If you’ve ever questioned the authenticity of a content online, you’re not alone.
Just recently, a video featuring the CEO of Open AI, Sam Altman, made rounds on LinkedIn. If you check through the comments, you’ll find people questioning the video’s authenticity.
But whether the video is real or not is not the point here.
The point is that people are more cautious of online content than ever before.
As a business creating content on the internet to win customers, you need to earn and sustain trust.
It’s also why you should prioritize authority-building. By positioning yourself as a reputable source of invaluable knowledge, you’ll significantly reduce the barrier to trust.
This article will show you up-to-date ways of building trust and authority with content marketing.
1 – Conduct original research
According study by Buzzsumo and Mantis Research, 56% of marketers surveyed said original research either met or exceeded their expectations.
Five years later, AI is in the wild, churning out thousands of words in seconds. The internet is choking with rehashed information.
What does this tell you?
Research reports will be more important than ever. Because it’s based on fact and AI is incapable of creating fact, only finding secondary information.
Depending on the relevance of your topic, your report can spark interesting conversations, attract new eyeballs to your brand, and position you as a thought leader.
Journalists eat up original research like hot donuts as they need it to validate their assertions.
If you position your site as a primary data source, they’ll gladly give it a backlink like I did above with Buzzsumo and will do throughout this article.
This helps build authority on search engines and encourages readers to click through to your site.
This report by Semrush also shows that content marketers will continually need it to create content that ranks high on search engines.
At the time of writing, the Semrush report has amassed 4,600 backlinks from 2,200 sites.
If you’re unfamiliar with backlinks, they’re an important authority signal Google uses to rank content higher.
Ahrefs published an original report article titled “I tested premium AI prompts to see if they’re worth it. They’re not”.
Here’s the impressive number of backlinks it has garnered in three weeks.
Like a gift that keeps giving, you can amplify the authority of original research by:
- Using it to validate your sales messages and marketing claims.
- Extracting topics to present in industry podcasts and events.
- Repurposing it into an actionable guide, an infographic, and social content with a thorough content distribution strategy.
Want more clicks on your content?
Download this Content Distribution Checklist.
2 – Create expert-led content
As AI has taken up the job of creating mundane content, you must be saying something worthwhile to earn a listen that builds trust in 2024 and beyond.
Besides original reports, another type of content you should create is expert-led content.
This type of content aims to answer these questions:
- “Who are you?”
- “How well do you know the topic?”
In this case, you’re expected to showcase first-hand knowledge and speak from a first-person point of view.
Google knows this, that’s why the first 2 letters in EEAT of their Quality Rater Guideline stand for Experience and Expertise.
To create genuine expert-led content, you need to be an expert in the field you’re writing about.
Anything else is secondary and deserves to rank below it.
Harsh? Maybe.
Correct? Probably.
Sure, you can interview someone who’s an expert or research til your eyes bleed, but that doesn’t make up for someone who’s lived the technology, been a customer, or configured the solution.
There is a major disconnect, however, when the subject matter expert isn’t skilled in writing “for Google” or even for humans.
They may know everything there is to know about the topic in question, but communicating it via written word may not be their forte.
If you are the expert or have experts in your business, here are some ways to convey expertise in your content:
- Share your first-hand experience
- Incorporate original videos and photos
- Use real-life case studies
- Give opinionated takes
- Give unique advice
- Tackle objections
There can be a compromise.
If you don’t have in-house experts who excel at writing blog posts and whitepapers, hire a niche agency or freelancer who combines both subject matter expertise and writing and marketing skills.
In the UC&C industry and need help with content?
Here are 12 unified comms writers you should hire.
3 – Diversify your content marketing channels
Picture this…
You visit LinkedIn and find an insightful post from this brand called “A”.
You search a keyword around their solution on Google and they show up. You keep on encountering them as you navigate Spotify, Twitter, and YouTube.
Conversely, there’s brand “B” that offers the same product, but you only find them when searching for specific queries on Google.
All factors being equal, which of these two brands are you most likely to trust?
It’s most likely A.
How did I know?
The mere exposure effect
The mere exposure effect is a psychological phenomenon that explains that the more often humans see something, the better we can process it.
And because we prefer easy cognitive processing, we’re more likely to choose familiar things over unfamiliar ones.
You can facilitate familiarity by meeting your audience at multiple touchpoints.
Start by identifying other platforms where your target audience hangs out and share platform-native content.
You can also repurpose your long-form blog posts into videos for YouTube, infographics for socials, and audio for podcasts.
The more you show up, the more memorable you’ll be.
Related Article: Get More Blog Traffic Without Writing New Posts 🚦
4 – Build topical authority
Topic cluster may have become a buzzword in content marketing, but it remains an indispensable strategy for building authority on Google.
It allows you to cover a topic holistically, making you the go-to source for it.
For example, it’s easy to consider Webex as an authority on the topic of online meetings because they’ve been doing it forever.
But the reverse is the case for a random business blog that has one or two pieces of content related to “unified communications”.
According to Google’s Quality Rater guidelines, Google considers your site an authority on a topic based on how much it is perceived as a go-to source for that topic.
And with authority comes easy (and faster) ranking and higher traffic.
Your goal must be to create a hub of deep, rich, and original content. Google will reward you and leads will follow.
Recommended Reading: Google’s Helpful Content Update: In Super Simple Terms
5 – Optimize for user-generated content (UGC)
UGC refers to genuine reviews of your product by real users without inducement.
It’s one of the most effective forms of social proof because its authenticity aligns with customers’ consistent behavior toward reviews.
Research by Tint showed that 72% of consumers consider reviews and testimonials from fellow customers more credible than brand statements about their products. That’s a hard stat to ignore.
The beauty of UGC is its cost-effectiveness. It requires nothing more than an excellent product and customer-centricity.
Flodesk, an email marketing platform, has enjoyed the dividend of UGC from day one as Martha Bitar, the co-founder, said in an interview with MeetEdgar:
To sustain UGC, you need to optimize user behavior.
In the same poll by Tint, 72% of users admit that they’ll accept a brand’s request to use their content. It really is only as hard as asking.
Flodesk has optimized its user behavior through strategies like:
- Reposting and engaging with tagged posts.
- Creating a Facebook community to foster user discussion.
- Embedding affiliate links in email footers to reward customers when a new customer discovers Flodesk via their email.
Take a cue from Flodesk. Analyze your organic user behavior and develop strategies to optimize it.
UGC Example: Hello Bar 101: Know Before You Buy 💰
6 – Leverage hyper-personalization
Humans love exclusivity as it creates a sense of relevance.
Hyper-personalization taps into this psychology by addressing the nuanced challenges of a specific audience and offering custom-made solutions. This level of specificity enhances their confidence and trust in both you and your solution.
But then, hyper-personalization can be hard to implement because it’s time-consuming and relies heavily on technology.
Before investing in it, consider answering these questions to maximize your effort.
- Do I truly understand my audience?
- Does my product justify the investment of time and money?
- Is my audience in the decision stage of their buyer journey?
Types of hyper-personalization include:
- Account-based marketing (ABM) to target high-paying clients or companies.
- Custom product demo to address the unique needs of a client.
- Product recommendation based on purchase or search history.
- Personalized emails to individual decision-makers within a company based on roles, interests, and behaviors.
Recommended Next Step: Book a long-form blog post 🖊️
7 – Build in public
The internet is a famous place for highlight reels. To stand out and appear credible, you need to show some vulnerability.
Building in public helps you achieve this by bringing your audience along on your journey to creating a product or project while being transparent.
Olly Meakings has grown his SaaS business through many marketing channels but none stronger than the #BuildInPublic community on Twitter.
By sharing his updates while creating a product, building a marketing funnel, and converting customers, he’s built trust with his existing audience while growing at the same time.
Translating this to an established B2B brand is hard but Slack does a good job, constantly engaging with product folks and customers in the public domain.
Likewise, the Microsoft Teams community, albeit not Microsoft-owned, is a great example of support and roadmap development very much not behind closed doors.
That’s not to say you have to disclose everything, of course 😉
Read Next: How To Get More Twitter Followers
8 – Strengthen brand consistency
The rise in deep fakes and identity theft in 2023 is a reminder to prioritize brand consistency.
After experiencing website cloning, AI Multiple recommended some preventive measures in a recent article. One of them is investing in branding to help your audience identify cloned versions of your website.
As you diversify your marketing channel and formats, ensure harmony in your brand look and message:
- Develop a style guide encompassing your brand’s font, color, and tone of voice to ensure alignment among marketing, graphic design, web, and product designers.
- Establish an editorial style guide specifying permissible and impermissible words, phrases, and topics.
Alex Lindley, managing editor at Semrush emphasized the importance of an editorial style guide in this LinkedIn post:
Recommended Course: Mini MBA in Brand Management 🎓
9 – Tap into the authority of influencers
Gone are the days when influencer marketing was just a B2C thing.
According to a report by Ogilvy, more than 93% of B2B marketers plan to use influencers.
Even more impressive, this Tomoson report reveals that businesses make $6.50 for every $1 spent on influencer marketing.
The reason for this rate of success is simple:
Trust transfer.
Influencers take time to build authority in their niches and nurture a fan base that trusts their recommendations.
An example of the power of trust transfer is the 800% increase in page views Demand Base recorded through influencer marketing.
That’s a staggering amount that would take serious time and effort if you were running a standard social media campaign.
Google also uses the same principle to determine the trustworthiness of a site. If sites with high domain authority link to you, Google will see that as endorsing your credibility. So when an influencer with a high trust in your niche links to you, that’s a great sign.
There are various ways to use influencers in your marketing efforts, but the chart below shows that content promotion is the most effective.
To engage influencers in promoting your content, consider these ways of collaboration:
- Create round-up articles featuring different expert opinions.
- Interview thought leaders for expert-led articles.
- Co-host a webinar or podcast with them.
It’s crucial to remember that success doesn’t come from collaborating with just any influencer, but with those who have earned the trust of their followers.
Influencer Marketing Example: 50 Microsoft Teams Influencers You Need To Follow ⏭️
10 – Put a face to your brand
If you don’t know what a desert looks like, visit LinkedIn company pages.
Rarely do they get engagement.
This is to tell you that people are drawn to profiles with faces, not logos. Faces create connection and familiarity, making it easier to build trust.
Nobody does this better than Andy Crestodina. His brand, Orbit Media, isn’t recognizable by its logo or its branding. It’s recognizable by Andy’s face.
He’s the face of webinars, infographics, and social posts. You name it, if Orbit Media is creating something, his face is attached to it. Check out Orbit Media’s YouTube channel as a prime example.
Another great example is Tom Arbuthnot, now co-founder of Empowering.Cloud. For a long time, you saw Tom’s face speaking on a panel or reading a blog post and you knew he worked for Modality Systems.
His Microsoft expertise was a big draw for customers to engage with Modality. And it’s a massive draw for Microsoft users, admins, and sponsors to flock to his new company.
If a recognized expert is part of your company, it’s something to shout about.
You don’t have to plaster their face everywhere, and it’s easier to invest in this if the person is a shareholder, co-founder, or senior management, but putting a face to a brand can be such a strong builder of trust in B2B content marketing.
As fake unwinds into reality, embracing every opportunity to humanize your brand should no longer be a debate.
Consider these items when thinking about adding faces to your brand:
- Prioritize human videos and images over animations
- Encourage your employees to build their personal brands
- Add author photos to your blog posts
- Host and attend physical events
- Stream more live videos
Stop showing up as a business and start showing up as humans.
Read Next: Should You Include An Author On A Company Blog Post? 🤔
Building trust and authority with content marketing
Though the stakes for building trust and authority with content marketing are higher now than ever, brands that align themselves with effective strategies will shine.
By implementing the strategies above, you’ll prioritize your audience’s interests, create exceptional content, and nurture a relationship that’ll earn you trust and establish you as an authority before your audience and Google.
