This week I had the honour of being one of the keynote speakers at the launch of Network She magazine.
It was a great event, held at the Womens Business Centre at Newham College, and was a lot of fun.
After my talk I had the pleasure of meeting a number of women business owners who were in the audience, and most of them said something along the lines of “thanks for your talk, it felt very personal”, or “you come across as very approachable”, or “I like the way you simplify things and make it easy to relate to”.
Once I’d had my two minutes of being happy about the praise (who wouldn’t!?) I started thinking about why I’d had such a lovely response and what I could do to amplify it.
Quick aside: One of the first rules of marketing is to figure out what is working for you and then to do more of it. End of extra bonus tippet!
What I worked out is that I got such a friendly response because I am comfortable being myself and talking about my shortcomings and how I deal with them. I am open and honest about who I am, and because of that, the audience felt comfortable and were more open to what I had to say.
This week’s tip will show you how to do this for yourself – online.
Are you a small business?
Are you a business that requires your clients to trust the people that work in your company?
If you didn’t answer ‘yes’ to one of the above, then you are in a rare position indeed, but this tip might still help you to build rapport with your customers.
What I want you to do this week is to go to your website and have a look at your About Us page.
If it talks about your business in the third person and doesn’t mention your name or have a picture of you on it, it needs reworking – pronto!
Many people (i.e. your site visitors) simply won’t trust a business that has an anonymous About Us page (unless they are a household name). As you want your potential customers to know, like and trust you, this is pretty important.
So, what should you do about it?
Firstly, mention your founders and key team members by name.
Secondly, get some pictures up there. They don’t have to be staged head-shots of every person on your team, it could be a group shot, or something informal, like pictures of your team when they were children.
Third, write in the first person. This means saying “I do this”, rather than “he does that”. If you are a team, then you can use the second person “we will be happy to help”, but whatever you do, don’t go for the third person “Company X specialises in…”.
Fourth, be a bit friendly in your choice of wording. Don’t go all technical and use acronyms. Even if your role is a very specialist and technical one, the likelihood is that your audience aren’t that technical (that’s why they need you!). People will respect you for being able to put your knowledge into simple language – it means you really know what you’re talking about.
Here’s some examples of some interesting About Us pages to give you a few ideas:
http://enthusemarketing.co.uk/about-us/
http://www.thinkgeek.com/about-us/
http://www.theengineroom.co.uk/who_are_we.php
http://www.virtuallysorted.com/yourva.html
If you think your About Us page is already above average, post the link in the comments on my blog. I’ll look at all of them.
