The Trust Game: How Brands Gain Customers’ Trust

Building brand trust is easier said than done. Trust requires a lot of time and effort to develop, yet it’s so easy to tear down. Be patient and farsighted when measuring your efforts – don’t measure trust with the usual time frame of a typical quarterly timespan.

There are no shortcuts when it comes to building trust. Choosing to cut corners might come back to haunt you with irreversible consequences, that could end up being a lot more inconvenient than the original problem. For example, giving a half-hearted response to a complaint on Facebook could backfire and snowball into a crisis. Trust is built over years of dedication and commitment.

The customer journey starts from the very first interaction that the customer has with your brand and company. And you build that trust by getting to know the customer before you go ahead with your sales pitch. But even before you have that first interaction, you need to plan your communication strategies for every stage of the customer journey.

You can begin preparing by selecting the right communication tool regardless of the prospective customer’s level of awareness, maturity, and probability of conversion. In the end, whether your customer chooses to interact with you is not within your reach, but preparation sets you up for success.

Benefits of a Customer’s Trust

Establishing trust with your customers will make them more likely to refer your business and its offerings to other new customers. And word-of-mouth is an incredibly effective way of spreading awareness for your company. There is also an inclination for these new customers who were referred to your business via their relatives and friends, to trust in your business as much as they trust their referrer. This is one of the healthiest form possible of organic growth since it comes at a low customer acquisition cost.

Also, when your company isn’t faring too well, customers who placed their trust in you have a higher likelihood of sticking with you. This is important as it won't always be smooth sailing in the market and global economy. A customer that trusts in you is a customer that worries less and supports your business in spite of difficult times.

Know Your Brand

Before you work on your communication strategies, it is important to understand your brand, what it stands for, and its positioning within the market. With these elements, you’ll be able to succeed in finding the right tone of voice and visual imagery to connect with your target customers. By connecting with them, it forms a cornerstone for you to establish trust.

When communicating with your customers, it is important to be coherent across the different stages of the customer journey. Coherence means using a tone of voice and visual imagery that is aligned with the brand guidelines. By being coherent, your brand positioning is clear and purposeful. Any ambiguity is a barrier that obstructs trust from developing.

Understand Your Customer & Media

Finding the right target audience to commit your efforts, and finding the right medium to reach out to them is crucial. Building trust is a long-term and resource-intensive commitment, which you don’t want to waste.

It is not unusual for both your brand positioning and target customer to alter over time. When you realise that your target customer isn’t the most ideal, you should target a different audience until you attract the kind of people that respond well to your brand positioning.

These days, businesses are expected to offer their services on various platforms and media. As a brand, the challenge is to adapt to the customer’s chosen medium and yet remain coherent. To fully utilise the medium’s full capabilities, you’ll have to understand and be familiar with its features, like a push notification to the user's phone, or an out of home campaign at the train station. And it's not easy to familiarise yourself with a tool because, for example, radio messages have some things that are native to the radio medium and unless you’re familiar with the tool, you might struggle to get a grasp of the medium’s inner workings.

When I was asked to conduct some courses for aspiring journalists, I showed them how The Washington Post adapts one single piece of news across its different channels. For its coverage of the leap year news, they delivered it in 19 different languages: a language for each platform. Regardless of the language, The Washington Post still managed to retain coherence in the brand positioning.

There are so many ways to reach out to your target customer that it’s easy to be spoilt for choice. Should you advertise by sending out newsletters? Pay for a radio segment or screen an advertisement at a cinema? The choices are endless. Regardless of your choice, you’ll need to touch the hearts of your customers or send some kind of message at some point of their customer journey for you to effectively build customer’s trust.