3 Ways Retailers Can Earn Customer Trust With Helpful Content

Online retailers are constantly working on new ways to build customer trust. The good idea is not to focus solely on your products and services, but to become helpful to customers in a new way. Below, we reveal three tips on how you can establish a trustworthy relationship with your audience by sharing the information valuable to them.

Increase your brand awareness via influencers

Influencer marketing has been gaining momentum since retailers understood that they don’t need to spend a fortune to promote via celebrities. Even when the social media audience of a blogger numbers in thousands, not millions, they win by more dynamic communication with their followers and consequently their higher engagement. Retailers should use this opportunity to communicate knowledge and be helpful. Not only can influencers accompany an image of the advertised product with an expected effect or their own experience of using it, but they can also provide more value to the audience with their post.

Here are a couple of ideas… A fashion retailer encourages an influencer to create several looks with one piece of clothing, thus giving potential buyers a bit of style inspiration. A beauty brand asks bloggers to add feedback from their audience, which allows enhancing product credibility. The audience of a fitness coach finds short workout videos with various sports gear (promoted by a sporting goods retailer) helpful. Sharing recipes is a viable idea for marketing a food delivery service.

Don’t overlook a company blog

A blog is not a direct way to sell products or services. Rather, it is an opportunity to create a bonus for existing customers and attract new visitors from organic search. The key to turning a blog into a compelling reason to visit the website regularly is engaging and valuable content. We would suggest to start with the target audience of a webstore to understand how you can interest them. Thus, a furniture retailer can come up with design ideas while children’s clothing shop can share educational and sports games for kids. By creating a source of interesting and useful content, a seller invests time and resources into being helpful to readers.

However, many retailers don’t give much thought to this opportunity, mostly because ecommerce platforms don’t offer a blog as an out-of-the-box feature. One needs to explore available customization options for each specific ecommerce platform. For example, if you are planning to start a blog in a Magento-based webstore, you may choose to add a plugin, integrate a third-party CMS platform or run the blog on a separate blogging platform. We understand that the third option may seem questionable as you doubt the efficiency of running a blog “outside” the webstore. We hurry to dispel the doubts. Popular blogging platforms have a large audience, and high traffic allows them to show up high in Google searches. The more people see your blog, the more of them are likely to read it and click the link to your store.

Go to forums

There is one more way to reach a target audience, develop a brand reputation as an expert in the field and promote your business at the same time – forum marketing. To make this technique effective and worth investing time, a retailer shouldn’t try to make presenceon multiple forums. They need to find the right community for their business. Again, niche forums matching the sphere they work in can be a good start. Retailers will have an audience of potential customers there for whom their contribution will be experience-based and valuable. For example, a business that sells organic cosmetics most likely focuses on customers who care much about their well being. When communicating with participants of healthy lifestyle forums, they can impart knowledge about cosmetic ingredients – which ones are harmful and what consequences they can cause.

Naturally, when sharing their expertise, retailers seek to promote their company in return.

However, forums may restrict placing links in posts or allow them in member profiles only. It is still worth making efforts to participate in such forums as you may primarily aim at contributing to your brand reputation there. Readers trust your company if you communicate knowledge and mention your business where relevant (even not giving a direct link to it in a post).

Earn trust and sell more

It’s not for nothing that the content is considered the soft sell. The three marketing techniques we have covered imply that you share your opinion and expertise (for free). People value that you make an effort to be helpful and trust your company. Thus, you win new customers and contribute to the loyalty of the existing ones.