Establishing Trust In Local Dumpster Rental Marketing
It is a common knowledge that establishing trust is one of the essential components of business success formula. It is a key for building short or long term business relationship. It’s hard to argue that earning customer’s trust is especially important for businesses that are targeted at local market. Why is it so crucial? Here are a few key reasons:
- The number one reason is a natural feeling of anxiety that most customers experience because of the fear of loss. The level of anxiety depends on the past experience and can be very high if a person was recently screwed by a car mechanic, a mover, a plumber or any other local vendor. When typical customers are in need to rent a dumpster, usually they are not confident in their abilities to pick the right vendor. A typical customer is not sure whether or not a local waste hauler is giving the right price or suggesting the right size of the dumpster for the job. It is quite reasonable to expect that customers who were screwed in the past might experience a fear of loss when someone is asking for $500 or more to remove their junk.
- Another challenge that local dumpster rental owners have to deal with is the tendency of local customers to be irrational when deciding whether or not someone is trustworthy. People tend to be lazy when it comes to deciding whether a local waste hauler is trustworthy or not. Customers have a tendency to look for shortcuts and as a result, they rely on false if … than conclusions. For example, they may think like if this business owner is religious than he must be trustworthy dumpster rental provider
- It is also well known that, as customers, we often have tendency to follow the crowd. It’s sort of similar to thinking ‘if I see blue dumpsters all over the place in my city, then it must be a good vendor'. And the converse of it might be a conclusion like …oh, I’ve never seen any dumpsters of this company around so I assume that other people don’t use their services. I probably need to look for another vendor.
- Yet another irrational form of trust assessment is a so-called ‘differed trust assessment’ . It happens when instead of doing a primary research a customer asks a neighbor ‘who were the guys that worked on your backyard cleanup project? Were you happy with them?’. Then the customer bases the decision on the recommendation of one or at the most two people.
Let’s see how local businesses are trying to overcome these obstacles on their way to establishing trust? Many dumpster rentals owners try to tackle the issue by promoting the fact they offer a superior service.
However, there are a couple of problems with that approach. First is related to customers’ understanding that anybody can say ‘we have a superior service to offer ’. The second problem is that customers have no way to assess the professionalism of a junk removal crew or a roll off dumpster rental until after the fact when the job is done. So business owners are asking customer to take a leap of faith they will get a superior dumpster rental service with no basis behind.
Therefore, a simple declaration that the company offers superior services cannot be considered as a marketable advantage, especially when all the competitors are marketing their services the same way.
Thankfully, there are some other approaches and solutions that a local dumpster rentals owner can leverage to help establishing trust while building marketing funnels online as well as offline. Below are a few practical techniques to consider and implement to establish trust of the local dumpster rental market.
- The first one addresses one of the laziness factors that people have, namely the customer’s reluctance to complete a primary research before hiring a dumpster rental guy. It offers a shortcut ‘if it is good enough for … than it is good enough for me’ . This method relies on soliciting and producing testimonials from satisfied clients. However, not all the testimonials from any clients are equally good. The key here is to focus on so-called ‘Pillars of Community Endorsement’ . These are endorsements collected from people that tend to have high trust in the community. Actually, any positive testimonial is better than no testimonial. However, when the marketing effort is focused on testimonials produced by Pillars of the Community Endorsement, the likelihood of sales increase is greater.
Gallup Inc. every year publishes the poll of most trusted professions in the US. According to their studies the most trusted professions in America in 2014 were:
o Nurses, Medical Doctors, Pharmacists
o Police Officers, Military Officers, Firefighters Chiefs
o Clergy
o Bankers
o Lawyers
o Business Executives
o Advertising Practitioners
o Car salespeople
o Members of Congress
The clients that fall into any of listed above categories have more credibility than just an average consumer. It’s worth then to consider offering a discount or even a free service in exchange for the opportunity to use their feedback in local marketing campaigns.
Another approach assumes running systematized, incentivized referral programs:
Memory Jogging Technique
One of the specific ways of how a local business owner installs an incentivized referral program is based on the idea of using so-called ‘customer’s memory jogging’ technique.
It goes like this: rather than asking someone a straight question ‘who do you know that you might refer to my company?’ which puts people on high alert, instead to focus on people who have a similar problem that can be solved by renting a dumpster. It might sound like this ‘Who do you know that needs to get rid of old junk from the garage or basement?’ or ‘Do you know someone who is planning a renovation/remodeling job and will need help with debris removal?’ .
Asking this type of questions jogs customer’s memory and they start thinking about who did complain about mess in the backyard, basement or garage. And since the customer just has solved his own waste removal issue, he or she will more readily recommend the same solution to a friend or family member.
The next referral program approach is based on the concept of seeking for referrals among related subcontracting businesses or partners of your customer . For example, if a customer who ordered a dumpster turned to be a home builder or a renovation company, it is reasonable to assume that your customer can in turn use help of roofing, flooring, windows etc. subcontractors or hire Demolition Company for construction site preparation. It makes perfect sense to ask your customer to refer the dumpster rental business to these subcontractors and then follow up with incentives and special offers.
Power of demonstration.
In waste management & dumpster rental industry, a demonstration of the service can become a very powerful vehicle that helps business owners to establish trust.
The idea is to create an image of what a potential customer can and should expect. It is a short video that can be viewed from a web page. The video shows how it looks like to use dumpster rental service from a particular company, it may go through all the steps of junk removal process and it takes customers through a demonstration of what it’s like to work with a particular dumpster rental company.
The video should be high quality but not overproduced. It has to convey a feeling of reality. Rather than playing music and showing professionally created graphics and animations it would be better to sound naturally, demonstrating a real drop off and pick up of roll off dumpster.
Before & AfterAnother effective type of demonstrations is ‘Before & After’ demonstration. It is also a very effective marketing tool to help establish trust even it’s not as powerful as video demonstration. It may show an ugly, dirty yard/garage/basement before and the same place, but beautiful, after the clean up job was done. The key here is to make the images look like they are real photographs.
Presenting affinity
Presenting affinity is still another way, in fact one of the most powerful ways of establishing trust. The concept behind is that people more readily buy from those whom they know, whom they trust and who are like them. If an owner of a small business possesses or can demonstrate any of the similarity with his/her customers in one or another way, it will definitely benefit the business and help build trust. Business owners who happened to be a military veteran may go after military veterans segment of market, for example.
Geo Map Of Customers
Geo map of customers. This technique implies displaying on the business’ website a map of the customers. The website www.batchgeo.com is a free website that allows to create such a customer map image.
Negative Industry Perceptions
The last thing involves assembling a list of negative industry perceptions that can be addressed on the business website. In dumpster rental industry such a list can include
- Damaging driveway pavement
- Destroying property lawn
- Placing on property an ugly, rusted or dirty dumpster
- Cutting corners, destroying fence, damaging neighbor’s property
- Late (not on time) drop off & pick up of a dumpster
- Unfriendly customer service rep or a truck driver
-
Leaving a mess after taking a dumpster away
A business owner can combat with these negative perceptions on the pages of the business website by demonstrating some proves that the company is licensed and insured, by displaying photos of shiny, clean containers and by saying something like ‘ if we are more than 10 minutes late we are taking $25.00 off your bill ’.
A statement that addresses the negative perceptions that junk removal crews are sloppy and they leave messy environment behind may sound like ‘
We swipe the driveway after picking up the dumpster, leaving your property clean and tidy. We take the mess home with us
’.
The key concept and the strategic goal here is to really demonstrate that the business is serious and committed to take a risk from a customer and deliver a high quality service on time.
That is the list of ways and techniques that Dumpster Rentals Company owners can use to help them establish trust in their local markets.
Harry Cotten is the Dumpster Rentals Depot Waste Management & Customer Support Manager. You can find his Google Plus Page and read more of Harry's posts by visiting Harry Cotten Google + Profile .
- Published: 2015-06-27T12:43:25-07:00
- Author: Harry Cotten
