Building Credibility as an Expert

The wellness industry has significantly changed and evolved over the last 10 years. With this evolution, coupled with a more conscious, demanding and educated consumer, there is now greater pressure than ever on those delivering products or services within the industry to do so with transparency and credibility.

As we talk in more depth about how to build a successful expert or practitioner career in wellness, you’ll notice an emphasis on building trust with your clients. Trust comes when people see that you are deeply knowledgeable about your area of expertise, can communicate the value of that expertise clearly, and are both relatable and likeable.

We talked about using social media to build a personal brand, which will enable people to get to know you. Social media is also a great tool to enable people to come to like you and relate to you.

The golden trifecta for any successful expert or practitioner is that your audience (or potential clients) feel that they know you, like you, and trust you. When you’ve achieved all three, and consistently generate this feeling amongst your audience, then people are much more likely to buy from you. That is, they’ll buy your service, your courses, your programmes, or the many other things that you might decide to offer as an expert or practitioner. We’ll discuss more on this in the next week.

One thing we need to emphasise when talking about trust specifically, is the importance of being seen as credible. Credibility underpins your personal brand and is rooted in your experience, your training, your qualifications, and anything else that shows your potential clients that you are good at what you do.

You might consider the following as contributing factors to garnering a credible reputation in your field of expertise:

• Being qualified as and where required, and ensuring that you follow applicable codes of conduct and ethics
• Having associations to relevant governing or industry bodies that bring together other professionals in your area of expertise
• Committing to ongoing training and professional development – and ensuring that you are communicating this to your audience
• Proactively seeking out opportunities to speak about your expertise in the media (in magazine features, on TV, radio etc.) and providing credible information to the general public
• Leaning on previous client testimonials to prove your expertise and showcase the results that you can get for clients (also called ‘social proof’), and,
• Upholding yourself in a professional manner on social media platforms and at in-person events

You might also consider how your specialism or niche area of knowledge can contribute to creating credibility, but we’ll get into that in more detail later in the course.

What do you think?

When you think about experts that you admire or have worked with in the past, what would you say makes them credible?

How would you say they build trust with you in tangible ways and how can you learn from this? Share your insights with your peers using the Comments section below.