A single piece of content can have a lot of different jobs to do, like:
- Attracting prospects
- Educating
- Engaging customers
- Building trust
Each aspect of your contents purpose is important, but for right now I just want to focus on the last, building trust.
Building Trust
Building trust is vitally important to effective content marketing. Your online presence should make your prospects believe you are capable, skilled, and above all trustworthy. Prospects need to believe you are trustworthy because without a base of trust to build your relationship on there can be no sale at the end of the tunnel.
Content is an effective, relatively easy way to build trust. There are, of course, other ways of building trust but most of them take time. Things like being an active, engaged part of your industry or cultivating individual business relationships can take years to do, but creating content can be done in an afternoon.
Communication
Content can help foster trust because it allows you to communicate. For example, imagine two company blogs: one blog is filled with press releases and company news while the second blog actively posts "how to" content, reviews of articles, analysis of industry trends, and testimonials. Which do you think is more engaging, the blog that focuses inward or the blog that focuses on the bigger picture?
Both blogs would be full of content and both would be communicating, but they communicate vastly different things. One tells a story about a
company that thinks the only things they have to say are about themselves. They other tells the story of a company that is actively engage, immersed in, and respected in their industry.
Content that falls in line with the second blog is how you build trust. When prospects see that kind of content from you, they begin to believe you can be trusted to give them good information. And that is the first step to being seen as trustworthy.
The Next Step
If you are looking for more ways to take your expertise and translate it into killer content that builds trust, then you should check out the new book from HubSpot co-founders Brian Halligan & Dharmesh Shah, Inbound Marketing: Attract, Engage, and Delight Customers Online. The book is a comprehensive guide on how to provide the best digital experience for prospects, leads, and customers.
While you're at it, check out our book on how to apply inbound principles to all aspects of your organization.
