One of the biggest challenges your business will have is getting your prospects to trust you.
It’s easy to talk about what you can do for someone. Or how much your products cost. What is hard is getting a person to feel like you can be trusted to buy from.
Online reviews, testimonials, money back guarantees, etc. are all secondary to building trust. They reinforce trust. But they don’t create it.
So how do you initially build trust with a person who visits your website?
Simple.
Speak in the same way that they speak.
Make them feel like they are talking to someone who ‘gets’ them.
What are the words your customers always use?
In your business, there are certain words, phrases or slang that your customers use. If you run a cycling store you talk in a totally different vocabulary than a wedding planner. Yet both businesses have customers who take their service very seriously. These different manners of speaking have evolved over many years as the user base for a kind of product or service grew.
The more formal you are, the less people relate
In business, there is a tendency to talk in more formal terms. We think of those who buy from us as ‘clients’ or ‘customers’. But those people don’t think of themselves that way – they think of themselves as a person who wants something. They want a solution or an improvement.
If you can explain the problem you solve, or how things will get better, that is much more valuable than talking about ‘customer satisfaction’ or ‘seamless integration’ or any other fancy set of words you can use. If you can speak about it in a relatable, human way, it will be very interesting to people.
The more savvy the consumer, the more you need to know
Today in the world of free information, you can’t just rely on basic information to share with your customers. If it’s easy to google the same answers, then you aren’t really adding any value to the conversation.
Think about the reviews that you read on Amazon. They give you incredibly deep information about every single product on the site. And they do it in a real way. It’s likely that you trust the products more or less after reading the Amazon comments. This is simply because they are written without an agenda. And they are written in the way that people actually talk.
The next time you are talking to a customer, notice the slang terms, buzzwords, and phrases that they use. Speak in the same voice as your prospect. Incorporate more of their language into your marketing content, and your prospects will pay attention to it.