We live in a digital era, where people have access to more information than ever before. For various reasons, this has also turned into an era of intense distrust. If you want your brand to be successful, you need to swim upstream in this era and generate stronger brand awareness and trust in spite of the potential pitfalls that exist.
How do you do it?
The Value of Trust
Building trust isn’t easy in this digital age, and neither is measuring it. But higher levels of trust from your audience, your customers, your partners, and even your peers can benefit your business in a multitude of ways. More trusting customers are more loyal customers. Prospects who trust your brand because they’re familiar with it are more likely to become your customers in the future. And the better your reputation becomes in the industry, the more natural opportunities you’ll have to promote the visibility of your brand.
This is a recursive process; the more trust you generate, the more customers you’ll earn, and the more customers you have singing your praises, the easier it will be to earn trust from other people.
Prerequisites for Building Trust
So, what are the prerequisites for building trust? What do you need to have in place before you start any kind of trust improvement strategy?
- Brand identity and visibility. You need to have a set of brand identity standards in place – and people need to be aware of those brand values. These are descriptions of what your brand is and what your brand represents, which can serve as anchors for all your future marketing, advertising and communication strategies. Without these consistent elements, your brand identity may feel disjointed, or customers might not understand what your brand is “about.”
- Transparency and honesty. Your brand also needs to be honest and transparent. If your company attempts to cover up a potential scandal and then lies about it later, your customers may never fully trust you again. Conversely, if you’re always upfront and honest, even during bad PR moments, your customers will naturally trust you more.
- Quality and integrity. Your company should also prioritize quality and integrity in its work. If your products consistently work well, and if you’re willing to stand by them, customers will have much more trust in your brand. Excellent customer service, attention to detail, and extended warranties can all help you here.
- Absolute consistency. No matter what, your brand needs to be consistent. When people see messaging from your brand, they need to recognize it as uniquely yours. And whatever values you choose for your business, you need to stand by them when it matters.
Key Tactics for Improving Trust
With those prerequisites in place, you can employ the following tactics to improve trust in your audience:
- Communicate openly and constantly. Visibility and consistency are huge for building brand trust, so communicate openly and as constantly as you can. That means regularly sending email messages, posting on social media every day, and messaging customers any time you have something important to reveal, whether communicating about problems like service outages or positive news like new product announcements.
- Address bad press with integrity. People generally don’t lose trust in a brand just because the brand made a mistake or failed to honor a specific value. It’s more common for people to lose trust after witnessing how a brand handles one of these critical failures. For example, if the brand issues an underwhelming or insincere apology – or if it doesn’t issue an apology at all – people will rightfully lose some trust in that organization. Accordingly, you should always address bad press with integrity. Acknowledge what you know, own up to your mistakes, and get ahead of the news if possible.
- Under-promise and over-deliver. Generally, you should under-promise and over-deliver. Failing to follow through on a commitment or breaking a promise are great ways to lose customer trust. But if you consistently set conservative expectations and exceed those expectations, you’ll earn a much better reputation.
- Prove your commitment to your brand values. Don’t just parrot your core values over and over; show that you’re truly committed to them. For example, if you state that you want your organization to be environmentally sustainable, tell people about your new sustainability initiatives and highlight how much pollution you eliminated last year.
- Do good things (and show them off). Finally, do good things and promote them. For example, you can encourage team members to volunteer for good causes, take photos of those initiatives in progress, and advertise them in press releases and on social media.
Measuring Results
Measuring brand trust can be difficult, since it's a somewhat subjective variable. However, there are some tools that can help you estimate brand trust, from objective metrics like net promoter score (NPS) to qualitative surveys that can help you get into the minds of your customers. It’s a good idea to use a mix of tools to measure brand trust at regular intervals throughout your strategic execution so you can evaluate whether your tactics are working.
It takes a long time to build customer trust, but once you have it, assuming your integrity remains consistent, it can be a sustainable competitive advantage. In today's inherently distrustful digital era, trust is more valuable to business owners than ever.