How to make yourself, your story and your work more believable?

When a story captures our attention, we listen to it, and we remember it.

Believable characters are the lifeblood of great stories. They make whether readers are completely engrossed in your narrative, or not. It’s often hard to pin down, and it’s always a matter of perception — but it’s what will make one reader may scoff at a story which another reader will adore.

So whatever you’re telling to people, you should keep that in mind.

And what do most people do? They claim things. One thing is if we don’t believe what you claim, we’re less likely to use what you have to offer. Now, there’s a wide array of “social proofs” that are used today, but they’re so seen everywhere that they may lose their persuasion power. Let’s dig into it.

Superlatives and statements

What’s the common denominator between:

• The best Twitter content scheduler

• The world’s #1 task manager and to-do list app

• The world’s easiest all-in-one marketing platform

• Built for the new way of working

Arrogance and vagueness.

Number 1 of what? What does easy even mean? For who is it best? What’s the new way of working? We are all biased by our work and tend to lose empathy with website visitors. When describing or teasing your business, I’ll always recommend being as specific and honest as you can. That’s what people trust.

For example:

• A Twitter scheduler 50,302 people use every single day

• Task manager and to-do list for people who procrastinate too much

• All-in-one Marketing platform even your grandma could use

I believe this is how you make a better first impression, and get people to read past the exposition step.

Customer testimonials

Heard 100x in my career:

• “We need more social proof”

• “Have you checked the playbook on building the best converting landing pages?”

• “Let’s add a few testimonials to support our narrative”

To be honest with you, most customer testimonials and quotes feel more like paid endorsements than honest and trustful words. Yes, customer testimonials are excellent opportunities for showing that your business understands customer needs but you should at least make sure whoever reads them can believe what they say.

How?

You may embed actual tweets or reviews (Calmfund does it) so people can see they’re real. Or you may compile all positive reviews on Twitter (Slack did it). The last idea may be to create an extensive page with dozens of customer good words, to show A LOT of people love the product (we did it at Slite).

People may not read them all, but they’ll understand you’re not only using the “perfect feedback” from your best friend. And believe what you have to say.

Own competitor comparison

Yes, it happens people compare your stuff with the competition — so you might want to take the lead and eventually get some organic traffic from it. While the “how do you compare with X” is a fair question, people know you can’t answer entirely without bias. So rather than creating tedious and subjective side-by-side comparisons, think of how you can make your content more objective, valuable and believable.

What unique things do you have? What did you understand that others may not have? What are you solving and how that may catch people's attention and get them to trust you more? What’s your vision? How are you getting there?

I like for instance how Ahrefs used social data to compare with Moz and Semrush. Brilliant work.

Badges

G2, Capterra, Gartner, or Forrester are scams. Once you get a few reviews, they throw you a badge (you don’t even know the meaning) so that you want to get more out of their platform and pay. The middleman becomes the supplier too. And so companies use badges to prove they’re doing good business.

Let’s be honest, who cares if you’re “High Performer Spring 2022” or “Momentum Leader”? Not even your buyers.

The best badge you can show is your number of paying customers.

Product showcase

Showing your product is a great way to explain how it works and tease about its design. Nonetheless, this should be part of your story too. Acme and John Doe and Tesla and Steve Jobs aren’t relatable for most of the users. Would you read a book where the main character is John Doe working at Acme? If not, what can you do to make it more believable?

For instance, to explain what their product does and tout about it, Zapier tells a simple story that could happen to any kind of business. That’s straightforward, relatable, and believable. Please make your product screenshots real! Use copy that sounds like you and like a story that could happen to your readers/visitors in real life. Or make it funny.

Metrics

To support a narrative, it’s easy to tell about what you’ve achieved and inflate numbers or put them out of context. “ Trusted by millions of companies”, and “100K+ people signed up so far” look fantastic, but I always doubt when websites remain that vague.

The best way to reinforce your story with metrics? Use real (automatically refreshed?) figures and explain what they mean instead. Round and extrapolated and vague numbers are less likely to believed.

“Used every month by 1.2 million companies”, “103,021 people signed up in the last year”, and “30,405 tasks created every day”. One great way is to give full transparency on your metrics if you believe they’re great social proof for you.

Press logos and Sponsored articles

Just like the badges and reviews, press logos sound fake. “As seen on Mashable” or “Techcrunch” are the new “Seen on TV”.

What it means is there’s likely someone who paid for you to get featured there. What value does this bring to the user? That you raised money? That someone or some paper talked about you once?

If the paper is valuable, please link to it (like Hey does for instance). Make the whole content and context easy to understand for your readers. And instead of buying a Forbes article to get some street cred on Social Networks, consider reaching out to real reportersto get valuable content and proof. That’s real PR.

In all cases, giving proof should be something you focus on all the time. Each and every discussion you have with a customer should be an opportunity to grab feedback and ask permission to use it on your page.

We love stories, and we foremost love them when we can believe them. Please think of the readers!