Why your online credibility lacks credibility

Without credibility, your business has little chance of success. Credibility is the key ingredient with regard to a business being able to develop and sustain trust. Too many small businesses and solo consultants are really not paying attention to the words and images they use in their online advertising and marketing efforts. Too often they are killing their credibility even while they believe they are boosting it. For the customer, or the client, credibility means they have faith in you and your company. It means they trust you enough to buy from you.

• One initial disaster that so many small businesses make is that they use silly and meaningless words and phrases that actually, as recent research has proven out, seriously damages their credibility. Mind numbing superlatives will sink your ship every time and make you look like a pure amateur. So, in the future, try and avoid such words and phrases as “voted the best”, “experienced team” “best in the business”and “high quality”. Do people really think you sell low quality products and/or services to the point where you have to tell them that you don’t? What this really shows is that you have no faith at all in what you sell. If you did, you would be underlining how long you have been in business and your home page would have examples of why that is.
• Staying on that path, you quite likely have no case histories or testimonials anywhere on your site. No one cares about bells and whistles and fancy graphics. They want results. They want problems solved. Instead of telling them that you are the “best in the business”, show them with a testimonial from a customer or a client that you actually helped and who actually think you did a tremendous job doing it. As the old cliche goes: talk is cheap. Doing this can also heavily negate the review sites.
• Communication, of course, is the key and the responsibility for successful communications falls on the shoulders of the person trying to communicate. Don’t storm off saying people don’t understand. If they don’t understand you, it’s your fault not theirs. Stay away from industry jargon. Keep it simple. Also, while all of those chatbots and emails might be helpful, new research out of Harvard declares that more than 75% of people who have a bad experience talking with a real person are far less likely to ever deal with that company. And, they will tell at least seven of their friends about it.

-Written by Kevin Sawyer