Why do I keep talking about trust?
The simple fact is, if your website is not performing, the missing ingredient is almost certainly TRUST.
If they are coming to your site, but not converting – calling or clicking or buying – it’s because they don’t trust you enough. Abd if they aren’t coming to your site, Google doesn’t trust you enough to award you high search rankings. Or other marketing isn’t working because the people who see your ads don’t trust you.
It is a sad truth that an enormous percentage of people cannot be trusted. I’ve seen estimates that the percentage of dishonest people runs as high as 60%. It makes hiring a tradesman feel like playing Russian Roulette. Sure that plumber was good, but now I need an electrician. Let’s roll the dice again.
You know this is a lot worse than it used to be. Once, most people lived their whole lives in one place. You knew your neighbors. You knew the baker. Sure, there were people who couldn’t be trusted – but you knew who they were.
This, by the way, was the whole principle on which Google was built. Who is trusted by the people you trust?
Without that, what have you got? People can say anything, and often do.
Marketers and sales people spend an enormous amount of time trying to figure out how to say the right thing that will make people buy.
It’s not what you say. They’ve been burned a thousand times before.
If you’re trusted, you could say almost anything.
Why not put your effort where it will make the most difference?
Referrals are the best for one reason: You trust them. The rise of third party systems such as Google Reviews, is all about trust.
A key point about trust is that it isn’t all or nothing. There are gradations of trust from the tiniest to the greatest. This means you can – you should! build trust, one step at a time.
Once you know that what you need to work on is trust, you need to isolate trust is lacking. Your best tool for this is metrics. If you don’t have ways of measuring the performance of different bits of your marketing and website, you’re going to spend a lot of time scratching your head.
With metrics, it can be obvious where you are asking prospective customers to make too great a leap.
When you find one of these points and remedy it, it is like removing a branch blocking a stream. Things start to move.
Here’s a real example, I had a website that was producing few leads. With metrics measuring almost every step in the process, I could see no drop-off in the amount of visitors to the site, no drop in pages visited, no change in the number of contact forms started – and a severe drop-off in the number of contact forms completed.
Such a drop-off can be over time – it used to be a lot more. Or it can be absolute. Why do such a tiny percentage of people who start to fill out a contact form actually complete it? In this case it was both.
Prospective customers had enough trust to visit the site, to go to a second page, to start a contact form – but not to submit it. See, that requires a lot more trust. There was a change in the economic scene that made people nervous about spending money, and it was right there the trust broke down.
We added trust building factors at the point of form fill and – BAM – the site started generating leads.
That process can be repeated over and over. There may be several choke points of different size. You unblock things at one point and the stream flows down as far as the next beaver dam.
If you have a good product or service, and it is one that people need and want, there two primary reasons why they aren’t buying from you. Either they never heard of you, or they don’t trust you enough to take action.
The world is full of shysters. How do they know you’re different?
