How to Build Brand Trust With Surveys

Businesses must reach a sense of brand trust, as it reflects customers’ expectations of a brand being able to fulfill its promises about its products, services and experiences.

As such, all businesses must work towards securing a strong sense of brand trust, as no business is immune to customers who don’t trust it. 

Although large companies carry high brand equity and therefore seem to be at an advantage when it comes to brand trust, 76% of consumers trust small businesses more than large.

However, this doesn’t mean that small companies automatically have more brand trust and can reap all of its benefits. All brands have to establish this concept for themselves, as lacking it has dire consequences. 81% of customers say that they will only buy from a brand they trust, which leaves the brands that they don’t trust at a major disadvantage, one that will undoubtedly harm their revenue. 

This article explores the notion of brand trust, its importance, benefits, how to achieve it through five common ways and how survey research helps brands attain this consumer confidence.

Understanding Brand Trust

Brand trust gauges how much confidence a target market has in a business. Customers exhibit their trust in a brand as a kind of willingness to rely on the ability of a brand to perform its key functions and the other promises a brand makes, whether they are in the form of advertisements, social media, their website, their marketing content or otherwise.

Brand trust typically arises after customers evaluate companies’ offerings. However, there is much more involved in trust-building. Customers, therefore, don’t merely assess offers; rather, they weigh a company’s promises against their products, services and experiences. 

This involves CX (customer experience), the total of all the feelings that customers undergo throughout their customer buying journey. 

The concept of brand trust is rooted in a brand’s reputation, as such, it carries all the important aspects of maintaining a good reputation with customers and the general public. It should thus come as no surprise that brands with poor reputations struggle, while brands with good reputations strive. 

It may take longer for brands to establish a healthy level of brand trust when it is new, virtually unknown or untested, or in times of reputational crises. As for the latter, it can emerge during scandals, significant bad reviews, poor social mentions and more. 

The Importance of Brand Trust

This business concept is important for various reasons, most prominently because the way consumers, especially a target market, feels about business matters. Trust is important, as it is one of the most positive feelings that customers can have towards a brand. 

Brand trust brings value to a target market. While some situations may prompt customers to buy from a brand they don’t trust, these are nothing but one-off instances of need and lack of other options. Trust, on the other hand, fosters consumer loyalty, the bedrock of repeat sales, aka customer retention. It is no wonder that an increase in brand trust correlates with a higher customer retention rate. 

As such, when brands build trust, customers reward them with ongoing loyalty, a long-lasting relationship in which customers don’t merely buy from the same brand, but choose it over competitors time and again. In this way, the continuous support brands attain with brand trust yields a higher CLV, or customer lifetime value.

CLV denotes the total monetary value a customer will bring to a business during their relationship with the business across their lifetime. Given that brand trust incites customers to continuously purchase from the same brand, it positively ties in with customers’ CLV. Thus, the longer relationships present in retention spur more monetarily valuable customers.

Aside from valuable customers, brand trust is crucial to a company’s livelihood, as it softens the blow of a reputational crisis. This is because customers who are loyal will continue to engage and purchase with a company they trust, as opposed to a company they have little or no trust in. As such, brand trust serves as a kind of security blanket, enabling companies to take more risks. 

Brand trust also forges brand advocacy. When a happy customer becomes a recurring customer, they tend to speak out about their positive CX, therefore becoming a customer advocate. Customer advocates help brands obtain brand awareness and augment their brand visibility, reputation and overall branding efforts. 

They do this by spreading rave mentions about the brand they trust on social media, forums, review sites, brand websites’ comment and review sections, along with via word of mouth. This is tremendously important for a business, as customer advocates do many of the things that salaried marketing and PR employees do, but for free.

Finally, when a brand reaches high levels of brand trust, it is not only setting itself up for a better reputation and higher sales, but it is growing in its potential to be a key player in the cultural trends of an industry. Sometimes, this potential may carry over to greater cultural relevance, such as being a household name of a product that represents an entire country. 

The Benefits of Brand Trust

There are several benefits to brand trust, which complement its importance, as laid out above. These benefits also bring new ideas that support the need to establish and maintain brand trust. The following lists the key benefits of securing a strong sense of brand trust within your business:

1. Brand trust drives new business, making customer acquisition more feasible.
2. It makes consumers more receptive to marketing campaigns.
3. It fosters connections with consumers and drives loyalty.
4. It allows brands to innovate more, since consumers trust what they.
5. It makes those who write or speak negatively about a company lose credibility.
6. It helps brands achieve cultural relevance when strong enough. 
7. Key benefits such as brand loyalty, advocacy and goodwill allow businesses to overcome various challenges and obstacles.

10 Ways to Build Brand Trust 

There is far more to building brand trust than simply executing a strong product experience. Consumers have growing concerns about the customer experience (CX) that brands promise, along with other promises brands make in their marketing messages, such as their impact on society. 

As such, businesses need to pay attention to other key facets to work towards strengthening, solidifying, and in some cases, establishing brand trust. The following lists include 10 pieces of advice for brands to build trust among their target market and the general public.

1. Create quality products and services.
2. Establish optimal omnichannel CX, including digital experience, in-person, over the phone, etc.
3. Charges reasonable prices.
4. Offer promotions, sales and customer rewards programs.
5. Include a generous return policy. 
6. Treat customers well, whether on a chat, on phone support, etc.
7. Handle customer service issues quickly.
8. Keep up your end of promises.
9. Establish clear communication with customers.
10. Create consistent content; content is king for many reasons.

How to Forge Brand Trust Through Surveys

Survey research is a proven method of accurately measuring consumer sentiment through customer feedback — when used with the correct online survey platform, that is. Surveys allow businesses to probe as deeply as they wish into virtually any business matter, from product satisfaction to customer effort. When it comes to building trust, surveys allow market researchers and business owners to understand their target market’s needs, desires, expectations and aversions, which essentially tells them all they need to know to build trust. 

Researchers can set up surveys with questions that are as granular as they need, allowing them to zero in on a topic, so that they can identify and apply the proper course of action, whether that entails correcting something, creating a new product feature, changing an existing experience and much more. 

Additionally, researchers can make their sampling pool as granular as possible in the screening section of a survey. In this section, researchers can filter respondents as precisely as they need, setting eligibility requirements on demographics, psychographics, device used and more. 

Researchers can even set restrictions based on how respondents answer additional screening questions, permitting only those who answer in a certain way to take part in the survey. That way, only the qualified respondents will be able to take the survey. 

By providing precise information and quality data, surveys enable businesses to extract only the information that they need to build brand trust. Businesses can deploy as many surveys as they deem necessary. By iterating surveys, brands can gather as many perspectives as possible from their target market, paving the way for new ideas to build and improve trust and maintain statistical accuracy in the findings.

Heightening Your Brand for the Long Term

Brand trust is critical for the survival of any business. Whether you seek to increase sales or customer loyalty, remain relevant or simply to stay afloat, you need to build brand trust for your business.

When your brand consistently delivers on quality, reliability and credibility, it will yield significant benefits, as customers will go to your brand first and repeatedly when they look for products and services in your niche. 

To build brand trust, you must understand your customers as precisely as possible, cater to their needs and form marketing campaigns and promises to begin with. Survey research has transformed businesses’ access to consumers, allowing them to reach a wide swath of their target market and extract their feedback and other necessary customer data. 

However, not all online survey platforms are built the same, therefore, they don’t all offer the same capabilities and reap the same benefits. To gain the most quality customer data, businesses must use a strong online survey platform, the kind that offers random device engagement (RDE) sampling to engage respondents in their natural digital environments, uses

You should also use a platform that offers advanced skip logic to route respondents to relevant follow-up questions, one that implements quality data checks via artificial intelligence and machine learning and much more.

When an online survey platform offers these capabilities, businesses gain the most relevant and high-quality consumer data, the kind that allows them to accurately understand their customers’ preferences, expectations and virtually all else. In turn, it allows businesses to feasibly build and improve their brand trust.