Building brand trust is crucial for the success of your B2B business. Every investment you make towards building your brand trust can bring exponential results, from designing a professional and credible website to being transparent, providing value through thought leadership, leveraging social proof, and marketing.
According to statistics, most business decision-makers (90%) begin their purchasing process by gathering brand information from peers and industry experts. Generally, building a strong brand not only earns customer trust and loyalty but also attracts the attention of industry experts and influencers, increasing exposure and solidifying your brand authority.
Even if you have your people actively marketing your products/services, trust plays a crucial role in conversions. According to studies, most people (88%) buy from salespeople they trust.
In this post, we look at ways to build trust online for your B2B business, increase your brand appeal and customer loyalty and ultimately boost your sales and bottom line.
What Is Brand Trust?
Brand trust is the measure of confidence customers have in your business. It describes the relationship (experience) customers have with your brand compared to similar products/services. Factors contributing to brand trust mainly include product quality, customer satisfaction, emotional connection, etc.
According to Forbes, brand trust is the new marketing currency. But it relies on the principle of fairness (in pricing, towards employees, customers, the environment, etc.) to thrive.
Why Is Brand Trust Important?
Investing in brand trust is immensely beneficial. Generally, it creates a ripple effect across every aspect of the business. Besides boosting your brand appeal and winning more business, it grows your online presence, leading to increased awareness, and the cycle continues.
Here are some of the reasons brand trust matters:
- Creates loyalty – If customers trust your brand, they’re more likely to become loyal. They also tend to recommend the brand to their friends and relatives, creating a chain of loyal customers.
- Enhances marketing efficiency – A trustworthy brand wins more customers easily than one that is not, resulting in a better ROI. For instance, if a business creates content that gets a high volume of shares, thanks to a loyal audience, it can potentially have a higher content creation ROI than one with content that doesn’t get shared.
- Generates new leads – Trusted B2B businesses earn more new leads, whether through recommendations or paid advertising campaigns.
- Boosts sales – Customers are more likely to buy from brands they trust. In addition, you can expect a good flow of new purchases from referred customers.
- Increases brand advocacy – A trusted brand attracts more advocates. A trusted brand is an easy sell from industry experts to influencers and regular customers.
How to Improve Your Brand Trust Online
Given the vast benefits of having a reputable brand, it’s no wonder B2B marketers go out of their way to increase brand influence. Due to the lengthy buying process in B2B businesses, having a trusted brand helps overcome the bottlenecks and wins business more easily.
With that in mind, let’s look at ways to improve your brand trust online.
Be Transparent
It all begins with answering the question – is your business trustworthy?
One practice that has earned traditional sales and marketing a not-so-good reputation is telling customers half-truths about the products/services they’re interested in. However, this can be destructive for any business, especially in the face of the present-day’s enlightened customer.
With 90% of business decision-makers relying on the opinions of their peers and industry experts to inform their buying decisions, you cannot afford to give false information. Generally, if you fail to be honest and transparent with your customers, the word is bound to get out, and negative reviews can be pretty damaging.
In the same way, if you’re candid about your products and services and what they can do for the customers, you position yourself as a trustworthy brand that can be relied on. Actually, a survey once found that 66% of customers consider transparency an attractive quality in a brand.
Share Your Company Values
Your company values can influence buying decisions. According to statistics, most customers buy from brands with shared values. By sharing your values, you can attract and win the trust of like-minded businesses.
Provide Value Through Thought Leadership
Another effective trust-building strategy is by providing value to your audience. You can position yourself as a thought leader and provide value, including publishing high-quality and original blog posts with relevant topics, sharing informational content with your followers on social media, hosting webinars, creating podcasts, and speaking at industry conferences and events.
As research shows, 91% of B2B marketers use content marketing, a strategy that’s pretty effective as other studies have shown that 68% of people love reading about brands that interest them. In the same way, 70% of consumers feel closer to a brand due to content marketing, which further emphasis its importance.
Leverage Social Proof
Customers are greatly influenced by the opinions and experiences of others who have used your products/services. By providing social proof, you can influence the decision of potential customers and boost your sales. For instance, you could publish testimonials on your websites, add customer reviews on product listings, share user-generated content on social media, embed links to third-party reviews, share customer case studies, etc.
Design Your Website for Credibility
Perhaps one of the starting points in building brand trust is by designing a credible website. From employing a clean and crisp design to providing effortless navigation, using catchy and relevant images, creating quality content, and making the website content shareable, your website should portray you as credible.
Offer Consistent Customer Service
Last but not least, your customer service should be impeccable. In a past survey, more than three-quarters of the respondents cited customer experience as an essential factor in shaping their purchasing decisions. By improving your customer experience consistently, you can win the trust of both your existing and potential customers.
How to Measure Brand Trust
As you build your brand trust, it’s essential to measure it continuously. This helps you to discover what needs to be done to improve it. One of the fastest ways to measure brand trust is through surveys.
Creating customized surveys can help you discover your brand perception. For instance, you could ask the respondents their views on their customer experience or make a product comparison with a competing brand(s) to assess their loyalty.
Generally, you could use surveys to get the opinion of your respondents on just about any aspect of the brand. The answers can be insightful, from getting their overall view on the brand to assessing their likelihood of purchasing from you or recommending your brand.
Other easy ways of measuring brand trust include;
- Number of backlinks – Getting backlinks is a sign of brand appreciation by other people. It shows that people trust your brand enough to recommend it to their connections. By checking the pages receiving the most backlinks, you can draw insight into what people like and leverage those areas.
- Social media engagement – Your social media engagement can provide insights into brand trust. For example, analyzing followers’ comments, reviews, likes, and reactions can help you understand how they feel about your brand and leverage or improve as needed.
- Organic traffic and website dwell time – If your website receives decent organic traffic, it’s a good sign that your SEO efforts are effective. However, you may need to analyze further the dwell time to gain insight into your brand trust. If the visitors spend more time interacting with your site, it shows you’re providing value and is a good measure of trust.
- Social shares – Another excellent measure of trust is the number of shares on your posts. More shares show your audience loves your content. To optimize the efforts, you can analyze the posts that garner the most shares to understand what makes them popular and duplicate the efforts.
Start Building Trust Now
Building trust for your B2B business is crucial to your success, as statistics have shown most customers buy from brands they trust. Brand trust can benefit your business by creating loyalty, enhancing marketing efficiency, generating new leads, boosting sales, and increasing brand advocacy.
You can improve your brand trust by being transparent, sharing your company values, providing value through thought leadership, leveraging social proof, offering consistent customer service, and designing your website for credibility. At the same time, you need to measure the brand trust to discover ways of improving it. You can achieve this by creating surveys to get the customers’ opinions directly or by analyzing metrics like the number of backlinks, organic traffic, social shares, and engagement.
Finally, remember, you can count on us to help you build trust for your B2B business. Whether you want to enhance your SEO, launch paid advertising campaigns, or revamp your website; we got your back. Get in touch and let us help.
