In Search of Trust: How Authentic Content Drives Customer Experience

August 10, 2020

By Lee Odden

Authentic Content Customer Experience

The experience customers have through marketing content can be one of the most important differentiators for brands today.

And yet 58% of B2B buyers don’t not believe claims made by the vendors they most recently bought from (TrustRadius).

It’s hard to create a great experience if customers don’t trust brand communications.

Trust is the gateway to influence perceptions, behaviors and actions and brands that want to succeed in the uncertain environment of today’s digital world need to double down on building trust with their customers. But how?

Today’s increasingly digital buyers have high expectations of the companies they do business with: buyers want personalized and relevant information, they want a consistent experience across channels, they want confidence in the brand as a company that cares about privacy, their customers and the community.

Meeting these expectations has been a challenge. From fake news to privacy issues to deep fakes, the digital world has become an uncertain source of information for consumers.

Tired of information overload, sales focused brand messaging and unremarkable content, 86% of customers say authenticity is important when deciding what brands they like and support (Stackla – The Consumer Content Report: Influence in the Digital Age).

Customers want what’s real. They want to trust and be confident about their decisions.

While there’s a lot of information and even misinformation about content marketing and what it means for business communicators, there’s hope in building trust and influence by creating great customer experiences with authentic content.

To help marketers better understand how brands are winning customer hearts, minds, and trust with authentic content experiences here are 5 important steps:

Accelerate Internal Credibility

In order for marketing to have the support it needs to be successful externally with customers, marketing needs to be credible inside the organization. Unfortunately, 80% of CEOs don’t trust marketers but 91% do trust CIOs and CFOs (Fournaise Group).

To earn C-level trust, marketers must identify the key business problems faced by the business and make the connection to how marketing can help solve those issues. More importantly, marketing needs to provide clear direction about how and show credible reporting about impact. Ensuring credibility internally means promoting your wins to internal stakeholders. Make sure everyone from department heads to the C-suite are aware of the results that you are delivering to the business bottom line.

As marketers use content marketing integrated across channels to create “best answer” experiences for customers, marketers must also become the best answer for business growth inside the company by focusing on and communicating what matters to the business – not fluffy marketing promises with ambiguous correlations to the impact on the business.

Double Down on Activating Customers

Word of mouth and advocacy continue to represent important sources of trust and influence for brands. Marketers need to engage customers for reviews, ratings and even user generated content. As I’ve often said,

“If you want your content to be great, ask your customers to participate.”

Build credibility and influence …read more

Source:: Top Rank Blog

      

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