Boosting your brand trust is crucial in 2024. In such a competitive online market, businesses that don’t think outside of the box are likely to fall behind when it comes to maintaining a visible position during an industry search.
Customers are twice as likely to interact with a brand they know and trust, which is why it’s important to ensure that you appear on their screens across a wide range of platforms.
However, building a visible brand isn’t an easy task. As brand giants steal most of an industry’s attention, smaller startups must fight to win a competitive position within a niche search market.
“Branding demands commitment; commitment to continual re-invention; striking chords with people to stir their emotions; and commitment to imagination. It is easy to be cynical about such things, much harder to be successful,” says Sir Richard Branson, founder of the Virgin Media group.
With this in mind, we're diving head-first into 10 actionable strategies you can use to enhance your brand trust in 2024.
What is Brand Trust?
Brand Trust refers to the confidence that consumers have in a brand's ability to deliver on its promises consistently. It encompasses the reliability, integrity, and quality of the products or services offered by a brand. Building brand trust is crucial for creating long-term customer loyalty and fostering positive relationships with your audience.
When customers trust a brand, they are more likely to make repeat purchases, recommend it to others, and advocate for it publicly. This trust is built over time through consistent performance, transparent communication, and delivering value that meets or exceeds customer expectations.
Why Should You Work On Your Brand Trust in 2024?
There are plenty of reasons to work on your brand trust in 2024. From increasing your business's conversions to creating a loyal customer base, the positives outweigh the time and effort required to achieve them.
Here are just some of the ways brand trust could improve business success in 2024:
More Conversions
Ranking at the top of your SERP awards you with more than 39% of all clicks within your niche. If your brand is sitting at the top of a search page or constantly finding its way to the top end of a social feed, it is almost twice as likely to be interacted with by target consumers, which in turn increases your chance of converting more leads.
Omnichannel Interaction
If your brand is super visible on one channel, this also aids your brand awareness on a number of other platforms. For example, if your website ranks at the top of a search, it will secure more traffic that is likely to interact with direct pathways to your other channels and drive omnichannel engagement.
Creating Loyal Customers
Increased brand trust helps create loyal customers. If your business is constantly visible on a target’s feed, they are likely to think of you first each time they need to purchase products/services from your niche. This breeds repeat purchasers who trust your brand over less visible competitors. Visibility tells a prospect that your brand is an industry leader and an expert in its field.
Improving Your Site’s SEO
Increased brand trust also directly affects your brand’s SEO. For example, if you become more visible on social media and foster a larger audience, they are more likely to interact with links to your online store, transporting them straight to a converting landing page.
Each of these clicks and extended sessions of interaction tells Google you’re an authoritative player within your industry. In response, you’ll see your brand continue to move up SERPs and enjoy a higher domain rating.
“If you can recall at least one person whom you see on your newsfeeds daily, that is how band visibility works. All the posts may not be quality content. But appearance is what matters,” - say experts at Marketing91.
The more your brand appears in a search result or at the top of a social feed, the more likely it is that your target consumers will remember you when looking to purchase products and services within your industry.
10 Actionable Strategies To Improve Brand Trust Online
Now that we've covered the benefits of improving your brand trust let’s learn more about how you can implement trust-boosting tactics into your marketing strategy.
1. Choose a Memorable Name
In 2024, every niche market has numerous players. That is why it is important to appear as memorable as possible when prospects interact with your brand.
One way to do this is to choose a memorable name. Think of some of the biggest brands on the planet: Google, Amazon, and Apple. Each of their brand names is short, snappy, and unlike any competitor's.
The key here is to create a brand name that is quick to recall and easy to pronounce. If you’ve opted for a name that is hard to say out loud, or worse, hard to type into a search engine, it could be an absolute disaster when it comes to raising your visibility online.
2. Start Social Listening
Did you know that more than 61% of brands employ social listening as a key technique for improving brand trust?
Tuning into conversations and learning more about how your industry demographic operates can give you insight into the types of content they interact with and, most importantly, how they perceive your brand as an online player.
Using a range of analytic tools, you can track brand mentions, monitor your social sentiment score and discover a viral formula for content creation.
Leveraging the data you gather from social listening, you can tweak your branding to appeal to demographic trends and preferences, raising your chances of becoming more visible on their social feed.
3. Stay Consistent With Your Branding
Consistency is the key to remaining visible in an omnichannel landscape. Your brand needs to be recognisable on each platform, so maintaining a uniform visual identity will help you raise your brand awareness in multiple locations.
One way to do this is by using colour. In fact, 81% of your customers are more likely to remember your brand’s colour than its name, so this can be a great branding element to use when trying to raise visibility.
Take Coca-Cola, for example. This brand is known for prioritising a consistent colour palette.
Their classic deep red colour is found on all products, advertising and on content throughout their social feed in order to immediately trigger familiarity with the brand when scrolling or walking past a piece of marketing material.
4. Turn Your Employees Into Thought Leaders
Leveraging your employees as branding assets is one strategy many businesses forget about when working to raise their visibility online. çEncouraging employees to share their expertise as individuals while still linking back to your brand can help build credibility for your business while raising awareness of its services.
From social posts on trending industry topics to blog entries on expert strategies for B2B prospects, turning your employees into thought leaders is a great way to get more voices talking about your brand while showcasing your team’s skills, depth of knowledge, and expertise within the industry.
This, in turn, attracts more business partnerships and B2B conversions as you position your employees as sources a lead can rely on and trust when purchasing a product/service from your brand.
5. Enhance Your Email Marketing
You can also increase your brand trust using email marketing. Not only is this another channel where a catchy brand name in the inbox can boost awareness, but emails are a great place to position call-to-actions to your website and social pages for more interaction and engagement.
The key here is to design visually appealing, mobile-friendly email templates that showcase your brand’s identity and encourage a consistent open rate.
If you create catchy subject lines that include your brand’s name and its most recognisable features, you increase your chances of being spotted in a busy inbox.
Building a segmented email list takes this one step further, as you can send personalised messages to target consumer groups with customisable offers and discounts for a shot at a higher open rate.
The more customers you attract with email marketing, the more chances you have to raise the visibility of your website, social media, and services.
6. Widen Your Influencer Network
If you’re struggling to make a name for yourself as a brand with a smaller following, widening your influencer network could be the key to success.
Leveraging an influencer or industry opinion leader’s existing following and credibility as a spokesperson can do wonders for your brand trust.
To partner with influencers successfully, get to know your target audience first. Who do they trust as a source of information regarding your niche? The key here is to partner with influencers your customers trust and opinion leaders that naturally align with your brand values.
Take this example from Bosch Power Tools. Here, they didn't partner with the most followed influencer in their industry but one that was well-trusted by their target audience.
Using a micro-influencer to reach their target niche, Bosch appealed to tradespeople that regularly watched reviews of new products on YouTube.
The influencer's first-hand user knowledge not only taught viewers how each product performed in action but also acted as a positive review of the power tools, encouraging customers to discover the brand and start investing.
7. Start Networking
On the topic of building relationships with industry peers, networking can also improve your brand trust tenfold.
Joining online forums, attending networking events, and nurturing relationships with B2B partners are great ways to promote your brand on other platforms.
For example, if you partner with a brand in the same industry that promotes different products, you can collaborate and create partner content that can be viewed on both your brand and their brand’s social pages.
This is a brilliant way to gain more eyes on your brand from your partner’s loyal audience. However, in order for networking to be successful in raising brand trust, it’s crucial that you connect with brands that have similar target audiences, as you’re likely to gain more qualified leads in the process.
8. Optimise Your Visual Content
Did you know that 71% of B2B content marketers prioritise visual content when working to improve their brand trust online?
In such a saturated online landscape, visual content has become the key to capturing audience attention. Whether this is a set of clever graphics or a TikTok video, creating impactful visuals is crucial if you want your target leads to stop in their tracks when they reach your brand online.
Optimising your visual content for brand trust is all about knowing your demographic’s content format preferences. Are they attracted to infographics? Do they prefer long-style or short-style videos?
Appealing to these content formats encourages viewers to engage and sets your brand up in a better position for content virality on social media.
9. Think Omnichannel
Any brand trust campaign should attempt to target customers from all angles.
In fact, 98% of online users switch devices every day. This means that creating a brand trust campaign for mobile and desktop-based audiences is essential if you want to remain visible on multiple screens.
When creating content for social media marketing, email marketing and even your website, think about omnichannel consumers. Create content that can be viewed on multiple devices, and link all of your efforts together for seamless movement between channels.
If you own a brick-and-mortar business, it’s also important to take your brand into the online world, especially if you want to build brand trust. As you can see here, omnichannel customers make up 27% of sales. Taking time to build a website for your brick-and-mortar business opens up your brand to omnichannel engagement and a greater chance of being recognised by more than just your local customer base.
Prioritising your omnichannel marketing and providing leads with seamless movement between stores, channels, and platforms is a great way to ensure that your brand gains visibility on numerous channels.
10. Improve Your Site Searchability
Last but certainly not least, improving your SEO is a brilliant way to raise brand trust in SERPs.
Here are some of the ways you can increase your site’s visibility on a search engine:
- Conducting keyword research to identify relevant search terms for your target audience.
- Incorporating keywords naturally into your website's content and meta tags.
- Creating high-quality, shareable content that attracts backlinks from reputable sources.
- Ensuring your website is mobile-friendly and loads quickly to improve user experience.
Optimising your website to appear at the top of search engines like Google can significantly increase your chances of engagement from search targets.
Wrapping Up
As we step into an online era dominated by brand competition, raising your visibility online is crucial if you want to be in with a chance of generating conversions.
Take time to improve aspects of your branding strategy, such as uniform omnichannel marketing and optimising your online content for engagement, to make your brand easily searchable in multiple locations.
Better still, the key to raising brand trust amongst your industry demographic is to start partnering with other loud voices. Whether this is through influencer partnerships or B2B networking, the more mentions you receive on other platforms, the better.
Brand trust certainly doesn't appear overnight, but the correct level of dedication and constant creation of new content to share will put you on the path to improved brand awareness in 2024.
