How to build credibility with branding?

Why do we need brand credibility? 

Building credibility takes time. It’ll require you to take necessary actions that drive behavior. If you build brand credibility, it’ll be a great asset to your business or organization. It’ll generate lots of awareness and build a strong network around your brand. We call it loyal customers. 

When the world becomes more challenging and creative all the time, it’s essential to be credible. Because access to information has become easy, so if you fake it as a brand, you’ll be exposed soon. Furthermore, it’ll damage your brand reputation while making it harder to build credibility back again. 

Credibility is important

When building a brand, the idea of credibility plays the contrast feature to the vulnerability. Being vulnerable with your audience means you share things about your business or personal life that helps connect you with them.

Building credibility is not intended to connect you with your audience, it is supposed to help you gain authoritative respect from your audience. Your audience will listen to the advice you give and believe who you or your business says to be.

By gaining credibility followers believe that the business or person is competent in the field that they say they are in.

Now credibility is harder to build for personal brands than business brands.

The contrast holds for the story, as the story is harder to build for businesses than personal brands. The reason for this is that a business must have years of operation to share their story.

They also need years for people to trust that they follow their values. However, a business only needs a few satisfied customers to rapidly share how great their product or services are.

Personal brands, because it is only associated with 1 person, makes it easier to share a story.

To share more about their day to day lives, without having to worry about competitors copying their “business” practices. However, personal brands need time to develop their credibility. 

If you’re a business brand

If you are trying to build a business brand, the best thing to get started with is to prove to your followers of all the satisfied customers. Testimonials, reviews, and shoutouts provide a way for your followers to see that there are other people happy with what your business offered. By sharing these things, you attract more customers long term. 

If you’re a personal brand

For a personal brand, it is harder to prove your credibility, because you are not selling anything. However, there is a fun art that personal branding marketers engage in to help build personal brands, and I’ll share that with you here.

I call it “Becoming the Expert”. Whatever you want to build your brand around, there are things you could teach to your followers.

Say you are trying to build a personal lifestyle brand. By having 1-2 posts per week giving tips and tricks of different style-related hacks, you give value to your followers and prove to them you know exactly what you are talking about. 

Say you are trying to build a personal design brand, you should share a quick 2-3 minute video on how to properly design a logo. This all sounds simple, and its because it is.

When trying to gain followers, you should prove to them that you are truly knowledgeable in the personal brand you are trying to create. 

Now you do not always have to teach, for personal brands, you can also just share your brand-related stuff. Say you are going to a conference for Web Developers, and you are trying to build a personal brand off of that. Share posts of you at this conference.

People who find you and will see that you are someone who enjoys the thing you are talking about, people will want to follow you because they enjoy the same thing and want to see what more you have to share.