Are you building trust before your customers need you?

Most business owners I meet aren't short of marketing activity. They're networking, posting on LinkedIn, sending emails, updating their website and asking for referrals.

The harder question is whether all that activity is actually helping when it matters.

We often hear that people buy from people. I think there's an important word missing: people buy from people they trust.

But when does that trust actually get built?

Think about the last time you needed an accountant, solicitor, IT company or another business service. You probably didn't start with a completely blank sheet of paper. There were names you'd heard before, someone you'd met at an event, a business somebody had recommended or perhaps someone whose posts you'd seen on LinkedIn.

None of those things necessarily made you buy from them, but they probably influenced who you were prepared to consider.

That's an important distinction, because marketing isn't only about generating an enquiry today. It's also about giving someone a reason to remember and trust you when they need something tomorrow.

Most businesses already have the trust

One of the things I've seen working with B2B businesses is that the problem often isn't that they aren't trustworthy. They have years of experience, good people, happy customers and plenty of knowledge.

The problem is that a potential customer can't always see it.

A recommendation helps. So does meeting someone at a networking event. But increasingly, people will also go away and have a look at you. They'll visit your website, look at your LinkedIn profile, read something you've written or see what other people say about you.

That's where marketing has a job to do. Not necessarily to sell to them, but to reinforce the impression you've already made and give them another reason to trust you.

A useful article, a good case study or simply explaining something you know can do far more than another post telling people how good your business is.

Do you actually need to do more marketing?

When marketing isn't producing enough, the natural response is often to do more. Post more often, send another email, try another channel or go to another networking event.

Sometimes that's exactly what you need to do. But sometimes I think there's a better question:

Are you getting enough from the marketing you're already doing?

If you're spending time networking, what happens after you've met someone? If you're posting on LinkedIn, are you talking about the things you actually want to be known for? If you've spent years solving problems for customers, can somebody see any of that expertise before they speak to you?

And if somebody meets you at an event and then visits your website, does what they find reinforce the conversation they've just had with you?

There's no magic ratio here. It's just quite a good test.

Trust starts earlier than we think

This is part of the thinking that led me to develop G.R.O.W, a simple way I use to look at the B2B buyer journey:

Growing Curious → Recognising Needs → Options Evaluation → Working in Partnership

I'm not suggesting every buyer neatly moves through four boxes. Real buying journeys are much messier than that.

The useful bit is asking where your customers are in their thinking and whether your marketing is helping them at that point.

A lot of marketing concentrates on the Options stage, when somebody is already looking for a supplier. But by then, they may already have a pretty good idea who they trust and who they're prepared to consider.

That trust could have started with a recommendation, something they read or even a conversation at a Surrey networking event months earlier.

So perhaps the answer isn't always doing more marketing. Sometimes it's making what you're already doing work a little harder.

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Ralph Risk FCIM is a Surrey-based B2B marketing consultant and Fractional CMO with 30 years' marketing experience. He is the founder of R.R Marketing and creator of the G.R.O.W framework.

Want to see where your own marketing may be leaving gaps? Try the free three-minute G.R.O.W diagnostic at R.R Marketing.