Your products and services are in higher demand than you realize. Anyone who has taken the time to start a business around something has seen a need in the marketplace for what it is they offer. That’s you.
If your business you have right now:
- Solves a problem
- Releives a pain or difficulty
- Saves customers time
- Saves your customer money
- Gives your customers results quicker
- Makes your customers dream outcome more likely
- Helps customers overcome a legal issue
You need to read this…
Why The World Needs Your Services
You need people to do more business with you. It’s your obligation. Because of this it is critically important that you influence your target audience to do business with your company because it will solve their problems, save the money, and provide them everlasting value all thanks to you.
Today I’m going to share with you the 10 proven reasons why people choose to do business with you, your competitors, or even choose not to do business at all.
These are proven tactics that I have been watching well established businesses, my clients, my competitors do, and have implemented myself. Get more traffic, more leads, more reviews, and ultimately more money with these principles I’m about to show you!
Let’s begin.
1. Trust and Credibility
We’ve all heard the statement “if customers know, like, and trust you, then they are the most likely to do business with you”. Trust and credibility come with people knowing:
- Your businesses expertise
- The effectiveness of your business
- How transparent your business is with what it provides
- How much they can rely on your products and services
- How low of risk it is doing business with you
- Your companies customer support quality
- The bottom line price they will pay
This also comes with aspects like the statistics your business has achieved, outstanding customer reviews, and even awards your company has received because of its success. Winning the trust of your target audience is the first deciding factor to getting them to do business with you.
If this isn’t achieved, nothing else on this list matters. As harsh as that may sound, it’s true.
2. Emotional Connection
Jeff Bezos emphasized the importance of the customer journey when they do business with you. Customers knowing that they feel genuinely cared for and that your company is authentic with its intentions makes him feel safe and secure spending their money with you.
It is also important to understand the key characteristics, current relevance, and personal values of your target audience so that the features you express your products have resonate with what they desire most. For instance:
- If you sell food, some may want to know if it is sustainable, organic, gluten free, or vegan.
- If you offer marketing services, some may want to know what results they can achieve, if you charge monthly or one time, and if you market on certain platforms
- If you are a wedding planner, if you offer certain customizations, have access to certain venues, or travel to setup your layouts.
It is also very effective to have a strong understanding of your customers problems and issues so they can feel like you know exactly what they need because you have been where they are.
There are also certain factors like supporting certain organizations, Fighting for a certain cause, Committing to an underserved audience, or even empowering a niche group of people. Either way establishing this emotional connection with your target audience can raise the chance they do business with you drastically.
“People don’t purchase with logic alone. They decide to purchase with emotions and then justify their purchase with logic.”
3. Convenience and Accessibility
People also have a high chance of doing business with you if it is easy, quick, and convenient. The less someone has to do to get the results from your business, let alone start and complete business with you, the more likely people will be to do business with you.
Usually, they even recommend your business to other people if their experience went well. Why do you think everyone buys stuff off of Amazon.com instead of Walmart.com?
The key here is to make all parts of your customer journey easy to understand, quick & fast, and readily available at all or most times of the day. Put it this way for instance: you will have the best business of your kind in town if:
- Your business is open 24 hours a day
- Your businesses products are always in stock and your services are always available
- Everything your company provides always works
- Your business accepts all forms of payment
- Your business serves customers in locations locally and internationally
- There is zero commitment required to use your company’s products – cancel anytime
- Customer service and support is available 24 hours a day
This isn’t ideal for all businesses, but it’s a goal to shoot for if you want the convenience badge of honor. The best feeling a customer can have is knowing a businesses or companies products and services are available anytime, anywhere. This readiness for a company’s access is a strong and paramount reason why “convenience fee’s” exist.
4. Social Proof
Social proof is an extremely crucial factor when it comes to your business’s success. I can’t stress this enough! You can say what you want about what your offer, but nothing matters more than what your customers and your market says about your products and services.
Social proof is the highest form of offer verification in existence, even more honorable than awards received by large organizations or groups.
Whenever you make a sale, whenever you finish delivering service, whenever a customer ends a session with your business, solicit a testimonial, EVERYTIME! This will give you a firsthand idea of how effective your product is and the impact it has on your target audience.
This doesn’t necessarily mean you will always get good feedback. Be ready for a little criticism.
Versions of social proof include:
- Star-rated reviews (typical 1-5 star style)
- Customer case studies
- Social media comments
- Customer results
- Feedback surveys
- Statistics and figures representing customer results
- Company awards or recognitions (e.g., BBB accreditation, Trustpilot score, etc.)
Something to strive for is BBB accreditation, a 5-star rating on Trustpilot, high ratings on Yelp.com, Google my business reviews with pictures and testimonials from verified customers, and social media posts from your customers.
After all, statistically speaking, the first thing a customer looks for on the web after finding out about your company is reviews. Make sure they’re good—which is simple, just do good business with anyone and everyone you do business with.
5. Product or Service Quality
Social proof is great and all, but at the end of the day, what matters above all else is your product or services quality. This should be common sense to any business, but it’s not always present. I won’t go into detail as to why the quality of your offer should be top notch, but I will go into what you need for your offer to be considered high quality.
You offer needs to:
- Effectively solve a problem
- Have a well thought out customer journey
- Be easy to use or implement
- Clearly communicate what your offer does
- Deliver ANY of ALL the product benefits it promises
- Delivers results consistently
- Have a strong likelihood of success upon and after use
- Have more use value than cash value
- Offer a more than fair guarantee
- Provides excellent customer service and support
- Come highly recommended by past customers
Your offer cannot be high quality unless it exceeds the expectations of what your customer is promised. This can sometimes be based on price. The less something costs and the more something provides, the better it can arguably be compared to other offerings.
However, this needs to be examined closely because price point is usually associated with quality. Low price means low quality, which in turn makes a customer have low expectations of the product. The similar can be said about high prices.
6. Price-Value Balance
The price value balance is a delicate aspect to set properly. If your offer is overpriced customers will easily look to alternatives if value isn’t present, and if it is underpriced customers will suspect low product quality and still look for alternatives with more value. Customers also prefer to have price transparency before purchasing and understand exactly what their money is buying. That means any unmentioned hidden fees, taxes, or any sort of “gotchas” are frowned upon.
The key is figuring out what you can market in value proposition that will make a customer feel their purchase is worth more than what they’re paying. Wayts to do this include:
- Bundles
- Discounts
- Coupons
- Limited-time offers
- Bonuses (freebies upon purchase)
- BOGO offers (buy one get one free)
- Free trials before purchasing
The best way to at least get an idea of what your price point for your product should be is to look at customer pricing based on their features and benefits. Look into what advantages they have over the competition.
If your product offers an advantage over your competitors, then chances are your higher price point is justified. This is highly dependent based on if what you offer is in higher demand than your competitors’ offerings.
“You will have endless customers if the use value of your product exceeds the cash value of what you offer.”
7. Strong Brand Identity
When your brand is established in the marketplace, to the eyes of your target audience it represents something, and it’s usually specific. Your brand identity is your company’s promise, what your company provides, how well your company provides it, and even the approval everyone has for it. It is the first thing people think of as soon as they see your logo or hear your business’s.
Your brand identity always includes:
- Clear positioning with a USP (universal selling proposition)
- A specific sector of the market your business serves
- A simple yet visually appealing logo
- A company name that is easily memorable
- Consistent uniform messaging across all marketing channels
- An expected level of quality seen throughout all offerings
- A known amount of community approval
Leveraging your brand identity after proving to the market where you stand in relation to your competition will make you more sales and establish long term growth. The best strategy to achieving this is to start in a very specific niche, and then branch out from there as your markets demands and needs change.
Listening to your target market will reveal what direction your company should pivot towards.
“Listening to your target market will reveal what direction your company should pivot towards.“
A great example of this is apple and how they have had many products come and go and some products that never made it to the marketplace. This is due to excessive or lack of demand based on their target audience’s desires.
The reason iPads and apple watches are still for sale is due to the target market. But iPods have been discontinued. With iPads and apple watches this is also the reason they are offered in certain colors.
I encourage you to do the following:
- Find out what your target market has the highest demand for,
- Fill that demand with your offerings
- Get feedback from customers
- Pivot based on that feedback
- Provide that offering exceptionally well
- Market what works
- Be consistent with this offering
And watch your brand identity skyrocket.
8. Customer Experience
The customer experience you provide involves many things. It is a huge factor in determining if you will have repeat business, or not. Something that attributes to Amazon’s irrefutable success is their constant improvement of the customer journey with them.
Jeff Bezos knew that if the customer experience was easy, highly refined, and personalized for each individual, it would make repeat business automatic.
To list a few characteristics you must provide for the greatest customer experience, consider the following:
- Making customers feeling welcomed to do business with you (not as an inconvenience)
- Having an easy to understand steps a customer must take to initiate business
- Convey very clear expectations of what your customer will be receiving
- Allow many options to pay for their products and services they purchase
- Exceeding customer expectations by providing above and beyond value
- Providing outstanding customer service to give customers solutions for any problems they run into
- Using follow-up communication to check on your customers status with your product after they purchase and have used your offering
- Having a way to leave feedback on your business’s performance and overall experience you customers had
There are many more, and some may even apply to specific products and services. The general idea is to ensure your customers feel understood, taken care of, and value before, during, and after a transaction is made.
Doing this will elevate your company’s reputation in the marketplace and become highly recommended by larger corporations, influencers, and even media outlets.
9. Principals Of Influence
Using the principles of influence is a strong way to increase the chances someone will do business with you. These principles will come in handy during your marketing strategies and your sales processed while closing customers.
For those who are not familiar with them, I highly suggest reading Influence by Robert Cialdini. It goes over the 7 principles of influence that will likely get people to make decisions, usually financial. I’ll briefly explain what they are below:
- Reciprocity: giving something for free that has value or some meaning in exchange for business or as a means to persuasion
- Commitment/Consistency: having a constant output or timeline of action towards a cause in a market
- Social Proof: people who can verify the validity of your offers effectiveness and vouch for your brand
- Personal Connection: prospects feeling like an offering or a brand resonates with them on a deeper level, establishing trust
- Scarcity: having very little of something you possess or offer left for people to acquire
- Cultural Identity or Beliefs: sharing identities, such as race, religion, life missions, nationality, causes, or social groups
- Authority: being a figure in the market who has a strong voice and representation in a marketplace
There are other factors that one can use to influence such as using facts and statistics, referring to current or past events that affect a large community, or even being a user of the product yourself. The 7 mentioned above are used more often.
10. Innovation and Trend Relevance
The absolute fastest way to make money online is by spotting a trend and monetizing it. Taking advantage of these movements gets your business instant attention, viral publicity, And the easiest traffic you’ll ever get—people are already searching for content around that trend.
Trends are a very easy way to determine rising or current demand in the marketplace. Your job as a business is to find out how you can monetize it. You can make changes or adjustments to your current offerings to fill in the shift and demand these trends create. You can even charge high ticket prices because you are first to the market addressing the trend.
For instance, if it’s a trend that is talking about a pain that your company can address, create content around the trend, demonstrate your offer has an offering based on that trend, and call customers to act and do business with you.
Here are some ways to find trends:
- Social media posts engagement (Facebook, X.com. and Instagram)
- Online news outlet latest posts (Google news, CNN, and Buzzfeed)
- SEO data and metrics (Ahrefs, SEMrush, and Moz)
- Highly trafficked topics on forums (Reddit and Quora)
- Best seller lists on online market places (Amazon, Walmart, and AliExpress)
Yes, even normal products you use around your house or even in your car can be trending and you can simply sell them as an affiliate.
The bottom line is to understand how you can detect these trends even before they happen can be the first person on the market spreading content about it. This will give you instant attention in the marketplace and skyrocket your PR to get instant traffic.
Specific Example:
For instance, Apple builds trust through its brand reputation, evokes emotion by presenting a lifestyle aligned with innovation, and leverages scarcity with limited-edition releases. Meanwhile, their products consistently deliver high-quality user experiences and align with their audience’s identity of being tech-savvy and modern.
Conclusion:
As the main representative for your company’s brand and reputation, it is your primary duty to ultimately set the grounds towards why people do business with you.Even if you’re not the boss or the CEO, this still applies to you. The more of these 10 principles you implement, the easier it will be to get convert leads and get more sales.
You are now armed with the knowledge and the next step for you is implementation of that knowledge. Give them a try and see how it goes for you!
Here’s to your success!!!