5 Ways to Build Transparency with Your Audience

Kathleen Ohlson is a writer and editor with over 10 years of experience. Previously, she was a high tech reporter covering various topics, including 9/11 and virus attacks. You can follow Kathleen on Twitter, @kaohlson.

Brand transparency has been top of mind a lot in the last year or so. People want to know who they’re doing business with and what products they’re buying ⎯ who made them, where they’re developed and what they’re made of. They’re more aware of a brand’s environmental footprint and ethical practices.

According to a Label Insight study, 94% of 2,000+ people surveyed said they are more likely to be loyal to brands that are completely transparent. Companies that show they’re trustworthy, reliable, consistent and genuine will not only attract new customers, but also help to keep their existing ones.

But trust is something that’s earned. You need to continually prove your honesty to your customers. And if you don’t, you’ll pay a price. Now in light of recent events, including Facebook’s recent revelations of its user data, your responsibility to be transparent and honest is higher ever than before.

Here are five tips you can show yourself to be a trusted partner with your audience.

Focus on your customer.

Trustworthy brands are candid and transparent, and have their customers’ best interests at heart. Asking your customers about their concerns and offering answers can start to lay the foundation of trust.

For example, Purina became the most trusted cat and dog food brand through its educational content. Its Puppyhood site offers dog owners tips to care for their pets. Purina now offers content through Amazon’s Alexa voice service. People can get all kinds of information through Alexa, such as what breeds are good with children.

Own your mistakes.

Yes, this is a hard one. Making a mistake is difficult, but admitting it goes a long way with your audience. No one is perfect and when you admit your errors, it shows the human side of your business. How your brand faces a problem is critical, especially if it becomes public.

For example, Facebook recently faced international and U.S. government investigations, consumer backlash and other criticism for not acknowledging that Cambridge Analytica harvested more than 87 million user profiles. When companies don’t admit mistakes, they almost always come out and hurt the brand more: United Airlines, Uber and Equifax are recent examples.

Meanwhile, Samsung recovered after it was discovered its Galaxy Note 7 smartphones would explode. First, it took out ads apologizing to customers and then later explained the safety and quality tests for future releases. It also released an investigation about what happened to the Galaxy Note 7 devices. As a result, Samsung’s sales bounced back.

If your problem becomes public, own up to it and sincerely apologize. Do whatever you need to do to reach your audience and show you’re honestly trying to keep their trust.

Become a thought leader.

Trust takes time and it doesn’t happen overnight. It’s not transactional. To trust you, your audience has to like you, but they need to know you first.  

Create high-quality content that offers value and expertise to your audience. They’ll be able to tie a name and a face to you, humanizing your company. By doing this, you’ll appear more approachable, transparent and easy to work with.

Also recognize the impact you make with your audience when you promise a product or service. You’re giving your word, so your success or failure depends on that. Be reliable through great customer service and treat your customers with respect. It’s these actions that help to reinforce you’re a thoughtful leader.

Show what’s behind the curtain.

Another way to build trust with your audience is to show them your company’s inner workings. Talk about what’s going on with your employees. Some companies are discussing salaries and showing how they work day to day. For example, Buffer, a social media management platform, fully embraces transparency. Buffer shares its salary structure, as well as its product roadmap, code and editorial board. Its blog is dedicated to transparency, discussing what works for Buffer and what doesn’t.

You can also show steps on how you develop products. Everlane, an online clothing and accessories retailer, embraces that. Its mission is “Our way: Exceptional quality. Ethical factories. Radical Transparency.” Everlane lives by that. When you select an item, you learn what material was used to make it and where the product is made, including a link to the factory that made it. While its pricing may be higher than other retailers, Everlane explains what goes into its pricing ⎯ labor, materials, transportation and duties.

Remember that fear is OK.

Part of being transparent with your customers is acknowledging fear. You make an emotional connection with them by helping them identify what keeps them up at night: Fear of missing out, being left behind, losing out to competitors or trying something new. But if you want to tap into your audience’s fear, offer solutions. You want to be honest and transparent about what might scare them, but don’t use blatant scare tactics. These tactics may come across manipulative, cheap and could even insult your audience.

When you acknowledge your audience’s fears, come across in an empathetic way and try to use a positive approach. Using fear effectively might drive your audience to take action, but it isn’t about scaring the pants off of your audience. Taking a positive tack to your audience’s fear shows you’re taking their concerns seriously and creating an emotional connection to your brand, so they keep coming back.

Building trust with your customers won’t happen overnight. But you can show your trustworthiness by being honest and transparent about who you are and delivering on your customer promises. Quickly admitting mistakes and taking action to fix them will earn and keep your customers ⎯ and their trust.

How to Outsource Content Production Without Sacrificing Quality

Matt Solar is the VP of Marketing at nDash.co.

Content marketing is a proven strategy to improve SEO, drive traffic, build trust, increase engagement, and boost conversion.

However, you can’t expect to stick a couple of posts on your blog and hope for the best.

Content marketing is a long game – it requires consistent effort in creating and promoting high-quality content to generate the intended results.

If you find the task of producing a large amount of content daunting, you’re not alone.

Thankfully, you don’t have to do it alone either.

Outsourcing your content production is a great way to up your content marketing game without the overhead of hiring additional staff.

You might have heard horror stories about the frustrations some businesses encounter when working with freelance writers.

Don’t worry, it doesn’t have to be that way. Here’s how you can ramp up content production without sacrificing quality:

Set a Solid Foundation

When you’re outsourcing content production to different writers, you have to ensure that they’re creating content that’s in alignment with your overall marketing and content strategy.

The most efficient way is to create a set of documentation you can share with writers during the onboarding process:

• Goals and objectives – What do you expect the content to do for your business and what KPIs (key performance indicators) do you use to evaluate success? This information can help writers position the content and include the appropriate calls-to-action.

Image Source: https://digitalmarketinginstitute.com/blog/2017-7-11-the-ultimate-guide-to-content-marketing-roi

• Buyer personas – Who is the target audience, what are their challenges, what kind of information are they looking for, and where do they look for such information? Answers to these questions can help writers speak to the psychology of the readers and create content that builds rapport with your audience.

• Content map – Audiences at different customer lifecycle stages look for different kinds of content at different touch points. By mapping each buyer persona to the lifecycle stages, you’ll be able to determine the best topics, formats, and distribution channels for your content and share the appropriate insights with your writers.

Image Source: https://centricconsulting.com/the-customer-journey-in-the-digital-world-thank-you-amazon-apple-uber-and-zappos/

• Style guide – All your content should have a consistent tone and voice that’s relatable to the audience and reflects your brand personality. A style guide details how your content should come across to the audience, how to format the various elements on a post, and the kind of imagery to use with the content.

Build a Core Content Team

Even though you don’t need to hire an army of full-time writers, you should have a core content team to ensure that the quality of all your content is consistent, the production and promotion tasks are on track, and freelancers are properly managed.

A solid content team should consist of the following roles, even though the same person can hold multiple roles in smaller teams:

• A strategist to define high-level strategies.

• A content manager to turn the strategies into implementable tactics.

• An editor to manage workflow and ensure quality.

• An analyst to gather metrics and generate insights from data.

• A community manager to distribute content in earned or paid media.

You’ll also need a content marketing calendar so all your team members can effectively plan and manage workflow for all production and promotion efforts.

In addition, clearly communicate the KPIs you use to measure success so your team can prioritize the various components of your marketing strategy.

Assemble an All-Star Team of Writers

Even though there are subject matter experts in your company, they may not be good at writing or simply don’t have the time to do so.

Professional writers are trained to conduct the necessary research and interviews required to create expert content while making sure it’s written to reflect your brand style.

Outsourcing your content production to a team of writers can help speed up the production process and maintain the quality of your content.

In addition, having a roster of writers can bring in a variety of angles and perspectives to help attract readers who are drawn to different styles.

There are many ways to hire freelance writers, including:

• Freelancer websites such as Upwork, PeoplePerHour, and Guru. These sites allow you to set up a project, manage the process, and handle payment on the platforms.

• Job boards such as ProBlogger, LinkedIn, and Craigslist. Writers will apply for the position and you’ll be handling the rest.

• Content platforms such as nDash.co. These sites focus exclusively on matching writers with brands and are specifically designed with features that help facilitate the briefing, communication, production, submission, and payment process. You can also request pitches from writers on some of these platforms to get fresh ideas.

When you’re selecting writers, hire those who are familiar with content marketing and SEO. Review their portfolios to ensure that they produce high-quality content and write in a tone that’s in alignment with your brand.

In addition, pay attention to how they work: Are they communicative, proactive, responsive and deadline-conscious?

Manage Production Effectively

A good piece of content is not only well-written but also meets the objective of your content marketing strategy.

A comprehensive creative brief is critical in helping a writer produce content that will help you achieve the desired results.

If you use platforms such as nDash, you’ll be asked to fill out a specific set of requirements when you initiate a project. The form is designed to ensure that you’re providing all the necessary information required for the writer to deliver a high-quality piece.

In addition to the specifics of each post, you can also share your content strategy documents, such as buyer personas or customer journey map, to provide more details about the audience.

In addition, you need to establish systems and guidelines for managing the content production workflow, such as a centralized communication system, a project management system, and a centralized location for document sharing – to ensure that nothing falls through the cracks.

Conclusion

The key to producing high-quality content starts with hiring high-quality writers and giving them the appropriate information and resources so they can do what they do best.

There are many “content mills” on the Internet and it may be tempting to use them to save a few bucks.

However, high-quality writers don’t come in cheap and it’s worth the investment to get it right from the get-go so your team doesn’t end up spending hours correcting mistakes and editing articles.

Invest the time to screen for good writers and establish long-term working relationships with them. This will help you set the right foundation to get the most out of your content marketing dollars.

Marketers: Show Me Something Unexpected by Creating Your Own Images

Katie Burkhart is the founder of KBurkhart & Co. and serves as the lead brand strategist and designer. You can follow Katie on Twitter @KBurkhartCo, read her posts on Medium, and subscribe to her newsletter to have content sent right to your inbox.

I have two stories to tell you.

First, I’m browsing through the Wall Street Journal magazine, in print, on a Saturday morning. I flip past pages of ads and even content, eyes skimming the surface but not digging in.

Then I stopped. There was an ad for what I believed to be a jacket. It was so simple, the jacket hanging on a specific type of hook, the lighting executed to focus my attention on that hook, which in juxtaposition feels out of place and yet entirely perfect.

Image Source: Wall Street Journal Magazine

Second, I went shopping for a new smartphone, an exercise in comparing features I will likely never use to determine how to spend a lot of money for something I do not personally find fascinating. But one trend stuck out: the biggest selling point right now is the camera.

It doesn't matter if you're loyal to Apple or went on an adventure and tried the Google Pixel; everyone touts their camera as the feature show.

What do these stories have in common? They made me wonder why, if we all have these phenomenal little machines in our pockets, I scroll past most images because I've seen them before. They're one of the same dozen or so stock photos we're all passing around, despite having the ability to produce something different.

And as content creators, our collective acceptance of this reality means that our audiences are scrolling right past our content, too.

Create the Unexpected

Let me start by saying I’m guilty of using some of the dirty dozen. Because stock photos have become so readily available and are often free, I lean on the crutch. It’s understandable. If you’re writing a lot of posts, you need a lot of corresponding images -- and you need them quick. That says nothing about keeping social channels populated, or websites, or printed collateral. It can be a daunting task, and searchable libraries of well composed, high-resolution content provide a comfortable solution.

But, as my grandma says, nothing in life is free. “There’s a myriad of ways to hold your business back from success, and one of the most common and easily-fixable mistakes is the visual engagement pass over,” says Chris Newhard, videographer and storyteller. I reached out to hear his perspective as a purely visual content creator and one of my favorite collaborators. He continued, saying “Businesses have a duty to engage their current and potential clients on a deeper, more connected level with original content.”

I couldn't agree more. The reason I stopped on the ad with the hook and jacket was because it presented something to me in a way that was different than the rest of the magazine, and yet felt entirely specific and intentional to that brand. It told me a story with detail, not a pass over of what I've seen a hundred times.

It’s time we step up and commit to creating photos that tell our stories in clear, unexpected ways, most of which starts in the details, in creating images that are as intentional as the rest of our brand identities, and as precise as the wording we choose for our headlines. In short, something our audiences will want to look at because it offers them something they didn’t expect out of habit.

Unexpected Comes from Different Methods

When trying to come up with photos that are -- dare I say it -- unique to your brand, there are several approaches you can take. The option closest to a nicotine patch for free stock photos would be to investigate premium photo collections that restrict the number of licenses they sell. Utilizing these collections will help decrease the number of places you see “your photo,” and will still have the benefits of seamless discovery.

Another approach is to hire a photographer to take photos that go with specific campaigns, or even work with a few photographers to curate your own internal library so content teams and others have ample selection. This approach will likely take time to build up, but offers the greatest opportunity to make specific decisions that deliver unexpected results.

If you can’t afford a photographer, you can do it yourself. Smartphones now have the ability to shoot in beautiful, blurred background portrait mode and the Google Pixel 2 boasts stunning AI that uses an algorithm to combine multiple shots into one clear, crisp image. Our phones have made photography highly accessible, so encourage your team to give it a shot (pun intended) on behalf of your brand.

An alternative approach would be to use photos generated by your users or audience. Maybe you’re a brand with a following that has a particular flair for creativity-packed Instagram accounts. Consider giving them a way to share their photos with you so you can use them in your campaigns or other content. Just remember to get their permission first.

Even if you can't break the habit of using free stock photos, take a minute and think about how you can edit that image we’ve all seen before. An alternative cropping, selective color or an overlay does help to catch the eye during an otherwise boring scroll through the digital list.

Regardless of which method you choose, you should always ask yourself “Does this image tell a specific story that supports my brand?”

Asking this question will lead to photos that provide an unexpected experience for your audience because your choices will be intentional rather than general.

Most importantly, you should remember that your biggest opportunity lies in showing something genuine. Don’t just show me a desk: Show me your desk, with all the little things that make it human.

“These simple yet effective investments instantly connect your audience on a more personal level — and tell them that your business is full of what matters most: people,” Chris said as he closed out his email. “As you continue to develop your own content, you’re building trust with [your audience] and proving that you care about what you’re doing.”

Take out your phones, content creators, and start purposefully capturing the world so I can engage in a scroll-stopping, click-on-your-content-for-more, kind of way because you delivered something I wasn’t expecting to see.

(And yes, the images in this post were originally created.)

A Content Marketer's Guide to Decoding Dev Jargon

Brendan Butts is Senior Technical Lead at Alipes Inc.

Developers often use technical jargon in conversation, forgetting that not everyone has a full understanding of what those words actually mean. This can lead to confusion, especially because when asked to explain what something is, they use even more hard-to-understand jargon. Below, we go over some common technical words and phrases that get thrown around a lot.

Agile Development

This is a software development methodology -- a process used for developing software -- that is very popular with modern-day technologists. Agile itself is not limited to development and can be applied to many business areas, including marketing. It involves small, cross-functional teams, which operate in sprints.

Sprint

A sprint is a timeboxed set of work, the length of which is decided by the agile team. Typically a sprint is a week, two weeks, or a month, though sprints can be shorter.

Backlog

This is the work that remains to be done on a project. It is typically in a project management system and is often ordered by priority. When a sprint is completed, the top items from the backlog typically become the contents of the next sprint.

User Story

A user story is a technique used in Agile to capture some work that needs to be done, from the end-user perspective. For example, “As a visitor to the website, I want to be able to go to the contact page and fill out a form to submit my information to the sales team in order to facilitate a conversation about starting to use the product.”

Waterfall

Waterfall is the old-school style of developing software. You work on a project for an entire year, going from version 2.0 to version 3.0 and finally at the end of the year, you release to software. It’s called this because, unlike agile in which you develop in short bursts and release often, the development process is like a river you travel down for a long time, and the release process is the waterfall, in which everything is released at once.

Scrum & Standup

Scrum is a type of agile development. It is also the name many use for the daily team meeting where each team member tells the group what they did the day before, what they are working on today and what their blockers are. These meetings are done while standing, to keep them brief, and are often referred to as stand-ups.

Blockers

A blocker is simply something that is blocking you from accomplishing a task.

Jira

Jira is a project management product by Atlassian. It is commonly used by development teams to track their sprints, backlog, and to assign work to individuals.

MVP

Minimum Viable Product. In development parlance, this is a piece of software or a website that has the minimum amount of features for it to be useful for early adopters.

AWS

Amazon Web Services. Amazon doesn’t just sell stuff online. It also provides one of the largest and most used cloud services in the world. Without getting into the gritty details, many websites are hosted on AWS and even more assets --images, PDFs, etc. -- are hosted on AWS S3.

CDN

A Content Delivery Network is a geographically distributed network of servers that can be employed to serve up static content like images and files. It is useful because these are very fault tolerant in that if one server goes down, other servers can pick up their slack.

S3

Simple Storage Service is a CDN provided by AWS. Many websites and applications use S3 for storage. When you upload an image to Slack, it is stored in S3. When you upload an image to many websites, S3 is where the image is stored.

Hopefully this has given you a bit more to go on when you’re engaging developers in conversation. You might even find yourself surprising the developers if you start throwing around phrases like “What kind of blockers are we seeing on user stories this sprint?”