Your Marketing Will Sink in Quicksand without This One Thing

What do working relationships, romantic relationships, and marketing all have in common? They require trust to function properly. Just like a marriage cannot thrive when two partners do not trust each other, a business cannot effectively reach their target consumers when their credibility is tarnished or simply not yet developed. Rather than trying to directly sell products and services, businesses of all kinds benefit immensely from cultivating a relationship of mutual trust with their customer base. This trust, in the words of college basketball coach Bill Carmody, “transforms the relationship from one of buyer and seller to the preferred position of subject matter expert and interested party.”

Use Rich Content to Build Credibility

Society has significantly changed since the days when authority figures were automatically trusted because they held power. Our world has become far more transparent, and this has revealed frightening and disappointing breaches of trust from authority figures across the board. This is why trust now needs to be earned and maintained. For businesses, aside from providing goods and services that meet the promises you give customers, one of the most powerful ways you can build trust is to develop engaging and compelling content.

The type of relevant content that will boost your company’s credibility should vividly demonstrate your subject matter expertise, provide the reader with something significant, and encourage sharing among other readers. In an online market absolutely saturated with content, much of it silly or meaningless, supplying your readers with longer and professionally written articles will help you stand out from the crowd. Known as long-form articles, these pieces are far more detailed and give you the opportunity to fully prove that your company has valuable knowledge to share on the given topic.

Content in long-form not only benefits your business with its immediate message, but it also improves your visibility on Google and social media. Millions of social media users are eager to share long, comprehensive articles about topics they feel passionate toward, which means that your long-form could generate hundreds or thousands of shares and views if it inspires viewers in the right way. This puts your business name in front of many new potential customers and helps them remember your brand name as a source of authority and credibility. Similarly, Google rewards longer posts with higher rankings.

While creating trust through these channels isn’t immediate, it is far more sustainable and offers incredible long term benefits for any type of company.