How to Establish Brand Trust Through Social Media
In today’s world, social media has become an indispensable tool for brands to connect and interact with their target audience. With over 4.5 billion active social media users across various platforms, there’s a huge opportunity for brands to reach their target audience and establish meaningful relationships with them.
However, as more businesses flock to social media to promote their brands, the need to stand out from the crowd becomes more apparent. This is because the influx of brands on social media has also increased the rate of vendor or purchase scams, making it increasingly difficult for customers to trust genuine brands.
Therefore, to stand out on social media and build a timeless brand, you must win the trust and loyalty of your target audience. Establishing brand trust and loyalty has a huge, direct impact on sales, as customers don’t mind paying more to get a product provided it comes from a brand they trust.
A survey by Salsify in the US says that 46 percent of consumers would pay more to buy from brands they can trust. In another report by Edelman, 81 percent of consumers said they need to trust a brand to consider buying from it.
Building brand trust is essential for a business to succeed in the long term, and social media plays a huge role in this process. But how do you establish brand trust through social media? This article will guide you right.
Steps to Establish Brand Trust Through Social Media
- Know Your Audience
The first step in establishing brand trust on social media is researching your audience. This research involves understanding their pain points, expectations, and purchase history.
The information gathered from the research will help you tailor your brand message to resonate with your audience. Without understanding your audiences’ sentiments towards your brand, it’s difficult to deliver the brand experience they desire.
To monitor conversations among your prospects, use social listening tools like Sprout Social, Buzzsumo, etc.
- Build Relationships with Your Audience
Once you know your audience and their pains, experiences, and expectations of your brand, building relationships with them becomes easy.
Building relationships with your audience is as simple as engaging them actively on all social media platforms. Take a genuine interest in their concerns, respond to their comments, and promise to resolve their issues. Then follow it up by addressing those complaints they have on time.
Encourage user-generated content by reposting them and rewarding your customers who took the time to create them. This act helps make your brand more authentic and trustworthy.
- Maintain Consistency in Branding
Consistency is critical to a brand’s success, especially in a dynamic space like social media. Customers will easily forget your brand if you change voice, messaging, and visuals without remorse.
Maintaining consistency in design and content across all social media platforms helps make your brand trustworthy to your target audience. This is because consistency across all channels makes your brand recognizable wherever the consumer encounters it.
Customers trust familiarity. So, any interaction that conflicts with the usual brand experience provides extreme contradictions that could lead to a loss of trust in a brand.
- Provide Immeasurable Value
Nothing gets customers to trust a brand more than when they make a purchase that meets or exceeds their expectations. Brands that know this focus heavily on delivering exceptional value through their products and services.
Delivering value to your customers is a surefire way to promote your business, as your products do the marketing themselves. Customers would happily share reviews about your products with their audiences, thereby expanding your reach.
With most of your customers sharing positive feedback about your brand on social media, potential customers find it easier to trust your brand.
Providing value also involves employing a content marketing strategy that addresses most industry needs. This means answering your audience’s questions while subtly relating to how your products can solve their needs. An effective content marketing strategy establishes you as an industry authority and makes you trustworthy.
- Be Transparent and Honest
Brands that are transparent and honest in their social media dealings with customers earn their trust and loyalty easily. Customers want to do business with brands that will not deny them when things go wrong.
A report by Sprout Social says that 86 percent of Americans believe transparency from businesses is more important than ever before. In the same report, Sprout Social reported that 89 percent of people would trust a brand again if it admitted to a mistake and gave transparent steps it would take to resolve the issue.
Integrity is everything in business, especially when dealing with people on social media. Brands with a history of not being transparent with customers find it difficult to establish brand trust on social media.
- Monitor and Respond to Feedback
Smart businesses are conscious of how valuable customer feedback is and how it can help them establish trust and loyalty on social media. They encourage their customers to leave feedback after every purchase or service to enable them to deliver an effective customer experience.
To establish trust on social media, ensure you monitor and respond to your customers’ feedback always. But do not stop there. Proceed to implement the feedback to improve your services and share the results to gain trust and loyalty on social media.
Conclusion – Establishing Brand Trust on Social Media
Future-minded brands invest heavily in social media to gain the trust and loyalty of their customers. They understand how valuable the trust of the over 4.5 billion people on social media could be to a brand.
Words spread fast among social media users, and when it comes to brand evangelism, they do it freely for the brand that gives them the best experience. Having a genuine interest in your target audience is the first step in the process of establishing brand trust on social media.
Do deep research about their preferences and expectations, especially from brands like yours, and take steps to meet them. Meeting those needs and expectations establishes a strong relationship you never expected could exist between people and your brand on social media.
To consolidate trust and relationships, ensure you keep delivering value and maintaining consistency in your brand’s visuals, messaging, and voice. Being transparent and honest with your target audience is another way to build or repair broken trust.
Establishing brand trust is a walk in the park for brands that go out of their way to deliver exceptional brand and customer experiences.
