We recently had an excellent conversation with a friend of Invera. Once we’d caught up on the trivialities of life, things drifted towards what’s most pressing in marketing agency land these days. There’s so many different topics that our industry gets preoccupied by, and the pile seems to grow exponentially, making it tough to get your arms around everything. Given this overload, it’s always a treat when a discussion gets crystallised into something that feels simultaneously clear and singular. In this case, we had a chinwag about trust.
What is trust?
Trust is quite a nebulous concept. A bit like love, we all know what it is, and if we’re lucky enough, we’ve all experienced it at various points. We know what it feels like – broadly speaking, it creates a sense of psychological safety – but it’s not the easiest thing to define. Nevertheless, we’re likely all in agreement that trust is good.
As we launch Invera, our new B2B go-to-market studio, trust is a key watchword, albeit not one that’s necessarily talked about explicitly. We have two founders who’ve taken the plunge by leaving the world of paid employment to set up a venture. Given the stakes, it stands to reason that we trust one another.
We’ve been getting on with all the logistical shenanigans this entails. Registering the company, setting up business banking and insurance, creating a website and so forth. But the lifeblood of any (new) firm is getting customers through the door. We’re not an established entity with huge scale, so trust plays a big role in persuading prospects that we’re the right choice of partner. We have to lean on our personalities, leverage relationships we’ve forged over years, demonstrate an intimate knowledge of the industries we’re selling into – and say a few prayers for good measure.
Trust as a differentiator
It's a cliché, but people do still buy from people, so we’re banking on our credibility and the results we’ve driven up to this point as proof that we can do likewise in the future. The truth is that we work in a reasonably commoditised industry, where service capabilities across shops are broadly similar, with incremental advantages coming from factors like stand-out talent, efficiency, speed, creativity and innovation.
When you think about it, the challenge we’re facing is the same as what every B2B brand under the sun is grappling with. They’re ultimately trying to persuade buyers within target accounts that they own the best solution, often shouting into the ether along with several competitors pitching with a subtle variation on their theme.
How the best B2B brands earn trust
The smarter brands out there have twigged onto the fact that creating a regular stream of genuinely insightful content is one way to gain an edge, often getting the most credible individuals from within their organisations to handle the distribution of those messages, because a point of view from a person is inherently more trustworthy than from a faceless corporation. Others, like Unilever, are pumping millions into their influencer network, which is a nod to a fact that social proof from prominent figures carries a lot of heft. By the same token, being able to press the flesh and build rapport during events, pointing to reviews and results from other satisfied clients, customer advocacy programmes and analyst relations all seem like sensible areas to place those precious bets.
More generally, trust can get fractured when communications are inconsistent. Buyer friction is the result when your brand story is conveyed differently across touchpoints. This often happens because everyone within your business puts their own spin on things, leading to variances that seem small in isolation but end up seismic when combined together.
So, where does all this leave us?
Well, trust isn’t built through a single grand gesture. It’s the compound effect of showing up with consistency. It’s quite boring in theory and pretty difficult in practice, especially when all the muck and bullets are proverbially flying around. We’re thinking about this a lot, not only because we’re focused on earning trust ourselves, but because helping B2B brands build it, systematically, is the whole point of what we do.
Trust can be dwindled in seconds, but takes a relative eternity to build, so we better get cracking.
