There’s a lot of hullabaloo going on about how to help your brand become credible, especially for startups. Often, those tricks are challenging to understand and meander through unheard-of things that claim to give overnight success. When in truth, most of them exceed the budget and don’t really work in the long run.
At the end of the day, no matter what tricks you may start implementing in your operations, there are no shortcuts. Building long term success for your brand takes a fair amount of work and we are going to talk about them today.
Here’s a quick rundown of what you should do:
Becoming a credible brand will improve the way your audience sees you. How much trust your audience will give you depends on it. Brands that people trust usually close more sales faster, rank higher, and ultimately, become more noteworthy.
The factors you should consider when building credibility are quality, trust, transparency, and presence.
Creating a brand that falls short on having these attributes can lead to reputation damage, poor brand experience, lack of investors, among others.
Start with a good product or service
You can have the best marketing team and a vault full of budget, but if the very thing you are marketing is bad, you may be doomed from the start.
Ensuring you have a good product is the first step to becoming a credible brand.
Tap into markets with a good opportunity and maintain the quality of whatever it is you are offering. Remember that you shouldn’t stop at developing a competent product. You also need to work on consistently meeting that same quality.
But don’t fret if you discover you think your product has some flaws. You can always pull a big comeback just like Domino’s Pizza.
The pizza chain used to receive less than ideal feedback, one even went as far as saying that their product “tastes like cardboard.” Their image took a hit. Eventually, the pizza found itself at the end of the race. But instead of succumbing, they heard their customers out and went back to the market stronger with a better product. Domino’s Pizza emerged and outperformed its competitors.
Feature testimonials
User-generated content is your friend.
Social proof is a persuasive way to prove your value to potential customers. This is extremely important now that 81% of consumers now research a product before making a purchase.
The perception of your brand improves when people read good reviews of your product or service. We’re not just saying this, too. This is backed by actual research. A study by Big Commerce found that social proof boosts the trust of 72% consumers.
What are affordable ways to do this? Often, people display testimonials through social media or sprawled on their website design.
While you’re at it, work on your Google Reviews. This is a feature of Google My Business that allows users to rate a brand according to their experience. Embed Google Reviews helps you improve your search rankings as a form of social proof.
This is one of the many ways you can establish expertise, authority, and trust—three attributes the algorithm favors.
Hear your customers out
Brands experience loss because of bad customer service. Annually, $62 billion is lost by companies in the United States. Many failed startups actually cite this as one of the reasons behind their lack of success as well. It belongs in the top 10, too. This is a problem shared by both startups and established companies.
This is actually one way to retain customers and drive brand loyalty.
A study found that people who experience bad customer service are more likely to look for an alternative.
It would be valuable for small businesses to focus on retaining more customers because it costs way less than to acquire new ones. But if you do not have the resources and the budget to solidify a customer service team, you should try using social media. It can be used as a way for you to get feedback and take questions from your current customers.
For a bigger volume of work, you can opt to use free customer service tools on the internet. These tools usually come with a limited number of agents. The average limit is three, which works well for small and medium businesses.
Tap into digital marketing
Gone are the days when leave-behind materials were the stars of marketing. They now share the stage with digital marketing. Today, digital content marketing is one of the fastest-growing practices when it comes to brand awareness.
There is a good reason why marketers say that marketing plans must take on a digital-approach.
Like we have mentioned, a significant portion of consumers use online means to research a product and make a decision to purchase it. Poor digital presence may steer them away from you.
Companies are now proving their value and their expertise through content. Mostly because it is a powerful way to attract consumers and partly because it is a much cheaper campaign than traditional ones. For startups, the best digital marketing channels to explore are email and social media marketing. There is a wide range of options, but these two are definitely among the popular ones and for good reason.
Startups that plan on creating an email marketing campaign will find value in strategies like welcome and promotion emails. You can also grow engagement by implementing a responsive design.
Social media is a popular channel because it helps you connect with target customers easily.
You can even collect data to help you improve your operations. You can easily use trends to create relevant content. One of the platforms that let you do this is Instagram.
Besides hashtags and location features, it has an Insight feature that allows businesses to take a closer look at their engagements. You can see what age range, gender, and other demographic-related information of people responding to your posts.
Creating social media content is a great way to connect with your audience and make your startup more visible. However, you should also make sure that your content is true, research-backed, and authentic. With the rise of AI Image generator tools, there’s also a rise of AI generated media that blur the line between fiction and reality. As much as possible, create your own images with your own hand or use some AI verification tools to check your content.
It is now more important than ever
Currently, businesses are resorting to digital means of reaching out to audiences because of lockdowns. If you want to read about how brands can maneuver through this trying time, you can learn more about the COVID-19 survival kit for small businesses.
Make use of good design
You often see company websites that have an underwhelming design.
This is a common move for brands that are saving money. However, businesses that invest in good graphic design actually end up saving more money. There will be no need for them to spend time and money on redesigning their material in the future.
Another benefit of effective graphic design is looking more professional and trustworthy as a company. Brands who make an effort to ensure quality graphics do significantly better than businesses who don’t.
Graphic design can come in a long list of forms like social media images, email, and more.
People say that a picture paints a thousand words, right?. This is true for the most part and especially true when it comes to branding.
Branding is the act of characterizing your company through a unified tone, voice, and style. And it all starts with a logo. This is the most basic unit of any branding kit. A brand logo sets you apart from the competition.
Give your brand a strong start with a logo to make the first impression last. You can get better odds at running a logo design contest so you can have a lot of design bids to choose from. If you want a logo custom-made by graphic designers online.
Learn and turn your startup into something more:
Written by DesignCrowd on Tuesday, April 28, 2020
DesignCrowd is an online marketplace providing logo, website, print and graphic design services by providing access to freelance graphic designers and design studios around the world.