Building credibility: The key to winning B2B clients

Building credibility is complex. It can take a lot of time to build your ideal customers’ trust. Not to mention, it takes even more work to maintain it. 

But credibility is key for data and tech businesses. Now that almost every product has some kind of AI or automation feature, why should customers choose yours?

People may appear excited about your technology. You might even win awards for it.

That's all good.

But, in order to acquire and retain long-term paying customers, you must market the change your product helps them achieve. It's okay to talk about the tech. But don't get carried away doing that. After all we are all human beings and we do not become a different person when we go to work.

We spend time and money on what's valuable to us. And we're quick to recognise things that stand out from the rest. And most importantly, we remember the stories that resonate with us.

If you want to build credibility with your customers, put in a little legwork and show them you can be trusted.

Check out these seven ways you can build and maintain your business’s credibility: 

1. Be consistent

With many things in business, consistency is key. Your content marketing should be consistent. Your tone of voice should be consistent. Your social channels should be consistent.

… And, everything you do and say as a business owner must be too.

Credibility and trust can only happen if you’re keeping things consistent from the inside out. The more consistent you are with your customers, the more likely you are to maintain credibility and retain those customers in the long run. 

💡Top tip: Even if you have a full sales pipeline, consistency remains as it assists with retention and cross-sales.

2. Share value through educational content

Good content marketing can help you become a credible thought leader. It’s about being helpful and trustworthy.

The best thought leadership is earned through intelligent observation and perceptive insight into your industry. We find a lot of experts don’t realise their views and knowledge is incredibly valuable and interesting. There are potential customers out there that could learn a lot from you and want to hear it.

Good content ensures customers want to read it, Google wants to rank it, and partners and clients want to share it.

💡 Top tip: When writing educational content, make sure you explain it in the simplest terms you can so that its accessible and easy to understand. Once it becomes difficult to digest, it turns people off and the value and effort is lost.

3. Clearly articulate your differentiation

Purchasing tech solutions, data and consultancy today means entering a world full of noise and way too many choices. Any company looking to maintain a healthy pipeline needs to stand out from the competition. This means being able to demonstrate how you differentiate from your competition.

Customers attach value to a product in proportion to what they perceive as its ability to solve and meet their needs. You don’t want your product to be different just for the sake of being different. Instead make sure to focus on what matters the most to your customers and let that drive the decision on how to differentiate. What value can customers expect to gain from your products? What problems are they solving? How does it make their lives better?

💡Top tip: We want to sell to everyone. But that can mean you appeal to no one. By highlighting a niche whose challenges are uniquely solved by your product, you nail your value proposition and resonate with your audience far more than anyone else.

4. Focus on long-term results and relationships

While a connection is only a “click” away, a relationship requires commitment and it needs space and time to grow. We’ve come to expect fast results when we connect, rather than allowing a relationship to blossom.

But only 3% of your market is buying at any given time
 
These are prime for product-led content. However, they are very driven by price at this stage.

The remaining 97% is where the real opportunity lies.  If they’re still not fully aware of their problems and the solutions available, you have a brilliant opportunity to engage them earlier in the funnel. You can lead the way with establishing a relationship and building trust and credibility to be top of mind for when they are ready to buy.

This way, your brand is then not based on aggressive pricing and pitching. It’s based on a personal connection where your customers know you, like you, and trust you.

💡Top tip: It’s people that you form relationships with, not businesses. And it’s people that respond to your marketing. To form lasting client relationships, you need to build trust, show personality, inspire confidence, and deliver a great customer experience.

5. Use case studies and testimonials

One of the easiest ways to build your business’s credibility is to use your customers’ words to your advantage. Use your customers’ testimonials to boost your business’s credibility.

This positive feedback from your customers will really help build up your business’s credibility. We often find case studies are the most engaged with piece of content within banking and financial services campaigns.

As humans, we are inquisitive, we experience FOMO. We are competitive. That’s why we want to know what others are doing so we can get ahead too.

💡Top tip: Devote an entire page on your website to case studies. And when you promote them, focus on the learnings your client received and any value/results so that people want to engage with your content to learn from it.

6. Offer the best products, propositions, and data

If you want to build up your business’s credibility over time, you have to develop and offer the best of the best top-tier products or services. After all, no business can build up their credibility with weak products or services.

💡Top tip: The same should go for your customer service. Sure, you can have an A+ product. But if you don’t have friendly, reliable, and knowledgeable customer service, your business’s credibility can quickly sink. 

7. Engage customers across the whole sales funnel

Banking and financial services buying cycles have been gradually getting longer and more complex, in part because companies are involving more departments and people in their buying processes.

This trend has made it even more crucial to identifying potential buyers early and engaging them via valuable content marketing from the top of the funnel to the bottom.

💡Top tip: Specifically, think about creating different formats of content such as blogs, flipbooks, video and eBooks – all aligned to different stages of the customer journey. This will generate warm leads that are problem and solution aware, for when they are ready to buy.

In a nutshell, successful B2B data and tech firms understand that the key to growth lies with long-term customers. Technology has transformed the way we do business, but it’s our responsibility to build, nurture and grow trust over time.

With the strategies outlined above, you will become top of mind for when your ideal customers are ready to buy.