Building Trust to Build your Brand and Business

Building trust with your customers is a crucial ingredient for a successful business and will be the thing that provides a long life cycle to your advertising.

A brand promotion company will help you to introduce your brand to the world through print, web and other advertising methods.  But it’s the word-of-mouth that follows that campaign that will provide longevity to your advertising.

What is word-of-mouth?

Word-of-mouth advertising has been around as long as we’ve been able to speak with one another, and it still remains the most effective.

When you refer any product or services to a friend, colleague or member of your family you’re employing word-of-mouth advertising for the product owner.

You are actually becoming part of their marketing team.

The realization is almost enough to make me want to go and ask a number of large organizations for a share in the profits.

So wouldn’t you want to leverage this effective marketing tool for your own business.

Building a trusting relationship with your customers

Most products are not able to speak for themselves. But they do so through marketing campaigns and advertising.

Using word-of-mouth, existing customers can be influence friends, family and colleagues to use your product. This is because they are already trusted to provide truthful information about a product they’ve used.

At the beginning your company or product will not have that same influence through your advertising. So we should view each statement we make in our advertising as a promise to potential clients.

Much like a relationship with someone you’ve just met, the product needs to build trust into its relationship with its customers.

By delivering on the promise made through our advertising we can cement trust in the statements our company makes.

If a product doesn’t deliver on what it promises, customers often feel that the company has lied to them in some way. Being caught out in a lie is one of the quickest ways to end any relationship. The relationship with a new customer is no different.

So how do I build trust in my brand?

So when starting a advertising campaign with the goal of building this trust the key is to be sure that your product will deliver on your promises.

If you say your product is the fastest, then it must be.

If you say your products are the best quality, then be sure that they are.

You want to be careful using definitive terms like, fastest and best unless you know them to be true. Statements such as this also have a short life span. Once the next big thing comes along, your product may no longer be the fastest or best quality and you will need to shift your product statement so as not to mislead new customers.

The same goes for terms that depend on a customer’s point of view. For instance, if you were to say your product was the tastiest. You may run into trouble because one customer’s preference on taste may well not be compatible with the next customer.

Let’s use a Chicken Shop as an example.

Instead of saying something like ‘We have the tastiest chicken” which is a statement that could be challenged, you may want to say “You just have to try our delicious chicken”.

This statement invites them to make up their own mind, which in turn give them ownership of whatever decision they make after trying – ‘Our Chicken’.

The ownership over this experience will be the thing that prompts a customer to share it with others. Much like the reason that people tell you about their day.

Keeping that brand trust in the future

The key to continuing to build a customer base from trust, is to deliver the expected level of product and service that we’ve promised through our advertisements.

The word ‘expected’ almost sounds poor when referring to service. But this is the minimum level that must be maintained in order to keep that relationship of trust with your customers. It will give us a base line for quality control.

Provide a higher quality if possible, but as long as the customer receives what they are expecting when they make a purchase, then you have kept the trust in your promise and will likely continue to keep that customer in the future.

This article was written by Russell Pearson.
Director of Crimson Fox Creative Studios – Graphic Design and Promotion