Build trust towards your customers using reviews, influencers, and transparency.

Since consumers' expectations keep rising it's no longer sufficient to only release an excellent product or service. Nowadays, you need to build trust towards your customers. And this is not an easy task. But, by living up to the expectations, values, and beliefs of your customers, you can surely gain their trust. To build this, there are three aspects to keep into consideration: reviews, influencers, and transparency.

Reviews

Consumer reviews are the strongest predictor of trustworthiness judgments. What do you do when you are looking for a new restaurant, company, or new store you want to visit? There is no way around it, reviews are extremely valuable to gain trust from your audience.??

But why??We trust these reviews because they give us more and additional information about a company and its goods or services. Consumers rely a lot on the opinions of others and consider these reviews as trustworthy and true.??

Therefore, it is extremely important for brands to invest in these reviews in every form and context. Be it through a video, a google review or someone sharing their experience on social media. Keep in mind though that these reviews must be

·??????of high quality, ideally written.?

·??????recently added, no older than three months.?

·??????About your product ;)

Finally, of course, if a customer had a bad experience, make sure you reply on it as soon as possible and look where it could have gone wrong so that this experience can be avoided in the future.?

So, in conclusion: don't forget to lead your customers to leave a review after they had an experience with your product or service.

Influencers

Influencer marketing can be described as digital word of mouth. First, by using influencers, you can reach new people. These influencers share their experience about your product or service and their followers will therefore not only get to know your product but trust that it must be a good product/ service because the influencer shares about it.???

Using this method of communication is crucial for brands because a lot of consumers turn to influencers and social media to get to know new products but also to inform themselves about products before they purchase it. The new Gen Z mainly purchases products in direct response to social media content. They tend to trust them more than they trust brands. So, therefore it’s very interesting for brands to invest in this kind of marketing to reach the new generation of consumers.

Transparency

Today, secrecy is no longer tolerated. Building an authentic relationship with your customer means giving them complete access to every stage of your brand’s journey: details on where your company came from, what values you hold dear, what your vision is for the future, etc. --- including the bad decisions you’ve made along the way, this way you are holding yourself accountable which is highly important.

But how can you do this? Here are some suggestions you can easily incorporate in your process to fulfill the need of transparency.??

·??????Show your company’s “human side”: a lot of consumers make purchasing decisions based on emotion, rather than reason. So even if your product is better in every manner, they will still choose the company they think resonates best with them.?

·??????Give insight in the production process: provide a view of where your materials come from, how you work and what efforts you make to be environmentally friendly.?

·??????Create your own unique visuals, graphics, and images to communicate about all these points, or hire someone to do it.

Conclusion

To conclude, we can say that you can gain trust from your customer by investing in these points.??After you’ve developed trust, you can start to cultivate the next step:?brand loyalty.

Thanks to fabrikbrands, revlocal, Harvard business review, prnewswire and im-in.social for the useful information.

https://fabrikbrands.com/brand-transparency-and-consumer-trust/ - https://www.revlocal.com/resources/library/blog/here-are-2-reasons-why-customers-trust-online-reviews - https://hbr.org/2015/05/customer-data-designing-for-transparency-and-trust - https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/37-of-consumers-trust-social-media-influencers-over-brands-301538111.html - https://im-in.social/blog/consumer-trust-brands-whats-missing/