How a small shift in language can convert more customers
If you own your own company, blog, or Youtube channel, you should be proud of your work. It takes time, effort, and patience to see growth and find success. The amount of discipline it takes to achieve success as an entrepreneur or creative is impressive and you are rightfully proud of your work.
But what if that pride was driving customers away? No one likes the arrogant guy at the party who won’t shut up about himself and his accomplishments. What if that is your business right now? Using one of the 6 pillars of persuasion, liking, you can adjust your content to make customers feel more welcome and be more motivated to buy.
Being self-obsessed
Unfortunately, being self-obsessed is easy and can slip into your business subtly. You may have the best intentions, but people like to talk about themselves. By default, we talk about ourselves and I have met few people who naturally do anything else. So when you build your website, film a YouTube video, or write a blog post, the focus is almost automatically on you: what you do, who you are, what you have to say or your backstory. Customers don’t care about these if you aren’t listening to them and addressing their pain points. The two major ways entrepreneurs and small businesses slip into self-obsession are playing the hero and being feature obsessed.
In his book Building a StoryBrand, Don Miller spends extensive time discussing the pitfall of becoming the hero in your own story. Businesses are not on their journey to a goal, they are on their customers’ journey, helping them. Unfortunately, businesses position themselves as the heroes talking about how they came from nothing and how they are a family run business. All of this is fine in moderation, but if spend too much time on these types of topics and your audience will lose interest.
Imagine if a movie spent the whole time developing a side character’s backstory and that side character never helped the main character. Your business should not have a cameo in the customer’s movie. Customers did not find your content to hear you talk about yourself and you probably didn’t create the content to talk about yourself. You create content to provide value, so make sure you are. If you want to learn more about the perils of positioning yourself as the hero, then I highly recommend Don Miller’s book. Beyond the topic of not being the hero, he will help you create a company narrative that properly positions your company as a guide and converts customers to loyal brand ambassadors.
Another common way a brand becomes self-obsessed is through becoming feature obsessed. Before starting college, I was looking for a new computer. I scoured the websites of Dell and HP trying to find the best computer for my budget. I had a hard time comparing machines because, while I consider myself tech-savvy, I couldn’t easily tell the difference between an i7 7th Gen processor and an i5 8th processor. I had to do extra research to figure out the computer that was best for me. I spent time reading blogs and watching Youtube review letting them control the narrative around the products I was buying. Could you be wasting your customer’s time talking about features they either don’t understand or don’t care about?
Imagine if the scenario above had been different. After being overwhelmed by numbers and names I don’t understand on HP’s website, I go to Dell’s and on the product page, they explain in layman’s terms, the differences between the processors and why you want a certain amount of RAM. I would almost certainly buy one of their computers because instead of being bogged down by features, I was able to find the product that addressed my needs.
Talking about features in a way that shows how customers’ needs are addressed gives you control over the narrative around that feature. You have the opportunity to frame that feature in the best possible light without risking a third party downplaying a feature you are proud of. You should talk about the features of your product but in the context of addressing customer’s needs. Otherwise, your consumers will stop listening to you.
Why you need customers to like you
Of course, you want your customers to like your product so they will buy it. However, any good salesman goes one step further and gets the customer to like him. Sales tricks like saying “so and so recommended I call today” has become a common sales trick to build comfort and get the customer to associate the salesman with a friend. Why is this tactic used so often? Because it gets the consumer to associate the salesman with good emotions. Once a consumer likes a salesman, they are more likely to listen.
It does not matter how good your product is if you can’t get a potential customer to listen to you, you won’t sell anything. If you can get the potential customer to like you, they will listen to how good your product is. Liking is one of the 6 pillars of persuasion that provide ‘shortcuts’ for persuading someone. When someone likes you, they think less about the truth of what you are saying and tend to automatically agree with you. Getting a consumer to like you does more than increasing the likelihood of a sale, it decreases the amount of work you have to do to make that sale.
4 ways to get customers to like you
1. Start Talking About the Customer
The primary way to get customers to like you is to stop talking about yourself. Consumers want to know how you can solve their problems and aren’t concerned with your business’ backstory if it does not address their needs. Dale Carnegie talks about this in his book How to Win Friends and Influence People. “Talk to someone about themselves and they’ll listen for hours.” Start talking to consumers about themselves. If you have done a good job defining your target audience, you should know who your customers are, what they like, and what they need. Talk about these topics. Your customers will care more if you relate to them through their struggles instead of attempting to relate to them through your struggles. A company’s backstory is going to win you far less loyal clients than a story about your customer’s lives.
This goes back to playing the hero vs being a guide. Stop trying to make yourself the hero of your own story because if you are the hero, the customer is a side character and side characters don’t buy products from the hero. Instead, the customer should be the hero in all of your communication. Make the customer feel as though they are playing an active role and you are helping them along instead of them being the audience to your company’s success.
2. Compliment Their Efforts to Solve Their Problem
Another way to build customer’s positive attitudes towards you is by complimenting them or at the bare minimum, not insulting them. When attempting to help a potential customer, businesses must be very careful to not sound condescending. Provide examples of how your customers may have attempted to solve their problems. This will show relatability while creating the opportunity to talk about your product relative to your competitors.
3. Sympathize with the Customer
Sympathize with your customers. If you did your research when developing a product, you should have an acute awareness of the problems your customers face. Be open with them and acknowledge how that problem has affected their lives. This will force you to have a good understanding of your customers’ problems and put you in a position to provide a solution to that problem.
4. Provide Free Value
Finally, make sure you are providing value. What can you give your customers for free? The more free value you provide the customer the better. Based on the rule of reciprocity, customers will be more likely to buy from you because they will feel indebted to you.
Avoiding the self-obsession that fills about pages is difficult, but prioritizing your customers’ problems and their needs will make your business’ communication more customer-centric. Go read your about page right now. Are you the hero of your story or are you sympathizing with your customers? Adjusting how your business communicates about itself will make customers more likely to listen to how you can solve their problems and more likely to buy into your solution.
So how could you focus less on your business’ story and more on your customer’s?
I hope you enjoyed this blog post! If you want more content like this, check out my YouTube channel! Thanks for reading!