How Transparency Can Help Your Business Grow in 2015
Transparency has become an essential part of doing business. With the freedom to obtain any type of information on businesses in the United States, being transparent will greatly reduce the amount of people who go searching for adverse data and will increase brand trust among your current clients and potential customers. If you're looking for an easy and cost effective way to grow your business in 2015, transparency is your answer.
PR and Social Media Over the last few years, power people have discovered the all too great powers of the social media sphere. One wrong tweet or comment and a little fact checking can sink a person or business much faster than you think. Being transparent is part of good public relations. If you have a large following, use social media as a way to spread the truth about your company, whether good or bad. If some bad press is about to hit the morning papers, preempt it online by announcing that it's true and you or the company has taken measures to correct the issue at hand. Being honest and transparent about your business is one of the best ways to gain trust with your current customers. Because trust in the corporate world is often something that doesn't resonate well with consumers, your clients will be happy that you were honest and transparent about any issues, and will continue to be paying customers while referring new people to your company.
People Buy People: Be Personal and Honest at All Times In today's corporate world of level after level of customer service staff, middle management and more, consumers often get upset at the lack of personal customer service and honesty. Recent studies have shown that more than half of Americans don't trust their banks, and even more found their banks to be incompetent. These figures show that, at the lowest level of customer and employee interaction, the service is extremely bad and the trust is non-existent. While it may seem hard at first, in order to be fully transparent, you must transform your business from a faceless company into a company that employs real people. Doing this will be the first step in gaining your customers' trust and provides a great platform to begin the transparency process.
Engage With Your Audience The biggest stage in the transparency process is to engage your customers directly. Use your powerful social media platform to discuss issues with consumers on a daily basis and answer any question they have truthfully without hiding anything. Transparency does not allow for any business to have even the smallest of secrets, because customers will eventually find out. Transparency can help grow your business because customer engagement has made a comeback. Once you start honestly engaging your customers in every outlet possible, they'll begin to trust you more and will end up being your main source that drives the growth of your customer base.
Jeff Ramson pioneered the intelligent use of social media to advance investor relations goals