Authority Matters in How You Market Your Printing Company

To stand out online and in your customers’ minds, authority matters. 

Whether you have the biggest company on the planet or you run the shop down the street, you need “cred” to attract attention.

There are two types of attention you want to cultivate. The first form of authority is from real live people, especially from customers and potential customers. The second is from various search engines. 

Let’s talk about each of those.

Why Authority Matters to Customers

If you want customers to refer business to you, you have to look good enough to warrant that gesture. If you look weak online, customers don’t want that reflecting back on them through a referral to someone who does not look worthy, even if they enjoy doing business with you. However, if you look professional and credible, you convey authority. People will be proud to refer you.

This is human nature. 

When it comes to luring new customers, here’s another truth about human nature.

People don’t like to change their behavior for just anyone. By “change,” I mean (1) change providers from their current printer over to you, or (2) change from doing no printing to doing some printing. Either way, people don’t like to make a move without a compelling reason. 

To get a prospect to change their behavior and consider you as their printer, you need to present yourself as a low-risk option.

Using Authority to Reduce Buying Risk

When you are authoritative, you are giving off a “low-risk” signal. Being authoritative can help in having people trust you. In fact, it’s a little-used shortcut. You are essentially telling someone, “Others have trusted me to get me where I am now. Therefore you can trust me.”

Being seen as authoritative can mean different things to different people. Think about the people you are interacting with or putting yourself in front of.

For example, “authority” can mean you have a good track record or that trusted people recommend you. It can mean that people generally say good things about you. Authority can mean experience and longevity in your field, and that you are the one others turn to you for advice.

Can you see why, in a busy and noisy world, being an “authority” makes it easier for people to feel comfortable making a change and moving over to you? 

How Search Engines Perceive Authority

Search engines are where being authoritative really pays off. In fact, authority is the measuring stick for your online reputation. 

When positioning your printing company online, your “authority quotient” (what I call AQ) determines how and where you will be presented in the search results when someone searches for you (or for a key term highly associated with you).

This “authority” might be influenced by your brand statement, your credentials, and your unique identifiers. Authority is conferred when a circle of high-quality, well-known people talk about you or write good things about you, such as a testimonial.

For the highest authority, you need a highly-professional website of your own. On your website, you need well-respected and well-visited websites to link back to you.

Google factors in (not as much as they used to) the longevity of your online presence or website. It weighS the authority and credibility of the entities that accept and acknowledge you (backlinks).

As you can see, there are many ways search engines evaluate your authority, but everything revolves around having a regular, professional, well-regarded presence online.

The Hidden Factors That Affect Authority

You may not know this, but search engines also exist within each social media service. Each platform has its own search criteria or algorithms, and its own mechanism for delivering results. Here’s an experiment for you. Log out of social media and go to an incognito page. Search a key term that is highly associated with your company on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram. Does your company come up as a result for any or all of those platforms? If not, consider this: each day people are searching social media for answers to their questions and to find the right people to do business with.

If you’re not showing up in social media search returns, it’s time to make this a part of your social media marketing strategy. 

Finally, a big piece that’s overlooked is a company’s own website search engine. Whether you have your own internal search mechanism on your website or are tied to Google, your intended content should come up as the top result when someone searches your website. If you think this is crazy, try it on your own site. If you can’t find the right content or blog posts on your own site, you need to be more strategic in building authority within your own universe. 

Build Your Authority to Get Better Marketing Results

In the past few years, Google has rewarded “pillar content” on your website as a measure of authority. This means you should be known for something, not just blogging random content or posting clickbait. You should have one major topic that everyone agrees is “your thing” and then a bunch of sub-topics that support and explain the big topic. Your publishing strategy should revolve around building the pillar foundation and then filling it in. If you just publish the filler content or blog infrequently, Google won’t understand how everything ties together, and you won’t get credit for the big key term. 

If you have many big topics you are known for, be sure to flesh out each one on your website through blogs and descriptive content to prove you are the authoritative expert in that category. Proof, as I mentioned above, means having other authoritative sources “agree” that you are worthy. If you follow these practices, Google will look more favorably upon you. That favorable treatment creates… you guessed it… more authority!  

What To Do Next to Improve Your Authority

I know this is probably more technical than a casual reader wants to know, but just remember: all things being equal, when choosing a print provider, (1) people will pick an AUTHORITY as more credible, (2) they will pay more attention to a referral from an authoritative source, and (3) they will be more likely to refer you if you are authoritative. 

If you’re not authoritative yourself, work on it.

• Create content that elevates your personal and company brand.
• Curate the best testimonials, which you will post on your website.
• Ask people to leave reviews on Google.
• Include thank you letters and testimonials in your print marketing.
• Write guest blog posts for authoritative sites and link to them.
• Write articles for print magazines that have a strong online presence with a searchable database.
• Create a rich world of useful and up-to-date content on your website that people are excited to visit and dig into. 

The world is just going to get noisier. Whatever you do in your marketing program, you have to stand out as the best choice. Authority matters. 

Read more from Sandy here and learn how to improve your Marketing Strategy. 

Sandy Hubbard is an expert Marketing Strategist specializing in the Printing Industry. She consults with Print CEOs and owners of print, media, and platform businesses of all sizes — helping marketing teams build visibility and increase sales.

Sandy is also co-host of #PrintChat, a weekly discussion on LinkedIn. Join the group here. 

Read more from Sandy here.