4 Simple but Strong Ways Agencies Boost Brand Trust

Marketing agencies want you to trust them to enhance your brand the same way that you want customers to trust you to provide the information and products or services they need. Your company must create trust with prospects and customers to maintain strong long-term relationships with customers. These relationships are the lifeblood of a B2B company and they’re bolstered completely by brand trust. Working with the right agency can establish your brand as a trustworthy thought leader in your industry.

Whether your brand is already partly established in the minds of your target market or your company isn’t even on the map in its industry, there’s a lot the right agency could add to make your brand more well-known and trusted. We’ll discuss the elements of a trusted brand, and then how an agency can help build each one.

As the 2019 B2B Trusted Brands Report reveals, trusted brands are those that:

1. Have a strong visual brand identity and consistent voice throughout all content
2. Make personal connections with customers after understanding their values and needs
3. Create and publish content that’s informative and entertaining, not just promotional
4. Use current marketing tactics to meet audiences where they are now

Let’s examine each of these points in detail:

1. Have a Strong Visual Brand Identity and Consistent Voice

What ideas and feelings do you want prospects and customers to have when they see your logo and other marketing materials? Is your company’s content conversational or polished and formal? Will your audience appreciate the authoritative touch of technical vocabulary, or would they find jargon clunky and off-putting?

These questions are important when building a brand, and the way an agency helps you answer them is how they’ll help your company establish a strong and consistent brand identity.

Working with an agency can help give your company access to design professionals who can, with your input, efficiently establish the appearance of your website, marketing materials, logos and more. Content marketing professionals at your agency will help you to establish the tone of voice your brand should use.

An agency can help answer all these questions and create a brand strategy or creative brief document that defines your brand’s logo, color palette, tone of voice and all the public mottos, slogans and messages your brand will use. It’s important to be decisive and nail down these attributes because consistency is one of the building blocks for brand trust. When customers remember and recognize your brand, they can start to build a trusting relationship with your company.

2. Make Personal Connections with Customers

2019 B2B Trusted Brands Report data demonstrates that the brands most trusted by customers focused on building personal connections by understanding their customers’ values and needs. To do that, companies create buyer personas.

Some agencies don’t consider this practice part of brand marketing, but it’s one of the key places that companies can get in touch with marketers. Buyer personas are fictional representations of your company’s ideal customer based on data and research. A buyer persona of your ideal customer includes:

• Psychographic data: likes, dislikes and relevant personality traits
• Demographic data: age range and income
• Professional data: job roles, responsibilities, objectives and challenges (this is the part your company helps with)

Your agency can develop buyer personas for your company by getting information from you and using their resources to gather data. These customer profiles will help both you and your agency connect with prospects by knowing what they value. Customers feel appreciated and invest time and trust when a company connects with them on what matters most.

3. Create Content That’s Informative and Entertaining, Not Just Promotional

Content that’s interesting and informative gives you a chance to connect and communicate with customers and break free from the norm of companies “pitching” their products and services to customers non-stop. This is the essence of inbound marketing, a school of marketing that has grown in prominence in the last decade.

Many agencies, particularly those that work with inbound marketing software giant HubSpot, provide expert service in inbound marketing. Inbound marketing content includes resources like blogs, eBooks, videos, infographics and more. These resources will be relevant to what your customers are looking for, without simply selling them your product.

Quality content resources establish your brand as a thought leader in its industry, which is a stepping stone on the way to building a trusted brand. When prospects and customers encounter your content and gain valuable information from it, they’ll look to you as a trusted source of information.

Making interesting and informative content takes time, energy and lots of research. Having an agency with an experienced team that can efficiently create compelling content frees up your time and saves your company money.

4. Use Current Marketing Tactics

Across the board, brands that B2B customers trust used marketing tactics “of the moment.” That doesn’t mean they were using technologies other brands hadn’t heard of yet. Instead, it means they were using the social platforms and content formats that customers use the most, presenting their messages the way customers would most comfortably receive them. Using current tactics builds trust by making your brand accessible and relatable to customers.

One popular format video marketing at the moment is the text-only video. These videos are short and have limited on-screen text with relevant background images. They can accompany long-form content like blog posts, serving as a sort of trailer for blogs when shared on social media. These videos are easy to create, but only if you know how. That’s where an agency comes in.

Agencies know what customers want to see, read and hear, and have the skills to create that content. Your agency’s team should be up-to-date on all current and popular marketing tactics so that your brand doesn’t miss any opportunities to connect with customers.

Wrapping Up

Agencies are a brand’s best friend. Since agency marketers can see the big picture and offer an outside, informed perspective on your company, their guidance is irreplaceable. When you look for an agency to help you boost your brand and build trust with customers, look for one that offers a full suite of branding services. You want an agency that establishes your brand and puts strategy first, without just jumping into deploying marketing tactics. With the right agency’s help, your company will be ranking as a highly trusted B2B brand in no time.