Digital Trust

Social Media Strategies to Increase Trust and Engage Customers

Barry Connolly

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Business
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781472961358
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Marketing
• Index: Business

A guide to how e-SMEs can successfully engage within social media communities to positively influence their brand trust and reputation. Consumer trust is more important than ever, as digital platforms and social media have redefined the relationship between businesses and consumers. In this new and disruptive commercial environment, consumers have developed an expectancy of direct, transparent communication through social media. The traditional means of building and maintaining trust have been rendered obsolete by the chaotic, competitive magnitude of multiple online platforms. With a unique combination of academic rigour and practical guidance, Digital Trust is the definitive guide to effectively using social media to build an authentic, trustful connection with your consumer base. Drawing on his extensive experience in marketing and communications, Barry Connolly demonstrates how to harness the commercial opportunities provided by social media, while also showing how you can avoid its most common mistakes and pitfalls. With original research and illuminating case studies, Digital Trust provides adaptable and accessible social media strategies that will strengthen and expand your consumer base.

1

Branding and Digital Branding

Before we delve into consumer brand trust, it’s important to first fully understand the brand concept and how it can then be applied on social media to engage effectively with customers. If we think about actual definitions, a brand can be defined as a name, term, sign, symbol, design or a combination of them, which is intended to identify the products or services of a business (or a collection of businesses) to differentiate them from rival organizations. But most of all, a brand is, or at least should be, the positive image that you want your organization to have. In terms of understanding what a brand means to customers, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos summed it up brilliantly when he said: ‘A brand for a company is like a reputation for a person; you earn reputation by trying to do hard things well.’

As an organization or individual, you can control your brand but essentially it doesn’t belong to you. It belongs to the customer who experiences your company, which is why organizations have to work so hard to continuously ensure any brand experience is a positive one. In order to achieve this, successful organizations never rest on their brand laurels. As former Starbucks Chief Marketing Officer Scott Bedbury said: ‘A great brand is a story that is never completely told.’ This is such an exciting quote for any organization to apply to their brand. Your brand changes as your business does and also with the new technologies you use to promote your brand story to keep it interesting for customers. But there is also an emotional side to branding. From a consumer perspective, your brand is the conveyor of an emotive brand story and should act as a foundation for developing close customer relationships.

In contrast, the cultural side of branding takes into account the sociocultural perspective of the brand construct. A theory used in psychology, the sociocultural perspective describes the awareness of circumstances affecting individuals and how their behaviours are influenced by social and cultural factors. The sociocultural perspective considers the different ways in which individuals engage and interact with their peers and social groups and how these groups can affect their thoughts and feelings. This perspective is really interesting for businesses ready to put their brand out there on social media as it applies to so much of our daily routine: how we communicate and understand one another, as well as our mental and emotional states of mind. This theory links really well to another famous brand quote from Bezos: ‘Your brand is what people say about you when you are not in the room.’ Essentially, this means your organization should always try to ensure that it behaves or acts in a way which encourages people to say positive things about you when you’re not there to hear it.

The significant changes introduced by the Internet have impacted strategic brand processes for organizations. In the past, consumers have had little influence on organizational strategy with information being provided to them using traditional methods. Then, brands had complete control over what consumers ‘thought’ they knew about them. Due to the limited access to available information and in some instances geographical constraints, engagement with customers was at best minimal and organizations were able to influence customers how they saw fit. However, with the Internet being utilized for commercial purposes, this approach is no longer viable or beneficial to organizations. Historically, a firm’s brand activity was focused on the corporate offering which allowed a ‘one-way’ form of communication, such as a campaign billboard. The main downside to this approach is that there’s no opportunity for the consumer to give feedback to the brand. However, the Internet and subsequent social platforms created further opportunities for ‘two-way’ (brand-consumer) and even ‘three-way’ (brand-consumer-customer) communication, which has led companies to re-evaluate their brand strategic model.

The value of knowing the difference between a customer and a consumer is crucial when determining the marketing strategy for your product or service. Often the terms are used interchangeably but in basic terms a customer is the individual/entity who buys the product or service. For example, a supermarket chain buying products for re-sale is a customer, whereas a consumer is the individual/entity who actually uses your product or service – i.e., the individual who consumes products from a supermarket. Of course, a customer can also be a consumer if they purchase the product or service and then consume it.

For instance, aggregation websites such as TripAdvisor provide consumers with extensive product/service details as well as brand consumer experiences, making customers considerably more informed when making their purchase decisions. A perfect example of this is Skyscanner, the travel fare aggregator website and travel metasearch engine, which has over 70 million monthly active users operating in over 65 markets. Skyscanner’s success is built on using data and measurement analysis to help their customers achieve their travelling goals. In order for Skyscanner to grow, the company’s mind-set is focused on an experimentation culture by engaging with customers. Their approach of ‘design like you’re right, test like you’re wrong’ is based on customer insight through user research and then predicting what product changes will have the most effective impact. Rik Higham, Senior Product Manager for Skyscanner, explains: ‘Our culture of hypothesis-driven experimentation is so important and so successful because it allows anyone at Skyscanner to quickly test an idea. We no longer spend months creating a feature that may or may not work. Instead we test lots of small ideas, all based on insights and data, to see what potential they have. The more ideas we test, the more we learn about travellers, and the more informed our future tests are.’ Essentially this is a ‘peer review’ process which Skyscanner has in place to ensure visibility for customers; there is continuous two-way knowledge sharing between the organization and their target audience. This peer review process is one of Skyscanner’s brand values, which can help shape the direction of any organization.

Brand values

No matter the size of your organization, the values you choose to embody your business will have an impact on communications and most importantly, your relationships and connections with your target audience. Your brand values will influence consumer buying decisions and affect your sales and profits as consumers are more likely to buy from a brand whose values are similar to their own. Successful brands choose their values carefully and integrate them into every aspect of their organization to keep moving forward. By investing the time to establish and communicate your brand values, you are making a commitment concerning what is important to your organization and what you feel is important to your customers.

So where to start when defining or re-evaluating your core values? Well, your values must be true to what you believe in, who you are and what is important to you and your brand. Don’t worry if your organization has long established values as defining brand values is not a one-off task but a process that needs regular review to ensure values remain consistent to what your organization represents. Often, brands project values based on what others feel they should be, which won’t be sustainable in the long run. As an exercise, write down your own brand definition and include the values that your organization has or aspires to have. To help get you started, one of Google’s core values is highlighted below:

It’s best to do one thing really, really well.

‘We do search. With one of the world’s largest research groups focused exclusively on solving search problems, we know what we do well, and how we could do it better. Through continued iteration on difficult problems, we’ve been able to solve complex issues and provide continuous improvements to a service that already makes finding information a fast and seamless experience for millions of people. Our dedication to improving search helps us apply what we’ve learned to new products, like Gmail and Google Maps. Our hope is to bring the power of search to previously unexplored areas, and to help people access and use even more of the ever-expanding information in their lives.’ (Google.com, 2019)

Once you have a clear understanding of what your brand represents, you can start to consider additional brand management perspectives, such as the emotional and cultural approach to your branding and the values your brand possesses or aspires to represent. Once you’ve done that, below are some more exercises you can work on individually or as a team to establish or refine your brand values.

And the award goes to … How do you want to be remembered?

Imagine you’re receiving a lifetime achievement award at an awards ceremony and what the introductory speech before you arrive on stage might be. What would you want the guest speaker to say about your character and what your work and achievements have represented? You can then look for regular themes which can help establish your main brand values. Continuing with the lifetime award speech theme, write down the names of brands you want your organization to be like and who you’d like to work alongside, or be mentioned with in the speech. For each organization, think of one aspect of their brand that represents them and use those aspects to develop your values. Finally, for the award speech, imagine the part where they cut away to a video feed of someone who has worked with you and what they’d say. For established companies you can send out questionnaires to customers and ask them to highlight the values that best represent you and your brand and research the existing feelings that they have for your brand.

Now that you have a selection of your core values, you can define what they mean and represent to you and to your brand. There’s no denying this will be a challenging task, as it requires complete transparency and honesty with yourself and your team to determine what is important to the organization. However, once you have clarity on your values, your decision-making will hugely improve as for every strategic decision you make, you will be able to refer back to your core values for guidance. This is particularly true in terms of collaborative opportunities, hiring the right staff and building customer relationships. If your activity does not reflect your values, you could face the risk of feeling anxious and frustrated. Your employees and customers would also recognize the lack of consistency and unfulfilled promises, which in turn could negatively impact your brand reputation.

Once you have established your brand values, your entire organization must operate in alignment with those values, demonstrating them in day-to-day activity and crucially, in all communications with customers. Adopting this approach and applying the values to your business will motivate employees to share your beliefs and customers who share your values will be attracted to the idea of engaging with your brand. When you trust what your organization stands for and trust your team to promote those brand values, only then can you begin to engage with customers through social communities and truly highlight what your brand stands for within any digital environment.

Digital branding

Having covered the traditional branding concepts, we’re now going to review the strategic understanding of digital branding. Before delving a little deeper into the possibilities and considerations, let’s look at a definition. Digital branding can be viewed as an organization’s identity, values and credibility presented through digital platforms.

Digital branding is a brand management technique that combines branding and digital marketing over a range of digital platforms, which cover Internet-based relationships, device-based applications or media content. Essentially, digital branding aims to utilize an organization’s digital assets to connect and create lasting relationships. The main digital assets that you need to develop, promote and manage to create a strong trustworthy brand are:

• websites (including blogs and online stores);

• social media channels and assets;

• multi-media content assets;

• mobile assets, including apps and mobile sites;

• digital databases, including email subscribers.

Digital branding is a term used to cover the variety of ways in which a business stands out to customers online. This can include a number of different marketing functions, such as social media, content marketing, SEO (search engine optimization) and online advertising, as well as influencer marketing. So essentially digital branding is about developing and establishing your brand’s story and offering online.

You may often hear the terms ‘digital marketing’ and ‘digital branding’ used alongside one another but in practice they are quite different. Digital marketing is concerned with promoting a particular service or product by highlighting its features or benefits, whereas digital branding aims to highlight the underlying beliefs and core values of the organization.

Once you have developed your digital assets, the next hurdle – and one of the most important – is ensuring your digital brand is easily visible so that new leads and customers can find your company, review your content and then finally decide to trust your organization enough to purchase your products or services. Effective marketing can no longer rely on just one channel, as your target audience will, in all likelihood, use a variety of different social channels. Successful digital branding requires multi-channel digital marketing strategies and tactics, which include:

• search engine optimization (SEO);

• paid digital advertising (this includes banner ads and Google Ads);

• social media marketing;

• email marketing.

Digital marketing can be highly effective for one-time buyers using a limited promotion, for example, but having a strong digital brand will help develop relationships between your company and your customers. When looking to define your digital brand and marketing strategies, you must be acutely aware of the objectives for each one. For instance, when carrying out marketing activity using digital platforms, you are at the same time researching your audience and competitors, creating product/service interest, generating demand and promoting your offering. Whereas when working on brand strategy, you are raising brand awareness, providing quality service to your target audience and creating brand equity, which describes your brand’s value. That value is determined by consumer perception of, and experiences with, your brand – so if people think highly of your brand, it has a positive brand equity.

Devising an effective brand strategy is all about showcasing the value of your offering and your brand identity. Your brand identity allows consumers to instantly recognize your brand through the visible elements of a brand (such as colours, design, logotype, name and symbol), which together identify and distinguish your brand in the mind of the consumer. McDonald’s brand identity, for instance, is instantly recognizable and its uniformity and consistent offering has contributed to its success.

It’s important to remember that digital marketing is more foc...