How to Build Brand Trust in Your Marketing Campaigns

As a brand, building trust among your customers and clients is important not only for the ones you already have for potential new customers as well.

14:16 29 December 2021

Brand trust is defined as the consumers' confidence in the brand’s ability to deliver on the performance of their products and services. There are many ways to build trust through your marketing campaigns, and it all starts at the bottom line: your product. Whatever you’re selling, it should undergo ample research and testing before hitting the market to ensure that you and your brand feel confident about it’s effectiveness before putting it in the hands of consumers. From there, you can use real life testimonials to promote your brand's reliability, transparency, honesty and pride in what you do and the customers you serve. Let’s hear what some top level business leaders have to say on building trust through marketing campaigns in todays’ consumer climate.

 

Test Your Products

It should go without saying to test your products, but too often are products released to the market without enough testing! Make sure that you and your team trust your brand's output before marketing it to a wider audience. “Brand trust starts with making sure your services and products are high quality. When preparing your service or product for launching, be sure that it undergoes intense testing and scrutiny to make sure it meets yours and more importantly your customers standards,” said Akhilesh Srivastava, Founder & CEO Fenix Commerce.

 

This can be even easier to do if you have a client base already. Use your team and any current customers to help you meet the highest standards you can. “If you are testing new products and you have a customer base already, a smart way to test new products is by offering free samples to see how they react to your new offerings. This can help you get valuable feedback early from current customers and help you decide if the product will do well or not,” said Alex Tew, CEO of Calm.

 

Customer Testimonials

One of the best ways to use marketing campaigns for building brand trust is to use customer testimonial videos! These can take many forms, but no matter what you use it will help new customers see themselves using your products. “Use client testimonials to your advantage. This goes a long way for customers seeking your service or products, and allows them to build trust not just with your brand but with the customers who shop with you. If others have found your service beneficial, it will increase their confidence to buy with you,” said Matt Miller, Founder & CEO of Embroker.

 

Oftentimes we see testimonials in the form of an interview or explanatory style video. These are great and effective, but you can be more creative with your presentation of the customer's experience to draw greater attention to your brand. “Testimonials can take many forms and don’t necessarily have to take the form of an interview as they most often do. Your testimonial could feature imagery of a customer using your product with a subtle and simple voice over of them talking about the benefits of your product,” said CEO of Curology David Lortscher.

 

Industry Content

Today, many customers are searching for brands that offer an alternative to toxic trends in corporate industries. This is something that’s important to address in marketing campaigns designed to build trust, and it forces brands to think less about presenting company specific information and addressing issues within their particular industry. This builds a great deal of trust with a customer base that is becoming increasingly suspicious of companies and brands. “When planning your campaigns, try to steer away from content that is 'company centric.' Instead, focus on trends and answers to questions that consumers may have about your industry. Consumers are looking for useful info and products to help them, not necessarily learn about a company,” said Schuyler Hoversten, Co-Founder and President of Swoopt.

 

Be Honest and Transparent

Whenever creating an advertisement or marketing campaign, it’s important to lean on transparency, honesty and authenticity. “Transparency and authenticity are big factors for any brands' marketing campaign. You must find a way to be honest about your products while highlighting its benefits. Put yourself in their shoes and ask yourself what information you would want to hear about your products,” said Ari Sherman, Co-Founder of evo hemp.

 

This means that when mistakes are made, they need to be addressed and taken accountability for. Ann McFerran, CEO of Glamnetic said “Being honest means admitting when you and your company have made a mistake or a false claim. The fastest way to move forward is to admit what has happened, and take steps to actually change and amend the issue.”

 

Make Your Website Clean and Consistent

One of the biggest annoyances for customers is an inconsistent shopping experience on your website. Your webpage should be clean, easy to navigate and relatively predictable to the customer to make sure they can shop with you quickly and easily. “Make sure that when customers visit your site, you keep their experience consistent. If you are constantly changing your policies or how you deal with customers, it will drive your consumer base away rather than drawing them in. Consumers want reliability and simplicity with their brands,” said Max Tuchman, CEO and Co-founder of Caribu. Your best selling products should be at the forefront of your page. Make it easy for customers to shop with you!

 

Similar to customer testimonials, employee testimonials are a great thing to feature on your ‘About Us’ section of your website. This will make customers feel homey and trusting of your brand. “Make your website feel more homey by featuring employee spotlights and letting your team shine. Consumers will feel more comfortable buying from a brand that values its employees' experience at their company,” said Dino Ha, CEO of Kaja Beauty.

 

Build Relationships and Engage Your Audience

Ultimately, building trust is a separate goal than that of making a profit. Building relationships and trust with your customers takes time, patience and a passion for working with people and their needs. “Keep the focus on customer relationships over profits and finance. Retaining valuable clients will ultimately create a stronger brand trust. The more regulars you have, the more your reputation will spread as a reliable and customer friendly business,” James Shalhoub, Co-founder of Finn. The more strong relationships you have with your customers, the more their word will mean when recommending your service, business or product to another customer in the future.

 

One of the ways you can specifically build relationships with your client base is by engaging with their replies and comments to your posts and campaign efforts. There will, of course, be positive and negative comments and reviews. But be sure to take them with stride, and resolve negative feedback whenever possible to show that you do value the feedback from your audience. “Whenever possible, make sure you are engaging with your audience. Your content posts will likely be filled with a variety of comments, both positive and negative, and it's easy to ignore the negative ones while responding to praise. This does the opposite of creating trust, however, and consumers will see that you're committed to dealing with all feedback if you make a point to respond to your negative feedback as well,” said Rob Bartlett, CEO WTFast. It’s true that the more you surround yourself with ‘yes’ people, the less well rounded and thought out your customer service and products will be. Listen to your customers, they are the ones using your products and you have the most to gain from taking their opinions seriously!

 

As brands become more direct-to consumer based, customer feedback is becoming more important than ever to expand on your marketing techniques. “More than ever, it is imperative that you pay close attention to the wants and needs of your target audience. By adding requested features and showcasing products that fit their demographic, you can build trust with your customers, and they will automatically feel as if their feedback actually matters. As an added bonus, this will do wonders for your customer retention AND brand recognition,” said Marc Atiyeh, CEO of Pawp.

 

When building your marketing campaigns, think about promoting your products in ways that highlight your unique offerings to the industry your business is in, and how your brand values its relationships with its customers, employees and collaborators. For new customers, it almost always comes down to whether or not someone else has used your product before. Your brand content should contain a healthy balance of company specific testimonials in addition to addressing larger industry trends that your brand might be trying to change, or offer something different. When new customers see that other people have benefited from your products, it starts to create confidence in your brand. From there, you can build on that confidence by offering a simple, easy and positive shopping experience with ample customer service. Before brands can build trust through their marketing efforts, however, they will need to make sure their products and services are tested thoroughly and meet the expectations that customers will have of their services. Of course, there will always be customers who prefer another product over yours, but make sure you have looked at every angle and detail possible before coming up with your marketing plan.