How Website Content Can Build Credibility for Your Brand

Content marketing offers numerous benefits. Among other things, it can help you boost the credibility of your brand and enhance the trust that exists between your audience and your brand.

However, content that is poorly written, optimized, or executed can also damage your online reputation. At the very least, it will confuse your audience about what you do and what you stand for.

Here are seven ways in which you can leverage content to build brand credibility.

Flaunt Your Writers’ Credentials

While the internet certainly enables us to access information at the touch of a button, it also exposes us to false claims, fraudulent companies, and a whole lot of nonsense. With fake news on the rise, it’s quite easy to understand why a lot of your target audience will be hesitant to trust whatever you put on your website.

Instead of expecting people to inherently believe you, do what you can to reassure them you are a brand they can actually trust. For starters, make sure they know who’s behind the content you produce on your website.

Don’t hide behind pseudonyms or hide your author name and bio. Don’t use a generic “team” or brand name, either. Make it perfectly clear who writes your content and, more importantly: why they are experts on the topic.

Take a look at this Zoma post on mattress sizes. It was written by Sarah Anderson, whose bio is there to prove to readers that she knows what she is talking about. She has been published by some major publications and does a lot of work in the sleep industry.

In addition to the writer’s impressive publishing history, she also happens to be a certified sleep coach. This qualification makes her uniquely suitable to write this specific post, and it does a great job of boosting Zoma’s credibility on the topic.

Source: Zomasleep.com

Don’t worry if your own writers don’t have the same kind of reputation. Simply state the reason you have chosen that particular person to write that particular article. Maybe they’ve had similar experiences to your audience or they’ve done a lot of research. Or perhaps they’ve been using your product for a long time?

Embrace Interactivity

Interactive content can boost time on page; it is inherently more shareable, and it will certainly help you stand out from your competition. Since it is obviously more difficult and time-consuming to create, it will show your visitors that you are someone who has the will and the means to create something unique.

Think of it this way. When you visit a website for the first time, and it looks outdated, loads slowly, and publishes wall-of-text content, are you likely to trust the brand? Appearances aren’t everything, but they do speak a lot about the company. If they don’t have the time or resources, or worse still, if they just don’t care about improving their online appearance, what does that say about their quality of work?

Interactive content gives you the chance to merge content value with content appeal in one fell swoop. It’s likely to see more organic backlinks and more social media shares than “flat” content/ Plus, it can be leveraged in numerous promotion cycles and promoted across all of your digital outlets.

Take a look at the dividend calculator on MarketBeat. Its value is apparent, but it also sends tons of credibility signals. The brand clearly has the knowledge required to create this tool, which instantly elevates their entire website. If they were able to produce the calculator, their other advice is surely knowledgeable as well.

Source: Marketbeat.com

Show the Product

Your blog content also enables you to flaunt your product in a more organic way when compared to sales pages. After all, there’s only so much you can do with a product page. A blog has infinite room, and as long as you stick to the topics your audience likes, you can demonstrate exactly why they need your product.

This tactic will work in practically any industry. For instance, if you sell cleaning products, any post on how to get a specific stain out of a specific fabric lets you mention your product range.

Your goal here is not to sound like you’re pushing your own agenda. If your blog posts start to sound like an infomercial, you’re doing it wrong.

Take a look at this example by WordStream: a post on how to find niche SEO keywords. They write plenty of content that is of genuine value to their audience, but they always insert their product. They essentially show you how to solve a problem with their solution.

Source: Wordstream.com

Note how they also cleverly use images in the articles. Featuring your own product in photos can help you promote it further than if you merely mention it. It will also catch the eye of your audience easily.

Create Content Unique for Your Brand

Speaking of blog posts, aim to create articles that only you, as a brand, can create. This doesn’t mean that you need to reinvent the proverbial wheel, though. Just aim to put your own twist or approach to the topic at hand.

Every brand has access to unique information; this is not only the case in the obvious world of SaaS. If you sell shoes, you can easily write a piece on “how many people get their shoe size wrong” or “why everyone needs to own a pair of black dress shoes.”

How you approach the creation of this content will vary. You can interview your customers and write case studies. Or you can do a poll among them and publish the results.

A good example of poll-based content are the statistics posts that Wyzowl publishes every year. As their subscriber, I get a periodic email asking me to take part in their research, which is how they get their data. Their video marketing statistics post is one of the most quoted in the industry, as it actually contains data that you can’t find anywhere else.

Source: Wyzowl.com

You don’t need to do work that is this extensive. As long as you clearly state where the information comes from, you will be seen as much more credible by your visitors.

Tell Your Customer’s Success Stories

Customer success stories let you create unique content, flaunt your product, and at the same time prove to your audience exactly why you are trustworthy and dependable.

They give you the opportunity to demonstrate in great detail what kinds of problems you can solve, how you can solve them, and what others have achieved after partnering with you.

Just be mindful that you don’t make your success stories sound too good to be true. Don’t just write about the customers who have done something better than anyone else. Don’t select the best outcomes: select the ones that most other customers can reasonably expect to see. Otherwise, you will only be setting up a part of your audience for failure.

Take a look at Gong and how they shape their success stories. They give you the name of the brand and the specific results they have achieved. They also talk about various aspects of their solutions, thereby demonstrating their versatility at the same time.

Source: Gong.io

Prioritize Value Over Sales

Most of the content you create, other than your outright sales pages, should prioritize value. This will both help them rank better in search engines and demonstrate your credibility. Once your audience knows you are the real deal, they will be more interested in converting. If you come off as a brand that only cares about your bottom line, they will bounce.

In content marketing terms, this means choosing topics that will let you mention your product (like our Ahrefs example), but that will help readers achieve something. If they walk away from your article with a solution, you can consider the post a success.

Don’t aim to convert every visitor with every post. Aim to get them to know your brand and to inspire them to come back so that they can ultimately become a paying customer. Play the long game, as that’s the only way to win at digital marketing in the long term.

Hootsuite is a great example of slow-burning marketing. They have plenty of posts, like this one on Facebook post scheduling, that don’t just promote their tool. They tell you how to schedule a post on Facebook using just Facebook. And then they also tell you how to do it with Hootsuite. If a reader is not interested in the marketing part of the post, they can leave, having solved their problem.

Source: Hootsuite.com

Promote It on Social Media

Finally, don’t forget that you also need to promote your content on social media if you want it to help raise your brand credibility. Brands that don’t have any kind of social presence are often seen as less trustworthy and as having something to hide. They could be scams.

By creating content for specific social media channels, you can reap the most benefits. You can simply turn a blog post into a photo caption for Instagram, or you can shoot a how-two shorts for YouTube. You don’t have to produce content from scratch — just select bite-sized information you can use on your social media profiles.

Ideal Plumbing does it very well on Instagram. They show you what their finished work looks like, and they give you a brief description of the benefits, the project, the installation process, etc., in their photo captions. They don’t need to go out of their way to create this content: just shoot images on the job and write a bit of text.

Source: Instagram.com

Key Takeaways

With the aid of these seven content production tips, you’ll make your brand more trustworthy. Remember that you don’t need to execute all of them at the same time. Start with the one that makes the most sense for your online presence, and then work on perfecting it.