One of the critical factors in building audience engagement is trust. When your audience trusts you, they engage more and spend more money.

Using marketing content that your audience considers trustworthy helps to build that engagement. This means third-party content. No matter how great your company, no matter how strong its track record, your customers will trust content created by someone else more than they will trust content created by you.

This is something we may intuitively understand, but “The Role of Content,” a study commissioned by inPowered and conducted by Nielsen, confirmed it.

When making purchase decisions, the study found that consumers rely on third-party content (surveys, product reviews, other data) more than branded content or even user reviews. In fact, expert content was the only content type to exhibit a strong lift in all three areas of the purchase cycle.

On average. . .

Expert content lifted brand familiarity 88% more than branded content and 50% more than user reviews;

Expert content lifted brand affinity 50% more than branded content and 20% more than user reviews; and

Expert content lifted purchase intent 38% more than branded content and 83% more than user reviews.

What is the takeaway?

Add expert insights, recommendations, and reviews to your marketing and public relations “to do” list. Once you have this content, incorporate the most compelling snippets into your print materials. Reprint them on your website. Link to them in your emails. Use QR Codes to point to them on your product packaging. You might also want to print some of this content in your in-house newsletters so your sales and customer service teams can tap into it when talking to customers.

It’s great when you, your customers, and your employees can rave about your products and services. But when other consumers, social media influencers, and industry experts do it, it’s even better!