5 Steps Towards Building Brand Credibility

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These days, businesses rise and fall at the drop of a hat. So what sets apart a brand that succeeds versus one that doesn’t in this volatile market?

Brands that create relationships with their customers and gain their trust and loyalty are much more likely to succeed.

5 Steps Towards Building Brand Credibility

Building credibility through trust and transparency may seem like an uphill battle, but it’s an important step in establishing a good reputation and it’s imperative to get started sooner rather than later.

Here are some strategies to help build brand credibility:

Define Your Brand

Before you even get started building your credibility, you should know exactly what your goals are for your brand. Have a mission and values laid out, and use those to define your brand voice and personality.

Define what your brand’s boundaries are and how you want to talk about yourself so that you know how to proceed to portray your company to the general public.

Decide what would make you feel like your company has established itself as a respected brand within the industry.

Whatever that answer is, you need to use that as your goalpost when building credibility.

Talk About It

Your brand needs a platform for building trust, transparently, and credibility and your website and blog are a great place to start.

Creating content around your brand’s mission and values help people understand that you are a thought leader in your field and will attract people to your page.

In addition, content will help your SEO value so you will have more visibility online as well.

You can use your website and blog to share tips, tricks, tutorials, spread the good news about your company or product, and share commentary and opinions about the industry.

Make sure your website is up-to-date and in good working order so people aren’t deterred once they get there and will be more likely to browse around.

blog on website for credibility

Be Authentic and Transparent

In the time of “fake news”, scams, and shady marketing tactics, your audience is wary of brand motivations and tend to make decisions based on how genuine they perceive a company to be.

This is why authenticity and transparency need to be a critical part of your communication. But being authentic and transparent isn’t just about saying what you think people want to hear.

It is about understanding what you believe and putting that out into the world so you can attract the audience that feel the same way.

Authentic brands gain loyal followings, and more than that, those loyal followers will be more likely to share the good news with their friends and loved ones.

Look for opportunities to share your brand authentically, whether it’s on your website, on your social media, at events, or within your location.

Be open to your audience and they will be loyal to you forever.

Stop, Look, and Listen

One of the best ways to build credibility is to always listen to your audience.

How do you find out if your brand is resonating? How do you know your audience is loyal? How do you know if there are some changes you could make to make your product or service just a little bit better?

By listening to your audience and really hearing what they say. By taking the real feedback and putting it to good use.

Listening is a big part of engaging with your audience, so be approachable, be accessible, and always acknowledge feedback.

In addition to actually communicating and engaging with your audience, you can get a lot of feedback from your web and blog analytics to understand what is resonating and what people consider to be thought leadership material.

analytics help credibility

Be Prepared for the Worst

Finally, it’s always important to be prepared for something to go wrong. Nobody wants things to go wrong, and it’s everyone’s goal to try to keep things on the right track, but you can’t control everything.

Sometimes you might make a misstep, or maybe it’s just some negative publicity.

It’s best to always be prepared and to stick to your brand’s authenticity.

Responding in a way that aligns with your brand and facing the music will sometimes even help your brand look even more authentic and credible in the eyes of your most loyal audience members.

SEE ALSO: 7 Powerful Ways to Build a Great Brand Reputation

Conclusion

Building credibility for a brand doesn’t happen easily and it doesn’t happen in a vacuum.

That being said, a commitment to authenticity and consistency will carry your brand to a point where your audience will trust in it and will consider it an industry leader in the market.

If you believe in what you’re doing and do it well, stay committed to that and the rest will follow.

What’s the biggest roadblock that you’ve faced when trying to build brand credibility? Let me know in the comments.

Written by
Juntae DeLane

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