Leveraging Content to Build Trust and Gain Customers

 

The days of in-your-face offers and out-of-nowhere deals are long gone. In modern marketing, trust is the name of the game. The most successful brands are the ones who manage to establish relationships with their audiences, leveraging their recognizability, product quality, and thought leadership to make long-term profits and expand their client base. If long-term customer relationships built on trust are the end goal, then inbound marketing is the name of the game. This branch of marketing aims to help your brand build a foundation of trust with your customers. As they go through the buyer’s journey, your goal is to provide useful, quality content that addresses the needs and pain points experienced by your audience as they become more and more familiar with your brand. That begins with establishing a foundation of trust right when these audience members first come across your brand or offers. To learn more about the buyer’s journey and how to build trust and gain customers through quality content, keep on reading!

 

The Buyer’s Journey Explained 

The Buyer’s Journey is the natural psychological process a prospective customer goes through before investing in a good or service. Generally, it is broken down into four major phases: awareness, consideration, decision, and delight. 

As a company, your job is to create a campaign that ushers your prospective customers along this journey. This is done by offering content that anticipates and addresses the questions, needs, and issues they may have at each phase of the Buyer’s Journey. Your job is to deliver useful information, emotional appeal, or another kind of value that matters to your audience and makes them consider you a thought leader in your industry. 

 

The Buyer Persona at the Root of It All

That all sounds great, but how can you accurately anticipate the needs and questions your audience members will have as you create content? The answer is simple: create a well-researched, comprehensive buyer persona. 

A buyer persona is a semi-fictional biography of your ideal customer. It uses real, factual information about your current (and ideal) demographics to outline biographical markers like age, income, marital status, assets, and occupation of your ultimate client. Then, it makes predictions about things like their purchasing habits, personal values, pet peeves, and technological dependence. The aim of a buyer persona is to give you a specific kind of person to tailor your content towards. It will not accurately represent every single individual you reach, but it will anticipate the needs of your key demographic. 

 

Ultimately, the way to build trust and gain customers is to drive genuine value. The buyer’s journey is, in reality, a fantastic opportunity for your brand to share its expertise with the world. Thought leadership is at the core of a successful buyer’s journey: when your knowledge is strategically combined with a behavior-driven sales strategy, a successful buyer’s journey is born. To learn more about how to expertly design an effective campaign for your brand centered around the buyer’s journey, don’t hesitate to reach out to us. 

Read Kelly’s full article, Build Customer Trust and Better Sales with 4 Buyer Touch Points, on LivePlan.com