If you want any meaningful relationships with your target market, you’ll need to foster and maintain brand trust. It’s easier said than done – we know.
But it’s not impossible to achieve. With this in mind, you should never consider this concept as an add-on or a nice-to-have. That’s because your customer base won’t buy from your brand without it.
An astounding 81% of consumers need to trust a brand to consider buying from it. This vast majority of your target market doesn’t represent those who will actually make a purchase, rather those who will even consider buying from your brand.
You’ll need to establish brand trust for your company if you want your business to survive and thrive. You’ll also need to use viable methods that help instill a sense of trust in your brand.
This blog post will help you with just that.
This article explains brand trust in-depth and teaches you how to build it with out-of-home (OOH) advertising, specifically with DOOH (digital-out-of-home) advertising.
What is brand trust
Brand trust is a term used to describe the connection between shoppers and brands. Specifically, brand trust refers to the amount of respect, loyalty and perception of credibility that customers have of a brand.
It also greatly deals with how well your buyers believe what you claim, whether that involves the potency of a product, your offerings of great customer experience (CX), or your brand being able to deliver any of its promises.
This concept is usually associated with brand equity, brand love (or brand affinity) and brand loyalty, although the latter is more of an outcome of a strong brand trust.
This kind of connection is one of the major perceptions that customers hold of a brand, molded by a variety of experiences in their CX, such as interacting with your company in the digital space, on the phone or in person, along with seeing your advertisements.
Brand trust can also be affected by how well your brand operates by the values that it declares to live by. It is also affected by both internal and external factors (more on this in the Factors section).
How do you measure brand trust
You can detect and measure this connection through questionnaires and specific market research tools like the Edelman Trust Barometer, the Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) surveys. The data from these tools allows you to understand how trustworthy your brand is in the minds of your potential and current customers.
You can also gauge your trust around your own sales, reviews and engagement with your brand. It’s also critical to keep an eye on any mentions of your brand online, whether it’s through major publications or your own customers.
Brand trust does not always equate to repeat customers or customer retention. Rather, it exists as the positive feelings around your brand, the kind where your customers consider you credible enough to engage with your brand and patronize it.
You can measure these feelings with several tools, some of which are mentioned above, to get a sense of what your customers think about your brand and if you’ve earned their trust.
The factors of brand trust
As we noted earlier, brand trust is shaped by various feelings and experiences that customers undergo in their CX with your brand. In today’s landscape, brand trust is usually based on several major facets.
The following factors have the biggest sway on brand trust. Here you’ll also find some advice on how to increase trust within these categories:
- The quality of your products and services
- This includes how well your products work &
- The durability of your products
- Customer service experience
- Whether through communicating through chat or:
- Phone support
- Mail-in product support
- Interactions in-store
- Speed of support and accuracy of support
- Treatment of customers
- Whether through communicating through chat or:
- Data security and privacy
- Warning customers that your website uses cookies.
- Assuring customers that you won’t share or sell their data.
- Public perception
- Ratings
- Reviews
- Comments (online)
- Over-the-phone commentary on CX and any other concern
- Brand mission, values, and reputation
- Make sure you deliver on your mission statement(s) and values.
- You can do so through your advertising and marketing efforts.
- Make sure you deliver on your mission statement(s) and values.
- Political or philanthropic efforts
- This is important to uphold especially if it aligns with your values and mission.
- You can publicize it through marketing and sales collateral.
- Pricing
- Costs, promotions and sales
- The cost-to-quality ratio
- Employee relations
- Make sure to treat your employees well, as this reflects on your business.
- A great CX
- Optimize your experiences both online and in-store.
- Don’t hassle your customers with annoying online ads that cause advertising fatigue.
External factors that affect brand trust
Unfortunately, there are sometimes external factors that affect your brand trust, which deal with experiences and communications relayed not by your brand, but to those outside of it. This can include commentary from your competitors (think ads that negatively portray your brand), your current and former customers and publications of various sizes.
These actors can affect your trust through outlets such as online reviews, social media mentions, social media reviews, rating and review websites, news publications, bloggers, influencers, forums and other sources.
While these external sources do not necessarily spell out tarnishing your brand trust and reputation, it is key to stay vigilant and provide the best CX to avoid any negative associations with your brand. When you avoid this, no one will feel compelled to speak negatively about it.
Why is brand trust important for your business (and brand)
If the above didn’t signal the importance of this connection, the following will.
Firstly, building brand trust is important because it can be a critical factor for shoppers when choosing which brand to buy from. A solid amount of brand trust in your company will lead to customers choosing your brand over your competitors.
In fact, with low brand trust, forget about having any customers at all. To reiterate the data point in the intro, 81% of customers need to trust a brand before they would even consider buying from it. So when reaching out to potential customers (those who have never bought from you), it’s key to develop a sense of trust with your brand.
Before you land a customer, they’ll need to trust you. You can do this through the delivery of a great CX and brand consistency in your marketing and advertising. This helps clarify your key messages and selling points and will serve to help you deliver your promises to consumers.
Let’s say you already have a solid customer base of paying customers. You still need to maintain brand trust indefinitely, as it fluctuates and customers are prone to leaving when they don’t trust your brand. In fact, 86% of customers leave a brand they trusted after just a few poor experiences.
This sentiment is also a vital part of your marketing strategy and this includes advertising as well. This is because not all your ads will focus on selling a product. Instead, ads are meant to be vessels that build your brand, fortifying brand recall, brand lift and all other concepts relevant to branding, including upping your trust levels.
Thus, building and reinforcing trust is a major part of your marketing strategy, as this purpose should be used to inform many of your marketing efforts, including ads.
Trust is also one of the building blocks of loyalty, which is a must for any brand that seeks to stay afloat. Any marketing publication will tell you the importance of customer retention, which requires loyalty. Your customers will need to trust you to frequent your business continuously. When they trust you enough to do business with you, they’ll know exactly where to go next time.
Lasty, brand trust is so powerful that it spurs people into paying more. At 46%, nearly half of customers are willing to pay more for a brand they trust. You wouldn’t want to miss out on this opportunity. We suggest you work towards building and maintaining your trust.
How to build brand trust with digital billboards
You can gain brand trust with digital billboards, the foremost kind of DOOH advertising, which refers to digital out-of-home advertising. Billboards have a remarkable 497% return on investment, according to the Out of Home Advertising Association of America (OAAA).
Digital billboards, also called digital signage, simply can’t be ignored. And they aren’t. A heaping 70% of Americans see digital signage in public venues and 135 million people see digital signage each week. This reach is bigger than many social media platforms. You’ll never worry about members of your target market missing your messages on DOOH ads.
With billboards, you can address your customers’ biggest pain points, misgivings and needs. You can also accentuate all the benefits of your brand and churn out messages with brand consistency. In turn, you can then deliver on the claims you make on your boards, thereby growing trust among would-be and current buyers.
When you deploy billboard campaigns over a long period of time, your customers’ eyes will constantly be glued to your advertising. You’ll therefore nurture their trust on a long-term, gradual level, since you’re constantly keeping them engaged.
What’s best is that digital billboards don’t hamper your CX. As aforesaid, a strong CX is a prerequisite to building trust. Unlike online ads that pop up at the worst times, digital billboards are non-intrusive. They are simply part of the environment; they don’t foist themselves in your customers’ faces and screens.
We suggest using a strong DOOH platform to optimize your digital signage campaigns.
Nurture brand trust with the best DOOH platform
Now that you know that brand trust is an essential differentiator in all market conditions, you’ll need to use a proven DOOH platform; luckily, you have Blip Billboards.
Blip removes the need to use third-party agencies; it grants you full control over your digital boards. Our platform enables you to upload your ad design, create it using our templates, choose your boards’ locations, schedule your ads, bid on blips (8-15-second ad slots), get your ad approved and analyze your DOOH campaign.
Where else are you going to find such a powerhouse of a digital OOH platform? Now get started strengthening and building your trust and beating out the competition.
