Five Ways to Build Trust With Your Audience via Content Marketing

You, as a business owner, need to show that you represent the honest business that stands by its principles and values. But how to earn and keep your customers' trust? In today's online world, the main weapon is your content. Don't just tell; show your clients that they can trust you – follow these 5 core principles of creating trustworthy, quality content that earns engagement, trust, and loyalty for your brand.

The worst thing for you as a content creator is to write a misleading headline, and making it over-exaggerated on top of it is even worse. No matter how many power words you use and how promising your headline sounds, if your content is outdated and less informative than the title implied or not about this topic at all, you are doing something wrong. So, always create an intriguing headline which cloaks an even better piece of informative and updated content within it and that the reader should be compelled to click on. So don't mislead your followers in any way as it is hard to grab their attention, but it's going to be even harder to convince them to trust you again.

For instance, Montage does a fine job when it comes to flaunting its products and services in an aesthetic way. A simple yet emotional headline "Effortless photo books, made with love" says it all about the goods and services which Montage associates itself with and the extent to which the brand goes to provide an awesome experience to its customers.

Nowadays, big brands have realized the power of storytelling so as to boost up their brand presence and identity. While preparing such a story about your brand's personal journey to success, you need to ask yourself some questions like: What would be in a story? How would the story develop authenticity? How would such a story create that trust feeling that customers seek?

When it comes to explicating this wonderful concept with an exemplification, what can be a better option than the personal journey of one of the legendary brands, Apple. TIME magazine has created an awesome personal journey 'Apple Evolution' which highlights the brand's ups and downs in its path to success.

A great way to produce engaging content that earns trust for your brand is to interview someone influential and well known in your industry. Moreover, sharing the opinion of other already-established experts can do wonders for your brand. After all, you're not the only trusted source, and both you and your audience will learn something valuable in the process.

Find the personality that your niche adores and come up with intriguing, thought provoking questions related both to your company and the whole industry. To start with, here are some typical questions you can use:

YouMoz lists out the step-by-step guide for interviewing the experts in the industry. Some of the prominent steps are listed below:

Being genuinely interested in your audience is something we can learn from popular bloggers. Did you notice that they always ask people to share their opinion, ask questions, and invite them to be a part of the dialogue? It's a winning strategy every company can use no matter what you are selling/what services you are offering. Take extra steps to learn about and understand your audience, express interest in their needs, care and concern, and take the time to learn what motivates them. Once you know what's important to them and why they are following you, it's going to be incredibly easy to create killer content they are going to love.

For instance, let us understand this concept with an example. Southwest Airlines considers its responsibility to engage with its customers via Twitter directly, be it a reply for any query or simply forwarding a gratitude message for using the services. The screenshot shows a thorough response put up by Southwest Airlines to the query asked by a concerned flyer. This particular effort demonstrates the level of concern and interest shown by a brand to its audience.

The last but not the least way to engage your readers and earn their trust is to share only selected content that aligns with your brand's mission and values. Create relevant content and be consistent – one long blog post and a few months of silence is nothing compared to smaller regular reviews released twice a week.

Benefits that come with a well-developed content marketing plan are endless, but content is nothing without consistency. According to the 2016 B2B Content Marketing Report, producing consistent content is one of the biggest challenges for businesses. 57% of the respondents named consistency as their biggest challenge.

This data deduces a clear picture that content can't be only engaging; it has to be consistent – and the companies that manage to do both can see some of the greatest benefits. Also, diversifying your content is a must in order to positively engage your posts with your subscribers. Including varying things such as images, graphics, infographics, quotes, videos, e-books, etc. would do the trick.

Hubspot is a perfect example of a blog that uses content diversification. It specifically mentions the type of content the post will contain in the heading like this:

As Google wrote in their blog, search results, just like warm cookies or refreshing fruits, are best when they're fresh. For years, Google was exploring various ways to use "freshness" as a ranking signal. Beginning with their first patent called Information retrieval based on historical data released in 2003 and including its latest update from October 2011, Google is always experimenting with new techniques to rank search results. Thus, fresh content is important not only for your audience but also to Google, who will reward you with both higher rankings and increased website traffic. Creating fresh and relevant content for better Google search rankings is a win-win situation for your brand – you're not only creating quality content for your existent audience but also attract new followers who will find your blog posts via organic search.

Google always craves new, high-quality content and uses multiple techniques to find the right place for your content in its search results. Initially, your content can be given a "freshness" score based on its release date or the day when Google first becomes aware of the document. With time, some older documents may become less favorable than newer ones, but it depends on the type of content. Other factors that influence the freshness score are: the amount of changes, how often the website adds new pages, links from other sites, etc. From measuring all of your documents for freshness to scoring each page to determine "how fresh" it is, Google cares about the quality of featured content and put only the best pages on top.