Trust is a rare commodity.
A phrase you’ve likely heard before, and one that is certainly accurate in the business world.
You’re more likely to do business with or buy something from brands you trust. As a business owner or brand, finding opportunities to develop and deepen this relationship with your audience pays dividends throughout the customer journey.
Blogging for trust is one way to achieve this, especially when you’re aiming to create meaningful touchpoints that guide and support your audience.
Buyers are becoming more cautious and research-driven. I can’t count the number of times I’ve dismissed a product because of one bad review, and I consider myself very lax with social proof.
Yet, if I’m doing it, how many others are as well?
Trust in today’s market is non-negotiable and is taking longer than ever, especially in service-based businesses. That said, blogging provides an effective means for your business to build that trust and additional touchpoints with your users. Here’s how.
How Blogging Plays a Unique Role in Trust-Building
Blogging is a unique channel in the sense that it’s not overtly a sales tool from a customer’s perspective, but it can absolutely achieve conversions and have meaningful trust-building results.
Blog posts do this by:
Giving You Space to Educate Without Selling
One of the common phrases I heard years ago during the boom of LinkedIn was, “No one likes being sold to, but people like to buy”.
Which, when you think about it, is true.
Ads and sales-led email campaigns certainly work for some, especially if you can capture a specific audience at the right stage of their journey. However, some people are straight averse to being directly sold to.
For that subset of your audience, creating an educational space where you can discuss the benefits of your service and product, answer questions, and solve problems builds a passive, trust-filled archive that can compound trust.
Over time, your blog will continue to build trust, act as authority-building content, influence buyer decisions, and have a strong internal linking strategy, such as linking to your service pages, contact forms, or lead magnets.
Consistency Signals Reliability
Have you ever found yourself engaging with a great piece of content, only to discover that when you look for more on the same site, it hasn’t been updated in years?
This is when the figurative ball is dropped.
In these moments, as consumers, we consider whether we can actually trust this brand to deliver its services or products, given that it struggles to keep its own site updated.
This is something I tackle constantly, especially when it comes to the reliability of delivery with a new brand. If that brand isn’t active on their website, I find it hard to trust them at all.
Which, again, goes back to consumers being more cautious. Consistent blogging on a schedule helps signal reliability for users and reassures them that you’re active.
Transparency Builds Human Connection
Real talk – are you also finding that the moment you realise something is AI-written, you tend to leave the site and look elsewhere?
Don’t get me wrong; I believe AI is a powerful tool that can benefit businesses and blogs in numerous ways. The trouble is when businesses rely on non-edited, non-formatted AI content that lacks any emotion whatsoever.
Blog posts are a great medium for transparent content, especially when it comes to building trust with content. Their site positioning enables you to deliver behind-the-scenes stories, process breakdowns, in-depth how-tos for products, and honest perspectives that you believe are relevant to your industry.
Social and email platforms don’t provide the same accepted content length limits for in-depth content, while site pages may feel exhaustive. Blogs, however, provide the perfect space to add some extra humanity and foster genuine connections.
As already mentioned, we’re more likely to buy from brands we trust, but the same is true for brands we feel we can relate to or have a connection with, and transparency is the perfect way to achieve that.
Examples of Blog Posts That Build Trust
So, how do we establish trust through blogging?
There are several different approaches you can take with blog posts. It’s essential to consider, though, that even though we’re blogging for trust, we still want to take SEO into account and optimise our posts.
Here are a few angles you can take:
Answering Customer Questions in Detail
Finding that your regular customers are asking the same questions?
Blog posts are a fantastic way to address these questions in detail and provide down-to-earth, direct responses that offer value. Your team can then use these posts as resources to direct customers or prospects for an in-depth answer.
Many large service-based sites have a “help” section or a learning base area on the site that helps redirect users to blog content for that reason. It helps minimise the resources spent on answering customers, as your blog provides the answers instead.
Sharing Process or “How We Do It” Insights
This is a great one for services that have complex processes or more involved stories that may be too long for an about page.
Blogs that cover your entire process delve into depth and offer an insider’s look into your business, helping to build transparency, trust, and a sense of involvement with users as they feel part of your story.
They also make for great repurposing posts, allowing you to leverage them for your other channels and create organic brand-driven redirects back to the post.
Demonstrating expertise with in-depth guides
A benefit we’re all familiar with.
Outside of additional assets, such as landing pages, opt-in lead magnets, and other downloadable content, there aren’t many places where you can provide a truly in-depth guide.
Guides, in my opinion, help in three ways:
- Showcase expertise and industry authority
- Drive repeat engagement through revisits
- Provide unparalleled repurposing opportunities
They do, however, often require the longest time and consume the most resources to create. Despite this, guide blog posts can be an invaluable asset your brand can leverage far into the future.
Addressing Common Objections or Misunderstandings
The final point I want to make is more concerning sales.
Sales teams often encounter a range of objections or misunderstandings about how a product or service works. While these are challenges that can be overcome or pre-communicated via a service page, a blog post is the next best thing for pre-qualifying.
Through effective internal linking and strategic answering of these objections via a blog post, you can effectively pre-qualify prospects before they enter the final stages of the funnel.
This could potentially mean your sales team no longer has to overcome these objections, or at least to the same degree, as prospects are more informed about your services.
An additional knock-on effect from this is the saving of time in general. Prospects that may have called in for additional information no longer need to, resulting in less low-quality conversations.
How Trust-Led Blogging Affects Sales and Brand Loyalty
Building on the last point, blogging for trust also has a direct impact on the bottom line.
We often associate blogs with top-of-funnel, whereas the right post at the right time can be the final signal for a prospect to get in touch or make a purchase.
Here’s how trust-led blogging can impact this:
More engaged readers: Consistent, high-quality blog content helps generate more involved readers, which in turn can lead to increased shares, greater visibility, and an overall improvement in brand awareness and loyalty.
Better quality leads: By integrating your blog into your primary marketing strategy, you can significantly enhance the qualifying process. This puts less strain on your sales team and helps create a stronger funnel that develops more quality leads.
Long-term brand recognition and customer loyalty: It’s significantly easier to build brand recognition and loyalty when you consistently deliver high-quality content to your audience, encourage returning visitors, nurture newsletter engagement, and send signals that you’re active, listening, and allocating resources for their benefit. When you consistently deliver high-quality content to your audience and send signals that you’re active, listening, and allocating resources for their benefit.
Want to Build Trust Through Consistent Content?
You can!
Blogging to build relationships doesn’t have to be an outlier task. It can, and to be honest, it should, be implemented into your ongoing content marketing strategy.
Combining trust-building topics and direction with an intentional blog content strategy and SEO-led optimisations is the perfect mix for creating content that facilitates both brand trust and site growth.
Not sure what to write or how to get started?
Get in touch, and we can put together a quick overview to help you find a strong direction to follow.
FAQ: Building Trust Through Blogging
What kind of blog content builds the most trust?
The “most” trust is, of course, a subjective metric, but for me, I’ve seen the best results with my clients making use of educational blog posts, posts that show expertise without being overtly sales-focused, and listicle-based content.
These types of content often help build topical authority without straying too far into sales that it may put off readers.
How long does it take to build trust through blogging?
Trust building takes considerable time and is something you should aim to achieve through all of your channels. Building that trust through blogging specifically requires a consistent posting schedule, even if that is only once or twice a month.
This can make a big difference over time and provides an immediate signal for new users that your business is still active.
Is it better to blog for trust or for SEO?
Great question. The two often go hand in hand, as many trust-led approaches provide the opportunity to focus on user intent and specific keywords to achieve. When written well, there’s no reason why the content can’t facilitate both requirements.
I do believe there is an outlier here, though, and that is if you’re looking to create a piece of content solely as a resource for current customers. Sometimes, there’s a topic you want to cover for internal distribution. In those instances, focusing on achieving that goal 100% overrules the need for SEO focus.
Again, you can do both, but the goal here is more important.
