can email me, [email protected], with the subject line six questions for amazing testimonials, and I will send that over to you.
The second R is Referrals. Or, another way to say it is the network effect. What are the referrals that you’re getting from existing clients? What kind of strategic alliances and partners and lumberjacks do you have? And you can watch the second video in the series to learn more about those. And then how are you caring and nurturing for your referral network?
Before I talk about number three, I just want to remind you once again, what are your owned versus rented properties? So this is a foundational principle of trust formula, is that you own your website, and you own your email list, your CRM, your contact database. So what are you doing to keep the most relevant information on your website, and make the most use of that?
Then what are you doing with your contact database? How are you building that list? How are you nurturing that list? That is foundational to making all these other things work effectively. Rented properties are things like Facebook. You can be on Facebook and use Facebook, but you don’t own that. Facebook could take away that access at any point in time.
So let’s talk about number three. This is called RFP. And RFP is three elements, Recency, Frequency, and Proximity. So what does that mean? So when you’re deciding, “Okay. How often do I do anything?” What you have to do is go back to, “What’s the end result that I want? Do I want a referral? Do I want a client out of this? How do I take a prospect from point A to all the way through to point Z? From being prospect to a client?”
So a couple of ways to think about that is when it comes to let’s say, dating. The first time you go on a date, and if you’re the guy with the girl, and you go on one date, and at the end of the date you’re like, “I think we should get married.” That’s probably not going to go over too well. Probably not going to get a yes out of that. If you do get a yes out of that, you might want to run away. That might not be a very good thing.
So marketing is a lot like dating in that there has to be a certain number of contacts, so you can go back through your database and look at your client’s history, and kind of go, “Okay. How long did it take me to land this client? What were the number of contacts I had to make, either in person, on the phone, via email? What was the number of contacts and when did they have to happen in order to land that client?
The question of recency and frequency are really super important to getting to proximity. So when you go, “Hey, I sent an email out. Why didn’t anybody respond?” Okay, well, how frequently are you sending emails? And when was the most recent time that you had sent an email? So if it’s been months and you’re a stranger now, you’re probably not going to get as much of a response. But if it’s more recent and it’s frequent in the sense that it’s consistent.
If they know once a month they’re getting an email, they can follow that. If it’s once a week, whatever that frequency needs to be. You need to look at, “How often should I post on social media?” Well, again, how recent do you need to be? How frequent do you need to be to move a prospect along to become a client? So you can determine some basic numbers to do that.
Because we all want proximity. What is proximity? How close can we get? So if you are dating somebody for months or years, and there’s recent and frequent interaction, you’re going to build a closeness. The proximity is going to close and become closer. What you’re moving towards is, “I want to get close enough for a hug.” Chuck Blakeman, one of my mentors, who talks about this. “So what do I have to do to get close enough to get a hug?” And entirely HR appropriate hug, okay. Let’s be clear about that. HR appropriate hugs only. So hopefully you get that joke.
So RFP determines when do I send emails? When do I post on social media? And so you just got to work back from existing clients. Think about the number of contacts, how recent and frequent did you have to be to get those clients? And then just come up with a plan. And this really ties into your marketing calendar. If you’re going to be doing social media content, you should have a calendar that says, “We’re going to post on these days,” and then you can make up a content calendar, and plan out the type of content that you want to do. And then we can always get into how do you choose the content that you should be doing? Actually, I think I’ll do another video on that. That’s a great idea. Thank you.
So that’s really it. This is the Trust Formula. The Three R’s of the Trust Formula, Reviews, make it easy. Ask for them. Use the six questions for amazing testimonials. Work your referrals and your referral network to build partners that will send you clients, month after month, year after year, to help you grow your business on autopilot.
And remember, RFP, Recency, Frequency, and Proximity. We want to move close enough to an HR appropriate hug, and be able to do that. So what’s the recency and frequency needed to accomplish that? And, of course, remember, what’s your own versus rented properties?
Spend the most time, most money, most energy, and effort on building and developing the properties that you own. And that is my advice for you. And the advice I’ve given to many different types of businesses over the last eight or so years.
So again, it’s Peter Brissette, Digital Marketing Dude. Thank you for joining me in these videos. I hope you found them useful. Please take a moment to like, comment, and share. If you have questions, please post those, as well. Remember, sharing is caring. We love to get our message out, so if you can help us do that, we really appreciate it. Thank you and have a great week.
Video Transcript: All right, hey guys, Peter Brissette here, Digital Marketing Dude, and I wanted to share with you something new about Google reviews that you want to be aware of. So Google now will allow users to update their profile, their name on their profiles, so they can be more anonymous. So they're not entirely anonymous, but if they want to use an initial on their last name or shorten their first name, you know, if it's Jennifer and they just want to put Jen or whatever, Dogmom1234. They can change that on their reviews. So that change here just recently was updated means a couple of things. I just wanted to go through this article real quick and talk about that. So what exactly changed in the review system? So Google now allows any user to set up custom display name and profile image, which will appear on all reviews, photos, videos, and contributions across maps and search. It's also retroactive to all the other reviews that they have left as well. So you don't need to have a different Google account to protect your identity. You can just update your profile information. So in practice, what this should mean is that customers can leave reviews under a nickname instead of their full name. All past, future Google Maps contributions, adopt the pseudonym, applies across Q&A, images, and videos. So Google still knows the account behind the review, only the public name is going to be different. So it should allow, in some industries, folks to be able to leave reviews where maybe in the past they haven't. For example, legal services. So in legal services, can you imagine if you were charged for a crime and your attorney helped you and kept you out of jail or whatever it was, and you went on to post, hey, I got charged with shoplifting. And thankfully, my attorney helped me out. You may not want to put your name on that and have it out there. So things like that, mental health is another big area, various medical or health care practices, a lot of health care practices, I think this could affect. Definitely addiction treatment and recovery, financial advisors, and some sensitive home services. The big question is, does this is, The Increase fake review risk. Most people don't think so. Again, this article is from taprocard.com. They certainly don't think so because it's still a real account. It's not like it's a fake account or something like that. So I think it's still going to produce good reviews, but it should increase the number of reviews. And that's really why this matters for business. You should be able to get more reviews. What you want is more frequent reviews, more recent reviews, and that will help build trust from potential customers. And even with all the AI hype and everything that's going on, it's going to help you with your SEO in maps and search, in particular from phones. So how do businesses adjust the review request strategy? How One thing that can be added when you're requesting reviews is to mention if you'd like extra privacy, Google now allows you to leave reviews under a custom display name. And so that can be something that you add in there. I'm also going to put a link here in the post on how to change your Google display name so that you can see that and be able to offer that for your clients as well. So I just wanted to throw out this quick little update. If you have any questions about this, I want to talk about how your reviews are being managed right now. If you're using our services or someone else and would like to talk about that, please reach out. Thank you again, Peter Brissette, Digital Marketing Dude. Visit our website at dmdude.com. Here is the link to the original Post: https://taprocard.com/blogs/article/google-anonymous-reviews-update-2025 Here is a link that explains how to change your display name on google. https://support.google.com/maps/answer/15294714?hl=en
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The last question that should we follow our competitors on social media? Sure, why not. You know, you want to see what they're doing and see what's happening there. You know if you're going to be active and you're really trying to use social to build your business then having a good idea what's what your competition is up to is probably important. And you know sometimes what I find with so called competitors is that we you know often times find people that we can collaborate with. It doesn't necessarily mean they are competitors so we work with a number of other marketing agencies and provides some services for them for their clients that they don't necessarily do, but they hire us to do it for them. So like I work with other marketing agencies, so they're not necessarily, you know, your competitor and everything. So but yeah, see what's going on you know, investigate, read up on them, see what they're doing, check out their websites, see what they're ranking for. You know, the more you understand the competitive landscape, the more you know what you should be doing and what you need to do.
And the last question that we have is, can you say more about running a test on TikTok yeah, I so I'm not on TikTok I'm not using tiktok. I wind up watching a lot of TikTok videos on Facebook and the Facebook reels. I think it's fascinating. I find it very interesting. But it's not a platform that I've taken the time to jump on at this point. Again, based on where I'm at with strategy and so forth, it's not a fit for me. But anytime you're using any platform, if you're going to do something, you want to come up with some means of measurement. How am I going to measure success? What does success look like? Is it I, you know, posted a video and I got a thousand views. Is that success you know or is it actually driving traffic and are you tracking how much traffic and then are you tracking what happened to that traffic? Did they fill out a form, did they make a phone call? Like what's the, where do you want that to go? So we really need to step back and think about that whole process. Of creating content, I'm pushing this through to, you know, to my website. And this is what I want to have happen. This is what I wanted the results to be. And then how am I going to track it? How am I going to measure it and do that so anytime you're spending, anytime you're doing something new in particular. Or you're spending any money you need to track it all the way through. All the way through.
The next question that we have is if you have a GoDaddy web page already and are having some issues, are you able to switch over somehow? You can build your website on any other platform and then just you just change the domain where the domain points. So yeah, you can do that anytime. Thank you, Peter.
Next question is how powerful are paid plans to things like Google Adwords or whatever it is called now regarding driving traffic, how can you possibly compete when you don't have the cash to put towards such programs? Yeah, so that's where you gotta get creative. So again we're small businesses and we don't have you know, unlimited funds to you know, just throw a bunch of ads up and you know compete with some other big companies so. Again, this goes back to what are the things I can really do better, because chances are your website is getting some traffic and it could be getting good traffic, but if your messaging isn't clear on your website, you're not getting them to take the next step. They're not making a phone call or filling out a form. So where I can put energy and effort is in that messaging and that and being very clear about who I'm working with, the problem I solve, how I solve it. So that whoever does come across my radar, I have a much higher chance of converting that person then someone else. So you know it's not the best product that always wins, it's who's the best communicator. And so that's why I talk about what you own and what you can't can control and making sure that is dialed in. And doing what it's supposed to do so that if you do go I, if I'm dialed in and I know everything is working well with my website and it's communicating clearly now, I can spend a small amount on ads and drive a small amount of traffic knowing that I'm probably going to get a decent amount of conversions because my messaging's on point and so I don't have to spend as much as the big guy. But I can be more effective because I've spent time working on the stuff that really matters. Thanks, Peter.