The competitive world of marketing has brought about a shift in the way that businesses go after the attention of prospective customers. Companies that want to win business from modern consumers have to do more than just talk about themselves: they must build trust with their audience so that they are recognized as an authority in their field.
Content marketing is one of the best tools available for companies looking to gain trust with their prospects by offering them something of value.
Why Content Marketing Builds Trust
By its very definition, content marketing provides its audience with something concrete and desirable: content. Content marketing is not a fancy logo on a mailer or a witty television commercial: it is the opportunity for an organization to introduce themselves and their products, build a connection with prospective customers, and distinguish themselves from their competition.
Good content marketing eschews questionable tactics that appeal to emotion or use pressure to attract customers. Instead, this type of marketing uses statistics and facts to persuade prospective buyers through logic and evidence, which gives the marketer much more credibility in the eyes of potential customers.
How To Build Trust With Your Content Marketing
Now that you know why content marketing gives your client's business a great chance to build trust with your audience, you should understand the most efficient ways to use content marketing to build this trust. Keep the following points in mind when you are creating and distributing content, to ensure that it helps you gain trust with your client's prospects:
Use ordinary language:
Skip the fancy industry jargon and farfetched claims that products or services will totally change the lives of customers. In a Microsoft Business Hub article, marketing director Winter Prosapio advises companies to use terms that are direct and to the point. She also suggests using humorous language to bring down the shield of suspicion that many prospects have when reading marketing materials, which often prevents them from trusting the marketers that publish these materials.
Let employees do the talking:
Your client's employees are extremely important brand ambassadors that can help build trust with prospects. On Adobe’s Digital Marketing Blog, Cory Edwards reports that between 2009 and 2014, the credibility of the average company employee as a spokesperson for the organization increased from 20% to 52%. How do you leverage employees to build trust in your content marketing? Edwards goes on to advise that companies should encourage their employees to create content that is authentic and educational. Consider letting an employee author a blog post or share an update on your company's social media profile.
Be relevant:
A huge part of relevancy is understanding your target audience and their challenges and interests. When creating any kind of content for marketing, remember to be mindful of the problems that your client's readers might be facing and how your products or services offer them a solution to these problems. Accurately recognizing issues that prospects face is an excellent way to build trust before you even introduce the business and its offerings.
Why Your Content Marketing Must Build Trust
The development of technology like the Internet and smartphones means that people are subjected to more marketing than they ever have been before. In a recent Entrepreneur article, Dan Newman points out that there are 347 new blog posts made every 60 seconds and the average Internet user sees about five thousand ads every day. In a modern world so saturated with marketing messages, it is crucial for your client's company to create engaging content that builds trust by offering readers something of value instead of hollow self-promotion.
