Think about the rise of social networks and social-network marketing. An underlying assumption is that people trust their friends, and so will trust the recommendations their friends make. Every company needs a presence on Facebook and followers on Twitter.
Now, there may be many other good reasons to maintain a company identity on Facebook, Twitter, et. al. But according to Advertising Age, this year’s Edelman Trust Barometer shows that cultivating trust by proxy is not one of them:
It’s a finding that strikes at the foundation of many a social-media marketing philosophy: Tapping into peer-to-peer networks is a way for marketers to tell authentic, credible stories to consumers whose confidence in corporate CEOs, news outlets, government officials and industry analysts has taken a beating. But according to Edelman’s latest Trust Barometer, the number of people who view their friends and peers as credible sources of information about a company dropped by almost half, from 45% to 25%, since 2008.
Ad Age suggests that the explosion in social networking itself may be partly to blame: when people actually knew all their friends on Facebook, they might have trusted recommendations from them, but Facebook friends are just as likely to be casual acquaintances now, or people who went to one’s elementary school. No one has 300+ friends they really trust. It further suggests that people know marketing when they see it:
People have caught on to the fact marketers are increasingly behind that influential blog post or tweet. Despite regulations regarding disclosure of marketer-driven efforts, consumers may feel that whatever it is these people are receiving from companies positively influences their endorsements.
In other words, the well is tainted.
But marketers still have to market. So how can they build trust in an increasingly mistrustful internet?
There is no shortcut, unfortunately. We believe the answer lies in providing information consumers want, free from hidden marketing or sales messages. If people come to trust you as an objective voice, they might also trust you as a vendor. It can’t hurt if the information you offer is backed up by sources people still do find reliable, and they vary by field.
A colleague, for instance, trusts few health reform experts more than Dr. John Wennberg, founder of the Dartmouth Atlas Project, which for more than 20 years has documented glaring variations in how medical resources are distributed and used in the United States. In the field of Internet usability, many of us trust Jakob Nielsen far more than most other writers. But then we’ve been following the topics of health care and Internet usability for years because we have clients in those fields. And as with any subject, you yourself need to know something about the topic and its experts to determine whom to trust.
How to Appeal to an International Audience
Abridged with the author’s permission from a post on the MarketingExperiments blog.
How well do you know your audience? For Americans at least, sometimes I worry we have a view of the world similar to Saul Steinberg’s famous cover for The New Yorker. But let’s not forget that this is the World Wide Web. Your customers are, or at least have the potential to come from, anywhere in the world.
So here are some thoughts to consider and ideas to test when appealing to an international audience:
Where in the world?
Most analytics software, such as Google Analytics, will break down your traffic by country of origin (and drill down even deeper than that). Understanding where your current audience comes from can help you shape your message. Test how often to mention different cultures and which cultures to mention and see how that affects your traffic.
But don’t just limit yourself to where your audience is coming from today, consider where they could be coming from and think about how you can target content to that potential audience. In addition, if you have an ecommerce or even lead generation site, look at how your traffic compares to actual orders and leads. If you get a big chunk of traffic from a certain nation, yet they very rarely order or become a lead, what in your conversion process is stopping them?
Understand when it pays to habla Español
While you don’t necessarily need an entire website for every possible language, it is always a good idea to delve into proper segmentation of your current and possible audience. And if you find a big enough potential market, that commonality of language may significantly help your conversion rate.
You don’t even necessarily need to look beyond your borders to find that opportunity. For example, according to the U.S. Census, the buying power of Americans of Hispanic origin is projected to exceed $1.2 trillion by 2014.
Shalom means hello…and goodbye
If you do choose to test custom foreign-language pages, don’t just settle for poor translations of your current pages, but truly put the time and investment into understanding that segment and its motivations…as you would with any other segment.
Marketing history is littered with funny (and costly) cross-cultural blunders. It doesn’t take a major blunder. Even simple bad translations can turn away potential customers. I probably would not shop in the “Exciting Dressy Fashion zone” or want to eat “Desktop bacteria rice.”
6,809 ways to say “customer service”
Even better than acknowledging the existence of other cultures, show them that you truly cater to their needs. If you’re looking for some good examples, Israeli websites tend cater to a global audience well (a combination of state subsidies that makes international shipping cheap and the global interest of a nation that holds importance to three major religions).
One good example from that country is TheGreatShofar.com. This site clearly illustrates how it serves other parts of the world by, for example, having an American phone number and a testimonial from someone in America right on its homepage (leading us to believe that either America is one of its most important, sought after segments or this is a landing page optimized for Americans).
Daniel Burstein is the Editor for MarketingExperiments, the first Internet-based research lab to conduct experiments in optimizing marketing and sales processes.