Consumer trust is a major driver in the time from awareness to purchase, overall conversion rates and ultimately, sales volume. If consumers don’t trust your business, they probably won’t purchase its products or services. And according to HubSpot, only 3% of consumers trust sales reps, making it difficult for businesses to effectively sell products and services based on relationship and solution selling backed by a sales team alone. Following through with your business’s promises and guarantees is foundational, and has a direct impact on word of mouth, but how can you set the stage for trust across all of your marketing messages? The answer comes by messaging your high ethical standards through high-quality content.
Quality Over Quantity
Creating fewer, better pieces of content is more effective at gaining the trust of your business’s audience than creating more, lower-quality pieces of content. If your business publishes 500 pieces of content on a topic, but all are generic, poorly researched and poorly written, they may hurt your marketing efforts by causing consumers to distrust your business.
In fact, Search Engine Optimization techniques from only a few years ago encouraged heavy use of keyword phrases and the publication of content that was generally ugly to the eye of the reader. People skim anyway, right? You’re mostly using these pages for back link fodder, right? Why not create content for search engines? Today, that’s a hard “no.” With improvement in algorithms, search engines are looking not just for relevance, but for quality and credibility. Today, there is no separation between your SEO optimized pages and content you want to place in front of your reader. You need to build consistent, quality messaging throughout your entire messaging platform.
Project Technical Authority
It’s also important that you project technical authority when creating content. According to one survey, 63% of consumers view technical experts as being credible. To project your business as a technical authority, avoid making unsubstantiated claims in your content. Instead, include relevant facts, figures case studies and statistics — like the aforementioned statistic on how consumers view technical experts as being credible — that show consumers your business is an authority in its field.
Provide Value With Content
Your content needs to offer value to your reader. Some businesses make the mistake of creating advertorial-heavy content that primarily highlights the benefits of products and services. The problem with content such as this is that it offers little or no value to consumers. You can still mention your business’s products or services, but your primary goal when creating trust-building content should be making it valuable for your audience. If you sell sewing machines that walk the line between professional and consumer, your content needs to help sewists improve their skills to become designers. If your business designs survival gear, you better be in the business of helping people survive. In both cases, practice based educational content that builds skill upon skill will help you get moving in the right direction.
Touch Up Your Content
Don’t forget to reevaluate your content on a regular basis. Even after publishing an article, blog post or other content piece, you may be able to improve it with some updates or revisions. Most of us work in environments with constant change. When a topic becomes hot, having the most up to date, relevant content will help you maintain your position as a leader in the industry. Dated or irrelevant content can even decrease credibility. Statements that were once correct at the time of publishing, for instance, may now be outdated and inaccurate. By reevaluating your content, you can find and fix outdated statements that would otherwise promote distrust with your business’s audience.
Develop Your Social Media
As you build content, you also need to think about the channels through which you will communicate. You are the expert, after all. Sound marketing means being in front of your audience where they are – that could mean breaking an article into 50 engaging TikTok video clips and rolling them out across Instagram, Facebook and connecting with content creators on Twitch and other channels to get your content into conversation!
No matter what kind of content you currently create, it represents an opportunity to grow and build your trust in the marketplace. Connect with Green Vine Marketing to develop your content. From strategy to creation and publication, we do it all. We even offer coaching and development for individuals and teams ready to build their content and their credibility. To get started, give us a call.
