Are you using enough authenticity in your B2B marketing to build greater inherent trust into your brand purpose?
If you’re not sure, read on — and let’s examine how authenticity, influence, and trust go hand-in-hand to deliver great B2B content marketing.
Authenticity is a key factor in great B2B marketing, with the trust it builds powering campaigns that will stand apart from the crowd.
Influence plays two roles in authenticity, as those who have influence are seen as being authentic, and content built with authenticity creates its own inherent influence. This connection between influence and authenticity has a surprisingly lengthy history, as I explored in “10 Tips From Influencer Marketing’s Hidden 1,000-Year History.”
Taking a more conversational tone in your content marketing efforts, even in the B2B realm, can go a long way towards building brand storytelling that bolsters authenticity.
“Buyers expect and want authenticity from the brands with which they engage. This trend has caused a shift in voice and tone, that includes being conversational in your content.” — Brody Dorland @brodydorland Click To Tweet
At each step in your B2B marketing journey, whether it’s writing a case study, article, social message or white paper, ask yourself whether your work authentically represents the message and story you’re telling. Consider the words of English poet William Wordsworth as a litmus test.
“Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.” — William Wordsworth Click To Tweet
B2B content marketing that comes from your heart and rings true to you and your team is a major part of the foundation for building the kind of audience, brand trust, and genuine influence that authenticity allows.
Authenticity Accepts No Substitutes
Artificial intelligence (AI) and the rise of so-called deep fakes should make it clearer than ever that trying to use substitutes instead of authenticity is shortsighted, as Katherine Hays recently wrote about in “What Happens When You Fake Authenticity” for Entrepreneur.
“The brands that will win in the future are those daring enough to partner with their customers and smart enough to leverage robust technologies to ensure brand safety at the same time.” @KatherineAHays Click To Tweet
Building authenticity can be accomplished by sharing the kind of best-answer content that your audience is actively searching for, so learning about search intent can be an important part of trust-building in B2B marketing. We’ve explored best-answer content and how to find what people are searching for in several recent articles:
Genuine B2B Content Marketing Offers a Wealth of Trust Benefits
Authenticity matters everywhere in our lives, and leading a life where we’re as authentic as possible in every area makes it easier and more natural to incorporate it into our marketing efforts.
Digital audiences in 2020 are savvier — and more skeptical — than they’ve ever been, and having been exposed to countless marketing messages on an hourly basis, marketers face a trust barrier that authentic content can reach through.
When done well, authenticity is a business growth engine for B2B marketers, and with trust in marketing at the low levels seen in the following chart, boosting trust is a much-needed benefit, especially when done by using trusted influencers in your marketing mix.
Be True To Your B2B Marketing Efforts
Maintaining your meticulously constructed authenticity is an ongoing effort that involves constant observation, readjustment, and assessment. Making this process transparent to your team, clients, and audience can go a long way towards building your genuine content marketing a passionate following.
Achieving a passionate following through authenticity brings with it dedicated fans on social media platforms, and brand advocates who will recommend your brand whenever and wherever they can.
“For more than a millennia we’ve had the trust, expertise, and wisdom that meld together to allow one person to hold influence over another.” — Lane R. Ellis @lanerellis Click To Tweet
Learn More About Authenticity in B2B Marketing
We hope this introduction to authenticity’s role in B2B marketing has given you new ideas to explore and brought to light a few of the tactics you can implement in your own content marketing efforts and campaigns.
We’ve also got you covered if you want to learn even more about authentic content and trust in marketing.
Our CEO Lee Odden will be delivering a keynote presentation entitled “In Search of Trust: How Authentic Content Drives Customer Experience,” on March 19 at the Convergence Summit 2020 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where he’ll cover a wide range of trust and authentic content experience issues:
From fake news to privacy issues to deep fakes, the digital world has become an uncertain source of information for consumers. Tired of information overload, sales focused brand messaging and unremarkable content, 86% of customers say authenticity is important when deciding what brands they like and support. In this keynote presentation, Lee Odden will share the current state of content marketing and how brands are winning customer hearts, minds, and trust with authentic content experiences.
Finally, highlighting the importance trust plays in authentic marketing, we’ve put together an entire series of articles detailing various aspects of trust in marketing, and you’ll find nine of them here:
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