Helping Your Audience Trust You

Now that we’ve looked and assessed the territory, it’s time to start burying some acorns—er, enact our new marketing approach. And that starts with your reputation. Not ads, not campaigns, not content. What your audience thinks of you. 

You might be used to thinking about this as “brand,” but it’s actually so much more than that. Remember, marketing now owns the majority of the buyer’s journey. Before a salesperson ever makes contact, you are engaged in a conversation with the buyer—and that conversation that will likely decide whether they ultimately make a purchase.

They may not be engaging with you overtly, but they’re watching what you’re doing and making decisions based on those first impressions. So act like your audience is watching—because they are. 

We’re no longer in the growth-at-all-costs era. Short-term thinking won’t get you the results you want. That means first of all, building audience trust, but also balancing reputation-building with traditional awareness and demand generation activities, so they feed and nurture each other. 

In this chapter, we’ll explore exactly how to do that. 

Make your audience like and trust you

When you think about converting buyers, you might not jump straight to your brand reputation. For a long time, B2B marketers have focused on the demand side. This is a vestige of the “growth at all costs era”—how much money can I funnel into ads in order to get a certain number of webinar sign-ups?—not today’s sustainable revenue marketing approach. 

To become a black squirrel—a true standout in the market—you need to treat your reputation as a critical first step to acquisition. Your reputation has the power to convert buyers or dissuade them. All the best marketing campaigns in the world are only going to work if people have a positive opinion of your brand. 

There are quite a few misconceptions in B2B about what your brand reputation is. Your “brand” is not your colors and fonts. It’s not your website copy. It’s not your ads or awareness campaigns—though all these things can help establish your identity. Your brand reputation is the sum of all the assumptions that potential and current customers have about your business. For instance, that your solution is reliable, low-cost, and easy to use. Or that it’s premium, custom, and white-glove.  

Your brand reputation is the sum of all the assumptions that potential and current customers have about your business.

If you’re thinking that your reputation depends an awful lot on your product, you would be right. To borrow a B2C example, imagine you’re a sports marketer. You’re going to have a much easier time selling tickets if your team is on a winning streak—and a harder time if their season has been lackluster. Sure, you can send as many targeted ads and dollar hot dog coupons as you want, but if sports fans aren’t invested in your team’s performance, you’ll have a much harder time convincing them to show up. Not to mention that it’s far more expensive—ads are based on quality scores and poor or unknown brands have high costs associated with them. Your brand is an intangible asset that saves you money and makes all your work easier. 

Of course, marketing rarely has control over the product. But you can help advocate for impactful changes—being the voice of the customer in internal meetings and helping to push for what would be most beneficial, whether that’s new features or more responsive customer support. 

Beyond that, your work is to articulate your company’s unique perspective to build trust and connect with your audience. Companies are like people. They have a personality and a point of view. As humans, we’re prone to personify inanimate things, including brands. We’re more likely to want to do business with a company that feels like a friend. 

So your job as a marketer is to turn your brand into a character that your audience will like and trust. This comes down to both a “what” and a “how.” The “what” is what your company stands for. You can look to your company mission and vision statements for this—what is it that you’re trying to accomplish in the world and how do you plan to get there? The “how” is how you communicate it—or, your brand personality. Are you serious and soft-spoken, enthusiastic and upbeat, or creative and visionary? 

Unless your company is very new, you already have a brand reputation—remember, that’s your perception in the market. Whether it’s positive or negative is up to you to assess and improve upon. You can start by asking yourself: Who do our buyers think we are? Who do we want them to think we are? And, if there’s a gap between those two things: How can we better articulate who we are (or aspire to be) as a company in the world?

Then, you can start to leverage that reputation to make connections with your audience. 

Crafting content that people will actually care about 

In this new buyer’s journey, where prospects remain dark until they’ve almost made up their minds, your content is more essential than ever. It’s your way to have a conversation with your buyer without having a conversation—to show who you are, what you stand for, and why they should trust you.

As discussed in Chapter 2, you should craft content that answers your buyers’ questions and make that content as accessible as possible. But that’s just the first step. A mature content operation goes a step further to anticipate your audience’s needs beyond just what they want to know about your product, and takes into account what they want to know, period. 

Depending on what your solution offers, see what sources of information might already be available to you. For instance, if your software collects customer data and you can aggregate it in a meaningful way, is there any way you can package this to report on trends in your industry? Providing insights that your audience can’t get anywhere else is key to creating impactful content. 

Original research is just one way to do this. Thought leadership is another. If you have an executive or senior person who is on the cutting edge of your field and who has a lot of opinions to share, think about how you can package those insights in a way that your audience can consume. 

Your business’ unique insights—whether in the form of research-backed data or your internal experts’ opinions—should be at the heart of your content strategy. This is an important note in the age of AI. You can’t just generate blog posts through ChatGPT and hope to reach your target market. You need to put in the work of thinking through your perspective first (your “thesis statement,” if you will). As more and more content is generated by AI, content with a human point of view—whether that’s in the form of interviews, unique perspectives, or proprietary research—will become more and more valuable. 

In an age of AI, words are cheap—but your buyers aren’t looking for business platitudes or regurgitations of things they know already. They want your real opinions and insights. And by “real opinions and insights” we don’t mean promotional materials about your solution. We mean actual valuable information that a potential customer could use in their job. Your goal should be, above all else, to help your buyer. 

However, that’s not to say that we don’t think you should use AI in your content creation process. In fact, we encourage you to—but only once you understand how it can be most effective. AI excels at remixing things once the core ideas are already there—for instance, brainstorming social posts to help promote a piece of content, once that content is already written.  

We firmly believe, however, that the core pillars of your content should be created by a human. AI is best for derivatives and adaptations—and even then still requires strong editing so it doesn’t lead to any embarrassing mistakes. There’s nothing worse than a piece of content going live and a customer correcting you on an easily verifiable fact. 

Personalizing your outreach in a meaningful way

Having great content is a good starting point, but it’s not enough. With the size and diversity of today’s buying committees, you need to be able to address the concerns of a range of people—from the one using the tool to the one approving the budget. That means you need to be able to tailor your content to each person engaging with it. 

We now exist in an age of hyper-relevancy, where buyers expect content to be custom-tailored to them. This, too, is how you can start to build relationships with your audience. But it’s easy to get personalization wrong—as anyone who has ever deleted a completely irrelevant cold email knows (🙋🏻‍♀️), just having your name at the top of the message doesn’t mean it says anything to you. Meaningful personalization must go deeper. This includes:

• Interpreting signals to understand when buyers might be ready to be served a specific piece of content.
• Using the best delivery mechanisms based on what a buyer is most likely to see and engage with, whether that’s email, social, ads, or another channel.
• Leveraging different content formats and experiences for different buyers’ preferences: white papers, videos, podcasts, workshops, and roundtables.
• Optimizing the timing of content delivery to when a buyer is most inclined to consume it.
• Adapting the content to a buyer’s specific interests and concerns.

One way to help with all of these measures, and particularly that last one (content adaptation) is through the creation of synthetic buyer personas. A synthetic buyer persona is a way of using AI to help you better understand how you can adapt your content for specific audiences—this is another great way we recommend marketers use AI. 

Synthetic buyer persona: An AI version of your customer that you can use to “react” to content and tailor your messages. 

For instance, say you sell to CFOs of mid-market manufacturing firms. To create your synthetic buyer persona, you might pull up examples of customers you’ve sold to in the past. Pick a few that seem like good encapsulations of the type of person who buys your product. Then, load the information you have on them into your AI tool. The more info you contribute about your personas—the more well-formed your synthetic buyer persona becomes and can provide more valuable insights and feedback.

Now, you can ask your AI questions. For instance, you can upload your content and ask how well the content would meet their needs as a CFO and give it a score out of 100. Here’s a sample prompt to use with your synthetic persona:  

"You are an exceptionally detailed CFO. Please read the attached content and score it out of 100 on how well it addresses your key challenges, how useful the content is, how well the content aligns with your topics of interest to you, how clear and relevant the content is, and how effective the call to action is.” 

Depending on the score, you can ask to rewrite it to score at least a 90. 

You could even create different versions of this synthetic persona based on different viewpoints and personality traits. Whether a CFO or another role, there’s not just one way to be an executive. Just to create a short list, there are strategic execs, operational execs, transformational execs, innovation or tech-evangelist execs, and customer-facing/commercial execs. You could even create a skeptical or adversarial persona to give you a different perspective.

Now, you’re using your AI assistant more as a sounding board to help you improve and personalize your content, based on the information you provided to build the persona (which is based on real information you have from past deals). 

This is also an area where the boundary between marketing and sales begins to blur, so it’s critical that you are aligned with your sales team about who is talking to the customer at what time, so they don’t get overwhelmed. (See the Demand Continuum from the previous chapter as a great alignment tool for doing exactly this.) Spamming your audience with irrelevant content is one of the fastest ways to lose them. To avoid this, we’ll talk about exactly how you should think about distributing your content in a way that makes sense for how your buyers want to consume it below.  

We don’t call them “nurtures” anymore

You obviously can’t hand-pick content and resources for every potential buyer. (Maybe if they’re in a 1:1 ABM campaign). But you do still need an intelligent way of drip-feeding them information. What you need is an always-on campaign. 

What’s an always-on campaign, you might ask? And if this is starting to sound a bit like a nurture campaign, you’re not wrong, but it’s more than that. An always-on campaign advances the conversation with prospects and customers at their convenience, using all your marketing channels (not just email). That means using all the tools at your disposal to gently guide the conversation—not push it forward. Customers can tell when you’re pushing and become disenchanted. An always-on campaign, however, is responsive to the actions they’re already taking, helping move their buying journeys along at a natural pace. Think of it as a flow of conversation between you and them, not a sales pitch. 

Always-on: A way of guiding your buyers along their journey across all your marketing channels. Using triggers based on your customers’ buying signals, these smart campaigns will feed your customers the kinds of content they’re most likely to want to engage with next. (We go into detail about exactly what these campaigns look like and how to set them up in our Always-On Ebook).

Setting up specific triggers for certain types of actions—like a welcome campaign when a potential buyer enters your system, or a closed-lost campaign when a qualified buyer decides not to proceed with a purchase—ensures that buyers get relevant, non-disruptive content across all the channels they engage with, keeping you top of mind without becoming annoying. 

In addition to this, there’s the data-building campaign—which is not a campaign, per se, but the foundation that makes it possible for any of these campaigns to happen. This is the process of gathering and improving all the information you have on accounts and contacts for your campaigns within your various data systems.

Leveraging your partner network to expand your reach

There’s a lot you can do with content and always-on to ensure you’re having the right kinds of conversations. But how do you continue to connect with the right kinds of people? The key is in your partnerships, aka nearbound marketing. 

In nearbound marketing, you focus on participating in market ecosystems and building loyalty through relationships. You might do this through software partners or relevant influencers in the field. The idea is that the market already exists—you’re finding your way into a conversation that’s already happening, rather than creating a totally new one. You can leverage this partner ecosystem to establish trust with new audiences. 

Partners have already established trusted bonds with buyers. Their influence flows naturally without raising the buyer’s defenses. With nearbound, marketers can leverage this trust to surround buyers with gentle influence towards products or solutions that might pair well with the tools they already like and trust. For instance, maybe someone just bought a content management system (CMS), but now they need a video tool to manage their video content. Would they rather go out and research a whole new solution, or just go with the one their CMS provider recommends, that already integrates with that software? Most people would choose the latter. 

Well-executed partnerships can provide profitable new pathways to growth without requiring expensive awareness plays to get up and running. It’s a great way that you can meet your buyers where they are and you can anticipate their needs—because cultivating that trust is worth its weight in gold. 

Plant your acorns now to ensure healthy growth later 

The way buyers buy is changing—and we have to change with them. Engaging your audience today requires a more sophisticated, integrated approach that leverages new technologies while maintaining authentic human connections. And since marketing owns so much of the buyer’s journey, the stakes have never been higher. 

To recap: It’s not enough to focus on “awareness.” You have to build trust and cultivate relationships with your audience. This means understanding “who” your company is, what you stand for, and what others think of you—in other words, your brand reputation. 

Your reputation lays the foundation for everything that comes later, from creating great content to personalizing it to distributing it to your audience in a way that makes sense to guide the conversation along to growing that audience through partnerships. You’re always guiding, never pushing—and you use the tools at your disposal, from buying signals to AI, to help you do this work most effectively. 

It takes a long time for an acorn to grow into a tall oak tree. But as black squirrel marketers, we’re no longer seeking instant gratification. We’re looking for long-term, sustainable growth. With the right care and tending, the acorns you plant today will grow into tomorrow’s opportunities and revenue. It just takes some time and patience. 

But how can you be sure that it’s all working the way you want it to (especially when growth might be happening slowly, or underground, where you can’t see it)? The key is in your marketing metrics—choosing the right things to track, how often to check in, and what trends to pay attention to. We’ll delve into all that in the next chapter.