When it comes to marketing your brand or business, and subsequently connecting with potential customers, there are few things more valuable than creating trust.
Nowadays, many digital marketers connect with a prospect on social media, through a Google search, or via email and immediately begin ramming their products or services in the potential customer’s face. They haven’t taken the time to get to know the prospect, foster a relationship or even prove why they should be trusted.
This approach is not only a massive blunder, it could have dire consequences for the brand.
Today, it is critical for marketers to create trust with prospective customers – and only once trust is established can products and services be sold.
The importance of trust
These days, so many brands and companies are being scrutinised by customers, so building trust is more important than ever before.
It’s simply not enough to get your product or service out there and hope that the sales will come.
Building trust helps people to see the value in your brand. But trust cannot be sustained if people fail to see your value. What value does your brand offer potential customers and how are you delivering that value?
Firstly, ask yourself how your brand or business resonates with people. What is your brand doing to establish importance and meaning in the marketplace? Does your business have a strong ethos or mission? Define what you want your business to be renowned for and start incorporating that message in your marketing activities. When a brand resonates, people will have less resistance to it.
Once your brand resonates with people, you can work on building trust.
How to create trust in your marketing
When it comes to building trust, content is king.
Publishing compelling and valuable content is a great way to demonstrate your brand’s commitment to being honest and transparent, while having a conversation about topics that matter to your prospective clients.
This can position your business as a genuine and credible source of information that people can come back to time and again, thereby creating trust.
Create valuable content
When you share something valuable with people, you give them a good reason to come back to your business. If that value is continually offered, potential customers will view your brand as useful and appealing, and they’ll start trusting you.
Value can be shared through digital content in a number of ways including informative articles, helpful graphics, step-by-step video tutorials, and entertaining social media posts.
Your content must be useful – it should inform, entertain, help, make people’s lives easier etc – for it to be perceived as valuable.
Take it a step further and create valuable content that can’t be found elsewhere, so your brand can be the exclusive provider of that information that will keep people coming back to your brand as the trusted source.
Be likeable
While you’re creating great content, adding value and getting to know your prospective customers, you’re increasing your likeability.
And the more likeable your brand is, the more people will engage.
As digital marketing veteran Bill Carmody said: “The more someone likes you, the more they begin to trust you. This transforms the relationship from one of ‘buyer and seller’ to the preferred position of ‘subject matter expert and interested party’.”
How do you become more likeable? According to Tim Sanders, author of The Likeability Factor, you can enhance your likeability by being:
- Friendly: having open communication with others
- Relevant: your ability to connect with the interests, wants and needs of your customers
- Empathetic: recognising and acknowledging your customer’s feelings
- Real: the aspects that show your integrity, honesty and authenticity.
Can you find a way to be friendly, relevant, empathetic and real in your content and other marketing activities?
Become a trusted brand
Every business has the opportunity to become its own publishing house where it can create and share meaningful content that provides value for their customers.
Publishing quality content on a consistent basis will also help build your brand’s visibility, credibility and trust.
But don’t just add to the noise – share your ideas, opinions, expertise and insight generously and in a way that will bring value to your customer’s life. That is where trust is truly formed.