Jumptlist

Kentico Survey on Content Marketing: There’s Trust, But Be Truthful

28 May, 2014 by Barb Mosher Zinck

Print this article Font size -16+

Kentico has completed the 6th edition of its digital customer experience survey, this one focused on Content Marketing. Called Kentico Digital Experience Survey: Customer Trust in Content Marketing is High but Fragile, it was conducted in online in May with 325 respondents in the US. The survey provides us a good look at how people perceive the availability of educational content on the Web today from brands.

When asked how often respondents learn about a product/service while searching for information related to a product or service. 56% said sometimes, and 27% said often. When asked if they trust information from a business 73% indicated they do. This is certainly good to hear for brands developing education based content.

Another good question asked was if the respondent read good educational content that ended with a product or service being mentioned, would they trust the information less? 55% said no. Brand-based educational information is shared about 65% of time and many trust it more when it’s passed on from someone they know.

For information that can’t be corroborated with other non-brand sources, over 46% said they wouldn’t trust it. Others said that different perspectives were also important and that the fact that it’s from a brand must be clearly indicated (an important point to note for native advertising).

It’s kind of interesting to note that over 73% said businesses are not more trustworthy than they were five years ago. I honestly would have expected the reverse to be true with so much information available on the Web and brands working hard (at least it seems) to be more open and transparent.

Finally, when asked how much respondents trust companies, 48% said they trust them on a certain topic, but they will also corroborate with other sources. So maybe the key there is give people direct links to sources that agree with/say the same things.

The key takeaways for me from this survey are that brands can provide useful educational/informational content and people will read it, but it has to be correct. It can’t simply be information spun to make a product or service sound required. If people trust what they are reading, they will trust you and ultimately that will either lead to direct sales or the development of great advocates. The other key point – native advertising is fine as long as it’s clearly indicated as such.

Print this article