The secret to creating more revenue, attracting more customers, and creating high brand recognition starts with trust. Showing your customers by your actions that they can trust you and that you will be there to support them is how you grow loyal advocates for your brand. The brand advocates then do a lot of the marketing work by sharing your content and making purchases.
When consumers believe in your brand, product, or services, they are more likely to share them with others. Without trust, you simply won’t have customers or a community. In fact, a 2019 Edelman Trust Barometer Report states that 81% of consumers reported trust as their main contributor to making a purchase. Thus, showing you just how important trust is to your success as a company.
The following are five ways to build trust within your community to grow your business successfully:
Offer Superior Customer Support
First and most importantly, your customers or community members must come first. Your support should be as consumer-centric as you can make it. Use the technology at your fingertips by using automated systems like FAQs, Bots, and files with information to help your audience and members feel supported. If your community is very large and active and you’re spending more than 30 minutes a day on customer care, it’s time to hire a customer service, virtual assistant.
Share and Encourage User-Generated Content
One of the advantages of having a community is all the user-generated content created. You can use a lot of this content in numerous ways, from creating a new blog post answering someone’s question, compiling your members’ answers to questions into a blog post, and even creating a joint book that you can publish on Kindle. It’s really up to you and your imagination to accomplish all the user-generated content you will cause to be created.
Ask for Honest Public Reviews
Use your community as a way to get genuine and honest feedback. If you seem open to criticism, your community who already loves you will be happy to assist you with making your community and products and services better. You just have to ask and listen.
Show Behind-The-Scenes Content
This is a fantastic way to get closer to your members and make them feel like true VIPs. Bring them behind the scenes and show them what you do daily. Even if they never want to do it themselves, people love this humanizing content as it brings them much closer to you on a human level.
Keep Your Branding Consistent
Remember that within your communities, your branding should be very consistent and noticeable. Whether you’re on Facebook or YouTube or your own coded message board community, your audience needs to realize it’s your brand without much thought due to your strong and consistent branding efforts. Your messaging, imaging, and content all need to have the same message regardless of where it is published.
Overall, there are several ways you can establish trust within your community. Listening, supporting, and guiding them to success is the only way to establish it. In other words, putting your customers first and making sure they are successful will lead you to success as well. Building trust shouldn’t be hard if you have good products that truly solve your target audience’s problem.
How Community Member-To-Member Engagement Grows Your Business