Why marketers should try building trust among customers to experience success?

Trust takes years to build, a second to break and forever to repair, aptly underlines the value associated with trust. As humans trust is intuitive to us. Soon as we grow up to come to our senses we build bonds of trusts first with family and then with friends. The same is true when it comes to businesses or brands. There are various factors that go into building trust, it can be interpersonal skills, how we conduct ourselves, it could be for the simple reason that you stand for someone in need, could be because you are looked up at as a guiding force, you religiously follow and adhere to requests etc. Gaining trust is not as easy as it was in the past. There is a lot happening in and around the world that has instilled fear in the minds of people that holds them back from trusting an individual or for that matter a business. Edelman’s annual trust barometer reveals confidence in CEOs, industry and government officials has declined sharply to its lowest level since 2008.

The fiercely competitive field of business requires trust more than ever to set it apart from competition. Johnson & Johnson producer of baby consumables is trusted worldwide by millions of mothers who choose their products over everyone else. A staggering 90 percent believe on brand recommendations from friends who they trust, while 75 percent do not believe advertisements to be true to what they state. There is a lot marketers need to do as trust building exercises to attract and retain customers.

The 24/7 connectivity ensures that we are consuming a lot of content. Marketers are taking advantage of the trend to create customer friendly user centric content. As per the Content Marketing Institute 86 percent of businesses use content marketing; of those, 70% are creating more content than they did a year ago. In an ebook published by the Direct Marketing News, Kevin Green, Executive Director of Marketing, Digital Strategy at Dell says, Clearly, trust is a fragile bond with multiple layers. We don’t blindly trust anyone or anything. Just as we are curious, we are also skeptical, which creates varying degrees of trust in the information we consume. Maintaining trust can be one of the most difficult things to achieve and one of the easiest things to lose. To avoid losing this trust, marketers must think differently about the content they create, as well as about the processes and infrastructures that they need to maintain that trust.

Green underlines a three point checklist of questions marketers need to ask when creating content with the intention of garnering trust.

• When the audience consumes the content do they see themselves or they visualise the brand?
• Does the story being portrayed interest the consumer to be part of it?
• What distinctive advantage does my content provide the consumer which is not available elsewhere?

Content does not have to always aim at conversions, a customer feeling good about a business is bound to interact with the business at some point. Businesses should consider to encourage the feel good factor, that makes the users feel empathetic. GE is an apt example that did exactly that by making a video showcasing how their technology was trying to cut emissions from passenger jet engines and helping reduce the carbon footprint of passenger jet engines on world environment.

The one to one connect available in this digital age gives marketers direct access to their customers. They should look to not abuse that connect by misdirected marketing messages. Instead they should try personalising their offerings for the customer to feel at home. Personalisation will lead to the customer believing in the business for the simple fact that products and offers are being made available as per their taste and liking. In the long run personalisation is what turns into trust which is a vital factor for loyalty. A report indicates 70 percent companies acknowledging that retaining customers is less expensive than acquiring new ones. Trust and loyalty walk hand in hand and so building trust will be most important if businesses wish to create a loyal base of customers.

Building trust can be quite a task for marketers, but is not impossible. The availability of customer centric identity management system ensures that you are on the same page as your customer as it provides you with valuable first party data about the customer. Enabling CIM solution on and across your web properties ensures that your customers have a seamless experience accessing your web property or properties. You can garner their trust by making a mention on the precautions put in place to store customer data simultaneously adding that their privacy is your businesses prime concern. The strict security arrangement provided by the third party vendor will ensure that valuable customer data is stored safely up in the clouds, besides helping you gauge that data through customer insights to help you understand your customer better.