Hey! What’s up? Chad here and I’ve got my space t-shirt on because we’re going to talk about how to build trust in cyberspace. In particular, how do you build trust on a website? And for this video, I’m going to do something a little bit unusual compared to most of my videos. And I’m going to actually take you on a tour of our website and share the insights and pieces of advice that I receive from people who are way smarter than me related to web design.
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Now, it’s a little bit outside of my range because typically, I’m helping some of the top universities and organizations on the planet amplify a culture of connection belonging and trust internally. This idea of how to build trust on a website is super interesting to me. I’m not a web designer though. If anything, when I first got started and built my own website, it was a giant piece of garbage. And so, now being in a place where I have lots of people smarter than me who are doing the copy editing and the design elements and whatnot, we’re gonna just kind of take a preview of lessons that I’ve learned here. Stick around. Can’t wait to jump into it. Let’s go.
Website Review
In order to review a website, we should be on that website. Let’s portal into welcome to Weand.me website. Here’s the url if you want to poke around for yourself. This is the current iteration of it although we’re always making improvements on it. When you jump to the page right away, one of the things that i really missed in the first version of our website was it was all focused on us. It’s all focused on me as opposed to being focused on the customer, the client. Right here it says “Recognizing um you know people hire us to make connection and engagement and communication easy.” recognizing they’re doing that because it’s hard.
Specifically, right here, we help leaders educators and events make connection and engagement easy. Wanting that to be really clear now. I will say I think there are some sites, you know, if you sell stickers, it’s a little bit easier to be really concrete. When you sell keynotes at virtual conferences and remote workshops, you want to be I think as literal and concrete as possible because cute can sometimes be confusing. Donald Miller in his book story brand always says “If you confuse, you lose”. And I think that that is immensely true. And I think there’s also a nuance to that that if you confuse, you also break down trust.
Really clear 2 options right here. If someone’s not ready for those 2 options, there’s some interesting data here. This is a big piece of trust online, right? Social proof. You’ve seen it on lots of websites but behind each of these, like, I have a story of how I worked with conscious capitalism, and the University of Notre Dame, and TedX, and everywhere, on Starbucks and… Right? These have people and stories behind them. They’re not things that I just put up there that I hoped look good. There’s behind this little graphic is groups and thousands of people that I’ve worked with and train. That social trust of, “Oh, I’m not the first one they’ve worked with other people before” is really useful. Here’s a little bit of the underpinning and the basis for our work, stats around trust and engagement and disengagement, etc. And then another huge piece which you’ll see riddled throughout our site is video. I think video is one of the most rapport-building, trust-building things on the planet because it’s the easiest way to asynchronously meet somebody else before you do business with them. I think you’ve probably heard the adage that people do business with people that they know, like, and trust. It’s like an overused phrase at this point. And you can’t really know someone by just reading something on a webpage. It’s really hard. If you just read this, would you know me? Probably not. And yet, video, if you want to build trust, I would invite you to up the bandwidth.
If you’ve got text, great. Can you get a video up there? Can you get even an animation up there? Can you get a picture up there? Right? Up the bandwidth from definitely beyond uh just text. And then, let’s see. When you click into here we have two kind of parts of our site which is different than some. We’ve got a store because we sell these tools like… Where are they? We! Engage Cards and the connection toolkit and all these other resources. Seeing them pictured up here is useful. This is a hugely trust-building thing. And this is true. If anyone buys any of our tools for any reason, doesn’t like them, we will just send them their money back. No questions asked. Just placing our trust in customers that that won’t be abused. And have a couple people probably got free decks because they took us up on that and use the cards and love them anyway. Maybe. But I’m okay with that. Because I think to earn trust you’ve also got to give it out as well. And so, for me, that’s important. And you know, this is… You know, put in in our language and in a genuine way. Now, the other thing that I think is really, really useful to think about when you’re designing a website is letting people know exactly what’s going to happen next.
This was advice given by our copywriter who wrote a lot of the copy for this website, Chris Danilo. And on a contact form, oftentimes, these are like portals of mystery, right? You like… You enter in your information and then it just goes some… Oh, look. We’re wearing matching shirts. I just have more hair in that picture. That’s a shame. When you enter in your email in this information, it’s like, I don’t know, what will happen? And Chris gave us really sharp advice which is just tell them what’s going to happen next. We will respond within 48 hours. And in fact, if you’re on our services page, that unpacks… It unpacks how… Whoa! That’s getting meta. YouTube video in a YouTube video.
Whoa! When you un go through our services and unpack… You know, give people a chance to digest what’s written, at the bottom, if they want to reach out and actually get a quote for something, it specifically says, “We’ll respond within 48 hours with pricing and availability”. Right? I know as a person if I fill this in, I’m going to get pricing and availability within 48 hours. And that is very, very trust-building. Here is the final tip that I’ll offer. If you’re trying to build a trust on a website, it’s happening also asynchronously, right? It’s like somebody… Like, you invited somebody to the party and the party is your website except you never showed up. They’re just like in your house like kind of looking around making assessments. Like, “Okay, is this person neat.” Right? They’re learning things about you. The best way to build interpersonal trust though is through conversation, being able to connect. If you or anybody else fills in this contact form, within 48 hours, not only do we send them what we promised. 99% of the time, if I’m not away from somewhere or me, Will or somebody on our team will actually send a personalized video to you. Not like a stock video that we had to just auto send you. No. We’ll actually like read your email, your contacts, what you’ve typed in here.
And actually send you a tailored video for that we use loom.com. It’s this brilliant tool. There’s a plugin for chrome. It gets embedded right into gmail as well. Just allows me to record a video, speak the person’s name, say you’re going to respond to that email. And what a cool surprise and client after client after client has told me like, “I filled out a contact form. I was thinking like maybe I just like get a auto-generated email back or something. And you sent me a video with my name in it. What!? And you took some time to like look at our website and poke around.” Right? That is where that trust comes in, where it says where I’m able to say in that moment even virtually people say, “I see you. I care about you. I got into this work because I believe in the value of it. Not because I just want to collect a fee and roll out.” That is really trust-building. Feel free… I would love… I know like there’s no way that our site is the most trust-building website on the planet. It’s just the one that I happen to know very intimately. If you’ve got other ideas, I’d love to create a library of great ideas on how to build trust in an online context in the comments below.
Feel free to drop some info there. The one other bonus thing that I’ll give you and an offer to you, if you go to weand.me/free, you will get (or /ideas)… There’s a whole bunch of free downloadable stuff. And this has been a huge benefit to our business. Since we’ve changed, since we added this tab, a whole bunch of people have said who may not be ready to hire us or may want to learn a little bit more, we need to move up that no like and trust ladder, want free resources. They’re in need. They’re coming here to figure out how to make connection communication and engagement easy.
Seeing this free tab has been a really, really huge difference. Same with the FAQ. Like a lot of times this is something buried. And for us, we know that people want to know when their orders are going to arrive and how much do you cost and things like that. We put a lot of that information right in the frequently asked questions. This video was fun to record. A little bit odd and vulnerable to share our own website and some of that behind the scenes. And also, atypical for my normal videos on how to actually just increase connection engagement in your group, in your meeting, in your uh virtual or in-person conference. But I hope it was really useful. Can’t wait to see you in cyberspace sometime again soon.
If you liked this video, you will almost certainly love these videos. Or these videos. I can never, never remember which side they’re… Videos, check them out. Cheers!