As a freelancer or business owner in the service industry, you don’t have a physical product people can grab, toy around with and put to the test. You might be delivering an amazing service, but how do you build trust in your service with prospective clients?

Your efforts to market your product all start and end with trust and word-to-mouth only gets you so far. While word-to-mouth is amazing, you will stay stuck within your network of past clients. What if you want a breakthrough and tap into a new market or clientele that’s more than 2 handshakes away?

People will look for your service and will find there’s a bunch of people offering similar services in the eye of the general public. There are a set of reasons why people either book you or not. It can be the price you ask, the look of your work, your location, or whatever reason people will find to justify working with someone.

A lot of those reasons, you can only control so far and you should ask yourself if you actually want to compete on those. Competing on price can have a short-term positive effect, but do you really want to become the cheapest?

Having a vision of where you want your business to be and translating that in your personal brand is key. If you imagine how your business is going to look in the future and have all your communication in a way that sounds the way you want it to sound you are well on your way!

The way you project your business is the way people are going to see it.

As a freelancer or business owner, you must have a personality beyond your work. Your face is the face of your business and thus your brand.

You should give people the opportunity to trust you. All they want to know is whether you will catch them when they fall. You are offering a service people need, people look you up and want to assess the level of trust they have in you getting the job done.

When a stranger walks up to you in the streets, even before they ask their question, you already decided how you are going to respond. You looked at them and checked if they appear trustworthy and your response is dependent on it. The same goes when you reach out to people to see if they wanna work with you. If you do not appear trustworthy, they will not respond the way you’d like.

People are constantly profiling others and assessing what they are about. If you consider yourself a professional you cannot get away with a bad image, both visually as well as trust wise. It should all be in sync, what you want and how you are perceived.

And that’s the most important thing; Imagine where you want to be and act like it!

In the end, it’s up to you to succeed, but it’s also up to you to take all the steps necessary to make it happen and find people that help you move forward.

Think about it and watch my follow-up post when I hand you some inspiration on how to approach it. Please also check out my previous post about why you need to start thinking about your personal brand.
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