Why is It Important to Build Trust With Customers?

Customer trust and loyalty can make or break your business

You probably hear about trust and loyalty in business all the time, but have you ever really asked yourself, “Why is it important to build trust with customers?” After all, they aren’t your friends or family, and you aren’t giving them your bank passwords – so why is building trust with customers a top priority for so many business owners?

It’s true that customer trust and loyalty are vital for business success, but for too many business owners, trust and loyalty have become mere buzzwords with no plan or substance behind them.

To take things a step further: How do you build customer trust? Businesses, customers, industries, and markets are all different, but are there core concepts that can be applied across all aspects of customer relationships to build trust and loyalty?

Defining Customer Trust

To answer these questions, we need first to take a look at the definition of customer trust. A customer must have some level of trust to do business with you. A buyer is forking over their hard-earned cash to you in exchange for a product or service. This transaction is built on a bedrock of trust. The customer believes that you will exchange what is promised for money. At its core, this relationship is built on trust.

The thing is, customer trust is much deeper than that.

Customer trust is hard to earn but easy to lose

Customer Trust Begins at the First Touchpoint

Business owners have to realize that trust doesn’t just begin or end at the transaction. Establishing customer trust starts from your first touchpoint or interaction with a consumer and ends when and if it is broken (Pro tip: You don’t want this to happen.)

Before someone ever even considers a purchase, your marketing campaigns, CSRs, paid influencers, viral content, social media accounts, and more are all building customer trust. Once trust is established, you can work on loyalty.

It’s imperative, however, to understand that the trust component, while officially established during and after a purchase, begins building long before the point of sale.

Think Your Brand is Trusted? Think Again

Our working definition of trust, in this case, is the belief by a customer that your business will stand by the things it represents. These things can be your products or services, mission statement, value proposition, branding, or anything else.

Whatever you build trust off of, you must stand behind what you promote to customers. Recent research suggests that many businesses think their companies are trusted, but consumers only offer a 30% trust rating.

This shows that you can easily fall into a mental trap if you aren’t engaging in ongoing trust-building and monitoring.

Building customer trust means more than just making money

The Benefits of Building Customer Trust

The obvious benefit of customer trust and loyalty is increased business. When a customer trusts your company, you’ll make more money. Likewise, loyalty increases the odds of repeat business and more earning potential down the road. What you may miss here are the not-so-obvious benefits of building trust.

Trusted Brands Receive Free Marketing

Customers who trust your brand are more likely to share their experiences with others. These “others” could include friends, family, coworkers, people they meet at a picnic, or the guy at the bus stop – you never know, which is why building and maintaining trust is imperative. You want to capture every possible word-of-mouth marketing opportunity that customer trust creates.

Trusted Companies Leverage More Authority

Beyond that, being trusted by customers boosts your industry authority. This makes engaging in indirect marketing using brand recognition and reputation monitoring much more manageable. When customers trust your company, a bad review on the web isn’t going to ruin your reputation. When you have clout in your industry, you have more opportunities to partner with other organizations to make big things happen. All of this is built on earning customer trust and loyalty.

Trusted Businesses Are More Resilient

As we all saw over the last three years, market volatility can be a big concern for any business owner. Covid affected businesses in all markets and industries, but trusted brands made it through, and some even thrived.

Putting a plan in place to monitor customer confidence and trust can help your team weather storms more effectively than a business already on the brink. Remember, at the end of the day, with all things being equal, research has shown customers will choose companies they trust over companies they don’t know.

Trusted Brands Access Greater Insights

Something else to consider is the value of trust as it relates to customer feedback. If a customer doesn’t trust your brand, you’re less likely to reach optimum engagement with that customer.

This means you’re less likely to receive honest feedback about their experiences with your company. This feedback is vital for strategy and growth; without it, you could spend a lot of resources heading in the wrong direction.

Trusted Brands Attract the Best Team Members

Lastly, customer trust and loyalty give your business an edge when it comes to attracting and retaining top talent. Companies that hold a lot of trust in the eyes of buyers tend to attract top-tier employees because the company has a reputation for being the best.

These employees stick around longer and offer higher productivity. This then leads to better service to customers, and the cycle continues.

Taking proactive steps to build and maintain customer trust is vital

4 Steps You Can Take to Build Customer Trust

You can build customer trust by standing by your word, but that only affects customer trust after a transaction is initiated or completed. This is important, sure, but you want to begin building trust before a buyer even pulls out their money.

Below are four steps you can take now to begin building a solid foundation of customer trust that can last for years to come:

1. Use Content to Rank Higher in Search Results

Studies have shown that customers trust companies that rank higher in search results. This analysis only applies to the web, but you can extrapolate that this trust also extends to IRL interactions.

When you use solutions like content marketing combined with SEO to get found higher in search results, you get found before your competition in search results. Gaining a higher ranking and establishing an extensive digital footprint can build customer trust before a customer has even initiated a transactional relationship.

2. Use Social Proof

Social proof can be defined as the demonstration of trust by peers. When customers see that many in their peer groups have liked or followed your business on social media, they are more likely to trust your company. This is why successful companies invest so much into creating digital content for social media.

Content marketing is not always about selling something or developing leads. In many cases, it’s about building and supporting social proof.

Humans are social creatures by design, and even when we don’t know someone else, we tend to take the opinions of others into account when making decisions. Likes and shares are not leads, but they can be foundational in building a consensus that your business is one to trust.

3. Provide Value

All of the content your company produces should provide value. This isn’t to say that every bit of digital media you create has to change consumers’ lives, but your content needs to give something that buyers walk away with, saying, “Ok, I trust that company.”

This could be proactive community messaging, a blog post with insights that improve customers’ lives, or an eBook that offers helpful information that enriches customers.

4. Engage in Proactive Dispute Resolution

You can also build trust by monitoring feedback and addressing issues before they blow up. Taking this approach shows your business cares and opens up possibilities for personal connections between customers and your company.

Don’t take anything for granted in this regard. As mentioned above, you never know when an experience with your company will spill over into someone else’s life, so make the most of every engagement.

All elements of your business must come together to build customer trust and loyalty

Make Ongoing Trust-Building a Priority

Trust-building never stops; even when you’ve achieved customer trust and loyalty in business, it’s a delicate thing to behold. You can break that trust in an instant, and loyalty is fleeting if it isn’t nurtured, especially in the digital economy where opportunities to jump ship are everywhere. When you make earning and maintaining customer trust and loyalty a central part of your company, your business will likely see long-term benefits from your team’s hard work.

To learn more about how you can use content development and strategy solutions to build and maintain customer trust and loyalty, contact Charlotte Content Marketing.

Let’s get to know each other. Call our team at (704) 323-6762 to have an informal chat about your needs, or reach our content marketing agency in Charlotte online using our contact form right now.