BRAND POSITIONING - Does your business look untrustworthy or unprofessional online?

There are a 8 key things to check to make sure you look trustworthy

With more consumers than ever researching products and services online before purchase, it is crucial that your business appears credible and trustworthy. When online, consumers can make split second decisions that rule your business out of their search.

"Once this happens you have to work ten times harder to get them back"

But what does this really mean... isn't what is considered ‘unprofessional’ subjective to each person?

While this is true, there are some things that are universal. Here is a checklist of the 8 factors you need to check

1. Your website is not optimised for mobile

This is the number one things that makes a business look unprofessional to a potential customer. Research has shown that over 60% of searches for products or services are done on mobile devices. When browsing online many consumers will bounce straight away if it is not mobile friendly. The majority of people have short attention spans and just can’t be bothered to manually zoom a website that is built for desktop. Not only that, but the Google search algorithm on mobile will penalise your website, sending you the the end of the line in terms of search results, while favouring mobile optimised sites.

If your website is built on a flexible platform already such as Wordpress, this is something that can be fixed relatively easily and without having to completely rebuild your website. My advice is do it, and do it soon. If you are unsure of what to do shoot us a note through our contact form.

2. Unprofessional contact details

Having a personal email, residential address or mobile phone number as your business contact details can make your business look like a backyard operation to the potential customer. A dedicated business email address is essential and this can be obtained through webmail services like Google for less than $10 per month and also includes cloud storage. You can purchase a 1300 phone number or redirect your mobile to an existing landline for your business.

You can also pay a monthly subscription to a ‘hot office’ to use their address as your mailing address. If you don’t want to set up the address or phone, I would recommend that you leave these details off entirely and instead use a contact us form on your website, so you can contact the potential customer directly.

3. Parts of your website don't work

Just because your website worked when you launched it, doesn’t mean it works now. You would be surprised at how many things can go wrong - images don’t show up, pages don’t load properly or too slowly, links direct to pages with error messages. All of these thing make you look unprofessional and for some potential customers untrustworthy.

Check and navigate your own website at least once a week to make sure you can identify any of these issues before it starts losing you customers. More often than not there is an easy fix.

4. Inconsistent branding

Does your logo and styling look the same across all your platforms including your website, social media, email newsletters and other advertising? Do you have a different logo on your social pages? Or multiple versions of your logo on your website? Do you have different fonts on different pages of your website? All of these branding inconsistencies can make your business look thrown together, which can makes you look shoddy online.

Pick one consistent theme including fonts and logos and use these across all your assets and communications. There are design tricks that can make this easy, shoot us a line and we can give you some tips.

5. Not updating your social media pages

If you have social pages, you need to commit to keeping them current and updated. When a consumer visits your social page and the latest post was over a month ago, it sends the message that your company is unorganised and unprofessional.

While it is important in the current market to have business social pages, it is actually better to not have them at all, than to have stale pages that send the wrong message.

6. Using images that are poor quality

High quality images both in terms of resolution and content are a must for your online presence. You can purchase high quality stock photos at a low cost for almost anything. Potential customers will look first at your images and then at your text and call to action, so you need to make sure your images are spot on.

7. Repetition of the same images

Do not repeat the same images  on social media or across different pages of your website. Not only does this look like you haven’t put effort into your website, but on social in particular, the algorithms will punish you for posting the same image. This means the platform will not show your post to the majority of your followers and so wasting the time you spent on the post.

8. Using outdated styling and fonts

Styling and font choices can make your online presence seem old and outdated. Facebook posts with clunky text are off putting and the design of your website in particular can look ‘old’. Have you ever visited a website and thought it looked like it was built in the 90’s? I know I have. Ask a few people for their opinions on your website and check out the websites of other successful companies across a few different industries to gauge how yours stands up. A branding revamp might be needed to increase conversions and turn potential customers into sales.

Remember perception is everything, so start with the easy stuff and work your way through this list. The image you portray sends a message to your potential customer about the kind of product or service they can expect from your business...