3 Steps to Building and Measuring Brand Trust

In B2B branding, trust is everything. Building brand trust in today's hyper-niche markets demands careful strategy and planning far beyond getting your name in front of the right eyes.

Brand trust takes targeted, multi-disciplined, and thoughtful marketing campaigns designed to resonate with prospects and customers based on what they truly value. Now, many marketers do direct their efforts toward developing relationships with prospects and customers—but how do you know if these strategies actually build brand trust, and how do you gauge it?

In this blog, we'll?discuss the essential trust indicators to help you determine if you're on the path to building a trusted brand. At Sagefrog, our job is to help B2B brands build trust with their customers—learn how we can help you.

• What is Brand Trust?
• How Can You Measure Brand Trust?
• 3 Steps for Building Brand Trust
• 5 Building Blocks that Lead to Trust
• Start Fostering Brand Trust
• Accelerate Your Brand’s Success

What is Brand Trust?

How do you feel when you get something in the mail that doesn’t match its online description? People also feel the same disappointments and frustrations in business interactions and communications. The products and services you offer have the potential to bring your company great success, so be accurate when describing your capabilities. The right people will find you, see alignment between your promises and your offerings, and increase customer loyalty.

If you're launching a new B2B brand, you're probably laser-focused on selling your product or service; however, your audience cares about more than just the final product. Humans want a well-rounded experience. To deliver a customer experience worth remembering, repeating, and sharing, new brands must focus on establishing human connections, so be accessible, friendly, personable, helpful, and appreciative. Investing time and resources into satisfying one client will result in repeat purchases and a foundation for referrals.

From your very first customer, you'll begin to form a deeper understanding of who comprises your audience and why. The initial companies that find value in your products and services can, in turn, help evolve your messaging and attract other similar customers. Your audience constantly evolves, so you must keep tabs on what's most important to them at any given time and change business directions depending on where they gravitate.

While knowing your audience is an essential starting point, securing their trust comes from listening to what they say and how you put that feedback into action. In today's B2B world, helping is the new selling. Customers often have questions, and you have answers that can build credibility and trust. Ensure there are always ways for customers, leads, and prospects to contact you to ask questions or provide feedback. Become a resource and help them get the most out of your product or service.

How Can You Measure Brand Trust?

To measure brand trust, you’ll want to ensure that your mission and vision are integrated into all aspects of your internal operations, live by them unwaveringly, and actively promote and communicate them.

Your brand's message and tone reflect who you are and what you do, forming a reputation and image for your brand in competitive, saturated markets. From the launch of your brand, you must dedicate your team to delivering brand messaging, design and imagery, and customer communications consistently and dependably for optimal trust. You can measure your success by your customers’ reactions to your brand.

In marketing, a mission statement connotes your brand's purpose, and the vision statement establishes your brand's direction. These elements explain why you exist, where you're going, and how you'll get there.

In today's digital age, information is readily available, tools like ChatGPT are becoming commonplace, and consumers are increasingly skeptical of marketing messages, making transparency more important than ever for new brands looking to build trust. To get prospects and customers to trust your brand (and eventually buy from you), you must remain transparent in every aspect of your company values and deliver what's expected in every interaction and transaction.

3 Steps for Building Brand Trust

Step 1. Build Connections with Your Brand

Trust begins in the earliest stages of creating a brand, and people tend to trust brands that connect with them based on values. B2B brands that focus too much on selling their own products and services and not enough on what matters to their prospects and customers tend to fall flat: simply put, prospects and customers don't trust brands that are always trying to sell them something.

For instance, a B2B healthcare technology manufacturer involves creating solid relationships between their brand and medical professionals through thought leadership blogs, case studies, guides, and other content, as well as attending industry conferences and expos. These medical professionals and practitioners often act as champions for a product's adoption in a hospital or clinic, even though they may not be the actual purchaser. Through high-quality resources and support solutions, product design, ease of use, and other customer experience-focused avenues, a med-tech brand may be able to build equity with patients or end-users. And by connecting and collaborating with key stakeholders on R&D projects, participating in industry associations and initiatives, and developing strategic partnerships with other health tech providers, you can steer them in the right direction by showing how your brand solves a given need in the best way possible.

Your brand identity is built on the vision and values that founded your business. Use these aspects as a guide to developing an authentic and compelling mission statement, finding your target audience, researching the competitive landscape, uncovering differentiators, creating a visual identity, and finding your brand's voice.

Step 2. Measure Brand Awareness

Brand awareness is the extent to which prospects and customers know and recognize not just your brand name or logo but the unique aspects of your brand, and the ability for people to recall it when thinking about a particular product or service category.

Your brand needs to build awareness to build trust—you'll never have positive, long-standing relationships with customers if they don't fully recognize the key attributes, products, or services that make your brand one-of-a-kind. First, you need to know how your brand awareness is growing to see if you're laying the foundation for brand trust.

Brand awareness is measured by:

• Surveys: Surveys can be conducted to gather information about brand recognition, brand recall, and overall awareness. Methods can include phone calls, online questionnaires, or in-person interviews. Marketers can analyze the results of these surveys to determine the level of brand awareness among the target audience.
• Social media analytics: Social media and third-party platforms provide businesses with tools to track their brand's performance on these platforms, including engagement rates, reach, and impressions. By analyzing these metrics, companies can determine how effectively their brand reaches their target audience and how aware people are of their brand.
• Website traffic analysis: Website analytics tools can track the number of visitors to a brand's website as well as their behavior and engagement with the site. Analyzing this data can help businesses determine how many people know about their brand and gauge interest in their products or services.
• Sales data: Sales data can be analyzed to determine the impact of brand awareness on sales. By comparing sales data with brand awareness data, businesses can evaluate the efficacy of their efforts in increasing brand awareness and driving sales.

Step 3. Assess Brand Equity

Brand equity is the worth of your business that comes solely from how prospects and customers view your brand rather than from the products or services you provide. Brand equity, like brand awareness, is one of the components of building brand trust and an indicator of brand health. You can tell how healthy a brand is by how well-recognized and respected it is. A healthy brand is a trusted brand.

Keep reading to learn how marketers assess brand equity.