Build trust and drive loyalty.

The essential asset that helps you build that trust and ultimately, to garner that loyalty, is your brand.

Gaining brand loyalty actually begins with building trust. Brand trust is the level of confidence that your target audience has in you — your business, your product or service offer — and how they inherently believe you will deliver on your promise. Earning a high level of brand trust in your market makes the difference between someone choosing your brand or another option.

Reviewing, improving and consistently managing each of the above factors helps you build strong brand trust with your target audience. In turn, that trust will help create loyalty for your brand, ultimately allowing you to grow your top line and your customer base.

Where to start?

Offer quality and cost-quality ratio.

These two factors are closely connected.

Focus on the quality of your product or service offer and be sure that it matches the brand promise and messaging that you’ve communicated in the marketplace.

Make sure the cost and quality align with your target market’s expectations. If you make the cheapest widget and advertise as such, that’s fine. But even the cheapest widget needs to work as intended. If you sell millions of widgets that don’t work, no one will talk about your low price. Rather, their reviews of your brand will be focused on the disappointment they have — money wasted on a product that doesn’t work.

We all remember experiences that are thoughtful, easy and pleasant. B2C or B2B — it’s a human experience regardless of the product or service. There is a real person making the decision to purchase and they experience the customer journey your business has curated. Make sure it’s a positive one. The quality of your product or service won’t negate a frustrating customer experience. Create a process to gain feedback and make enhancements to the buying process based on the input. Understand your customer and deliver the experience they expect.

Mistakes and missteps happen to everyone. When they do, you need to have an adept and empathetic customer service team, ready to make it right. Great customer service is vital to ensure that trust, loyalty and patronage are not eroded when a mistake occurs. In fact, studies have shown that great customer service can engender far deeper brand trust, despite a mistake occuring. Provide customer surveys and collect the metrics. Then test and train your customer support staff. This will help continue to build trust, despite the inevitable speed bumps.

An important part of your brand identity is your brand promise — your commitment to deliver a specific and consistent experience to your customers. Your brand promise, together with your communicated brand values, build an expectation about your business to your audience. While it is vital to promote a strong brand promise and admirable values, it’s even more important to ensure those messages accurately reflect your business and your offer. Authenticity is key to attract customers who feel strongly about those principles.

The takeaway.

With these sensible approaches to build trust, and supported by an effective brand management plan, you can create a reputation that helps attract new customers and keep current customers loyal.