5 Reasons Why Your Content Marketing Efforts Should Focus on Trust-Building
If a person asks you to choose between an Armani suit and a similar-looking suit bought from the nearby thrift store – what would you choose? Well, no person in his/her right mind would choose the thrift store suit over Armani.
Why?
It is because Armani is a trusted clothing brand. And even if you get the thrift-store suit at the best price, you know that its quality cannot be trusted.
Similarly, unless your company can establish itself as a trustworthy brand in the market, it can be difficult for the company to succeed in a competitive environment.
As a content marketer, you need to focus your strategies on building trust with your clients and prospects. If your content marketing efforts can earn the audience’s trust, it can unlock new avenues for your company’s success.
Why does Content Marketing need to Focus on Building Trust?
A study done by Hubspot revealed that only 3% of the participants considered marketers and salespeople trustworthy. Moreover, marketing strategist Matthew Tyson suggested that Millennials no longer trust advertisements. From these studies, it is evident that it is essential to build trust rather than push products.
According to the content marketing statistics from the Content Marketing Institute (CMI), 86% of the B2C marketers consider content marketing to be an essential strategy for success. Creating valuable, relevant, and consistent content is crucial in building trust with your target audience.
If you are running a small business, content marketing is your best bet at earning your target audience’s trust. Even large enterprises rely on content marketing to build trust with their clients and prospects after a crisis. Here’s why your content marketing strategy needs to focus more on building trust.
1.Introduces your name in the market:
Content marketing plays a crucial role in establishing their name in the market for just starting businesses. Unless the customers do not recognize your business, they won’t even think of trusting your products or services. Content marketing is quite useful when it comes to improving brand awareness.
Impactful and robust content allows you to tell your target audience what your company is all about and what your brand represents. Content marketing will enable you to showcase what sets your brand apart from others in the industry and show the potential customers why they should choose your brand over the competitors.
Brand awareness cannot be created overnight. You need to produce impactful content about your business rather consistently to establish your company’s name among the prospects.
2.Informs people to learn about the services/products:
Introducing your business to the audience is the first step towards a relationship with them. However, it is not enough to earn their trust. With your content marketing efforts, you should focus on marketing the services or products and show the audience what value they can add to the customers.
With informative blogs for every stage of the buyer’s journey, it is possible to attract the prospects, convert them into leads, close the leads as customers and finally, delight the customers with further support. In each stage, the content strategy slowly builds trust with the prospect or client.
Cold calls or straight-curt advertisements do not work to convince the audience to try something new. Content marketing, on the other hand, does it seamlessly. However, you need to ensure that the content does not make fake promises to the audience or confuse the readers. Then it will create trust issues among the audience.
3.Helps create word of mouth recommendations:
92% of consumers believe in a recommendation from a friend or family over any form of advertisement. That’s the power of word of mouth. A positive recommendation about a brand from a known person can boost a person’s trust in the brand quite significantly. Over the years, content marketing has proven itself effective in increasing word-of-mouth marketing.
Promoting user-generated content is a great way to build trust. Audiences are more likely to trust your brand when they hear good things about your services or products from fellow customers. According to statistics, 86% of millennials say that user-generated content is a good indicator of a brand’s quality of service.
Content marketing can also promote relevant hashtags that can help engage more people in a conversation about your brand, boosting word-of-mouth marketing. You must have heard about Coca-Cola’s “Share a Coke” campaign. A successful hashtag campaign can increase your company’s trustworthiness exponentially.
4.Allows the brand to communicate with the audience:
Another way of building trust is by assuring the audience that your company cares for each customer. To make a relationship with the customer, you need to create avenues to communicate with you. Connecting on social media, answering queries of the customers and prospects, and responding to feedback are effective ways to do that.
A well-defined content marketing strategy can help boost the social media presence of your brand. Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are great places to engage with customers and earn their trust. Moreover, social media can be a great place to try new things regarding your business – through well-planned content marketing efforts.
It is also essential to respond to the online feedback you get from the customers about your services or products. Even if it is negative feedback, you need to respond to the feedback, address the issue, and get follow-ups. This is a great way to retain the trust of the customers.
5.Helps to recover from a crisis:
Crisis usually comes unannounced, just like the current situation of the Coronavirus pandemic. In such cases, you need to retain your client’s and prospects’ trust with content marketing. If your company has gone through a crisis that damages the brand’s reputation, you need to leverage content marketing tools to build trust with your audience.
Crisis management is generally the PR department’s job. However, to gain the audience’s trust, the content marketing team needs to work with PR in perfect sync. You must have heard about the crisis faced by Nestle’s instant noodle brand Maggi. You can learn a lot about how to bounce back and gain the customers’ trust after being banned for several months from the market.
If you take the current situation, you can look at the leading brands’ websites and social media pages in your industry. You can see significant changes in their content strategy. You can study those changes and learn how to retain their target audience’s trust during these tough times.
To wrap it up, content marketing is quite evidently an essential part of a successful brand. While it can boost the conversion rate and increase sales, it certainly plays a pivotal role in earning and retaining the trust of the clients of prospects for a business. If you haven’t set the focus of your content marketing efforts for trust-building, it is time to do that immediately. Otherwise, it will be challenging to catch up with the competitors during this state of the pandemic.
Author bio: Olaila Lee is a senior marketing manager at a reputed e-commerce company based in Australia. She is also associated with MyAssignmenthelp, where he offers assignment help to students at their request. He is also a skilled calligrapher.
