In the past few years, the advertising and marketing ecosystem has been changing fast, and the context we are in right now creates even more places for communication and advertising that builds trust.

We’ve all lived it. Your search for socks on a local retailer’s website and one hour later, you are targeted by socks on all sites and platforms your visit, but not only by the retailer you visited, but by dozens of other brands and sites you’ve never heard about.

It is as if the entire planet knew you are missing a few socks in your socks drawer.

What makes this targeting worse is that many of the brands that will target you, you have never seen them before. You do not know anything about them, you don’t even know if they really exist or, and that is the key element here, you can TRUST them.

Trust is at the heart of any relationship between a brand and a consumer. But in the past few years, it has sometimes (if not often) been more important to get immediate results, no matter how you reach the consumer, no matter if they’ve heard or not about you. Results, conversion, revenue.

More and more brands are realizing that there needs to be a balance between performance marketing (results) and brand building (trust).

Want to get your content team up to speed on this? Organize a team workshop or one-on-one coaching with an expert of our team. You can also book Alexandre to come and speak at your event!

Trust has eroded and I often mention this in keynotes and masterclasses: By default, consumers don’t trust your brand.

This trust has to be built, earned and nurtured.

With the death of the cookie and the fact that in coming years, it will be harder to target sock-buying consumers like the example above, brands need to build awareness, generate trust, so that they can more easily reach out to consumers and offer their products. And if consumers happen to drop by their online properties, brands need to be able to demonstrate that they can be trusted, that it’s not only about the product, but about customer service, quality, social involvement, etc.

It makes a difference to build that relationship.

This is why traditional advertising seems to be making a comeback in many marketers’ minds. An HBR article by Christine Moorman, Megan Ryan, and Nader Tavassoli, “Why Marketers Are Returning to Traditional Advertising” outlines 7 factors that influence this trend:

  1. Breaking through the digital clutter and noise;
  2. Capitalizing on consumers’ trust in traditional advertising;
  3. Preparing for the decline of third-party cookies;
  4. Tapping the growing medium of podcasting;
  5. Exploiting the digital lift of traditional media;
  6. Fine-tuning brand and market fit;
  7. Revisiting digital effectiveness.

And why are you reading this on a Toast platform? Because content also does exactly that. The team will often say that content helps create trust between a brand and a consumer. It creates a connection based on the creation of value (high-performance content is known to bring actual value to its audience, it is not just brand messaging).

Struggling to get performance out of your content? If your content team is living through content chaos on a daily basis, schedule a quick call with us to discuss Content strategy and content operations. We can help you get all your ducks in a row.

How can your brand leverage the combination of traditional advertising with content? How can your marketing mix include these brand-building efforts? We’d love to discuss this with you. Reach out to a member of the team to schedule a quick informal discussion today!