Your content plays an important role in building trust. It affects how people perceive your brand in obvious as well as subtle ways. In this post, we’ll look at different ways you can leverage content so that your audience trusts your brand sooner and is willing to buy from you.
Both trust-building and content creation are ongoing processes that will help you get results in the short and long run. Here are the different content types you need to create to build trust continuously and to create a solid brand image.
Publish blog posts regularly
Have you ever visited a website and then wondered why they haven’t posted any content recently? Visitors to a site will notice if a website does not update their content. This can create discomfort because it indicates a lack of activity and will make users wonder if the business will respond to them.
This makes it important to create blog posts regularly. Whether you post a blog post once a month or every week, the important thing is to do it consistently. And you can also update your create evergreen posts by adding edits and making the date field show when the post was last updated. Google notices when your posts are updated too and this impacts how well your content ranks on search engines.
Stay on top of your social media posts
Just like your blog or website, you need to create and post content regularly on social media. If you’re starting out or are a small company and don’t have a large following yet, it’s still important to keep posting content often.
Even if you get most of your leads from other places, your social media content still matters because your activity level implies that you are likely to respond to queries from your audience.
So, create posts on a daily basis if not multiple times a day. And make posts that use natural conversational language so that your audience feels like you’re talking to them directly and in a friendly way.
Respond to comments
Along with your blog and social media posts, visitors to your site or social media profiles will explore comments people leave. It is critical to reply to comments that users make on your posts. When your audience sees that you respond to comments, they’ll feel assured that you listen to people. They’ll expect you to similarly respond to customer complaints, which will make them comfortable.
It’s important to create responses that are personalized, informative, and that sound authentic. Canned responses like ‘We appreciate your feedback’ alone will make your audience feel like you’re not really listening. Try to speak to your readers in a natural tone of voice and have a conversation instead.
It’s small touches like these that create a good image of your business.
Keep your emails out of the spam folder
One powerful way to make sure that your content builds trust is to make it ‘spam-proof’. Today, email service providers take spam protection seriously. Steps like making sure that your email copy doesn’t have any spam trigger words will ensure that your content doesn’t land in the spam folder.
It is also vital that you send email content only to people who have explicitly agreed to receive content. Sending newsletters with helpful content to your email list helps you build a relationship with your audience. So, it’s important to ensure that your email arrives in their inbox.
Make sure that you configure your email settings correctly and authenticate your email so that it lands in your user’s inbox. This step can be difficult to do and it’s a good idea to use a plugin like WP Mail SMTP to help you. You can also get a white glove set up done for you in case you need additional help.
Leverage user-generated content
Your audience expects marketing messages to portray your company in the best light. However, if customers and other audience members engage with your business and leave positive feedback, then your leads are more likely to trust you.
User-generated content consists of posts, reviews, testimonials, and other types of content created by your audience or customers. Content on forums, pictures on social media, discussions, ratings and similar material can be leveraged on your website or social media.
Ask your customers for testimonials and add them to your website with the customer’s headshot, company name, and position.
Use a social media feed tool to integrate social feeds into your website so that you can share posts created by the public in a feed on your site pages.
Highlight the number of users your product has or feature positive reviews left by happy customers on your landing page.
Steps like these add social proof to your site, creating compelling arguments in favor of your business. Visitors to your site and people researching your brand will trust you sooner and buy from your business.
Create FAQ pages
An FAQ page makes it convenient for users to find critical information. It also shows foresight on your part. As you carry out your usual business activities, take note of challenges that your users face or common questions people ask about your solutions.
Address these issues with an FAQ page so that users can quickly get the answer they’re looking for and make the decision to buy from you.
This type of content subtly conveys a large amount of information about how prepared and aware your business is. The effort and research you do to create content that helps your users by providing just the information they need will speak volumes about your reliability.
Back to you
To build trust, you not only have to explicitly promise your users that you’re reliable, you also have to back your claims by carrying out ongoing content creation activities.
We’ve covered several ways that you can build trust through content. You are certain to come up with more ideas of your own that will lead to a stronger brand image. So, focus on your content creation and management to win over your audience.
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Syed Balkhi is an award-winning entrepreneur and online marketing expert. He is the co-founder of OptinMonster, WPBeginner, MonsterInsights, and WPForms.