Six things I wish our clients knew …

Karen    Building trust, Opinion, Updating site content    

For the last two and a half years, I have been working with a web design and development company. The following observations are my own and are echoed by many of my colleagues.

1. Research takes time, and there isn’t always something tangible to show for it. When we scope something for a client project, it might take five hours just to work out that it can’t actually be done in the way the project was envisaged, or with the existing technology platform. Correction – it can’t be done cost-effectively – as they say in the business, anything can be done if you throw enough time and money at it.

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rsvp … please?

Karen    Building trust     communicate, information overload, respond

Répondez s’il vous plaît – yeah, that’s right – respond.

All too often in the information-overloaded world we live in – full of twatterbleeping, facebooking, beebopping, txting, online chatting and emailing messages – to say nothing of the more old fashioned forms of communication (like phone calls and face to face meetings), common courtesy appears to be lost.

What am I on about? Well, all too often, people get caught up in the overwhelm and forget that there is an individual human being on the end of some very specific forms of communication – and sometimes that human being is very keen to hear back from you when they have made the effort to communicate.

So that might be a comment on your blog site, an enquiry through your website’s enquiry system, a request for a quote … or a job application.

How often do you hear frustration from friends, family and co-workers about not hearing back? The sheer inconvenience when not hearing back slows them down from making a decision – what product to purchase, which supplier to use, which job to take more seriously.

Unfortunately it happens all too often, and really, it’s just plain rude.

If you are overwhelmed by so many messages you can’t keep up, and you can’t work out which communication is most important – take someone on to help you, or pay a contractor, service person or professional.

Please don’t be one of those people. Make an effort to respond, even if it is purely with a quick acknowledgement that you have received the communication, in whatever form it arrives.

And then take the time to sit down and respond in more detail, in a timely manner.

Always keep in mind that someone has taken the time to write to you – do them the courtesy of making the time in return.

(And if you really, really don’t have any way of managing your communications, take down your enquiry form off your site and hide your email until you have caught up on things. Mmm, didn’t think so.)

Please.

Merci.

Karen

tangerine trees and marmalade skies

Karen    Building trust, Populating your site     perception is reality, press releases, site content

winter sea

So it would seem that the picture really is worth 1,000 words – and if it’s a cute one, then even better! My last picture post brought the most visits so far to my blog, which was very interesting and great illustration of my point about the power of images!

So I figured that this time I should include an image too – this one is from Takamatua, a bay on Banks Peninsula, New Zealand, about an hour’s drive from where I live. And yes, it has been coloured – there wasn’t really a marmalade sky.

And the point of this post? It’s all about perception.

Marketing people will tell you over and over again, “perception is reality” … so no matter what the actual reality is, that doesn’t matter … what matters is what people perceive that reality to be.

How does this affect your web content?

Well it’s all good for you if you have a new site and need to quickly build brand credibility, reputation etc. Because it is possible on the web to immediately present your business as an established organisation – or equally, you as someone with an existing reputation.

Look at the sites of the leading players in your market segment, and pay attention to the cues that indicate they are established and credible. These might be things like case studies and customer testimonials; a significant number of stories or press releases in their News pages;  a company profile that shows more than one person in the team – and gives some history to the business; a number of newsletters archived on the newsletter section; significant number of blog posts etc.

Now you might not be able to produce all of that overnight, but you can start to build up some material that will all go up on the site at once, but possibly with a variety of dates.

For example, you may have launched your business last year, but not got round to creating a web presence until 12 months later. At the time you started the business, you may not have put out any press releases – perhaps because you didn’t know how, or you didn’t think what you were doing was particularly newsworthy at the time. Or, you simply wanted to put a toe in the water before you started making a lot of noise about your business.

No matter what the reason, you can create a press release – that is purely for your site, which is dated from the time you launched your business. Then create additional releases for significant moments in the next 12 month period – so when your new website goes live, you have three or four releases up there, all dated chronologically.

The great thing about this approach is that you don’t have to worry about pitching these releases to your target media, you can write them specifically for your audience. Which means you can provide a more specialised type of information – designed for your audience, rather than the broader brush approach you would take for business media.

You can also optimise these releases for your target keywords, and incorporate links to other parts of your site, and to your sales conversion path, so they provide a great opportunity to improve your rankings and direct people into the most important parts of your website.

If you are not certain or confident about writing good press releases, there are plenty of online resources that will give you tips, like this for writing perfect press releases and this http://www.press-release-writing.com/newsletters/

So filling up your News page is a start to making your site look established and substantial - make sure it is rich with content, even if you have to create it retrospectively.

If you have a blog on your site, have at least five posts up in there before you reveal it to the world. Again, you can date them in sequence, so they give the impression you have been blogging for a while.

I think that’s enough for you to digest now – another post on building credibility further through your site content will follow soon.

à bientôt

Karen

But what about credibility?

Karen    Building trust, Uncategorized     awards, connection, credibility, testimonials, trust building

Well might you ask – over the years the catchwords of professionalism, credibility and reputation have all been very important in corporate communications in particular.

The words passion, dynamism, excitement, connection, engagement and fun seem a lot way away from the often stuffy world of corporate speak.

But finally companies are coming to realise that what readers/viewers connect with is real people – connecting the way real people connect.

Which is not through carefully selected sentences from the corporate phrase book. Stilted, formal, corporate brand speak that endeavours to never be personal, never be “inappropriate”.

But in reality, that kind of word-smithing takes the reader so far away from the humanity that should be behind it … if they even stick with it long enough to get the point.

Chances are that today’s readers will simply scan the words, not even try to understand, and move right along to something more engaging.

Because there is always something more engaging – be it a viral video, a i can haz cheezburger image, the next tweet popping up on the screen … or your competition, who have somehow managed to capture the essence of what they have to offer in a way that is far more dynamic and interesting than your approach.

So how do we build trust?

Ok, so if you shouldn’t be building reputation and trust through stuffy language, stilted layouts and anonymous photo library images, how do you do it?

Your potential clients need to know that other people have used your products and services, and that they got a good result. They were happy with your service and would recommend you to their friends, family and associates.

We are all very familiar with this formula by now. Amazon.com  and eBay were among the very first e-commerce sites to make it popular. It is the new democracy – the equalizer, particularly on the auction sites, where the opportunity exists to provide mutual feedback.

Whatever the structure, users of a service and consumers of a product now have the opportunity to share their experience with the whole world, but especially other potential consumers of that same product or service.

(Actually marketers have been using testimonials for many years, but the web makes it possible for those recommendations to be read by a massive audience, and for readers to dig down and find out much more about the recommenders than ever before.)

Which is great.

Especially great for you if what you are offering is up to scratch.

• So let’s assume that it is (and if it’s not, you are making your best efforts to get that issue sorted asap) … customer feedback, testimonials and case studies on your website are a great place to start building that trust.

• Awards for excellence, innovation, success are also great – make sure you have them up there. And if you don’t have any, think about entering ones in your industry sector.

• Stories from local media about your business doing well are also great ways to share a third party view of your company. Make sure you include a News section that not only has room for your own press releases, but also has room for you to put up any media mentions.

• Links to and from your site from other reputable sites are also valuable ways to build trust by association.

I am sure you can think of other ways to build trust on your site – pictures of your products/services being used in the real world; feedback widgets like Trip Advisor that give travellers the chance to give feedback on hospitality providers around the world; forums and blogs with commenting facilities and the chance to offer real time customer service through the net. So many different ways to demonstrate that people trust you, buy from you and come back again for more of your products and services.

Of course you don’t have to use them all, and you don’t have to put them all on your site right from day one. But there is a great selection here of ideas to get you started and give you something to work towards.

So tell me, if your site is already up and running – how do you build trust?

Karen