Testimonials help build trust, authority and make it clear what kind of clients/customers you want to work with.

Anyone can get a testimonial and add it to their website but getting an effective testimonial can be difficult.

In this episode, we’ll cover…

• • What makes a ‘bad’ testimonial
  • What makes a great testimonial
  • How to get the kind of testimonial that connects to your target market
  • What questions you should be asking your clients to get the perfect testimonial

Time Stamps: In a rush? Get to the section you need to below!

0.54 – Benefits of testimonials
2.15 – How testimonials can help attract your ideal clients
2.42- Examples of bad testimonials
5.15 – What kind of testimonial should you be looking for?
8.32 – Avoid web designers with bad websites
12.32 – How to get the answers to these questions without emailing
16.10 – Marcus Sheridan and the power of three

Useful Resources and Links

Membership Community 

Free Facebook Community

World Class Communication

What To Do Next

Thanks for listening to our episode. If you found this episode useful, please feel free to share it via social media using the links above.

If you want to know about search engine optimisation (SEO), website conversions, content marketing and website copy, then join our FREE Facebook Group.

We would love it if you subscribed to our podcast and left us an honest review. This helps us reach more people and produce more podcast episodes.

If you have any questions about this episode or you want us to cover something new, then contact us on hello@jammydigital.com or leave a comment at the bottom of the page!

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Episode Transcript Below

Welcome to episode 17 of the Make Your Mark online podcast. Today we’re going to be talking about how to get client testimonials for your website, but before we get into the show, this podcast is sponsored by the Make Your Mark online membership. This is our signature membership community where we help personal brands build and grow a successful business website. The doors for the membership are now closed, but you can check out the details at makeyourmarkonline.net and you can join in the wait list and we’ll notify you as soon as we open the doors again in January. So let’s get on with the show. So we’re talking about testimonials. What kind do you need or how to get them. Isn’t that right?

Yeah, it’s absolutely vital that you have some kind of proof of the work that you’ve done in the past. I mean, they help you build trust instantly depending on the type of review, they allow you to show results that you’ve gotten for people who’ve worked with you in the past, which is another great thing that people look for when they’re on your websites and they can actually help you elevate your level of authority. So if you’ve worked with people in the past, their authority is quite high and they’re quite respected in the industry and you’ve got testimonials from them, that can immediately allow you to kind of increase your prices and charge a lot more than your competitors. So they also help on that level as well. They also help you showcase the types of clients you want to attract. We noticed this for ourselves because we like to work with personal brands and we mainly feature, examples of websites we’ve built for personal brands and the testimonials that people have left. So yeah, it really, really helps build trust and authority and allows you to position yourself differently.

Yeah, definitely. And people forget that don’t they? Because I think people just like to collect testimonials and particularly the showcase and the types of clients that you want to work with, some people have testimonials that were given sort of five, 10 years ago from there.

Yeah. 2013.

Yeah. Next door neighbor Barbara type thing and your clients or your ideal clients have probably changed a little bit since then. So that’s a really good point. But I think the big question is, and we get asked this quite a lot, is do you people actually trust these reviews these days? I mean, it seems like everywhere you look, everyone has these big boastful testimonials that only promote themselves. I mean, do people actually trust them?

It’s true that not all reviews and testimonials are created equally. They’re not all as effective as one another. And that’s the problem I think, especially for anybody starting out in business. You just want to get some testimonials on there and that’s fine. If you need to ask a friend or a family member, do a little bit of work for them in exchange for a testimonial. Then fine, if you’re just getting started, but if you have an established business and you’ve got reviews like, “Oh, I really enjoyed working with Martin. He’s very friendly and professional and I would highly recommend.” These are the kind of reviews that you don’t want on your website. They don’t offer anything in terms of content or contacts at all and they don’t allow the reader, the visitor on your website to imagine what it’s going to be like to work with you. That’s one of the biggest problems.

Yep, that’s absolutely true. We do see those kinds of fake testimonials all the time. Don’t we? The kind of often nothing and just say, “Oh, this person was really friendly and professional.” And yes, kind of the minimum that I would expect from working with any company. So it’s-

Does that mean the people that haven’t left you a review, don’t think you’re professional or friendly?

Exactly. So it’s not really that impressive as it. If someone says that you’re professional and friendly.

No. But I do feel as though, there’s so many review websites out there like TripAdvisor, like Yell, like all of these other places that have an abundance of these types of reviews. Everyone just cares about the star rating on these websites. I just need five stars. I just need more than 4.5 stars and I want to get my scores up so an abundance of these reviews helps on those websites, but it doesn’t help on your website. We need some actual value here because you don’t have a star rating that everybody uses and funnily enough, every testimonial that you add to your website just happens to be five stars. That’s just … Because you’re not gonna add a three star review to your own website and that’s where this trust thing comes in and that’s why people have a problem sometimes and why sometimes people glaze over when you have 15 reviews that say you’re professional and friendly.

Yeah, definitely. I totally agree with that actually, that there is a difference between TripAdvisor reviews or Yell or whatever it might be, and the reviews on your website you do have control over and it should be about appealing to your potential customer by using those reviews. That’s really interesting. So what kind of reviews are we looking for then?

Okay, so now that we’ve discussed what kind of reviews we’re not looking for, I want you to kind of reframe your mind a little bit really, always remember that people don’t care about how amazing you are. They care more about the results that you can help them achieve. So having 25 reviews on your website that just say you were great is not as effective as having two or three that actually walk people through the story of that client. Actually walk people through the ups and the downs and what’s happened throughout there project and what results you’ve gotten out of it.

Now we don’t want to [inaudible 00:05:49] on kind of a case study here is just a testimonial, but I still want you to think about your client as being the hero of the story essentially, and you’ve probably heard the analogy quite a lot and it is important that you think, this visitor that’s coming to my website, they want to know how this other person, Julie or Bob, what problems were they having before they hired us, what did we help them achieve and what results did they get at the end of it and how are they happier? It’s a tall order actually getting someone to leave your review without some guidance here. And this is exactly why we wanted to record this episode.

Okay. So yeah, you were talking about getting those kinds of reviews from Julie and Bob, but that’s quite difficult to get out of a client, isn’t it? I mean, how do you actually get that good meaty review that’s going to appeal to your website visitor as well? How do you do that?

Well, I’ll tell you what you don’t do. You don’t email them after the website’s gone live or after you’ve finished working with them and saying, “Please can you leave me a few lines of text?”

Like we used to do.

Like we used to do. Yeah. This is the biggest problem. If you are in the routine of kind of emailing them afterwards and just asking a vague question or, “Please would you leave me like a Linkedln recommendation?” That’s fine if that’s what you want, a LinkedIn recommendation or just a general review, but we’re talking about actually allowing your testimonials to act as a little bit of a sales tool. If Bob has had a problem that he’s been struggling with for years and you help him achieve all he’s ever hoped of from his business and his life.

All his dreams came true.

All his dreams came through and is now rich and living on an island. Why would you just say, put his testimonial on your website. That’s great, “It was friendly and professional and it helped me get what I wanted.” You wasted that amazing project that you’ve worked with people on. I mean, especially from our point of view, when we work with clients for months on end, we have lots of different ups and downs and stories to tell and for us to leave a kind of vague review like that it wouldn’t work very, very well. You’ve wasted it. So we actually created a system that we try to use as much as possible and we want to talk to you a little bit about that in this episode, about what you can do to get the answers that you want without manufacturing them, without getting your sister to write them. Actually asking specific questions that you want the answers to that allow you to create a testimonial.

Okay, that sounds really good. So have you got any examples of what kind of questions we should be asking our customers or our clients?

Yeah, I mean it completely depends on your industry and the types of questions that you might ask, but on an overall level, we’re trying to get people to answer questions about, what frustrations they were having, what problems they were having before working with you, what were they really struggling to do that they couldn’t do so they needed to hire you for? And again, this is going to change quite drastically depending on your industry, but for us, for our example, we might say the first question would be, what problems were you having before working with us? Another question might be, why did you hire us? There’re two very different questions there and it’s important that that person answers them individually. For us, we might say, how does your new website solve your original problem? So you’d have to work out what that would sound like for your business.

So if you are a fitness trainer, then how did the new fitness class or fitness regime help you lose all that amazing way that you’ve lost? Another question might be, what results have you got since going live? That might be a question for us. It might be what results have you got since implementing the tips on the coaching call that you had for whatever industry that you’re in? Another question might be how did you find the service you received? So this is a question that sounds a little bit kind of like the previous reviews we’ve been talking about, about actually, what did you like about us? But it actually is a nice question because it allows you to do a little bit of research, what did you like about the service? What didn’t you like about this service?

I’m not saying you have to include all of these different elements in the testimonial, but you might as well get a little bit of honest feedback from your previous clients to ask them, what did you like? What didn’t you like? What can we do to improve? The more questions that you ask like that it shows that you care. Not that you’re just ringing up for a testimonial, it shows you that you’re asking specific questions that will allow you to improve your service. So these kinds of questions are the ones that we’re talking about and they should help you formulate a testimonial that you could potentially add to your website.

Yeah. So we’ve actually had, for my asking these types of questions, we’ve had some really, really good answers that we never would have gotten, just like you said, just from emailing a client. So what problems were you having before working with us? A lot of clients said that they’d had nightmare experiences with the web design industry before and-

Absolutely.

… Things that aren’t, and you actually uncover things. You actually discover more things and problems perhaps within your industry or that people are having and you learn so much from these testimonials don’t you? And you start to actually talk to your customers on their level. You really start to listen and understand your customers. So these testimonials are really, really powerful in actually helping you understand your customers and your potential customers. And so they really work very, very well.

Definitely. And this is the important thing as well, is we’re only sort of data gathering at this point. It’s a case of asking the questions first so that we can think about the testimonial second, and this is where we’ve got kind of from asking these questions from a research purpose as well as an information testimonial gathering phase. We’ve got lots of great ideas for content as well. I mean sometimes when we’re in the business it becomes very difficult for us to see it from a brand new perspective, clients perspective. And this is why it’s really important that we ask these questions because it gives us lots of content ideas actually reaching out to people after you’ve worked with them as well. And asking these questions just in general is a good idea. It’s just a great thing for customer service, but we’re talking about testimonials here and it gives you lots of different information that you can use for the testimonials as well as blog content and podcast episode content. Hence, the reason that we’re doing this episode is because of what people ask us this question.

Okay, so I mean we’ve established how good these questions are and that we need to use them, but if we send like a client, someone who’s really busy, like a big list of these questions, it might take a while to get this back up them. What’s the best way of actually getting these testimonials and getting them quite quickly?

Well, what we like to do is shortly after we take a website live, we like to actually set up, a final call with our clients. So we just want to tie a few loose ends. “Are you available at 3:00 o’clock on Tuesday? We just want to give you a quick call.” Or you can do it over video call. We do all our calls over video mainly.” And actually say to them. “Okay, so we just finished the last few bits. This is how you update your website. This is what you do. Let us know if you need anything, but we just wanted to ask you a few questions that we’d like to use in your case study and some testimonials on our website.” Nine times out of 10, everybody’s going to say, “Yeah, of course. Ask me whatever questions you want.”

So you’ve got these questions prepared. You then actually ask them the questions on the call, “So what problems were you having before you worked with us, what were you struggling with, what was keeping you up at night?” Ask them in whatever way that you like, but get the problems that that person was having and the struggles that they were having. And then ask them the other questions as well. The trick with this is to actually write them down or record the call if you feel comfortable doing that. If your client’s happy with you doing that, then record the call or document the answers and then repeat them back to them. “Okay, so you said you were struggling because you couldn’t find a web designer that could build a website within your budget that allows you to have a blog and have all of these fancy features. Okay. So that was the problem you were having.”

Great. You write it down, you repeat it back to them, and then you say, “Okay, so then why did you hire us? What specifically was the reason that you came to us?” And they may say, “I stumbled across a blog post from these people.” And before you know it, you’re creating your own client story with each question that you ask, and by repeating it back to them, they’re not in a haste. They’re saying, “Yes, that’s true.” And you actually go through these questions, create the testimonial, live on the call, and then once you’re done, you just say, “Okay, so I’m going to write this up for you and I’m going to send it to you and I just want you to make sure that you’re happy with it. I’m not going to add anything that you’ve not said yourself, but you ask the questions you want to ask so that you get the answers that you want,” And this works so much better than just relying on them to give you the testimonial.

Yeah, definitely. So these are really, really good points and I think you also have to probe a little bit, don’t you? When you’re on these calls, because we’ve been on calls with clients and let’s say for example, that problem was that they’ve had bad experiences with web designers in the past. You have to say, “Okay, so what effect did that have on your business?” You have to push a little bit further and then they might say, “Well I was wasting so much time and so much money.” And then you start to get to the real core of the problem then. Don’t just kind of take the first answer to the question because they need a little bit of pushing to get the actual answer that’s going to be really good for a testimonial.

So you’ll know kind of what kind of answers you want them to give, but just kind of, really kind of coax them a little bit and ask more questions. Don’t be afraid to ask them, “Well, how did that make you feel? Or was that having an effect on your business?” Ask those deeper questions and you’ll get some really, really good answers out of that.

Yeah. In the past. I mean, I’ve been on the WCC, which is World Class Communication speaking course with Marcus Sheridan and Chris Maa. This is something that Marcus talks about a lot about the rule of three, which is the first answer that somebody gives is usually the surface level answer. It’s only when you ask three times that you really get down to that root cause of the problem.

That’s good.

I know. So it’s like, “Okay, so why did you hire us?” “Oh, well your websites were great.” “Okay, well why did you think that was going to be beneficial?” “Well, I wanted an amazing website for myself.” “Okay, so why is that important?” “Well, because it will allow me to attract my ideal clients.” You get in deeper and deeper and you get in to the real juicy stuff. This is the kind of like proper stuff that everybody wants is just if you just ask the questions, like you said, you’re going to get surface level answers.

Now, those are still pretty good because you’re coming up with the questions yourself, but it makes it more of a conversation. It shows how much you genuinely care about your previous clients. When you’re going that deep and you’re allowing them to uncover their own thoughts and feelings. It might be six months ago that they initially got in touch about our website and they may have forgotten those immediate emotions, those first emotions that they had that made them pick up the phone and call us, and what you’re doing now is you’re bringing those new feelings to life so that they remember and that’s when these people go out and there’ll be like, “It feels amazing that I hired these people. I’m going to recommend them.” And they’re going to be more than happy to let you use this testimonial because you pulled out all of these amazing feelings that they had when they initially got in touch.

This is a very feely podcast episode.

I know. I’m getting emotional right now.

That’s the way we want. We want people to get emotional. Okay. So those are all really, really good points and I think that’s great for actually a written testimonial. How would you go about getting a video testimonial about that? If you’ve interviewed someone, you’ve asked all these questions, would you say, “Okay, that’s great. Would you mind just doing a quick video testimonial just straight after this call?” Or how would you do that?

Yeah, well, video testimonials are absolutely amazing.

They are.

Lots of people are afraid of videos. So if you work with people that don’t mind doing them, then literally it is going to be the best thing.

Jump on it.

Definitely. And that’s why it’s so good that we work with personal brands because usually, they’ve got video going in their business and recording in a quick iPhone video is not going to be a problem. It might be different for you and your industry, but more than anything, I mean you’ve got the testimonial there by setting up a call with somebody and asking these questions. All you have to do, what you’re going to have to do anyway is actually put it into a document, something that they can read potentially on a video and the only final step rarely is you’ve got that testimonial in text that you’re going to add to your website.

Why not just send it to them and saying, “Would you mind recording a video?” Some businesses actually hire a video company to go out and sit with the client, actually shoot a video and do it all professionally. So it all depends on what industry you’re in. But for us, our clients generally don’t mind sticking their iPhone on a tripod and actually just reading the testimonial back to you, especially if you’ve gone through the effort of asking these questions and getting to the root cause of why they hired you in the first place and what amazing results that you got out of it in the end. And that’s the important thing. That’s what everybody wants. It’s what results did you get for these previous clients that I can imagine that you’re going to get for me as well? And that’s kind of overarching theme here, is to allow your potential customers to imagine getting the same results for them that you got for your previous clients.

Yeah, that’s a really really good point to end on it. It’s all about how they relate to the testimonial. Definitely. Okay. So I hope you found that episode useful. I thought it was really good there.

I found it useful.

Yeah. I found it useful. I was learning still. I know many of our listeners struggle with this. So maybe now you have a few action points to take away with you. If you didn’t already know, we do actually have a free Facebook group. We’d love you to join it. So head to jammydigital.com/Facebook. We do training, we do free website critiques and we’d love to help you get better results from your website. So feel free to join and say hello. So that’s it for today’s episode. We’ll see you next time on the Make Your Mark online podcast.

Martin Huntbach

Web designer & marketer for small businesses. Martin is an experienced search engine and web design specialist, with over a decade of experience working with large corporations to small businesses.

jammydigital.com

The post Ep 17 – How to get great testimonials for your website appeared first on Content Marketing & SEO Agency | Get More Sales From Your Website.

Your website might fail.

All of the time and effort you put into creating your website might not lead to a successful business.

It happens all the time and like it or not; nobody is guaranteed success.

Some people invest £10,000 in a new website, and some people pay less than £100.

It doesn’t matter. It could still fail.

Over the years, we’ve noticed that there six key reasons your website isn’t working.

These things will stop you from getting traction and cause your website to become ineffective.

I want you to avoid failure as much as possible, which is why I wrote this article.

My hope is that you fix these issues before it’s too late.

1. Nobody wants or needs your product

Let’s get this one out of the way first.

Your website will NOT make up for a bad product. Not even a big fancy site with all the bells and whistles.

If your product or service is bad or simply not relevant. Your website (and business) is likely to fail.

I know it sounds harsh, and it is, but it’s vital that you have a product you can actually sell. Otherwise, what’s the point?

What can you do about it?

Be honest and ask yourself, do people want or need the product or service that you sell? Or was it just an idea that came to you, which you ran with.

If it’s the latter, I’d strongly recommend that you do some research to see if there’s a market for it.

I read a fantastic book on this very topic. It’s called Will It Fly by Pat Flynn. It will allow you to test out your idea to see if there’s a need or desire for it.

If it turns out there is a market for your product/services then great, however, if it turns out your product isn’t as relevant as you’d hoped, then see how you can develop the product and make it more commercial.

This isn’t a time for feeling sorry for yourself; you have to adapt or risk failure.

2. Your website is ugly

If your website looks like it was designed by a drunk 4-year-old, it’s probably NOT going make you rich.

Your visitors care about design and you should too. It makes sense. If you have a nice clean website, people will generally stick around for longer and potentially do business with you.

On the other hand, a bad looking website will turn people away and impact the number of customers you get.

This is why it’s so important to have an attractive website.

Here are a few things I see from time-to-time that might make your visitors feel icky;

Bad choice of colours – Luminous green is always a bad choice
Hard to read font choice – Fancy does not mean better
Stretched or distorted images – Image quality is so important

What can you do about it?

Your website doesn’t have to be a masterpiece. It just has to be clean and simple.

Generally speaking, if you have paid a web designer I would hope that the site looks pretty good. Your chances will certainly be better than if you do it yourself. If you’re in any doubt whatsoever, get some honest feedback by sharing your website in our free Facebook group and title it “honest feedback needed”.

The biggest problem when business owners build their own website is they make it far too complicated. Too many features and too much clutter.

The best advice I can give you is to find a low-cost template and use that as the framework for your website.

You can install WordPress templates for around £50 and as long as you don’t change too much, it’s going to look pretty good.

Bad design will definitely impact on the success of your website so please take some pride in it.

3. You’re making your visitor think too much

A common problem I see when reviewing websites is a lack of clear, concise messaging. Everything is far too complicated and it’s just confusing for your visitor.

Imagine if you were walking down a street and none of the shops had signs up. Instead, they all had vague statements like:

“Helping you to prosper”
“Making you feel in control”
“Communications through solutions”

It would be pretty confusing trying to work out what anyone does. So why the hell do we do this we our websites?

Everywhere I look online, business owners are trying to be clever by using these random phrases. I’ve never really understood why because it just confuses people. They don’t help anyone and in most cases they’ll turn people away.

This also goes for the rest of your website text too, there seems to be too much industry jargon and not enough simple language.

What can you do about it?

Keep it simple. Whenever you write anything for your website ask yourself…

1. Would this be easy for ANYONE to understand?
2. Do I make it clear exactly what we do?

If the answer is no to any of these then you will want to revisit it.

Around two years ago, I read a book by Ann Handley call Everybody Writes and it helped me understand that writing is a lot easier than we think. I would suggest anyone struggling with getting started to check out that book too.

It’s also worth checking out this post, where I talk about how to get across what it is you do in one sentence, with some examples too.

4. You’re ignoring SEO

Search Engine Optimisation is far from dead. As long as people are still using sites like Google to browse online, SEO will be important.

I know it might seem complicated but SEO is part and parcel of running an online business. If you have not spent the time understanding even the basics of SEO then you’re probably missing out on a lot of traffic.

The truth is, there are lots of people out there searching the internet for your products and services and by burying your head in the sand, you’re simply missing out.

What can you do about it?

SEO doesn’t have to be complicated, it’s like anything else, learning a little bit and taking action will allow you to improve over time.

We’ve written lots of blog posts about SEO that can help you get started for free. We avoid jargon as much as possible and include lots of examples and images to make things easier to understand.

Here are a few to help you on your way.

SEO for Blog Posts
SEO Jargon
Why you’re not ranking in Google

You could also take an online SEO course, look on sites like Udemy or Lynda, you could even pay for a website critique and we’ll tell you exactly what to do with your website to improve your chances of ranking higher in search results.

There are so many ways you can learn about SEO if you just focus on it.

Even if you hire a company to help with SEO, I would still recommend that you learn the basics first so you can inspect the work that the company have been doing.

5. Your blogging efforts are poor

If you are not adding new, quality content to your website on a regular basis, you’re going to get left behind.

Blogging can help in so many ways:

• It helps educate your visitors
• It builds trust
• It generates more traffic
• It allows you to get more customers

These days your visitors expect information fast, they want to visit your websites and get answers to questions before they buy. They don’t want to wait to speak to you on the phone or via email, they want a self-service website where they can inspect you on their terms.

What can you do about it?

At the very least you can write 2 blog posts or new pages per month and focus on helping your audience.

• Think about the questions that your customers ask you on a daily basis. Write an article to answer those questions.
• Write articles that educate your audience and empower them to achieve more. For me it might be “The Ultimate SEO Checklist for your Blog Posts”
• Write articles about your internal process. What is it like to work with you. For example, we wrote an article on “how we build your website from start to finish”

Write down a list of all the blog posts you can think of and come up with a content calendar so you can plan, write and promote your content over the coming months.

6. Your visitors don’t trust you

If you want more customers, your website needs to feel trustworthy.

With all the dodgy websites out there, it’s no surprise people are cautious about buying from websites they’ve never heard of.

This is why you need to build up a level of trust.

What can you do about it

There are many ways to show your visitors that your website is trustworthy, here are just a few:

• Show images and videos of you and your team
• Show genuine case studies and testimonials
• Educate your readers so they become more informed

More than anything, it’s about being authentic and showing who you are and what you stand for. Take this article for example. I wrote this because I wanted my readers to be aware of the potential dangers of an ineffective website. I want my customers to understand that I am an honest person and that they are not guaranteed success. It takes hard work.

Summary

Please understand that your shiny new website is not a golden ticket to success. It takes hard work and constant improvement. Your website is simply a vehicle that can help you get there BUT you are the driver.

I get that this article might come across as one big rant, but as I said at the beginning, I want you to be successful. I don’t want you staring at your analytics and your bank account in 6 months time and wondering why nothing is happening.

Over to you

Be honest, do you think you’ve suffered from any of these in the past? I certainly have. Please tell me your story in the comments below.

Martin Huntbach

Web designer & marketer for small businesses. Martin is an experienced search engine and web design specialist, with over a decade of experience working with large corporations to small businesses.

jammydigital.com

The post Why Your Website Might Fail appeared first on Content Marketing & SEO Agency | Get More Sales From Your Website.

You see this all the time, small businesses using stock images of smiley, shiny people in board rooms. You see fluffy jargon and taglines on their website like, “We’ll help you prosper”. They use words like “solutions” and “consultancy” all the time, when they might just be “Steve” who works from his home office and helps people save money on their mortgage.

This kind of tactic might have worked well ten years ago but not anymore. Your customers can spot bullshit a mile off, and it’s time to start doing things differently.

Now’s the time to step out from behind your logo and cheesy stock photos and show everyone who you are.

People buy from people

It’s much more than just showing people what you look like, it’s about creating a culture of honesty and choosing to be approachable rather than sophisticated.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a one man band or a big organisation, I want to get to know a little bit about you before I get in touch. This all starts with your website.

Get over yourself

I know the feeling. You’re about to hit publish and add your image to your website, but it’s not quite right. It’s not your “good” side, and that plant in the background needs watering. Sigh.

I’ve been there, I know the feeling and guess what? I got over it. And you will too. People don’t care what you look like, they only care that you can help them.

The quicker you get past this, the faster people will trust you and will want to work with you.

People love small businesses

If you are concerned that people won’t do business with you if they know the truth, then don’t be. There are so many benefits to working with a smaller team or a freelancer as oppose to a bigger business. For instance:

• Bespoke service
• A personal approach
• Lower fees
• Less red tape

The worst thing you can do is to misguide people and claim that you are big business with lots of capacity.

It’s much better to be honest and attract people who are right for your business rather than wasting someone’s time.

Your website

So what can you do with your website to become more approachable?

Include an image of yourself on your homepage

If possible, include images of you and/or your team on the homepage. Your homepage is the most visited page on your site, so you may as well build up some trust immediately. I do this myself and it’s always nice when someone calls and asks to speak to “Martin”. They know who I am and what I look like before we even speak.

Staff profiles on the about page

Have an image and bio for each staff member on your about page. If you take a look at your Google Analytics stats, you may be surprised by how popular this page is with your visitors. It just goes to show that people actually care about who they do business with. Who’d have thought, eh?

You can have fun with it too. Talk about hobbies, interests or your favourite Disney films, I don’t really care! But try to be as human as possible and stay away from the “Linkedin bio” approach.

You might think that your business is “different” and this kind of approach is not appropriate. I’m currently working with one client who is a funeral director. His customers have commented how nice it is to see a smiley face on his website, as they’re accustomed to seeing glum, grey pictures everywhere else. Don’t be afraid to show the real you, no matter what industry you’re in.

Check out the team page for video hosting company Wistia to see how they’re using their individual personalities. Not a grey suit in sight.

Include a group shot

If there are a lot of people who work at the organisation, then you might want to consider a group photo. Make it fun. Something that shows a diverse group of individuals with their own personality. This will go a long way in breaking down the corporate image that so many websites try to portray.

Show people behind the curtain

It’s always nice to see you and the team in action. Showing the team working away gives your customers an insight into how your company is run. You could include images of the office, people working, people chatting on bean bag chairs, whatever you like! It’s nice to see real people in a natural office setting.

Include a video

There’s no doubt that people love video, which makes it a very useful tool in building trust online. Why not include a video of yourself or your team on your website? It could be a simple welcome video or you could use videos on your blog to answer questions that people might have. Either way, video can be very powerful.

Social Media Tip

I use my personal Twitter account for Jammy Digital. I tweet about design, SEO, walks on the beach, cats and Star Wars. (Follow me here you should) The point is, I don’t hide behind my logo or the twitter egg. If you have an egg as your twitter picture, please remove…right now. People want to see and hear from the real you. So show it to them.

Summary

The internet can feel like the wild west sometimes. Your customers know this and it makes them very cautious. This is why it’s so important that you make it easy for them to trust you. Transparency is the only way you can set yourself aside from your competitors and make people feel at ease.

Over the you

Do you find it frustrating when companies do this kind of thing? Or maybe you ARE one of these companies and you’re kicking yourself. I’d love to hear you thoughts on this so please leave a comment below.

Martin Huntbach

Web designer & marketer for small businesses. Martin is an experienced search engine and web design specialist, with over a decade of experience working with large corporations to small businesses.

jammydigital.com

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