Everyone wants to work under trustworthy leadership, but it can be hard to know exactly what that looks like. More often than not, it comes down to communication. Communication is an essential tool for a good leader. Whether they are communicating business successes or failures, the information must be shared in an open and safe environment for your employees to ask as many questions as they need. This is what trust looks like, and we all know that trust can’t be bought. Below, we have a few great ways to build trust with effective leadership communications.

Does your company have a blog? If not, What are you waiting for? With today’s online consumer behavior, blogging has become a vital part of maintaining an online presence. Blogging can essentially divert traffic, increase sales, and improve conversions for your business as well as develop relationships with your readers.

Does your company send out emails as a marketing tactic? Maybe your business sends out a monthly newsletter or a monthly sales promotion. If you don’t, you are missing a tremendous opportunity to nurture leads, build brand awareness and increase sales. 

Go mobile

No, you’re not crazy, Millennials, in fact, are glued to their smartphones, I’m not joking there are facts to support it. According to a report done by Experian Millennials spend just about over 2 hours a day - 14.5 hours a week - on their smartphones. The report goes on to state that in fact, so much time is spent on their smartphones that it accounts for 41 percent of the total time that the American population spend using smartphones, despite Millennials only making up 29 percent of the US population.

But wait, it gets even crazier.

Business cards. Easy, simple, and one of the best ways to gain new clients. Think about the last time you gave a potential client your business card. What did the client look like? What sort-of help were they looking for? Where did you meet? A restaurant? A convention? Maybe in line at a coffee shop? These questions may seem trivial, but they can actually mean the difference between gaining and losing a new client.

That age old battle - the ego vs the heart - is more relevant now than ever to us marketeers and anyone directly involved in business development. It dictates how you speak to the people you need to be speaking to; how you capture their attention and it applies to every communication you put out there – online, direct mail, posters, brochures, social media.

The thing is though, with everyone communicating to everyone else - shouting, pitching and bargaining for a share of the market - it can be hard, defeating and infuriating for those of us running ethical business operations to compete with ‘get rich quick’ and ‘lose 7kg in 7 days’.

What are you really saying to your customers?

Have you had a great conversation with a potential customer, been really optimistic about getting them on board, and then never heard from them again? Maybe that conversation wasn’t as great as you had thought? Impossible! You know your product inside and out, you answered every question they had. As hard as it may be for you to identify, there may be something small in the way you are speaking with these customers that is putting them off coming back.

Being a statistic for failure isn’t much fun-let’s face it. I don’t like the idea, and I bet you aren’t too keen on it either. And when it come to small business, or any business or cause for that matter it is best to avoid it like the plague. This leads me to wonder why so many businesses out there do not invest in a solid online marketing strategy of an effective website.

Put simply- no business will survive without a good website. However, what is most surprising to me is not how bad some websites actually are but in fact how easily these website short comings or problems can be fixed.

Having had a browse around various small business websites recently it occurred to me the magic a good website can do for a small business.