Starting a new business involves more than just setting up a pretty website and uploading a few posts on your social media accounts. With any company, your brand becomes how you communicate about your operation to the world.
From messaging and colors to where your products are manufactured, every piece of the bigger puzzle matters when you’re seeking to build trust in order to attract and sustain customers. Here are four tips to help your small business earn trust through quality branding.
Identify What You Stand For
When you create a brand identity, you are designing a persona. You have a voice that requires specific types of messaging.
You select colors and typography that make a statement to your audience about what kind of emotion you seek to ignite in others. But deep down, at the core of your brand identity, is what your business stands for.
Figure out what that mission is, and really home in on it. The more you declare your mission and what your business stands for, openly and confidently, the more trust you’ll build with future customers because they’ll know what to expect from you.
People love when you consistently meet their expectations, so why not set the precedent for them?
Branding In Manufacturing
In order for companies to create a trustworthy and reliable brand, they have to begin from the inside and move out. This includes how and where their products are manufactured.
According to GenSteel, a leading firm in steel construction, “A brand is only as reliable as the facility in which their product is manufactured.”
When GenSteel began work on the Wyoming Whiskey distillery, the company had to overcome a few obstacles. But in the end, its team knew they could create a more durable and disaster-resistant structure than their competitors who specialize in lumber.
GenSteel ended up saving the client on labor costs, which in turn allowed Wyoming Whiskey to focus more of its time, effort, and dollars on creating the best quality whiskey west of the Mississippi. Customers could trust their locally made bourbon to be made “the Wyoming Way,” thanks to their manufacturing facility.
Foster Trust Through Free, Quality Content
Content marketing has become one of the most affordable ways to build your audience. But in order to build trust among your prospective customers, you’ll need to create free and high-quality content.
This means sharing information that’s relevant, timely, and pertinent to your audience’s needs. What questions are they currently seeking answers to? What is lacking in their life that you could supply?
By creating videos, blog articles, and social media content that answers these concerns, you’ll promote yourself as a leader in the industry. In turn, this will help to build trust with your growing audience, since you aren’t charging them for content that honestly helps them.
Aside from building trust, the other benefit of free, quality content is that it can boost your search engine optimization (SEO) capability. This is what empowers your operation to turn up readily during prospective customers’ online searches.
According to Small Business Bonfire, 82% of consumers are more inclined to support a brand after reading quality, customized content.
Social Media Is Your Community
When you find a community you trust, you want to be a part of it for the long term. This is how businesses have always retained their clients. They gave their customers a reason to return; what better way to encourage that than to make people feel a valued part of a community.
Finding the proper social media channels on which to build your online community is crucial for any successful branding strategy, particularly when you’re working to build trust.
Start by learning where your ideal clientele may be spending their time online currently. Look toward building your brand presence on those platforms and nurture the relationships that start to evolve there.
The only way to enlarge trust is by starting and engaging in genuine conversations with interested individuals and influencers online.
Overall, the most important step you can take to build a trustworthy brand for your small business is to make your customers your priority. Focus on their needs, their questions, their concerns, and how you can make them feel valued using your services and/or products.
