The Content Format That Builds Maximum Trust

When growing a business, or looking to develop a brand, whether that be a business brand or a personal brand, one of the fastest ways to accelerate the growth is by focusing on building trust with your audience.

By building an affinity with your ideal target audience you can accelerate a buying decision from your dream prospect — purchase intent will only usually occur after a significant amount of trust is built. So, you’re primary focus is to establish and develop assurance in the mind of your consumer.

Generally, the process is ‘know, like, and then trust’.

Now, let’s be clear, this is not always the case. For example, if you are on the beach, on a blisteringly hot, sunny day, and someone walks past selling water, you might not need to build up that much ‘know, like and trust’ to make your purchasing decision, as your immediate need is being met quickly and easily.

But in general, that process of ‘know, like and trust’ does need to occur. This is where podcasting can be supremely powerful.

Power Of Long-Form

Long-form content gives you the ability to really build that rapport, understanding and expert position with an audience.

Once they know you, and they decide that they like you — or they like what you’ve got to say at least — then they will trust you.

I have had this happen with my own podcast Building The Brand. On multiple occasions, I’ve had what I would consider to be ‘cold market’ traffic approach me to work with them through these purchasers listening to my podcast, so whilst they might seem like ‘cold traffic’ to me, I am not cold to them. Because I’ve already built up that rapport through the content I’ve been delivering.

Show Your Expertise

Extended content, like long-form podcasts, also gives you the ability to really be able to display and explain your value consciously and subconsciously.

For example, if you are a coach, mentor, consultant or expert you should most definitely be showcasing your skills using the power of a podcast; deliver a coaching session, use audio from a webinar you have produced, do a solo episode based around an expert blog you have written etc.

It is one thing for you to spend your time in your content talking about how good you are, it is quite another for someone to come to that realisation on their own!

TOP TIP: A great hack you should definitely use if you monetise through the ‘expert economy’ is to stop doing so many ‘discovery calls’ and start framing those initial calls as a free ‘coaching’ session with you… that you record for your podcast. What a great win-win-win; the prospect gets to experience your offering, you get great content that you can share across all podcast platforms, clips across socials and videos across YouTube gaining an organic audience and the listening audience gets solid advice they can use too.

From the feedback that I have had from clients, this methodology is a great lead generator for new prospects and it also helps them convert sales of those who have appeared as a guest on the show too.

Sales Process

With this level of content showing your depth of knowledge and expertise a lot of the sales process is already underway for anyone that goes from content consumer to potential customer.

Given the above-stated benefits of long-form content, here are a few stats to further solidify why a podcast can be an attention-acceleration platform that adds to your bottom line:

• 80% of podcast listeners fit into the ABC1 socio-demographic, meaning they are educated, affluent and have disposable income
• UK listeners favoured podcast length is 27 minutes
• Podcast listeners will consume 80% of an episode

So, let's do a quick equation here, if you did a weekly show that was the ideal length, and gained the average 80% consumption rate you would 21.6 minutes of listen time from your ideal prospect… weekly! Commit to a weekly show and that means each year you spend 1123 minutes (that’s over 18 hours!) annually building rapport with your listeners who can ultimately become your clients and customers.

And the numbers above only relate to one single listener… let’s imagine you can get just 100 people to listen to your show each week then you can start to see how — and why — this content format could be so powerful for you.

What impact would it make to your brand and business to have the ability to talk to your ideal prospect, build rapport and develop expert positioning with them for 20 minutes per week?