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When you first set out to start a company, what you’re essentially doing is building a brand. To ensure the success of your company, you’ll need a strong brand, and behind that is a powerful marketing strategy. You’ll also need to build trust with your audience in order to get and keep loyal customers.
Before becoming customers, your audience will typically come to you for expertise and knowledge through your blog, social media, and other content.
However, it goes beyond that. Your prospects want to know that they can trust you before they make that purchase.
Let’s look into how to create trust for your brand and ensure the success of your company with these core tactics.
Start with Your Value Proposition
Before you can start promoting your brand you’ll need to start by creating your brand proposition. This is crucial because it defines “you” and tells your customers what value you can bring to them.
To create your value proposition, you need to do intensive research into what matters most to your audience. Develop buyer personas that highlight your ideal customers’ problems and how your product or service will help them alleviate these challenges. Look into the challenges your product is designed to meet and how to convey that to your audience.
Create Valuable Content
Content continues to reign and is one of the best ways to draw in an audience and keep them coming back for more…if you do it right.
To create content that resonates with your audience, you’ll need to take those challenges you discovered in your buyer persona research and start helping your target audience get past those challenges. While you don’t want to overtly sell yourself, you want to provide educational content with a call to action to download additional, more in-depth information.
Ideally, it looks like this: prospect reads your blog, is intrigued and clicks on the link in CTA. After reading that content they download a case study or sign up for a demo of your solution. The result is a qualified lead that is near the final stages of the buyer journey. While it looks different for different companies, each step in the process should bring them closer toward becoming a customer.
One thing to keep in mind when creating content is Search Engine Optimization (SEO). SEO will help potential customers find you amongst your sea of competitors and will help establish you as a credible business. Great content is the first step toward SEO, but guest blogging and building backlinks are others.
This article from SEOJet.net teaches a backlink strategy where you must first build brand trust on your homepage before trying to get your inner pages to rank.
Have a Strong Social Media Presence
Everyone’s on social media these days, including potential buyers. To reach every area of your target market you’ll need to get heavily involved in social media. Your buyer persona research will show you which channels your ideal customers use most so you’ll know where to focus your efforts.
Why is this such a critical area for building brand trust?
Social media promotes dialogue. It allows you to have a conversation with your audience, in a way that no other medium does. By building a strong presence on your social channels, you’ll build authority within your industry. You’ll also benefit from the shareability of social media.
Prospects can easily share your content to their followers, which means more visibility for your brand (and it won’t cost you a dime!)
Engage with Your Customers
To build brand trust, you need to build a relationship with your prospects. Social media helps encourage this in part, but you’ll also want to use email marketing.
Emails help you nurture potential customers and keep them coming back for more content. Personalizing these emails takes it a step further by creating an individual experience for each recipient.
Be Authentic
When creating content for your brand, it’s important to be you and show the human side of your company. You can accomplish this through live video, podcasts, and sharing behind the scenes content on your blog and social media.
Don’t be afraid to let your audience see “behind the veil.” It helps them form a connection with your brand that goes beyond your product…it helps them form a connection with YOU.
Storytelling is one of the best ways to show the human side of your brand. You can tell the stories of your employees (who they are and what they do) and you could share your customer’s stories. This type of content makes you more relatable and in turn, makes your brand more trustworthy.
Be Consistent
Regardless of the marketing channels you’re using, one thing you always want to do is be consistent. From your logo to the tone and personality of your message, it shouldn’t deviate too much.
Whether someone is on your blog and then your social media, it should be apparent that it is the same brand. Keeping things aligned will help your audience feel like they know you and will help establish trust.
How to Create Trust and Keep It
Content is clearly key when it comes to how to create trust. Whether on your blog or social media, you want to create engaging content that solves your prospect’s challenges. In doing so, you’ll position yourself as an industry leader and keep them coming back for more.
Check out the rest of our blog to learn more marketing tips for building trust and making your brand stand out.