Slip under your audience’s
suspicion-and-distrust radar
Sneaky? Manipulative? Unfair?
In our last post, we looked at the factors that go into building your credibility.
You learned that it’s just like watching and listening to a witness in a courtroom to see if you believe him or her.
And you learned the Mother of All Factors of credibility, the “talk is cheap” factor: Action.
Given the fact that Mass Persuasion is truly powerful, and given the fact that you are a responsible person truly concerned about the welfare of your prospects rather than merely being interested in harvesting their bank accounts, you absolutely need to make sure you put this next part into Action:
Where do you start (which factor exactly) in establishing credibility?
Action.
And what action you take?
You give something valuable for free, ask for something small in return, then consistently continue on giving something valuable for free.
Why?
In one fell swoop, you disarm any arguments your audience can have about your:
- Motive: of course they know you’re in business to make a profit, but you are seizing the moral high ground by demonstrating that you believe in offering value. Since every right-minded person also believes in offering value, you have aligned with everyone’s deep belief — they immediately see the positive in you.
- Contradictions in words, behaviors, actions: your continued, consistent actions speak louder than your words, and they shout that you give far more than you ask for. Summed up in one word: you give value.
- Recognized authority: over time, as your audience grows to believe you and trusts you, you become a recognized authority to them. And that’s all that matters.
- General reputation or character: as you seize and keep the moral high ground, this begins to establish you as a person of quality, and if you have a unfavorable past following you, this helps to neutralize its sting and erase any memory of it.
- Results: you will have an easier time in gathering your proof elements (testimonials, endorsements, third-party evaluations and reviews, before-and-after photos, and case studies). Your audience will climb over each other in order to endorse you. Don’t believe me? How fast would you react to a request for endorsements that will be widely featured in front of the audience of: TV super talk show host Oprah or David Letterman, marketer Seth Godin, Apple product users? Or if those are too broad and popular examples for you, how about the leader or visionary founder of your own industry, or anyone else you’d instantly support at the drop of a hat?
The fancy phrase for this kind of action — giving away something of value — is “psychological debt” or the “law of reciprocity.”
What valuable stuff can you give away for free? Just feast your eyeballs on all the offers around you that don’t have fine print conditions. (You see it constantly in cell phone and cable TV and internet service … with fine print conditions.) Here are a couple more:
- your physical products
- solid, valuable information and solutions that you can easily charge money for
- unexpected friends’ discount to customers brought to you through your network
- free or highly discounted initial consultations, inspections, or reviews
- separating a segment of a package and offering it as an “initial consultation” — years ago, I sat down with a highly specialized tax attorney, paying him $400 for one hour to describe my situation. His lowest-price package cost $40,000, and I welcomed the opportunity to pay him for his initial ideas without further obligation
You may recognize you can use these for lead generation programs — building your prospect lists. Yet, you can also use them to go back to your existing prospects and customers to build your credibility even further.
Let me point out a couple of traps you don’t want to fall into:
- psyching yourself out: not using this just because it’s been used forever or by those around you. This time-tested truth about the nature of human behavior and psychology works.
- not really making it free: offering lots of free stuff that requires your audience to invest a lot, whether in time or in buying new things in order to use your free valuable offer. My solution? Treating your audience like executives. Executives are short on time, have too many projects underway, and would love to have an extra 24 hours each day to take advantage of all the good stuff coming their way. In the meantime, the free valuable offers that take too much time to use pile up unused like unopened presents long after Christmas.
Your action of consistently giving valuable goodies away – or modifying your usual terms (such as the tax attorney with the usual $40,000 package who gave a $400, one-hour consultation) – while asking for something small in return (such as contact information), helps you slip under your audience’s suspicion and distrust radar, start building your credibility, which over time turns into platinum-plated trust.
Slipping something under their radar might sound sneaky. And the fact is you do have a hidden purpose: to generate profits.
This sound a lot like manipulation, doesn’t it? Really, you get people to do something that otherwise they wouldn’t do. And, you’re using a strategy based on truly understanding human psychology and behavior in order to get them to recognize their beliefs are the same as your
Seriously . . . something about it sounds unfair.
So, is it manipulation? Or not? You learned before that Mass Persuasion is not manipulation. But propaganda is. The main difference: with Mass Persuasion you look out for and protect your audience. Propaganda is happy to march them off to war so they can serve as cannon fodder.
Next time, we dig into the two simple steps when I show you how to build your trust and credibility using Mass Persuasion. I’ll show you what not to do — by using a vulgar carnival barker’s email subject lines as proof of disgustingly ugly marketing — then take you for a blast into my past a quarter-century ago during the dinosaur days when snail mail marketing was all the rage and when it was impossible to know how many people opened your messages.
See the two-headed 50% Off monster … revolt in the constant display of Sale Ends Soon messages … marvel in the brazen feats of Truth-Twisting marketers, and many more wonders of the world under the Big Top — in our next post covering Mass Persuasion.
Related posts: