If a potential customer doesn’t trust you or your company, they simply won’t buy from you.
Trust is the foundation without which all the other efforts are useless.
What increases people’s trust? Speaking their language. Understanding them and showing it.
Yes, you can go too far and overdo it. Below you’ll find a checklist of how to prevent it.
Start with the tone you use on your website, your emails, your ads, your communication with the customers (chat, phone, email).
Think of tone on a spectrum. Too cute and you don’t look trustworthy. Too formal and you’re not connecting with people.
“Anything else?” would be on the left, “What else can I help you with?” would be in the sweet spot, and “It will be my utmost pleasure to assist you in any way possible” would be overdoing it.
So how to better understand what language your customers speak?
- The most effective way to get authentic language is to go through user reviews. Amazon would be a good place to start. People use their natural language there, tell what they like about the product, what they dislike, and why. It’s a goldmine of user feedback and for borrowing the tone and even the exact phrases used to describe the product or the problem. (For non-ecommerce businesses there’s usually an equivalent of Amazon to read user reviews.)
- Track customers and potential customers on social media – monitor the most used words on Twitter by tracking the hashtags relevant to each customer sector
- Ask your sales people – they are talking to your customers all the time and can give you the words, phrases, and priorities for your customers
- Attend customers’ industry events and listen out for the phrases and words they use to describe challenging situations
- Read industry publications relevant to your customers and understand how situations are described in their industry and make your communication relevant to addressing those needs
- Read blogs by people in your customers’ industry – what are they talking about, what do they care about, what are the most pressing issues they are addressing, what words do they use to describe these issues, etc…? When you know, address your message to those concerns with the words they use
- Join LinkedIn groups relevant to your customer’s business and monitor the discussions and the words most used to address certain issues
- Broaden your knowledge by monitoring discussions around online articles, blogs, etc. See what people are saying and what they care about, as well as how they are saying it.
Once you know how your customers speak, use it wherever you can:
- On your website
- In your ads
- In your promotional emails
- In your newsletters
- Even when communicating with customers directly
Conclusion
Above you have a nice list of methods to speak like your potential customer.
Once you know how to speak, you can focus on what to tell. But not the other way around.
The more you match the language and the conversation already happening in your customers’ heads, the more they trust you and the easier it is to tell them effectively what you do, what you sell, and how it will help them in their life.
