Brand trust is important for businesses in every industry, and it heavily influences the purchasing decisions of consumers. Brands that succeed in building trust with their consumers tend to foster brand loyalty and draw more business. This article will give you insights into building brand trust with your target audience.

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• The importance of engagement
• The importance of audience analytics in content strategy
• How your content strategy can lead to customer activation
• Creating Content that Builds Trust

In the previous article about Why Branding Matters and How To Do It Right, we touched upon the need to build a strong presence on social media platforms to connect with your audience. In a sea of brands, the content that you use on various platforms will determine whether your brand stands out or not. Crafting quality content is the only way that you can reach customers and get them excited about what you are offering. With so many other brands competing for attention, your content needs to let potential customers know that you are the best in your industry. Don’t be afraid of claiming your position as the market leader. So get out there and start telling consumers that you have the solutions to their problems. This marketing strategy is called ‘audience engagement and is crucial for your brand to form a strong connection with your customers.

In order to keep on connecting with your audience consistently and regularly, you need to be able to create engaging content. If you don’t manage to keep creating content that engages the audience consistently, you might as well be creating no content at all.

The Importance of Engagement

You should craft the content to evoke an emotional response from your audience.

The first step towards building audience engagement is creating a distinct brand identity. This means showing your audience that you are present on their favourite social media platforms and posting relatable content that encourages them to interact with your content. In this way, the audience engagement will increase the number of followers on those profiles, which will help the brand to build a community of followers.

Building a decent number of followers on any social media platform is a matter of maintaining an active presence and consistently posting engaging content. Slow and steady is the way to go to build a base of followers who are actively engaged with your content and openly interact with the brand.

You should craft the content to evoke an emotional response from your audience. The emotions your content evokes can be positive or negative, but either way, it will lead to higher levels of engagement with the brand. The way you communicate your brand story and messaging needs to have a consistent style and position, making your brand seem reliable and familiar. It is important to engage with the community as a whole in the same way you engage with individual customers.

How is audience engagement measured?

Audience engagement is typically measured by analysing the metrics for the responses to your social media posts, such as the number of comments on Facebook posts, the number of people that have ‘liked’ one of your tweets, etc. It is also measured using other metrics, such as the number of people who shared or saved your content.

The importance of audience analytics in content strategy

The ability to quantify and measure the engagement of your content is especially useful in case your brand does not get as much attention from consumers as you were expecting. In situations where you need a deeper understanding of the consumer response (or lack of a response), you can go back and study the data with a fine-tooth comb to see what worked for you before and what didn’t work. This will provide you with a clearer idea of what you should do to make your content more engaging and appealing to audiences. Web analytics is one of the ways you can check the performance of your website and social accounts. Most social media platforms today offer analytics tools that let you measure the performance of your content on those platforms.

Many brands have learned this the hard way after wrongly assuming that regularly uploading content is enough to maintain audience engagement. Many social media platforms give businesses the tools they need to monitor the engagement metrics of the content posted on those platforms. These tools are invaluable tools for marketers for helping to find out whether your content is doing well or not and look at things from the perspective of the consumer.

How Content Strategy Can Lead to Customer Activation

A successful marketing campaign needs to develop a content strategy that manages to engage the audience and conveys a clear brand message.

 

Customer activation is the term used to describe what a brand does to motivate the customers to move on to the next stage of their customer lifecycle. The customers’ lifecycle starts from the moment they become aware of your brand and develop an interest in your business. The last stage of the cycle is when the customer actively advocates for your brand.

A majority of marketers fail to properly activate their customers due to not delivering relatable and purposeful content. A successful marketing campaign needs to develop a content strategy that manages to engage the audience and conveys a clear brand message. As several studies show, the information that is delivered has to be relevant and of value to the recipient. Research shows that 98% of surveyed consumers believe that the information that marketers delivered was not aligned properly and was irrelevant and unhelpful. The same study showed that over 94% of consumers have a negative response after being targeted with information irrelevant to their actual concerns. Misaligned information delivery can lead to consumers who stop frequenting your website or stop visiting it completely. They also become less likely to purchase your products, and your marketing emails will be considered spam mail.

The key to successful customer activation is engaging with the customer throughout their lifecycle and continuing to provide them with valuable products and services. You should also strive to publish content that highlights the various ways your offerings can solve problems that the audience might be having. By making your content relatable for the average audience member, there is a better chance of resonating with them and leading to further engagement.

You can make the content more likely to resonate by taking inspiration from the buyer persona used to direct communications with the customer. When you know details about your target audience’s demographics, needs, motivations, and other traits, your information delivery will likely be properly aligned and work to activate customers.

Increased Customer Advocacy

When customers feel that a brand genuinely values them, they start trusting the brand organically.

One of the ways by which you can encourage the growth of trust in your brand is by treating your customers as real people who have real value and importance. By actively advocating for the customer, people will start seeing your brand in a positive light, which will increase their trust. Some of the ways in which you can do this are through customer-oriented content and good customer service. Good customer service can range from promptly answering any questions or queries, frequently posting helpful content such as FAQs, informing customers of any problems with your services, to allowing negative reviews to remain visible on your website and social media profiles. You can display your customer advocacy by methods such as customer rewards like coupons, loyalty points, etc. By using such methods, your brand can consistently keep the customer engaged long enough to start feeling loyal towards the brand. When customers feel that a brand genuinely values them, they start trusting the brand organically.

Creating Content that Builds Trust

By now you should have a better understanding of the need for building trust amongst your customers and its importance for your bottom line. Building customer trust not only increases your revenues it can be used as a way to measure the growth of your brand over the course of time. The COVID-19 pandemic has caused significant disruptions in the way companies to operate, forcing them to change the way they reach their audience and offering new opportunities for businesses to develop trust among customers. As the 2021 Edelman Trust Barometer has shown, people nowadays place more trust in businesses than in governments and media outlets. There has never been a better time for companies to connect with their customers and build strong relationships.

Be authentic

90% of consumers look at the authenticity of a brand when choosing if they want to trust and support it.

Consumers today don’t become interested in a brand unless they feel that it is authentic. A recent survey showed that over 90% of consumers look at the authenticity of a brand when choosing if they want to trust and support it.
The importance of authenticity should not be taken lightly. Brands that fail to be authentic can suffer from lost consumer engagement and a reduced bottom line. Strive to make authenticity a core aspect of your brand and make sure that your content marketing reflects the authentic nature of the brand. The following are a few of the ways you can effectively communicate your brand’s authenticity:

Consistently keep your customers engaged

It’s not enough to just provide your customers with good customer service. To form genuine connections with your customers, you’ll need to make an extra effort by being responsive and timely in your engagement with customers across all of your social media channels. The key to forming long-lasting connections with customers is to provide them with as much personalised messaging and services as you can.

Prioritise the needs of the customers

This point comes back to providing good customer service. By giving a high priority to resolving any issues of your customers, your brand will be cemented as a responsive and authentic brand. Likewise, by acting on feedback in a timely and relevant manner, your brand will be seen to provide real value and solutions to customers’ problems.

As noted through this blog, the process of building brand trust is clearly very important and can be the thing that decides potential success. That is why you need to draw upon the input of experts who are skilled and experienced at delivering such goals. At APM, we have you covered. We have a record of curating content that fosters trust and draws more business for clients, and we are keen to work with you to do the same. So, reach out to us and let’s take your brand to the Apex!