Five Ways to Build Trust With Your Audience via Content Marketing

Trust is essential to any business relationship, whether you're a small business or a Fortune 500 company. It's also a key element of customer loyalty. That's because trust is a basic human need.

When we trust someone, we feel safe and secure. In business, this translates to customers buying from you more often because they know they can count on you to deliver on your promises. If they trust you, they'll be more likely to purchase from you, even when they have other options available. In fact, Salsify found that 46% of consumers say they would pay more to buy from brands they trust.

On the other hand, a lack of trust can destroy your business. If customers see you as a brand they cannot trust, they will avoid making purchases with you. According to Adobe, 71% of consumers will stop buying from a brand if trust is broken.

So, if you want to build a loyal following of customers who will return repeatedly, you need to learn how to create engaging content to earn their trust. 

Content marketing is a way to attract and retain customers by delivering value through content. It's a strategy that helps businesses grow from the inside out by building trust and credibility and attracting and converting customers at scale.

There are five main types of content you can use to build trust with your audience: educational, expert, curated, conversational, and promotional. Each type has its own guidelines and serves a slightly different purpose. Apart from that, your content marketing strategy should also include the types of content that are best for SEO.

The first step to creating compelling content is to know which type you should use to achieve your desired outcomes. So, let's take a closer look at each type of content marketing.

Educational content is the most common form of content. It's designed to educate your target audience on a specific topic related to your brand or industry. Educational content can take many forms, including blog posts, ebooks, videos, and infographics. Its goal is to help you build trust with your potential customers by educating them on topics they may not know otherwise.

One of the most commonly used types of educational content is "how-to" content. It's about giving people actionable instructions to improve their lives or businesses. It could be as simple as making a short blog post on gluten-free brownies or as complex as a long eBook on creating an online business from scratch. The key here is that this type of content must show your reader how to solve their problems step by step.

Expert content is the most effective type of content marketing to build audience trust. It's all about the content writer's credibility and expertise, leading to better conversion rates and brand awareness. Expert content can come in the form of:

• blog posts;
• eBooks;
• reports;
• testimonials and interviews from industry leaders;
• infographics, and many more. 

Expert content helps you establish yourself as an authority in your industry. The goal of expert content is to provide valuable information to your audience so they can learn something new and use this knowledge to make better decisions.

Curated content is any information collected from other sources and repackaged for your readers. The goal is to make it easier for people to find and access information that you believe would be valuable. You can collect data from other websites, archives, or social media.

Curated content includes lists, excerpts, or slideshows of valuable articles and blog posts. It can also include images, videos, or infographics that provide value to your audience.

You can use curated content to:

• Open a conversation with your readers on trending topics.
• Never run out of content to publish on your social media platforms or other marketing channels.
• Reduce the costs of original content creation.
• Connect with your audience over topics that matter to them but aren’t necessarily related to what you sell.

Conversational content is the type of content your audience wants to engage with. The best way to think about conversational content is as a conversation between you and your customer. The key is to keep it natural. Use the same tone, language, and style as if you are talking to them in person.

The goal of conversational content is not to sell, but rather to inform and build trust with your readers. This type of content works because it resonates with your customers and reflects the way they talk to themselves. It encourages readers to interact with your brand and offers the information they want to read.

Conversational content can come from blog posts, videos, podcasts, or live-streaming. You can also use it to answer questions from customers directly or offer advice on common problems faced by your target audience.

Promotional content is a type of content marketing that helps build awareness for your business and its products. It's a great way to promote your business, but it should be done with caution.

While this type of content can be used as a way to sell, it should instead focus on educating customers about the products and services you offer. Promotional content can include:

• Reviews & testimonials: Reviews are a great way to share expertise and build credibility with potential customers. In addition to the standard review format, you can also offer video reviews or customer testimonials.
• Social media posts in the form of photos and videos: Photos and videos help drive sales because they're easy to digest and help your audience visualize what your product looks like and how they will be able to use it once they have it in their hands.
• Newsletters: They help drive sales because they're personalized and relevant, making them feel like a trusted source of information for your customers. A newsletter could include tips on how to use your product or services, upcoming events, discounts, special offers, etc.

Now that you know why it’s essential to build trust with your audience via content marketing and the different types of content you can use, it’s time for the how. If you want to make your audience’s trust, it’s important to find the best ways to create a content plan that boosts engagement and provides value. 

We’ve prepared a detailed overview of 5 effective content marketing strategies you can implement right away to start building trust with your audience. 

The first thing you need to do when either starting a blog or developing it is to create relevant content for your audience. Research what topics they want to learn more about or what problems they may be facing. Then create content around those topics or issues that will provide value to readers. For example, if someone has a question about something specific related to your industry, answer it in a blog post or a YouTube video.

In addition, if you want your content to rank in Google, you need to pay attention to relevance. This is crucial in determining which pages rank high in Google search. ​​Google uses several factors to determine the applicability of the content. These include the text on your page, title tag, meta description, keywords, and how these elements are linked together.

So, how do you create relevant content? There are a few things you need to consider. 

The first step in creating relevant content and ranking it high in Google search is understanding what users are searching for and why they’re searching for it. You can do this by analyzing the three C’s of relevant content:

1) Content type: What’s the most common content type for this keyword? 
2) Content format: What’s the most common format for this keyword? 
3) Content angle: Is there a common denominator that connects the highly-ranking forms of content? For example, are they all aimed at beginners? Or maybe they’re all very recent? 

To illustrate this, let’s assume that you want to write a blog article on “best strategies for content marketing.” After typing this keyword in Google search, these are the results we get: 

In this case, we can see that the three C’s are as follows: 

1) Content type: Blog articles.
2) Content format: Listicles.
3) Content angle: Fresh content aimed at beginners (mostly from 2022).

Based on this analysis, we can see that the best way for us to rank high in Google for this keyword is to write a blog post in the form of a listicle of the most relevant content marketing strategies in 2022.

To find out what people are looking for, analyze the most used keywords. Check out Google Trends to see what terms people search for and how often they do so. To figure out what people are interested to read about, you can also:

1. Look for the most common subheadings under the keyword you’ve typed into the Google search bar.
2. Conduct keyword research for common subtopics using a keyword research tool, such as Serpstat.

This service offers a lot of different reports, for example:

• The "Related Keywords" report represents all search queries that are semantically related to the searched keyword. This is where you can check and use new variations of the queries.
• The "Search Suggestions" report shows the queries offered to users under the search bar.
• The "Search Questions" report is where you can see all question forms of search suggestions. These are questions that include a selected keyword that users are looking for an answer to.

So this is one of the ways to overview the most popular keywords and find out what interests your audience the most:

3. Find out what people frequently ask about. You can do that by simply browsing through the FAQs on the Google search results page or using a tool such as AnswerThePublic.

This information can give you ideas about what kinds of posts people want to read.

Another step in creating relevant content is to build topic clusters. This is a simple process that involves grouping similar topics together. For example, if you have a website about travel, you might group articles on America, Asia, and Europe into separate topic clusters and write about them separately.

This is important because topic clusters help search engines understand what your site is about. When each page on your website focuses on just one topic or idea from start to finish, Google can do its job better and provide relevant results when people search for those topics in its search engine results pages (SERPs).

Relevant links are an essential part of any content strategy. They help people find your content and can help you build your audience. But they're not just a way to get more traffic; they're also a way to show your readers that you understand their problems and needs, which helps them trust you and makes them more likely to convert into customers.

You should include link-building as part of your content marketing strategy. Always include internal links to your existing content and external links that are relevant to your writing and can help your audience better understand what you're talking about.

One of the most effective ways to build trust with content marketing is by offering valuable information and expertise. The goal is to establish yourself as an authority in your field. Here are a few ways to do that. 

To create compelling content that’s relevant and valuable to your audience, you first need to understand their needs. This means creating content that helps them solve their problems and achieve their goals. 

For example, if you’re targeting small business owners who want to grow their companies, then content around marketing automation, social media strategy, and inbound marketing could be helpful.

People want to know that they can trust you when they read your content and share it with others. They want to know that what they’re reading is valuable, accurate, and trustworthy. If you can show them how knowledgeable you are about your industry, they will be likelier to listen to what you have to say.

You can do this by sharing your expertise with confidence and authority — but not arrogance or conceit! If you don’t sound like an expert, people won’t think that what you have to say matters much anyway. The most effective content is written by an expert with a unique perspective on the topic they’re writing about.

You can use this authority to build trust with your audience by sharing stories from your own experience or expertise instead of merely regurgitating what other companies are saying.

You can't build trust with content marketing if it's not valuable to your audience. Take the time to educate and inform your customers; they'll feel more comfortable handing over their contact information and wallets.

Remember that your content should help your audience solve problems, answer questions, or offer valuable insight into an industry or topic that's important to them. In addition to providing practical information, consider sharing expert opinions on topics relevant to your audience's interests.

What's more, ensure your content is easy to understand and digest. Avoid jargon and corporate terms that your audience may struggle to understand. Always use your audience's language, no matter what type of content you create — whether it's a blog article, a video, or an Instagram post. This will help them resonate more with your content and generate more trust.

People want easy-to-digest information they can implement right away to help them take steps to solve their problems. If you're going to create trust and establish yourself as an authority to your audience, make sure your content isn't just full of fluff. Instead, provide actionable tips, so people know precisely what steps to take to apply what they've learned from reading your content.

Make your content conversational and easy to read so that people feel comfortable reading it. Don't write like you're selling something! Instead, write like you're talking to a friend over coffee. This feels more personal and will make your readers feel like you genuinely care about them.

Another step to building brand awareness and gaining people's trust is reaching a wider audience. People tend to trust brands that have a larger following. When we see brands with a big audience, we tend to believe they're reliable and trustworthy. 

You can implement many content promotion strategies without having to invest thousands of dollars into paid advertising. You don't have to be a Fortune 500 company with millions of dollars in the advertising budget. Content marketing allows you to compete with more prominent brands by leveraging the power of social media, email, and other digital platforms. One of the best ways is to repurpose your content and post it on multiple social media platforms. 

For example, if you've created an infographic as part of your blog post, you can repurpose it into a Pinterest graphic. Or, if you've made a YouTube video, you can turn it into a podcast episode. The more channels you distribute your content to, the more opportunities there are for someone else to discover and share it with their friends or followers. 

Engagement is the secret to an effective content marketing strategy. Your audience wants to interact with you and your brand. It's a no-brainer that engaged audiences are more likely to buy products and services from brands they follow on social media than non-engaged audiences. 

So, if you're not engaging with your audience, you're missing out on a golden opportunity to increase brand awareness and build trust. Here are four tips you can start implementing to boost your audience engagement.

As humans, we're attracted to the things that grab our attention. If a headline doesn't resonate with us, we'll scroll past it and move on to something else. But if it does, we're more likely to keep reading. That's why headlines are critical to every piece of content, whether it's a blog post, an Instagram caption, or an email newsletter.

Your headline should be descriptive enough, so readers can tell what they're going to get out of it — but also mysterious enough to catch their attention and make them want to know more. You should also avoid clickbait. This means that your headlines should match up with your content's delivery so that readers aren't disappointed after reading them.

If you are looking for tools that will facilitate the processes of content creation and analysis, you should not miss Serpstat content tools based on Artificial Intelligence.

This is where you can generate titles, descriptions, articles, check grammar and spelling, and many more.

For example, the Description Generation tool analyzes a fragment of the text from the page of your site and composes a description according to the requirements of search engines and the analysis of competitor pages in the search results.

One of the most effective ways to boost engagement on any content piece is to include a call-to-action. This is a direct way to invite your audience to take the next step in their journey. You can prompt them to answer a question in the comments, offer them an opportunity to download something or sign up for your email newsletter.

Don't let your readers walk away without telling them what to do next! If they've already invested their time into reading or watching your content piece, they're genuinely interested in what you have to say. So, don't limit yourself to just sharing information — tell people what you want them to do with it!

The most successful content marketers engage with their audiences by asking questions. Questions are powerful because they open a loop in our brains that we'll want to close by answering the question. So, asking questions in your content is a great way to prompt people to leave a comment and, therefore, engage with your brand.

In addition to that, asking questions can help you find out what your audience is thinking. Once you've asked a question, you can use your audience's answers to create more content.

The first thing to remember when writing content is that you're writing to inform, educate and engage your audience. The more information you can give them without taking too much of their time, the better your chances of making an impact.

The truth is that your readers aren't going to read something vague, lengthy, or tedious. What's more, most people will only read your content if it entertains them, educates them, or informs them about something that matters. So, keep your content pieces simple, specific, and concise!

People want genuine relationships just as much as they want expert advice —maybe even more so! When you write authentic content while being faithful to your brand personality, your readers will feel that and resonate with you more.

Many brands try too hard to come across as professional and authoritative. So much so that they forget to show their human side. And that’s exactly what makes your customers feel like they know you better than just another company or brand out there!

Being transparent can be as simple as acknowledging your product’s weaknesses or sharing the behind-the-scenes of your business. The more personal and relatable your content is, the more likely people will be willing to connect with you emotionally — and therefore, they’ll build trust with you.

Content marketing is a great way to provide value for your audience, inform people about your product or service, and build trust — all at the same time.

However, it's important to remember that trust builds over time through regular interactions and great transparency. This is especially true when it comes to content marketing because you'll need to create and execute a consistent plan.

Remember, the more value you can provide to your audience through content, the more trust you're likely to develop :)