Top 10 Ways To Boost The Credibility And Persuasive Power Of Your Website

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Credibility is one of the most important factors in converting website visitors into enquirers. It’s the nature of marketing pitches to make claims or promises about what you do and the results you can achieve. But getting website visitors to believe what you say is the key to generating more leads and expanding your online sales pipeline.

Here are 10 ways to boost the credibility of your marketing message so you can convert more clicks into cash:

Strategy #1: State the rationale (the Reasons Why)

Persuasion expert Robert Cialdini of Influence fame reports that detailing the reasons why your claims are true adds significantly to the believability of your message.

e.g. If you pitch yourself as “The Lowest Priced Luggage Retailer in Australia”, explain the reasons why this is so.

• You buy container loads at a time and take advantage of bulk discounts (show photos of the containers)
• Your warehouse is located in the suburbs, where you have a much lower rent and therefore lower overhead
• Your strategy is to sell more volume at lower margins in order to build a loyal base of repeat customers
• Most of your business comes via the Internet, avoiding the big media costs of your big-end-of-town competitors

Start explaining the rationale behind what you do and watch your credibility and conversions climb. Remember that it’s also important to explain the rationale behind a particular OFFER (especially discounts or sales). A Jay Abraham marketing aphorism that has always stuck with me is “You can’t discount your way out of a marketing problem — you need to educate your way out”.

Strategy #2: Case Studies and Testimonials

If I could only use ONE credibility-boosting strategy, Case Studies / Testimonials would have to be it.

Case Studies can be extremely powerful because they are at once specific, concrete and demonstrable examples of the RESULTS you have produced for customers, patients or clients. Rembember that your clients don’t buy products and services. They buy RESULTS.

It goes without saying that your testimonials need to be genuine. Some sites feature testimonials that sound, well, fake. They use too many superlatives and read like they’ve been ripped from the pages of a Hollywood B-movie script.

One of the best ways to accumulate a file of Case Studies is to provide your clients with a few guiding questions and have them respon in their own words. This will produce testimonials that sound authentic and “ring tue” to the reader.

You should also remember that Testimonials and Case Studies have become a standard feature on many websites. They can be easily ignored by website visitors UNLESS you go to the trouble of “exponentialising” them.

You can “Exponentialise” a Testimonial or Case Study by:

• Adding a headline
• Placing it in a Johnson Box
• Highlighting key phrases and results with bold or another form of graphical emphasis
• Adding a photo, audio stream or video stream from the testimonial provider
• Adding the client’s logo (especially if they are a well-known brand)
• Showing graphs, scanned documents, screenshots or other visual representations of results.

Strategy #3: Association Marks, Qualifications and Certifications

If you’re a member of any professional associations or other groups, place their logo on your website. This implies some kind of standing in your industry and can even constiture a 3rd party endorsement of your company.

Some qualifications and certifications will be well know to your audience (e.g. ISO 9001). Others will be more obscure, so the onus is on you to EDUCATE prospects and clients about the certification. Here are some ideas to do that:

• Explain why you decided to pursue the certification
• Explain the process or what you had to go through to be certified
• Explain the context of the certification (e.g. “Marketing Results is one of only 16 Google Adwords Qualified Companies in Australia)
• Explain the benefit to the customer

Certifications and qualifications are great, because they not only increase your ability to deliver for customers and clients, but they also start to flesh out a “360 degree” view of your company from multiple third-party perspectives that can serve to shorten the trust cycle.

Strategy #4: Awards

Industry Awards can also boost your standing in the eyes of prospects and clients, but don’t go too over the top patting yourself on the back – try to tie the award into how you produce a better outcome for clients.

Here’s a good example of this in practice. Combo IT’s “Awards” page provides details of the awards they have won (including inclusion on the prestigious BRW Fast 100 list). Not ony the prestige of the awards, but the fact that Combo is a multi-award winning company, helps to build an impression of legitimacy and competence — enough, certainly, to shortlist them as a prospective supplier.

Strategy #5: 3rd Party Verification Services

3rd party verification services such as Verisign, the Better Business Bureau and HackerSafe can also reassure visitors that your site is legitimate and that your business practices and customer service policies are sound. The key here is to refer to “industry standard” sources as much as possible – you don’t want to rely on little-known verification services that don’t have enough recognition to reflect favourably on you (although having said that, “official-looking” logos would probably help — that would be an interesting thing to test.)

Strategy #6: Photos, Audio and Video

Good sales copy is one of the most powerful persuasive elements on any sales page, and there are a few high-converting sites (www.doubleyourdating.com comes to mind) that rely almost exclusively on text content to convert visitors, rather than text or fancy multimedia effects.

Nevertheless, in most cases photos, audio and video can certainly add value and boost your credibility.  And with broadband speeds getting faster all the time [yes, even in sleepy old Australia ], there is no excuse to limit rich content for bandwidth reasons.

HOWEVER, coming from the direct response school of marketing as I do, my only proviso is that audo-visual content should be used to enhance and reinforce your selling message.

The following types of photos work well: product images (especially with relevant close-ups), author images, team photos, photos of your premises, plant or equipment, graphs and charts.    Wherever possible, you should add effective captions — they invariably attract the eye and have been tested to increase response, both in the direct mail world and online.

Audio and video content can also provide a conversion boost. Audio testimonials work well, and audio programs are easy to record and publish online (the open source Audacity recorder is a good place to start for PC users and I hear that Garage Band rocks for the Mac people out there).

Direct response video can also drive increased conversions – though not always, so you have to test – and Camtasia screencaptures area great way to deliver visual content.

Strategy #7: Reprints PR Articles and Media Comments

Press releases and media comments can produce enormous traffic spikes in a short period of time (one article in the Brisbane Courier Mail drove over 1,000 opt-ins in a few days to one of our clients, an independent real estate agent.)   But the buzz tends to die down just as soon as it began.

You can make it last longer by “reprinting” articles as images or PDF documents, and either placing them on your website in an “As Seen On TV” kinda way, or sending key articles to clients in the form of an email autoresponer message.  “Official” information coming from 3rd party sources persuades better than anything coming from yourself.

Strategy #8: Avoid Exaggeration and Hype

This is something that’s going to get more important as people everywhere yearn for a bit of authenticity from the companies they do business with.  You should check your copy for exaggerated claims that we’ve all indulged in before.   If you’ve ever seen one of uber-copywriter Michel Fortin’s video copy critiques, one of the things you’ll notice is that he often tones down over-the-top statements — one exaggerated claim can break your audience’s connection with what you have to say, even if your product or service is very good.

Strategy #9: Speak the same language as your prospects

Use the same words, phrases, grammar, slang and turns of phrase as your target audience.  If you don’t know what those words are, you need to hang out more with your customers.   The best copywriters really know how to crawl inside the minds of their prospects and talk on the same level but anyone can do the same if listen to their customers and ask the right questions.

Strategy #10: Include “we are a real business” factors

Your website should always include contact details and a phone number that works.  Photos of your premises or operations can also help to “tangiblise” your business.   In some industries this is more important than others and if you’re selling something more “intangible” such as information, the need to appear “real” to prospects is even greater.

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