5 Tips to Build Your Business Credibility

Building your business's overall credibility is critical to ensuring that customers trust you when they have a need in your industry. Customers are looking for a company they know they can count on. Around 82% of shoppers will research online before making an in-store purchase. If your business is primarily online, your customers may want to do more research before reaching out to you. Today's customers are savvy, and digital marketing is pivotal. Customers know there are numerous scams out there and want to ensure they have a reputable provider to offer the services they need.

How can you build that vital business credibility? You can use several strategies to grow brand awareness and establish yourself as a trusted resource within your industry.

1. Have Strong Personal Branding

Your personal branding is a critical part of building your overall business credibility. Your personal branding establishes who you are and why customers should trust you with their needs within your industry. It also helps your business stand out. Your personal branding establishes:

• What's important to you as a business: Do you have the same beliefs your customers do? Do you focus on sustainability, ethical hiring practices, or eco-friendly products? Do you aim to make your clients' lives more accessible in a specific way? Your personal branding helps lay out what matters most to your brand.

• What expertise you have: As part of your personal branding efforts, you should aim to establish yourself as an authority in your field: a trusted resource for information, solutions, and support. 

• What areas you focus on: Your personal branding may help display your past education and other efforts. That can, in turn, make it easier for you to show what is most important to your business, its management, and why your customers should trust you. 

Your personal brand and your business brand are not the same. However, you need to put equal effort into both. By clearly establishing your personal brand, you can often set your business up for higher levels of success and brand engagement.

2. Obtain Quality Customer Reviews

Social proof is increasingly important for many customers. Once, customers primarily relied on word-of-mouth to learn more about a business or brand. If they had specific needs in an industry, they might have turned to friends and family members for recommendations.

Now, consumers accept social proof from people who have used a brand in the past to get a better feel for what a company has to offer. More than 54% of customers will check at least four online reviews before buying a product. Many customers will do extensive online research before they set foot in a physical store or place an order. If you have quality customer reviews, you can showcase exactly what past customers have experienced when interacting with your brand. As a result, future customers will be more likely to trust what you have to offer. 

3. Obtain Awards and Showcase Them on Your Website

Awards in your field can go a long way toward helping your business stand out. Giving an award shows that you're one of the best options for those specific services within your industry and that others recognize you for those efforts. An award says that you have been recognized for your work and stand out from the crowd. Seeing that you have awards can help increase your overall credibility and encourage potential buyers to trust you more.

Keep in mind that awards rarely fall out of the sky. Instead, they come from a strategic effort by your business leadership. You have to position yourself to obtain suitable awards for your company. 

For example, at Think Global Awards, we have a variety of awards categories, from the "Brand of the Year'' category to the "Start-Up" category. We also offer categories in specific fields, including education, language, life sciences, and nonprofits. Make sure you know what categories are appropriate to and available for your business, how you stand out in your field, and how you can best position your brand to acquire those awards. With a clear strategy in place, you can start getting noticed. Then, your customers will begin to see your efforts, and prospects will naturally trust your brand more.

4. Provide Critical Information for People Who Are Interested in Your Industry

Establish yourself as an authority in your field to build your overall credibility. If people trust you to provide the essential information they need about your industry, they are more likely to trust you to provide the products and services they need. You can use several strategies to establish your expertise in your field.

• Build your blog: Create a comprehensive content library containing the critical information consumers might need to make buying decisions, use your products and services, and troubleshoot any problems they might have.

• Host webinars: People are looking for more information from experts in many fields. Regularly hosting webinars can help establish yourself as the source of that information, expanding customer knowledge and encouraging them to trust your brand simultaneously. 

• Guest blog: Find ways to share content on industry-leading websites and build genuine backlinks. Avoid posting the same content on multiple low-yielding websites, as this may cause your content to be flagged as spam by search engines.

As you build your online presence and continue to provide that information, you will find that consumers are more likely to consider you an expert in your field and are, as a result, more likely to have a higher level of trust in you.

5. Do What Customers Expert (Or Go Beyond It) In Every Interaction

If you're interested in building credibility for your business, one of the most critical things you can do is deliver on your customer's expectations—or, when possible, exceed them. If you promise that you will have a project provided by a specific timeline, make sure that you delivered that project when you promised. If you tell customers that you can offer something to help them accomplish their goals, make sure you do it. When possible, for business success, go above and beyond to meet your customers' needs.

When you fail to deliver on customer needs, word spreads quickly. Many communities, professional or personal, are smaller than you expect. As a result, if you regularly fail to deliver on customer expectations, it won't take long before you start seeing fewer customers come your way and sales declining.