If you want your content marketing to work and convert your followers into customers, you must use good quality content that has value and is informative. It also must build trust with your followers.
While content is still king, it now also has to build trust with your followers or community, especially on social media. If users can’t verify what you are telling them with independent sources by doing a Google search, how can you expect them to find your content trustworthy?
Always back up your content with sources and tell your readers your sources with links. An example of this would be; according to Harvard…. And anchor a link to the article from Harvard.
Here are 11 content creation tips for building trust with your followers:
1. Set your end goal. Is it conversion or is it being an authority? Before writing your content, set your end goal and make sure that your content sticks to it. If it is being an authority; then the content you use must mirror that. Do not mix your content with different goals or your readers will become confused, distrusting of you and leave.
2. Remember branding is crucial. Most people, when they think of branding, think of graphics, colors, or a tagline; however, your content can actually be the branding item. To use your content as the branding component, know the difference between branded content and branding content.
3. Use your values to reflect your brand. Allow your values to be your brand. Readers with the same or similar values as you will become followers and convert into clients because they feel at ease with your beliefs.
4. Increase the relevancy of your content. Remember to write for the targeted audience. Root your content in reality. Write to different levels; every fourth or fifth blog post should be written for the more advanced reader.
5. Use different platforms. Distribute and publicize your content on all available platforms and social media where your readers may visit. It is not just desktop computers you are catering too, but also mobile devices such as Smartphones, tablets, and iPad. You need to make sure your content will work on all devices.
6. Interact with your readers. Use polls, answer your readers’ questions and ask their opinions. Reply and interact with readers. This will help you build your community and become an authority.
7. Stay current on trends in your industry. Know what the latest pop culture references are and use them with your content graphics. Staying current with trends will help you remain an authority in your industry.
8. Provide your sources. Roughly half of readers will try to verify the content with outside sources. If you do not provide those sources and they can’t find them, they will consider you a fraud instead of an authority.
9. Provide advice, not a sales pitch. Tell your readers how you solved a problem with one of your products, or how one of your products can be good for the environment. By providing details of how you solved a problem or found a green use for one of your products you are providing helpful advice. Be sure to ask for their feedback on how your products have helped them solve a problem.
10. Analyze. Continue to analyze your content for performance; then tweak and analyze again. Just because your content is performing well doesn’t mean you do not have to analyze it. It will help you learn what works and how to improve the things that do not work.
11. Guest posting. Ask influencers in your industry to share one of your guest posts on their blog and make sure that you include a link back to your own blog in your byline author information.
List of 10 tools for content creation
Here is a short list of tools for content creation to help you build trustworthy content for your community and its readers.
- List of the best writing services for content creation that is of importance.
- Pinterest; can be used to watch for trends.
- Canva; creates graphics for social media.
- Hemingway Editor; will highlight issues with weak writing and offers you way to fix them.
- Topsy; a social search engine that takes whatever phrase you put in and searches social media for it.
- Unsplash; find the correct visual graphic for your content.
- Curalate; uses data to determine which images in Pinterest and Instagram are most appealing for their audiences.
- Zuum; provides awareness into competitor content on social media and identifies viral content and popular influencers.
- MarketMuse; crawls your website to recognize holes in your content, find important keywords and ascertains how your site compares to the competition.
- Ginger; grammar and spelling checker that will help improve your skills in both.
Conclusions
Building trust with your readers and followers is very important. If they feel they can’t trust you (your content) then they are going to go elsewhere.
Planning, implementing, and analyzing your content to make sure it provides a value that is trustworthy doesn’t have to be hard. With so many content tools available, you can find ways to create content. Just make sure that content is doing the job, and compare your site to the competition to discover your weak spots.
Using these tools, adding links to sources in your content so your readers can verify what you are saying all help to build trust in you with your followers.
