How to create content that builds brand trust
The first step to creating great content is to identify what evokes a feeling of safety and trust in your customer’s mind. Consumers have limited money to go around, so every spending choice they make is based on trust. You have to discover what will invoke this feeling of trust towards your brand. Is it the number of social media followers/engagement or the total number of referrals done by your existing customers? Having this insight will help you to create content that achieves drives the trust objective.
Here are 5 tips on how to create great content that builds trust for your brand.
1. Emphasize on helping rather than selling
One of the core tenets of good content marketing is that you can’t make it all about your business. You need to commit time and resources to create content that’s genuinely helpful to customers, this shows them you care about them beyond the bottom line.
Take time to understand who your audience is and what they care about, then craft your content strategy around them. Focus first on providing value and building a relationship with your audience, and only later on selling. If you offer value and build trust first, you’ll be more successful when you do make the sales pitch.
2. Demonstrate your expertise
This is especially important for professional businesses. One of the ways you can build trust is by establishing that you are an expert in your industry. You can create content via blog posts, e-books videos and social media, that tells your audience that your company has the necessary skills, knowledge and experience to solve their particular problem(s).
3. Give your brand a relatable and consistent personality
This means that you should incorporate the language and interests of your target audience into your marketing, but only as far as you can do so naturally. If a marketing choice feels forced, you’re probably better off not using it. It is more important to be natural and consistent, which will translate into a perception of authenticity and safety. You have to find the right mix of focusing on what they care about, while also staying true to yourself in your marketing. If your research suggests your target audience is full of people likely to love Nigerian Jollof, slipping a reference into your marketing can be a way to connect with your audience on a more human level.
People can recognise pandering. If it looks like you’re trying too hard to relate to your audience, while they always know that just underneath your actions is the desire to sell you something, they’ll know it.
4. Keep it simple
When you’re trying to build trust for your product or brand, your marketing content should be optimised to help your customers fully understand what it is you are offering. Using complex language that’s difficult to understand, will not make you look smart. If anything, it will increase the perception of risk in the eyes of your customer.
Most of the people you are targeting at this stage have very limited knowledge of your company and its products. What they want is information; they aren’t ready to make a purchase. Any content you provide during this stage should be focused on making your customer an expert on using your product which means simplifying your language and terminology, so it is better understood.
5. Differentiating by innovating
Why should customers trust you if you are repeating the same information, or doing the same this as your existing competitors?
There’s no differentiation if you’re regurgitating information someone else has already provided, and it doesn’t give your readers any good reason to trust you over another brand. So look for gaps in the information that’s out there, or make sure that if you do tackle a topic your competitors have already covered that you bring a unique spin or angle to it.
Content marketing provides an opportunity that enables you to build relationships with your audience while demonstrating all the reasons they can trust you. This is more valuable than just making a sale, it’s the path to creating loyal customers
However, creating great content is just the first step. For optimal impact, you must optimise the content to achieve your desired objective and then deploy the content on the most effective channel(s). Here at Algrowithm. we have devised a framework that allows us to achieve this seamlessly and we call it the COP Framework™ (Content, Objective, Placement), for policing your strategy execution.
If you would like to find out more about alGROWithm’s COP Framework™ and how it can help your business, please contact us