Have a Great Claim? Prove It!
I’ve often talked about how today’s customer is more wary than ever before. When shopping around online, customers have their BS detectors turned all the way up. Every claim you make will be met with skepticism and seen as a lie until you prove otherwise. And for good reason. After all, consider all the crazy claims you get in your email inbox every single day:
“Lose 50 pounds without working out!”
“Make millions working just 4 hours a week!”
“Increase the size of your…”
Well, you get the idea.
The point is that if you have a claim, you have to prove it. You can’t just say your products or services will yield a certain benefit without presenting proof. By presenting facts, your claims are legitimized, and once your claims are legitimized, you earn the trust of your customers and eventually their sales.
There’s an old quote by Dr. Charles M. Edwards, an NYU professor at the School of Retailing, where he said, “The more facts you tell, the more you sell.” It’s simple, but truthful.
Of course, this leads to the question: How can you prove your claims? There are many ways to back your words up with facts.
- Case studies—Case studies are an in-depth investigation that show how your products or services yielded a specific result for a client. For example, if you sell a product that’s supposed to streamline contact management, a good case study would be to follow a client who purchased the product to show comparisons of how much time the product saves on contact management, how much it has improved customer loyalty, etc.
- Independent studies—Even better than your own studies are studies performed by independent researchers showing how effective your products are. You see this a lot with cleaning products. Labs will study Clorox and show that it cleans a certain percentage of germs or outperforms other cleaning products by a specific amount.
- Studying the competition—Take a look at the claims made by your competition. Are there any of them that you can prove you do better? For example, if the competition sells a printer that prints 100 pages a minute, can you prove that your printers print 200 pages a minute? By beating the competition at their own claims, you render them completely powerless.
- Testimonials—Even with all the facts in the world behind you, some people still don’t trust the word of a company because they know you’re trying to make a sale. However, customers do tend to trust other customers. So, include testimonials in your marketing materials that backup your claims.
- Video demonstrations—Seeing is believing. That’s why infomercials are so effective. When you see the ShamWow guy cleaning up a liter of coke in just seconds, you believe the product really does work. When you saw Billy Mays pulling an 18-wheeler with a chain patched with Mighty Putty, you suddenly bought into his claims. Incorporate video whenever possible.
What are some other things you do to prove your claims? Share your tips by leaving a comment.
August 24th, 2010 at 2:13 pm
Studying the competition is very powerful. Thanks for the idea Eric.. Sometimes we are afraid to mention the competition, thinking that we may lose customers to them. But if we can clearly demonstrate how we are better, and have the statistics to back it up, then there should be no fear. Great tips!
August 25th, 2010 at 2:47 am
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August 26th, 2010 at 1:24 am
Testimonials are a great way of convincing users to buy certain services or products but you have to clearly disclose each testimonial in order to comply with ftc regulations.