Theme 5: Show That You’re Connected
Your fifth theme for your social media marketing is to show who is connected with you. This is the whole point of social media!
If you can show that other people – particularly people your prospects respect – have checked you out and decided to get involved with you, then it’s easier for them to make the same decision.
So find ways to let people see that you have important people in your network, great customers, talented people working with you, respected people who refer business to you.
On Facebook, make your featured likes people your prospects will recognize and respect.
Retweet what influential people say.
Comment on blog posts of influencers.
Interact with customers or partners (especially those who are well-known and respected).
Talk about employees and subcontractors – if they have impressive degrees, I’m sure you can find a way to work that into the conversation from time to time.
Mention your board, advisors or investors.
Talk about really good sessions at conferences or webinars you attended.
Quote people your prospects respect.
Be grateful for any honors or awards you receive (or are nominated for).
Think about who your prospects and customers respect, and look for ways you can show connections with those people.
How do you build credibility by showing that you are connected to people your prospects recognize and respect?
Theme 3: Care about Quality
A third theme for your social media marketing is quality.
Let people see that you care about quality and excellence. Everyone wants to know that if they buy from you, you will deliver as promised, and they will get good results.
Show them that you care about delivering a high quality product or excellent service.
You can do this in a lot of different ways…
You can respond quickly whenever any problems surface. Twitter is good for this – if anyone complains or has problems, you can let everyone see how quickly you respond and how helpful you are.
You can share customer quotes and testimonials that talk about how pleased people are with the quality of work that you do.
You can congratulate employees, subcontractors and partners who go above and beyond to deliver excellent results.
You can talk about what happened on those rare occasions when quality was not up to par – what did you do? How big a fuss did you make? How did you fix it?
Something that is very easy to do is to appreciate quality and excellence wherever you encounter it. If you received excellent service at a restaurant, share that. If your coffee was made perfectly, tell people. If you met someone who absolutely delighted you with their service, tell the story.
Talk about your initiatives to improve quality. Maybe you are a Six Sigma fan. Maybe you are a process fanatic. Maybe you are all about continuous improvement. Let people see that you care and that you are always working to improve. That impresses people!
Know your numbers – let people see that you monitor quality and track results. Talk about the improvements you see.
An extremely easy way to do this is to share quotes from people who talk about quality and excellence, like W. Edwards Deming.
The most important message here is that you care about making sure your customers have a good experience – that delivering quality is important to you. How do you let people see that excellence matters to you?
Easy Way to Get Quotes and Testimonials
Everyone loves seeing quotes and testimonials – they are a great way to get prospects more comfortable with your business. But a lot of people have trouble coming up with a good quote, so they put off giving you one. Here’s how to make it easier for them…
The easiest way to get good quotes and testimonials is to ask customers to spend 10 minutes on the phone with you, talking about the product or service.
Record the call (with their permission) or take notes.
Then you draft a quote based on what they said and send it to them for them to edit.
That’s all!
The trick, of course, is that you do the work for them. The bonus is that you will get a better quote, since you can work in the points you want most to make.
Here are some other tips for crafting the quote:
- Make sure you include the company or product name.
- Use the customer’s phrasing, not yours. This can actually give you some great keywords.
- Keep it short! Most people won’t read a long quote. If they gave you a long list of wonderful compliments and you want to use them all, create several quotes.
Here is a sample email asking for permission to have that call:
[Name] suggested that I contact you to see if you would be willing to give us a quote about your experiences with [product/company].
Would you be willing to give us a quote we can use on our website?
The way we usually do it is that we schedule a call and spend about 10 minutes on the phone. You just talk to me about your experiences and I’ll take notes. Then I’ll draft a quote or two and send it to you for you to edit.
If that would be OK with you, is there a good time for me to call?
Here are questions to ask during the call:
- How did you first hear about [product/company]?
- What problem were you having at that time?
- Did you look at other products or solutions too?
- What made you decide to go with [product/company]?
- How did things go?
- Was there anything that particularly impressed you about the company or the people you worked with?
- What kind of results did you get?
- Are you planning to do more with the [product/company] in the future?
Here is a sample email to send with the quotes you have drafted:
Thank you so much for spending the time on the phone with me today! I really appreciate it. You gave me some excellent information.
Here are the quotes I have drafted for your approval. Please let me know which you are comfortable having us use – feel free to edit them as much as you like.
Could you please confirm how you would like your name, title and company name to appear with the quote?
To get extra leverage from the quote, ask if they would be willing to post the quote as a recommendation on LinkedIn or share it on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ or another social site.
5 Ways To Increase Credibility On Your Website
Why does credibility matter? Credibility is the essential third step that has to happen before you can make a sale.
The first step is Findability. People have to be able to find you – they need to know that you exist and that you can solve their problem.
The second step is Education. You have to educate people about how you can help them, what you will do, how much it costs, and why they should do business with you rather than anyone else.
Once you have jumped over those hurdles you still have the third step – Credibility. People need to believe that you will deliver what you promise – that it is safe to do business with you.
So your website needs to send the message that you will deliver what you promise, that you get good results for the people you work with.
How can you do that?
A recent Stanford University research report* identified all the different ways people evaluate a website’s credibility. Here are 5 tips based on that report you can use right now to increase the credibility of your website.
1. Design Look
While you can’t judge a book by its cover, most people judge the credibility of a website by its visual design. This is the biggest reason why it’s so important to engage the services of a professional graphic designer for a new or redesigned website.
Besides a pleasing overall layout, you should consider things like typography, color scheme, and ample use of white space for your website. You don’t want your prospects or customers to think you threw the site together haphazardly in your friend’s garage. More than any other factor, a professional-looking design helps you prove to your prospects that your company is the real deal.
2. Navigation Ease
A well-organized website is critical to establishing your site’s credibility. If you are thinking about redesigning your site or creating a new one from scratch, think carefully about how the site should be structured from the user’s perspective. Try to put yourself in their shoes. Why are they visiting your website? What do you want them to do when they get there? How can you make it easy for them to complete a simple task such as filling out a contact form or downloading a white paper?
The best way to answer these questions is to create simple outlines and page mockups called “wireframes”. The good news is you don’t need to be a graphic designer to do this and it’s easy to test out different scenarios. You can simply sketch them out on a white board or with paper and pen, or you can make more formalized page mockups using Microsoft Powerpoint or Word.
Besides enhancing your website’s credibility, this exercise helps you remain focused on your site’s goals. Also, doing this before you hire a professional designer will likely save money by reducing the possibility of major changes later in the project.
3. Information Usefulness
Another big credibility factor is information usefulness, meaning how relevant your site’s content is to your audience. In order to be useful, any information included on your website should be relevant to both the business and the end user.
How do you know what’s useful to your audience and what’s not? Ask. Online surveys and direct interviews are the best way to determine what people want and need from your website, and both can be done very inexpensively. You can make assumptions, but at the end of the day website users click on what they want, not what you want. And if they can’t find it on your site they will click away to your competition.
4. Writing Tone
Since your company’s website is an online extension of your company’s brand and personality, the tone of voice in all website copywriting should match your company’s other marketing collateral. However, most users are turned off by “marketing speak”, so the attitude conveyed in your site copy should speak directly to their needs without being too “salesy”. Likewise, all pages should have a consistent tone of voice, so if you have different writers make sure they are aware of your messaging standards.
5. Readability
Finally, improving overall readability can greatly improve your website’s credibility. Test your website on a variety of different browsers and make sure all typography is legible. Even better, get a second set of eyes to proofread and test every piece of content on your website. Easy-to-fix things like typos, broken links and grammatical errors can damage your site’s reputation in the marketplace. Don’t let this happen to your website. Spend the extra effort to make sure the final product is the best it can be.
*B.J. Fogg, Ph.D., Cathy Soohoo, David Daniel, “How Do People Evaluate a Web Site’s Credibility?”, 2002.
Start a Nurture Program
If you’re not already doing some kind of nurture program, you should start now. It is inexpensive (typically less than $500/month) and highly effective.
Nurture programs are designed to educate prospects about the value you provide – because almost any offering requires some education – and generate excitement and buzz about your company.
The idea is that you identify a small list of people – typically 100-200. Then you send them something every month.
Who goes on the list?
- Prospects who are already in the sales cycle
- Ideal prospects (people or organizations that you would love to have as clients)
- Influencers (respected individuals who could refer business to you)
- Business partners
- Maybe editors or bloggers who you want to have cover you
- Maybe competitors (if you want to annoy them)
- Maybe your best customers
- You (because you want to see what everyone else is getting and ensure the quality is high)
What do you send them?
Your goal is to educate them about your offering, so they fully appreciate the value. You also want to keep them up with what’s new with your company – to show that you have lots of interesting, exciting things going on.
We typically rotate between the following things:
- Case studies
- Postcards (often with a special offer)
- Press releases
- Educational articles authored by you or someone in your company
- Reprints of articles that have appeared about you in industry publications
- Reprints of articles written by others that support your point of view or help educate about a topic they need to understand to fully appreciate your solution
- Personal letters introducing something new that you are doing or making a special offer
- Giveaways (something cute and relevant to your company or offering)
You can do this by email, which is a good idea if you are nurturing people around the world. But we prefer direct mail, because so few companies use direct mail anymore that your mailings stand out more.
Keep in mind that prospects don’t know that you are only mailing to a couple hundred people each month. For all they know, you are blanketing the industry. And in a tough market, where many companies are cutting back on marketing, that’s impressive.
They get the sense that there’s a lot going on with your company – you must be growing rapidly and doing well for them to hear from you so often. That helps your credibility as well as gains you mindshare.
These programs are simple to put together too. Just define the goals for your program, pull together a list to start with, and line up the first 6 months of what you’re going to mail. Then turn it over to an administrative person to execute – you can do it almost on autopilot.
Just revisit the plan every 4 months or so, as your business needs change. Update the mailing list, and tweak the items you are planning to send as new ideas come up and new collateral gets created.
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