How to Use Content to Boost Trust for Your Brand Online

One of the key goals of online marketing is to build trust for your brand.

Anyone can post a website, a blog, and social media profiles online. But actually building trust through these platforms can be challenging.

Fortunately, you can solve this challenge through the intelligent use of content.

How can you use content to boost your brand’s trust? Let’s take a closer look at some of the best strategies.

Let People See Your Brand in the Real World

The online world is filled with scams. When somebody visits your website online, and all they see are stock images and boring logos, it’s hard for them to connect to your brand. They don’t have a physical or tangible connection. They might think you’re just another online company with little substance.

With that in mind, one of the best ways to build trust with your brand is to highlight your company in the real world. Some of the ways to do this through content include:

-Taking professional photos of your employees

-Highlighting recent company events

-Taking pictures of your company’s logo at local events you sponsored

-Create t-shirts, cups, posters, hats, or any other products and then get your employees to post pictures of these products on social media (ideally while wearing or using them)

If you’re a small or medium-sized business, then you want to build trust by putting a human face behind your name and brand. The above strategies let you do that both online and offline.

Stop Focusing on Engagement (As Much)

If you look at any list of “social media marketing tips and tricks”, you’ll find the word “engagement” sprinkled liberally throughout the page. Engagement refers to the hits, clicks, retweets, likes, shares, and other measurable metrics you get through social media marketing.

If you want to build trust online, then engagement should not be your number one strategy.

As an example, let’s say your social media marketing goal is to publish one blog post per week, with at least 1,000 people reading that blog every week, generating a 1% conversion rate.

If that’s your goal, then you’re going to have trouble using content to build trust for your brand. Engagement simply means that your content was noticed in some way. You might have published something controversial online. Maybe something went viral. Or maybe you were just quoted in a news article.

This type of engagement is important, but it doesn’t necessarily build trust for your brand.

Instead of locking yourself into X number of blog posts generating X number of hits per month, focus on creating timely, helpful, informative pieces that aren’t confined to a specific schedule. Otherwise, you’re going to miss out on timely news stories or force yourself to publish blog posts that aren’t interesting.

Highlight your Company’s Background and Story

Does your company have a family history dating back to a log cabin in Wisconsin in the 1800s? Probably not. However, you can still create a story that builds trust for your brand online.

There are so many bland “About Us” pages on the internet. Most of these pages explain little about the company or its people.

Why not do things differently? On your “About Us” page, explain how your company came about, who is involved with the company, and why you’re passionate about your industry. If you have a family connection or some type of personal reason why you entered the industry, share that with your audience.

Highlight Experts within your Company

Building trust online is about highlighting your best people. One of the best ways to do that is by leveraging your company’s best experts to create content unique to themselves.

Moz.com recently highlighted a situation where a team member is passionate about radio, so you ask her to do a weekly podcast and then share that podcast on iTunes, SoundCloud, and anywhere else.

Or, consider starting a Twitter handle where one of your company’s experts can answer industry-specific questions for 30 minutes a day.

Or maybe an employee is a charismatic person who would do well with video blogging – not written content like blogs. Consider doing a weekly video series.

Be Like Blendtec

Blendtec is one of the best examples of using content to boost your trust online. Typically, a blender company isn’t associated with exciting online content, personal employee stories, or YouTube videos with millions of views.

But despite these odds, Blendtec has one of the most successful and trustworthy online marketing personas in the industry. Their popular YouTube Blendtec channel has over 278 million videos and 900,000 subscribers. On that channel, the company’s eccentric CEO uses the company’s blenders to chop up everything from Pokemon to selfie sticks.

These videos do two things:

-They show you that Blendtec blenders are really good at blending difficult things without breaking down

-They give you a personal look at a core member of the company and his personality

If you want to build trust online, be more like Blendtec.

Not sure how to start building your online presence? Renew Marketing offers competitively-priced blog management and social media marketing packages customized to your unique needs. We can build trust – and leads – for your business online by implementing simple strategies that work.