Author: Brittany Crockett

As we bring our know like trust series to a conclusion, we end on trust. Once we have introduced someone to our company and we’ve gotten them to like us, now we need to close the deal by building trust. Today, we’ll talk through some of the things that we can do to increase trust with prospective customers. The first thing is sharing our experience. One of the key things that can help close new business is to share with them the experience that you have, specifically if it’s in the field that they’re looking for. For example, you might say, “We have 10 years of experience in marketing,” or even better, say your customer is a roofing company saying, “We’ve been working in residential roofing marketing for over 15 years.” That’s a hard offer for someone to turn down. A second component of showing experience is showing customer testimonials. The richer these can be with real names, pictures, and details, the better they will be at building trust with potential customers. Second question, does your customer have a good experience when they come to look at your experience? When they interact with your brand, your website, your social media, is it clear who you are?

Are all the detailed points of your brand and your website contributing to that trust over time? Or is it ruining that trust by not being clear and not being effective? The third thing is, are you able to showcase any trust signals for your brand? The Better Business Bureau used to be the clear sign of a trustworthy business, but I think they’ve lost some of the shine off their endorsement over time. Things like reviews from Google, local chamber memberships, or membership in a governing body for your industry can show legitimacy and help to seal the deal. Another thing that’s important is a clear path forward. Do clients know who to go to to start business with you or how to go about getting into business with you? Is it a call? Is it an email? Is it set pricing? Making the process clear can help build trust with the customer. And the last thing I want to say is if you can find a way to share your expertise with your potential clients, whether that be through white papers or videos or events or podcasts, it can help build trust through expertise. The more you have to share, the deeper that trust will be.

Now, what are some things that hurt our efforts to build trust? One, stock photos. Almost everyone can spot a stock photo when it is used anymore. And stock photos can trigger quality concerns for potential customers. You may have inconsistent branding, visual or otherwise. And so what I mean by that is if your visual branding, meaning your logo, has multiple versions that aren’t the same logo kit over different places, it might be a mark of concern for potential customers as they seek to build mental recognition of who your company is. Additionally, if your messaging communications vary wildly in tone from one place to another, it can be off-putting and show a lack of professionalism, which can be a concern for potential customers. Number three, if your website obscures who owns or leads the company, it can cause potential customers to wonder why that information is being hidden. If your company has great leadership, you should flaunt it. And then finally, you may have reviews, but the more generic a review is from a customer, the more fake it will seem. And you don’t want fake or seemingly fake quotes out there or testimonials out there.

It would be better to have no review than a fake testimonial or a testimonial so devoid of specific information that it could seem fake. Keep track of your best reviews, ones that show passion for the service you provided and include details about what made that service great. So are you ready to utilize the know-like-trust funnel in your business? Hopefully, this podcast mini-series has given you a leg up to getting started. If you’re implementing the funnel within your business or you’re looking for a little help getting started, we’d love to hear from you. You can shoot me an email at kevin@adelsbergermarketing.com.

As a business owner and the leader of a company, you would think it would be easy to know what success looks like. If you’re a business leader, the clear question to ask yourself might be, How much money can I make? Now, I would hope most people think that that’s not the only gauge of success, but profit is a pretty clear metric to track. Now, I am also a Christian who owns a business, and so how does my faith affect my understanding of success? Last year at the Agency Builders Conference, I got to hear from Brandon West, who owns FOS Creative in Florida. I immediately appreciated Brandon for his conviction and how his business should affect the world. The purpose over at FOS is to reach and restore the lives of women and children who have been impacted by extreme poverty and sex trafficking. So just to reiterate, Brandon’s business, a digital marketing agency similar to mine, has the mission to serve women and children who’ve been impacted by extreme poverty and sex trafficking. Brandon is wired differently, and I love it. When I heard Brandon was releasing a book, I knew it was going to be great, and that it would almost certainly end up on an episode of this podcast.

Brandon’s first book is called “It’s Not Your Business to Succeed,” which from off the jump is a little startling for someone like me. I build my day around trying to succeed. From what time I wake up to the way my phone is set up to the people I work with, the time I go to bed at night. Every bit of it is geared towards me having the opportunity to be successful. Brandon challenges this notion at its core. Therefore, Brandon’s thesis is that that is outcome-based thinking or judging everything by the bottom line, and that that can be dangerous because it’s built around the wrong things. Because ultimately, the important thing is being faithful in our everyday tasks, whether that be leading in a boardroom, parenting, or marriage, being faithful in our actions in those areas, regardless of the outcome, because the choice to make a faithful action is more important than the result. In other words, the means are more important than the ends. Why? This is what God asks of us. Brandon points to the scripture throughout the book to show that God is concerned with our faithfulness, not our success. Brandon also covers this with our need to be faithful stewards of what we have.

As a Christian, I believe my business is not my own, but I am a steward of it for God. Sometimes I need a reminder of that. But as the steward, I also need to make wise decisions with what I am entrusted. So while outcomes-based thinking is not the key, that does not mean we throw the baby out with the bathwater, as it were. We still have a responsibility over the company and to lead it well. A few years ago, we were working on a political campaign. The candidate and I knew there was a significant chance the opposing side would start campaigning in an ugly manner. We had committed to each other before the race began that we were going to run a clean campaign. When the opponent and his friends went dirty, we maintained that commitment. We pursued the faithful option. We were committed to running it the right way, regardless of the outcome, regardless of any of the negative effects the opponent’s mudslinging might have had on us. It is easy to play the game of comparison in business. This company has more staff or this company has more revenue. But maybe the question should be, are you making faithful choices day in and day out? Not if you have made more revenue than the other company.

So ask yourself this, how do you measure success? Are you judging it by the right metrics? Thank you for listening to this episode of the Content Machine podcast. If you end up reading Brandon’s book, “It’s Not Your Job to Succeed,” I’d love to hear your thoughts. Shoot me an email at kevin@adelsbergermarketing. Com, and I look forward to seeing you on the next episode of the Content Machine podcast.

Kevin

Welcome to the Content Machine podcast. I’m Kevin Adelsberger, and this week, I’m joined by Amy Garner, who is the Chief Compliance and Communications Officer at West Tennessee HealthCare. Thank you for joining me, Amy.

Amy

Thank you for having me.

Kevin

Amy, you have a really unique journey in your career, and I’d love for just the audience to hear starting about that. If you want to tell us a little bit about how you got to the position you’re in now.

Amy

Okay. Well, it’s probably going to be surprising to a lot of your listeners because I actually do not have a communications background. I actually have an accounting background. My undergraduate degree is in accounting. I have a master’s in business. I also have a law degree with an emphasis in health law. And then a few years ago, after I got the communications gig, I decided, well, I need to probably get some formal training in communications or public relations. I do have a certificate in public relations now. But my first love was math and accounting, of all things.

Kevin

Wow. Okay. So the first two make sense. The law degree is a little bit of an oddball there. How did you end up with a law degree?

Amy

So I was working in health care already, back in the late ’90s, and I knew that I wanted to further my education. I knew that I wanted to get a doctorate, but I didn’t want to get a PhD. So I wanted to do something with an advanced degree that would be useful at work. And obviously, I couldn’t just go back to medical school. So I decided that maybe health law might be of interest because of what I was doing at work already, because that was when the HIPAA privacy rules had just come out, and it was very useful to what I was doing. And so I thought, Well, that might be a good route for me to take. And so I ended up getting my law degree in health law.

Kevin

How about that. Did you spend any time as an accountant then?

Amy

Very briefly. I was in accounting for about four years after I joined West Tennessee HealthCare. And before that, I had actually worked in banking for a little while. But after I was in the role of the controller at one of our small hospitals, I decided that I really loved operations. I really did not want to sit in the office behind the computer and just deal with numbers all day. I really enjoyed getting out and learning from the different departments. And I was in such a small hospital, and they all just took me under their wings and taught me what they knew and what they thought I should know. And so I was able to learn all sorts of things from what happens in radiology to what happens in billing, to what happens in medical records on the nursing floor. So it was a great learning experience for me because I was so young and I just wanted to soak up everything. And so I think that that’s what led me into being the candidate for the compliance officer’s job, because you have to know a little bit about privacy. You had to know a little bit about the rules that the emergency department has.

Amy

You have to know about billing and Medicare. And so I think that that’s what led me to the place where somebody said, Hey, she might be a good compliance officer.

Kevin

So a lot of times when people hear the words Compliance Officer, nothing fun comes to mind. And all of my interactions with you, you don’t come off as a Compliance Officer to me. You have a little bit more fun than that. So what do you do as a Compliance Officer?

Amy

Well, I have to say that I’ve heard that before. It is not the most popular position to be in. And for a long time, I thought, this is the most thankless job because nobody wants to see you coming, right? Sure. And nobody wants to come to your office to tell on themselves or ride anybody else out. But I try not to be scary, and I’ve done this for so long now that I really think being in communications has helped me because people know who I am, and they know that I’m not necessarily the police. And so I think that from that perspective, you’re probably right. I am probably not the typical compliance officer, but I want to be a resource for people. And I was just sharing with somebody earlier this morning that my favorite part of my job is answering questions. As strange as that sounds, I love being able to answer people’s questions or to help them figure out where to go to get the answers that they need. And so I think that from that perspective, I try to be a resource rather than just, Oh, hey, I got you. You’re not following this policy. And sometimes I have to do that, but I try not to be awful about it.

Kevin

So you worked your way up in the business side of things, which naturally progressed into the compliance thing with the law degree and stuff.

Amy

That’s right.

Kevin

Where does communications come into that, then?

Amy

So I joke all the time that the reason that I was asked to be in communications is because I like to talk too much. So there’s probably some truth to that. Sure. J.R, my CEO, as you know, J.R, he’s the type of guy that if he ask you to do him a favor, you cannot tell him no. You’re going to say, Sure. What do you need? And that’s exactly what happened. He asked me to temporarily work with the communications and marketing team seven years ago. And at the time, I said, J.R, I don’t know anything about marketing, communications. I’d had some limited experience when I was working on my master’s degree in marketing and communications, but nothing formal. And so I was really out of my element, but I was not going to tell J.R. no. Actually, after a few months of working with the phenomenal team that I have, I said, J.R, I love it. Please let me keep it. I love it so much. And it was, I guess, part of it was that it was not so rigid, like the compliance role, and I could have some fun with writing or with doing things like this that you can’t really do as a Chief Compliance Officer.

Amy

Sure. Yeah, yeah. So I loved it. And then who knew that there was going to be a global pandemic, and so at some point, I probably should have said, No, I’m not the one. But I just felt like when all my colleagues were struggling to take care of patients and doing all that they could do, I felt like, Well, this is one way that I can help them for sure, because I’m not a clinical person, and I didn’t really know what else I could do to help them during the pandemic. So I did what I was asked to do. Actually, when I was looking back at my Facebook memories today, this is my fourth anniversary of the night that J.R called me and said, I need for you to put together a press conference for tomorrow. I need the mayors to be there. I need Kim Tedford from the Department to be there. You all are going to coordinate this. And it was like 10 or 11 o’clock at night when he called. And I was freaking out because unbeknownst to him, I had never coordinated a press conference before. I had never been a part of one, and I was clueless.

Amy

But he didn’t know that, and I didn’t tell him that at the time because I knew that no was not the right answer. And we pulled it off, and that was the beginning of all-

Kevin

Of a nightmare.

Amy

Yeah, it was the beginning of all of those media interviews and press conferences and all of those things that I did with Kim at the Health Department.

Kevin

Yeah. So you said seven years ago, you became communications. So that’s It’s March 11th, ’24, when we were recording this. So that would have been ’17, right?

Amy

That would have been 2020.

Kevin

It was four years ago. It was four years ago.

Amy

Yeah, ’17 is when I took on the role.

Kevin

So you had three years in the role before COVID struck and changed everything. So talk to us about how do you deal with communication when you’re newer into communication and you have a global pandemic ravaging your city?

Amy

I don’t know. I don’t really know that I have any great advice. I will tell you that the three years prior to the pandemic, one of the things on my to-do list was to develop a crisis communications plan, and I never put that down as a priority, and then I was living it. And so for me, it was just day to day, who do I need to communicate with? What are the messages that I need to get out there from my team? I was also having to learn all about operations and surge capacity and what it meant for us to have those portable HVAC units that were turning our units into… So that we had negative pressure rooms on those COVID floors. I mean, I was having to learn a lot, but my colleagues were great because when I asked questions, they were more than happy to share with me the information that I needed to get out there. And so in the morning, I would get up and I would follow social media to see if there was anything that I needed to address during the day, if there were any questions I needed to answer.

Amy

Then I would get on multiple calls with our incident command team, which is our emergency response teams, if you will. And I would learn what we were facing for the next 24 hours or 48 hours, what we had faced for the last 24 hours, what our COVID census was. Is there any specific information I need to get out to the public today? And then I would go through that process of whether it was a media interview, whether it was a press conference, whether it was a radio interview, whatever it was. I would try to get that information out. And then the rest of the day, I would pretty much monitor local news, social media, respond to questions. It was just a constant cycle. And I call it on the job training because I really did not know what I needed to be doing that I wasn’t doing. I just tried to keep up with everything and tried to figure out how to get information out to everybody, not just Madison County, but I had people contacting us from Haywood County or Chester County or Gibson County saying, Hey, what about us? What are you seeing in our counties?

Amy

What can we do? Can you come over here and talk with our mayor? And so there was a lot of that, too. So it was just… I just was doing whatever I could to get information out there. Yeah.

Kevin

Well, and I’d say as a citizen, I felt like it was really organized and went from my perspective, you guys were proactive and communicated well in a really stressful time period.. Thank you for tuning in to episode one of two with Amy Garner from West Tennessee HealthCare. Join us back in a couple of weeks when we release episode two of the interview.

When you say you like a company’s brand, what do you mean? Most people, when they say brand, they mean the logo of a company. Don’t get me wrong, a logo is an important part of a company’s brand, but a brand is so much more. We believe brand encompasses four key areas. Each of these areas is sizable and has lots of opportunities for subsets of information. But today, we’re going to look at things from a bird’s-eye view. We believe a brand encompasses the business’s identity, the business’s positioning, the business’s messaging, and the business’s visual identity. Let’s take a look at each of these elements. Number one, the business’s identity. The first part of any brand is who the business is. What is the business’s mission and core values? What is the business trying to achieve? The mission talks to the bigger picture that the company is trying to solve and what they value. The core values gives the team guidance on what behavior is valued in the organization. It will direct how components of the business interact with customers, how the business interacts with the team. It will set the tone for what the culture in the organization is.

Business identity is a key component of what makes the brand of an organization and gains importance as the business puts value on the identity, making it part of the culture and potentially part of the marketing. The second part of the brand is the positioning of the business. Positioning talks about what a business brings to market and how it goes to market. Or to put another way, what differentiates it from other businesses. When we think about what a business brings to market, what we mean is, how do we make something not a commodity? What makes our product special versus our competition? How we bring it to market might also be our differentiation. Are you the only car wash in town that comes to people’s workplaces? Are you an insurance agency that has the most available markets? Are you the largest organic and natural food provider in the area? How you bring something to market and the positioning that you use are key parts of the identity. The third part of the branding is messaging. This could be viewed as the verbal identity of the business. How do we describe the organizations? Do we have specific words that we use?

What is our marketing one-liner to quickly share who we are? This also works into the tone of how we write copy for the business. The fourth part, and the one that people think the most about when they talk about branding is the visual identity. The logo is the most important part of the visual identity of the business, but there are also several other components to visual identity. One of the biggest things is what we call look and feel. Look and feel for a brand is the visual style for graphics and things like websites. They give us a uniformed visual appearance across all interaction points for a customer. A social media graphic should be able to be visually related to the website, which should be visually related to the business card. This unified visual identity is usually tied together by specific colors, typefaces, textures, or graphical elements like certain shapes or icons. A proper visual branding contains these components and a guide with all the rules on how use the visual branding. Is your business using all the elements of a brand, or do you just have a logo? Today is a great day to start developing the other elements of your brand.

A great thing is to look at companies that do branding well and start to look for all of those components and how they use them. When you start looking for them, you’re going to notice them. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Content Machine podcast. If you need help developing a brand or rebranding your company, please reach out to me at kevin@adelsbergermarketing.com.

When thinking about the customer acquisition journey, it can sometimes be a mystery how people decided to do business with you. Sometimes people describe it as a funnel. The more people hear about you, the more it’ll filter down to the people who turn into customers. And that’s a pretty good model. But a slightly different take on that, and a bit more of a relational take, is the know, like, and trust model. The know in the know, like, trust model means for someone to do business with you, they have to know who you are, they have to decide that they like you, and ultimately, they have to decide to trust you. Once they’ve decided they trust you, they will be willing to sign on the dotted line. This week we’re going to talk about the know, and then in future weeks, we’ll talk about like and trust. In the know like trust model, what does it mean to know? Very simply, it’s I know who you are or that you exist. So how do we become known? Two big thoughts, inbound and outbound marketing. Let’s start with outbound. Outbound marketing is anything that you are doing to actively get your name out there.

That might be sponsoring a local event, buying digital ads, or having a logo on the side of your truck. Outbound marketing is great for introducing yourself to people that might not know who you are or bringing you back to the top of people’s minds. Inbound marketing is when people come looking for you. It’s the experience they have on your website. It’s the content they see on your Facebook page when they come and look for you. I call inbound marketing being ready to be found. The biggest way inbound works into the no category is through things like social media and having good search engine results. We’ll talk more about inbound marketing when we talk about getting someone to like and trust you. But for now, know that if you invest in outbound marketing but do not have inbound ready to go, you are wasting your money. You have to be ready to be found, which is where steps between know and like start to bleed over. So what should we think about for outbound? One, audience, two, cost, three, brand image. When we think about audiences, we need to consider, are these the people we want to talk to?

So who do you want to talk to? Are they potential customers or are they referrers of potential customers? Are they just general potential customers? Or are they the target market that you really want to develop? Cost. Can you afford to do this? What do you think the ROI will be? Is it a one-time expense or an ongoing expense? Spending $1,000 to talk to 10 of the right people might make a ton of sense for your business. Spending the money to wrap your van might make sense, too. The cost varies by the audience and your business goals. And then finally, does this opportunity fit your brand? Even if an opportunity is with potential customers and affordable, does it make sense to align yourselves with that opportunity? This question could mean a variety of things for your brand, but things like the type of the event, the cause of the organization, or the message that the platform carries could have an effect. An example of this would be Adelsberger Marketing advertising in a traditional print newspaper. It would be an odd place to see us for a number of reasons, and it wouldn’t be a good fit.

We’ll talk more about know, like and trust in upcoming weeks. And so you need to ask yourself, are you ready to be found? Are you ready to start that relationship with a new customer? If not, send me an email at kevin@adelsbergermarketing.com and subscribe for future episodes of the Content Machine podcast.