As a B2B company, much of your success depends on your ability to generate and facilitate trust with your clients. The more people trust you, the more likely they are to do business with you and continue doing business with you in the future. The question is, how do you increase this trust? And how can you protect this trust from decaying or warping?
The Foundation: Your B2B Brand
Your B2B brand is the foundation of your trust-building campaign. Your brand is an identity and a set of standards that you’re going to use in every aspect of your trust building campaign, including direct customer conversation, marketing and advertising, and even your operations, to an extent. The stronger the core of your brand is, the stronger your audience trust is going to grow.
Pay close attention to how you develop the following:
- Identity. What is your brand identity? What is it that makes your brand distinguished from other brands in this industry? How do people recognize you and what is the voice that resonates behind your brand messaging?
- Values. What are the core values of your brand? What do you stand for and how are you distinguished in this field?
- Mission/vision. What are your mission and vision? What are you trying to accomplish? What do you see in the future and what are you doing to get there?
- Consistency. It’s also important to ensure that all your brand standards are understood and followed consistently across all your departments. Without consistency, there can be no real trust. The customer may have an amazing experience with your brand, and come to trust your brand, but if the next experience they have is completely jarring, the trust will be lost.
If you have a solid, cohesive brand with values that align with the values of your audience, you’ll start generating trust immediately. The specific actions you take to build trust further are going to be even more powerful as a result.
Key Strategies for Increasing Trust
These are some of the most important strategies for building trust with your audience:
- Commit to quality. First and foremost, you need to commit to quality. Your business produces products or offers services, and those products and services need to be effective and reliable if you want people to trust you. Without innate quality, it’s going to be hard for people to trust your brand.
- Provide value. Next, try to provide value to your audience in ways that don’t necessarily require them to purchase from you. For example, you can make informative posts on social media, you can start an email newsletter, and you can even offer free pieces of premium content, like long form videos or eBooks. People will trust you much more if you’re willing to do them the favor of providing free value to them.
- Be honest and transparent. Honesty and transparency naturally lead to more trusting relationships in business – and for somewhat obvious reasons. If a B2B prospect talks to three other businesses like yours, and yours is the only one that seems honest, transparent, and consistent, you’re going to win the battle of trust.
- Connect with your target demographics. It’s also important to genuinely connect with your specific target demographics. That means connecting with people on their terms, on the platforms they appreciate, with messaging that genuinely resonates with them. Every demographic is a bit different, so it’s important to do your market research and give people what they’re already looking for.
- Demonstrate your values. It’s great that you have values for your brand in place, and that those values are consistent. But you’ll have to show them off, explicitly, if you want to remind people what those values are. For example, if your brand is all about giving back to the community, make sure you’re actively engaging in regular volunteer efforts – and that you’re promoting your attendance there.
- Serve as a thought leader. People have much greater trust in thought leaders than they do in people who merely regurgitate existing opinions in a given field. This means you have to take bold stances, state your controversial opinions, and do your best to be on the leading edge of this industry’s development.
- Give back. Today’s buyers want to work with ethical brands – so do as much good as you can. Any donation or volunteer effort is likely to be well received by your audience.
The Benefits of Trust
Building trust is no simple exercise, but the benefits are incredible. When your customers have more trust in your brand, you’ll generate more sales, you’ll earn more loyalty, and your business will be better insulated against potential bad news in the future.
Keep pushing to increase trust to the extent you can if you want to see further benefits in this area.
