Establishing your business as trustworthy is key to building positive and long-lasting relationships with both your current and prospective customers. In order to do so, you will need to develop a robust marketing strategy.
One of the rising trends in marketing is providing valuable content to your ideal customers. Here are our top 6 tips on how to build brand trust using content marketing tools:
1. Understand Your Customers’ Personas and Their Journeys
To build trust with your customers, you need to first define your ideal customer personas, and subsequently their needs and preferences. You can achieve this by answering questions such as their age, income, life stage, hobbies, etc.
You can then map out your customer’s journey once you have defined who your ideal customers are. Customer journey maps are basically visual stories of how your customers interact with your brand. They help businesses step into the customer’s shoes and view their business from their perspective.
While there are many mapping tools available, the best and most effective way to understand your customers’ journey is to ask them. A quick survey or having a simple question such as “where did you first hear about our products?” pop-up right after someone makes a purchase will give you some insights of what kind of content is working for you.
Based on that feedback, you can determine which channel of platform you should place more focus on, and which ones you should improve on or disregard completely.
2. Build a Consistent Brand Voice
A very important aspect of a good content marketing strategy is to define your business tone and tweak your content to speak in this “voice”. This helps you stand out from your competition and provides a base upon which you can connect better with prospective customers.
Among the things that make up a brand voice include; common vocabulary, tone, style, and visuals. It is important for you to stay consistent in every post you publish so that you can continue to develop a rapport with your customers. By having a consistent brand voice, your followers will automatically identify your content when they see it even without seeing your name and logo.
3. Focus on Adding Value to your Audience’s Perspectives
In today’s hyper-commercialized digital space, everyone is tired of ads and promotions. Millions of people use ad-blockers just to get away from ads.
As you craft your content, rather than selling products and services to your audience, your main focus should be to create a connection with them by giving them valuable information. Among the questions you should ask yourself before developing your content plan are:
- What are your customer’s concerns and how can you help them?
- What are your audience’s intentions for reading your content?
Most importantly;
- What other value can you offer your audience apart from your products?
4. Engage with Your Followers
While great customer service will keep your existing customers coming back, effective customer engagement is what you need to attract new customers and create lasting impressions. Of course, you need to start with the usual – replying to every message, posting relatable content, etc.
Beyond that, think of the type of posts that they would enjoy interacting with. Consider asking your followers questions to encourage interactions. Again, it is very important that you use the language and voice that your audience can relate to in order to stimulate interactions.
5. Prioritize Authenticity
As mentioned above, the proliferation of intrusive digital ads has worn out many people to a point where authentic ads and content are now more valued than ever. A 2019 study by Stackla showed that 90 percent of consumers rated authenticity as one of the key factors that influence their brand or product choices.
Creating a consistent brand voice is one of the most effective ways to create authentic content. Avoid the temptation to recycle ideas from other brands. Instead, publish original content that is developed based on your own research.
Last but not least, focus on writing for people and not for search engines. Google has continued to update its algorithms to ensure valuable content is presented to users based on their search intent. Particularly, avoid clickbait titles and using too many keywords.
6. Share Customer Stories
Above all, the best way to build lasting brand trust is to make your customers speak for your business.
There are many ways on how you can share the stories of your customers. You can add a review section to your website or social media pages where verified buyers can leave their comments and testimonials.
You can have blog posts written to illustrate successful case studies relating to your products and services. Also, occasionally put up a social media post asking your customers to share their honest thoughts and opinions on your products.
The authenticity of the reviews and replies will not only put your brand in a positive light and bond with your satisfied customers, it also create an avenue where you can effectively deal with user complaints. A win-win if you may.
Importance of Content Marketing
Great content has become what consumers expected and is essential in building trust and generating leads. In fact, content marketing is proven to be 3 times as effective as outbound marketing in terms of both lead generation and conversions. Moreover, over 70% of internet users prefer learning about new products through content rather than through ads. It should be central to all your digital marketing efforts.
Conclusion
Building brand trust is crucial for every business. It can help the company cushion the impact whenever the brand takes a hit. Brand trust will also help a business collect honest and useful feedback from its customers and thereby, some flexibility to take risks and try out new things.
There are, as we said, many guidelines on how you can build brand trust. However, if you’re just starting out, focus on creating authentic content, having a clear and consistent brand voice, telling customer stories and basically everything written above and you will be well on your way to growing your brand’s trustworthiness, and by extension, your sales numbers.
What is your strategy on building a rapport with your customers? Share your thoughts with us in the comment section below.
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Alan Lo, Managing Partner of Stratwell Strategic Solutions, brings a decade of entrepreneurial and business development experience. Early in his career he was instrumental in building out the distribution channels of a real estate investment firm with over $2 billion in AUM. He has then founded an investment company in 2014 which he successfully exited in 2019.
