INBOX INSIGHTS, January 22, 2025: Best Practices for Building and Measuring Trust - Trust Insights Marketing Analytics Consulting

INBOX INSIGHTS: Best Practices for Building and Measuring Trust (2025-01-22) :: View in browser

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Best Practices for Building Trust

Given the ups and downs of this week, this year, this decade, I figured it would be a good time to revisit trust building. Chris reminded me that I’ve written or spoken about this topic a lot. Despite that, trust is part of your foundation. Since this year is all about roots and foundation building for Trust Insight, I figured I’d revisit trust building.

So, in the interest of (sort of) not reinventing the wheel, we used NotebookLM to grab the greatest hits.

If you want to learn how to do this for yourself, check out our livestream on January 30th where we’ll cover the basics of NotebookLM.

Looking back on three years of content, here are some tips for building trust with your teams and your customers.

Building trust with teams:

Trust is the belief that someone will do what they say they will do. It is shown by consistent follow-through and communication. It is broken when someone fails to do what they have committed to.
Trust is not all-or-nothing but exists on a spectrum.
To delegate effectively, leaders must build trust by developing and documenting processes. This includes setting clear expectations and providing the tools for success.
Building trust requires patience, allowing team members to learn and make mistakes. Consistent work from both sides, with constructive feedback, is essential.
Trust starts with the leader defining the process and communicating expectations, not with the team.
Team members need to trust that they have been given all the information they need to be successful.

Building trust with customers:

Trust is built over time through consistent interactions and by demonstrating that you will follow through on what you say.
Focus on building relationships and understanding customer needs instead of going straight for the hard sell.
Provide value by offering educational content that helps customers understand their problems.
Do not skip the relationship-building phase.
Actively listen to what customers are saying and help them put the pieces together for themselves.
Trust can be built by being transparent with prospects about how you work.
Be authentic to your brand.

Building trust in communities:

To build trust in a community, be aware of givers (valuable members) and takers (those who seek drama).
When trying to re-energize a community after a scandal or crisis, be aware of those who show up just for the drama.
Pay attention to members who perpetuate issues.
Behave in a way that is consistent with your brand persona.
Recognize the value of human connection.
Create a safe space where team members can say “I don’t know.”
Rebuilding trust takes time, and people need to process situations at their own pace.

Other ideas related to building trust:

Do not use “I’m sorry to bother you” as a way to start a conversation; instead, ask if it’s a good time.
Strong governance and process development are essential for building trust.
Building trust is an imperfect process and requires giving people a chance.
You cannot outsource building relationships and trust to a machine.
When you have to try harder to have good communication, it is important to build trust with one another.
When using AI, be skeptical and questioning.

Building trust is not a one-time event. It is an ongoing process that requires consistent effort, patience, and clear communication. Like anything, it takes work, patience, and time. Keep at it. Building trust is one of the most essential parts of your foundation.

How are you building trust? Reply to this email to tell me, or come join the conversation in our free Slack Group, Analytics for Marketers.

– Katie Robbert, CEO

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In this episode of In-Ear Insights, the Trust Insights podcast, Katie and Chris discuss social media strategy diversification after the recent TikTok incident. You’ll learn how to create content that thrives regardless of platform changes. You’ll discover strategies to build a direct, trusting connection with your audience, reducing reliance on third-party platforms. You’ll explore how to use generative AI tools to enhance content creation and distribution. You’ll gain insights into building a resilient marketing strategy that leverages both owned and rented channels. Watch this episode to build a future-proof marketing plan that isn’t at the mercy of social media giants.

Watch/listen to this episode of In-Ear Insights here »

Last time on So What? The Marketing Analytics and Insights Livestream, we looked at the barebones of setting up local AI models. Catch the episode replay here!

This week we’re off due to client work but coming up next week, a marketer’s introduction to NotebookLM. Are you following our YouTube channel? If not, click/tap here to follow us!

Here’s some of our content from recent days that you might have missed. If you read something and enjoy it, please share it with a friend or colleague!

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In this week’s Data Diaries, let’s put on our thinking caps and extend Katie’s opening piece about building trust. Edelman’s annual Trust Barometer came out this past week, and to no one’s surprise, trust in pretty much everything declined based on their survey responses.

That’s a good look at the macro picture, but what if you wanted to measure trust in YOUR brand, in YOUR company, rather than the world at large? How would you go about doing that?

Trust is difficult to define, much less measure. Katie’s definition, “Trust is the belief that someone will do what they say they will do. It is shown by consistent follow-through and communication. It is broken when someone fails to do what they have committed to.” is a solid definition, but how do you put a ruler on that to measure it?

The answer is that we can’t measure trust directly. (oh, the irony of the company being named Trust Insights, right?) What we can measure are proxies of trust, proxies that indicate people feel enough trust in us to want to do business with us in some capacity.

How would we know? Here’s a basket of some measures you might have access to, and that we have access to:

Survey data. You know the survey we put at the top of our newsletters every month, asking how likely it is you’d recommend Trust Insights to a colleague? If that goes down and stays down, that’s potentially a proxy for trust.
Returning users. In every channel, watch returning users, the people who come back. If you’ve lost trust with your audience, they’ll stop coming back, so we look for declines here.
Subscriptions. Be they podcasts, newsletters, or YouTube, if you’ve lost trust, people opt out. People unsubscribe.
Conversations. Look at the depth and breadth of the conversations you have with people, especially in your call center. Has the tone and tenor of conversations changed? Are people more skeptical? Generative AI language models are especially good at picking up nuances in language at scale, so having AI quantify engagement on sales and service calls would be very useful.
Community engagement. Look at engagement in places like Slack, Discord, or other private communities where there’s no clout to be earned by participating, no algorithms to please. Is conversation volume and tone changing? You can examine both qualitative and quantitative aspects.
Employee sentiment and turnover. It’s rare for a company to lose trust in just one area. Breaking trust in a sustained fashion (i.e. not a rogue employee spitting on the pizza and putting it on YouTube, but a systemic breaking of trust) requires implicit endorsement from leadership, and that has spillover effects in your team. If you’re losing people – especially your A-players – that may be another indicator of trust loss.

The next challenge is – how do you measure this? Here’s the straightforward (but not easy) answer. Collect all the data. Get it into one place. Use the analysis tool of your choice to process the data and create a blended index of your various trust metrics. Then see if that trust index correlates at all to things you care about, like MQLs, SQLs, purchases, upsells, etc.

If it doesn’t, then you might not have the right trust metrics, or trust isn’t a consideration when someone is buying your products and services.

If it does? You now have a benchmark for understanding how trust influences those downstream metrics that lead to money in the bank, and that in turn can help you build the case to your leadership that trust, above and beyond being an ethically and morally good thing, is worth investing in.

Here’s a roundup of who’s hiring, based on positions shared in the Analytics for Marketers Slack group and other communities.

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