What Do Our Prospects Think Of Us?

While we spend our time trying to reel in prospects with our online marketing – what do our prospects actually think of us?

Our results in signups and sales will tell us what is going on with those who have entered our marketing process but what about all those who see our offering but stay well clear?

For that sort of information you have to go back to surveying and that’s exactly what Mancx did, a company offering trusted answers for business questions. Instead of posting a question on a site like Quora or Yahoo Answers, Mancx is a business question-and-answer website that allows individuals to securely buy and sell their knowledge with others.

So they are very interested to know what users think of information that they find on the web.

Is this how your prospects feel?

Out of the 1,900 Americans surveyed a rather distressing 98% said that they distrusted information they found on the Internet with 94% adding that “bad things can happen as a result of acting on inaccurate information online.”

The reasons they gave for this included

Reading those results again you get ‘too much irrelevant, out of date, self promotional stuff’ and they worry that their unfamiliarity with any particular site can lead to them making a costly mistake due to their own lack of knowledge.

So what do you need to do to chip away at that monstrous 98% of users who are so fearful that they won’t come near you with a barge pole?.

Well you can’t do anything about the rest of the internet but you can do something about what you publish. Your website, your blog and any other online real estate you may use.

Who's happy now?

Keep it familiar, keep it comfortable and keep it simple. Reassure your visitors at every stage that you are doing exactly what you said you would do and they can find their way both further in to your process – or out again whichever they choose to do.

From the very beginning you need to build a relationship of trust which probably means putting your own personality into it so that they can relate to you personally.

You need to publish regularly so that they can see how recent your content is and you need to keep your marketing to a relatively low percentage of your total content so that you are not seen as publishing solely for the purpose of selling.

To put it simply, just be a nice guy (or gal!), give useful stuff away so they are more likely to come back and make sure that there are no surprises on your websites.

A smaller group of prospects on your list who are more comfortable with you and therefore more likely to buy will generate more sales for you than scattering marketing grapeshot left, right and centre.