Do you own a golden ticket in your business? What golden ticket would I be speaking of?
The golden ticket is the device that gets you in doors and past all the guardians of the inner workings of your customer’s decision makers. The golden ticket will get you a seat at their table. Without it, you are left on the outside wanting in.

Many times marketing tools are seen as the golden ticket. For instance, have you ever been told that if you have the right web site or are active on the right social media sites, you will own the golden ticket? How about if you put a listing in the right advertising medium or wrap your car with your logo? Then you would own the golden ticket, correct? If only you would get another marketing tool, people would be knocking each other over to buy your products or services.

In reality, marketing does have something to do with the golden ticket, but it is not a tool that does it, per se. So how does someone decide to buy from you for the first time? The golden ticket is one word: Trust. The purchaser has to be convinced that they can trust you enough that your product or service will live up to its billing and solve a problem for them. I break this trust into two parts: Believability and Faith. Let me explain the two of them with a story. A few years ago my family and I were in Orlando, Florida at a tourist attraction known as Gatorland. It is full of all kinds of alligators and crocodiles. I was asked when we were buying our tickets if I would like to wrestle an alligator for $5. Since my kids were listening in, I thought I should play the part of their strong father, so I said yes and bought the ticket. We were told to be at a small outdoor arena at a certain time. This arena surrounded a small grassy island that served as a stage. Around the island was a concrete mote full of alligators that were all 6-7 feet long. When the time came, an animal handler asked all of us with wrestling tickets to form a line while he pulled an alligator from the mote onto the center of the island. The animal gave him some resistance as he jumped on its back, then clamped its mouth shut with one of his hands. He then explained that alligators have a tremendous strength in their jaws to close down and crush their victims. However, they had very little muscle strength to open their mouth. As long as you had a good grip on their closed mouth, they could do little to bite you. He was demonstrating this to all of us. I found his story believable.

Next, he said we should come one at a time and replace him – sitting on the back of the alligator and clamping down on his mouth with our hands. Here is where the faith part of trust comes into play. It may be one thing for me to believe everything the animal handler was saying, but for me to put my own fingers around a seven-foot alligators mouth was a bit unnerving. My faith was shaky. That’s when he did something to convince me I would be okay. He pulled out a roll of black electrical tape and wrapped it around the beast’s snout several times. Now I was convinced I would not lose my digits in this, my first alligator "wrestling” experience. I had faith in the tape.

Now let’s relate this back to your customer’s buying experience with you. If you can build both believability and faith into your marketing, the customer will trust you and buy from you. And if they find this act of trust to be one which benefits them, you will earn the golden ticket to sit at their decision making table.

Now lets go back to those marketing tools for a minute. Too often we fall in love with the tools of marketing and try to develop them before we have a strategy. One thing I would suggest is to segment your marketing activities so you know what you are trying to accomplish. In this case, you are trying to get someone to buy from you for the first time. What tool would be best to get your trust message in front of your target market? That will depend upon their attitudes about different marketing mediums. You may be targeting millennials, and if that is the case, you better be able to build trust using a mobile marketing tool. You may be targeting baby boomers. You need a marketing tool that allows you to interact with them in a visual and in an environment where they can ask questions and get answers from a live person. It is what they value. The point I am trying to make is that the tool should be geared to the target market. Building trust is the golden ticket, not the medium.

The bottom line is this: it does not matter who your target market is, trust is essential to get yourself to the point where you are invited into their decision making process. When the customer comes to you to solve their problem, you are in a wonderful place. It all starts with effectively marketing believability and getting over the hurdles to build faith in you and your products.