In our Best Answer Marketing Playbook so far, we’ve covered how becoming data-informed provides clarity, and how an integrated strategy turns those insights into impact. But in today’s world of AI-powered search and information overload, even the best strategy won’t work unless it’s backed by trust. In fact, according to LinkedIn’s B2B Institute, 93.7% of B2B marketers agreed or strongly agreed that “building trust is the most important factor for achieving success as a B2B brand.”
I think we all realize that single-channel information discovery in the B2B world is dead. Buyers don’t rely on just Google, LinkedIn, or analyst reports anymore. Members of the buying committee, both known and hidden, consult a wide array of sources: search engines, social feeds, industry media, influencers, peers, and even generative AI platforms. To show up as the best answer across this multi-channel landscape, B2B brands need a system that creates trust signals everywhere their buyers are looking. That’s where the Best Answer Marketing Trust Engine comes in.
Why Trust is the Currency of B2B Marketing
Research from Edelman shows that 65% of B2B buyers rank trust in the brand as the most important factor in a purchase decision, more than price or features. In complex, high-stakes buying journeys, B2B marketers are seeing that credibility isn’t optional. Trust is the foundation that determines whether your insights, solutions, and content are even considered.
How believable a brand is directly correlates to how buyable it is.
Because sourcing of information has become more diverse, B2B brand trust doesn’t come from a single source. A slick case study or polished blog post alone won’t cut it. Trust is cumulative. It comes from repeated, consistent signals across multiple channels and voices. Trust comes from being the best answer for your customers, wherever they are looking.
Building the Trust Engine
Best Answer Marketing’s Trust Engine pillar provides a framework for generating the credibility signals needed to stand out in a crowded market. These signals come from multiple sources, reinforcing one another to create authority. Within the BAM Integrated Marketing Strategy that defines these sources for building B2B brand credibility, there are several options for trust-building tactics that stand out:
1. Influencer Partnerships
Collaborate with respected industry voices to co-create content and empathize with buyer challenges and advocate for your category and types of solution. Influencers bring built-in credibility while also extending the reach of your brand’s narratives. Of course, B2B influencer marketing is something we’ve covered in-depth here at TopRank for 10+ years.
2. Executive & Employee Advocacy
Influence from within is an exciting growth opportunity for building trust for B2B brands. Executives, internal SMEs, and key opinion leaders (KOLs) can amplify category, solution and product trust by engaging in industry conversations, publishing thought leadership, and showing up authentically on social channels.
3. Customer Advocacy
Beyond traditional case studies, customers can be active trust-builders. Involving them in webinars, co-authored articles, or testimonial videos provides powerful peer validation and can deliver useful information with the authenticity that is increasingly hard to find.
4. Original Research
Data from original research is at the core of the Trust Engine. When validated by influencers and covered by industry media, research becomes thought leadership fuel that establishes your brand as a credible authority and creates a rich flywheel of content and engagement opportunities. TopRank has partnered with Ascend2 to provide turnkey original research solutions that align with the BAM system.
5. Thought Leadership
Unique insights from a brand’s own proprietary data or original research can drive content and market engagement opportunities to build the brand’s leadership which creates numerous full funnel benefits including building trust in the brand.
6. Owned Media
Publishing consistent, trust-building content on your website, blog, social media, and email helps reinforce the credibility of your brand’s core narratives and creates a reliable home base for your perspective. Specificity of content supported by signals of trust rises to the top in Google search, AI powered search and in communities where conversations, referrals and recommendations happen.
7. Earned Media
By engaging with industry publications, analysts, and journalists, brands can propagate their unique insights with credibility to information sources that are already trusted by the audience a brand is after. Earned media coverage reinforces authority and creates citation-worthy content that build trust for both buyers and can improve AI-powered search. Fun fact: TopRank began over 20 years ago as PR/Marketing agency and we’ve added new PR and media relations solutions to our mix for B2B clients.
8. Social Proof
Displaying customer reviews, testimonials, case studies, and ratings underlines a B2B brand’s track record of success. Documenting these success metrics benefits customers seeking validation and also signals credibility to GenAI platforms that increasingly rely on quantifiable outcomes and social indicators to surface trusted answers.
As you can see, the Trust Engine tactics often work best together, vs. as stand alone efforts to build credibility. The question is, for your specific goals, audience, resources, timeline and strategy – which mix will be most effective? That’s where the BAM Data-Informed pillar comes in with audience research, customer surveys and auditing of other relevant data sources.
The Power of Multi-Channel Trust
Today’s B2B buyer journey is nonlinear. A prospect might read your blog, see an influencer post, hear an executive on a podcast, and come across your brand cited in an AI-generated answer-all before visiting your website. In fact, with diversifying channels of information discovery and consumption, it’s possible that buyers never even visit your website before making contact. The Trust Engine ensures that in each of these touchpoints, your brand shows up as credible, consistent, and authoritative.
When integrated with the first two pillars: Data-Informed insights and an Integrated Strategy, the Trust Engine elevates your marketing from start/stop campaigns to an ongoing system of credibility and relevance where it matters most for your customers. The BAM system turns your brand into a trusted source of truth for the questions that matter most to buyers. In uncertain and dynamic business environments, being a most trusted brand is an excellent place to be.
Best Answer Marketing is a System for B2B Success
Trust is the multiplier that makes every other element of Best Answer Marketing work harder. It’s powered by insights from data-informed clarity, elevates integrated strategy from mechanical to meaningful, and ensures that touchpoints from content formats to publishing channels are optimized for credibility. In other words, the Trust Engine helps power the entire BAM system so that buyers don’t just see your content, they believe it.
The Best Answer Marketing system is built on six interconnected pillars:
- Data-Informed – Using multiple sources of insight to guide decisions.
- Integrated Strategy – Aligning insights, narratives, formats, and channels across the funnel.
- Trust Engine – Building credibility signals across influencers, executives, customers, research, media, and more.
- Experiential Content – Creating engaging, immersive formats that capture attention.
- Multi-Channel Visibility – Ensuring your brand shows up everywhere buyers look, from search to social to AI.
- Full Funnel Analytics – Connecting disparate data to measure and optimize business impact.
Together, these pillars form a system that makes B2B marketing more than the sum of its parts. Trust amplifies every one of them but of course trust alone isn’t enough. To win attention and loyalty in a sea of AI-generated content, you also need to create experiences that differentiate your brand and inspire engagement.
In our next post, we’ll explore Experiential Content, which is how to structure and deliver content that goes beyond simply delivering information, but creating an experience buyers can feel.
Follow along with the Best Answer Marketing Playbook to receive each pillar as it’s published, and be the first to access the complete guide when it’s released including an exclusive strategy checklist and bonus resources.
