Whether a product or service, all the best brands in the market boast of prioritizing one core tenet: building a loyal base of trusting customers. And they do this by building trust with their existing client base. Trust is at the center of every business strategy—without it, entrepreneurs would have to struggle to develop relationships, win business, and retain customers.
If you’re running a new business, you undoubtedly understand this theory and want to build a loyal customer base yourself. However, if you want to know how to create such a customer base and trust, brands must adopt these ten useful qualities.
Transparency and Honesty
The first and most important factor in building customer trust is demonstrating transparency and honesty. Giving customers the right information and forgetting exaggerated claims about one’s services is a sure approach to building trust.
This has always been the case and will continue to be so in the future. Most customers are too wise tofall for manipulative sales and marketing tactics; hence being open about matters like pricing and limitations boosts the confidence that such customers would have for a company.
Being Relevant
Just selling or providing a service in today’s market is not enough – a brand must be relevant to its target demographics’ hopes, desires, and needs. Customers tend to trust companies that offer solutions suited to their personal needs, and being able to leverage this is a criterion of a trustworthy brand.
Relevance can mean different things based on what kind of business you’re running- it might mean innovation, improvement, brand messaging, and more.
Being Different
To stand out among competitive alternatives is another important quality of a trustworthy brand as it infers that the brand is unique. Being unique in more ways than one matters to customers as they need substantial incentives to purchase your product or service.
One of the best ways to know what makes a product unique is by researching and studying product comparisons which most online purchasers do. They often search for the product or service they want by adding ‘the top 10 best’ suffix before their business name when looking them up online.
Customer-Centric
A good brand needs to be customer-centric. A brand that can identify its customers’ needs, common issues, and pain points by conducting market research often stands to do better than its competitors. In addition, brands that seek to know their customers’ every need can deliver exceptional services, which helps foster the trust customers have for the brand.
Consistency
Consistency is also something most customers look for when choosing their favorite brands. Currently, the most popular brands in the market tend to be the ones that have been around for decades. This is because reliable brands are predictable, dependable, and authentic, solidifying customer trust over long periods.
Innovation
Innovation is the cornerstone of any trustworthy brand, and your product or service needs to focus on this factor as well. A brand’s ability to constantly reinvent the wheel, especially in a hyper-competitive business environment, helps reinforce the belief in customers that the company will always stay ahead of the competition.
Likable
Being likable is just as important for a brand as being innovative, honest, and consistent. Brands that can create emotional connections with their customers are rated as trustworthy. By making their brand image more likable, they not only bolster their public image but also become more highly regarded.
The perfume brand Dior is currently a great example of the importance of this factor. By sticking with Johnny Depp for the last couple of years as their patron, they have become so likable in recent weeks that their perfume sales are breaking records.
Accessible
Providing accessibility to customers is an important part of building trust with them – to successfully convert brand preference into a brand purchase – such brands must be easy to find and purchase online or offline. Accessibility is equally another viable trait of trustworthiness as it demonstrates that the brand has enough staying power to be on the market.
Popular
Strong brands tend to be popular by combining the traits mentioned above or focusing on a singular trait. In addition, being supported in public through brand advocacy is a crucial part of building up a long-term customer base. Coupled with positive momentum, popular brands remain the preferred choice of most customers in the long run.
Valuable
Last but not least, a brand must demonstrate enough value to be considered trustworthy by its customers. When a brand’s functional, emotional, experiential, and self-expressive customer benefits are weighed against the costs of acquiring and using the brand, its value is considered qualitative, excellent, or superior.
The perceived value of a brand in a customer’s eye is very important as it also sets up the opportunity for capitalizing on exclusivity in niche markets.
Taking It Slow
While it might sound easy on pen and paper, making a product or service trustworthy takes a lot of time and effort. So make sure to have your marketing and branding game plan ready if you want to stay ahead of your competitors. With persistence and good strategy, you should be able to build a loyal and trustworthy client base over time.
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