Trust: The Tiny Secret to Accelerating Brand Growth

Trust is an undervalued asset and the most fundamental element of any prosperous business relationship. Invisible, and immaterial, trust can only be measured through experience and because it’s so rare it’s remarkably valuable.

What is Trust?

By definition, to trust someone is to believe in their reliability, truth, ability, or strength. The same applies to a brand. To trust a brand you need to believe the brand to be:

a) reliable

b) truthful

c) able

d) strong. 

Think of it this way: Becoming trustworthy automatically increases your value.

Increased value (the 2019 LinkedIn buzzword) is what we’re all after and the most direct way of getting from our current level of value to where we want to be is through developing our ability to have total strangers trust us. 

To demonstrate how rare trust is: 

• How many people would you trust with your life?
• How many people do you trust with your money?

You could probably count the answer to both of these questions on one hand. Yet, your calendar for the month is jam-packed and you have hundreds or thousands of “friends,” “followers,” and “connections” on social. Just as we do not trust many people, we don’t trust many brands.

The most effective way to distinguish your brand and build a loyal community is to build trust with your current and potential customers and to let it spread like wildfire. 

Why Trust Matters:

One direct way (though immensely undervalued) to connect the above characteristics to your brand is to deliver what you say you're going to deliver, when you say you're going to deliver it.

You repeatedly order from Amazon because you rely on the couriers to deliver your package on time — despite hail, snow, rain, or doom’s day — not coincidentally, you probably feel, based on your experience, that Amazon serves you in a fashion that is reliable, truthful, able and strong. 

But how does a new brand prove trustworthy to its potential market, who are at present, complete and total strangers? 

All it takes to build trust in your brand from nothing is a handful of extremely satisfied customers or clients (and to take a step further, this is even more effective when they are carefully selected). Unfortunately, not many brands achieve this because they fall into the trap of dedicating the majority of their focus on acquiring new customers or clients.

But an insatiable quantity of customers and clients proves short-term (and short-sighted) if you do not retain their business or they do not become advocates of your products and/or services via referrals and recommendations.

I would rather have 1 client that raves about their experience with my company to all their colleagues, friends and family for life, than 20 that find my service to be "good" or "fair" and never return.

When you make a decision that "good" customer service is not acceptable, and focus on providing a beyond EXCELLENT experience for your existing customer base, new customers are inevitable.

This is why brands like Amazon, Apple, Google, Tesla, HubSpot, Salesforce, Nike, Coca Cola (and so many more) stay winning.

How To Cultivate Trustworthiness:

According to the Harvard Business Review, there are three core elements when it comes to cultivating trust: 

1. Positive relationships 
2. Expertise
3. Consistency

The above elements are key to developing the art of trust to build a loyal community for your brand. I have used the acquisition of trust to go from 500 connections on LinkedIn to 22,000+ and nearly 1 million views of my authentic video content in less than six months. 

Cultivating Trust is Crucial to Differentiation:

When people trust you, they not only allow you to help them via your product or services, they seek you out to do so. And the larger the community that trusts your brand, the greater the likelihood of positive differentiation.

The more seeds of trust you sow, the more will bloom.

About the Author:

Shanee′ Moret serves as the International Goodwill Ambassador of Public Health for the FAAVM and is the Co-Founder of MedSnake Media; as a stage 4 cancer survivor, she is dedicated to helping healthcare companies grow and increase their market influence and patient care via disruptive content creation.