As every business owner knows, winning new customers is much harder than keeping old ones coming back for more. It can be even harder to do online. This is largely due to the fact that building up trust virtually can feel like a near impossible task. 
However, there are ways that you can win over new business, building your reputation and growing sales – simply by creating trust through your website and other online presence. It’s all about creating a more human approach. 
 
Yes, customers like businesses to be professional and reliable. But they also want to know the people behind the branding and marketing. With that in mind, we have created this guide to humanising your website to create a more friendly and approachable online brand. Follow the rules below and watch your reputation grow. 
 

Tell them a bit more about yourself 

Instead of hiding behind a logo, humanise your brand by setting space aside on your website to introduce yourself. The most obvious place for this would be an ‘About Us’ page. Here you can include background information on why you started your company and the inspiration behind your products or services. 
 
You can let people know what motivates you, what experience you have and what your business goals are for the near and long-term future. Adding a photo of yourself or your team is a big plus. This helps people to put a face to a name – which can be very hard to do online. 
 
Customers are far more likely to trust an individual they can relate to than an unfamiliar, faceless company. So, establishing yourself as a friendly and approachable business owner will help you to build customer trust. 
 

Answer questions 

To keep up this dialogue you can also create an FAQs page. This will allow you to personally address any common concerns and queries. 
 
Or you might like to include a chat function, where customers can ask questions about your products in real time. This is a great way of building trust because it lets people know that you are attentive and always available for more information. In this sense it is perhaps more humanising than a FAQs page. 
 

Tell stories 

Write stories. Real life, personal stories about your company’s plans or accomplishments are great to demonstrate passion and enthusiasm. As human beings, we are all hardwired to like stories. They are how we have passed down information over the generations, and often how we generate an emotional response in others. 
 
From novels to Hollywood movies, we all understand the narrative arc, with beginnings, middles and ends making sense to our logic processes. So, if you can tell good stories on your website then you can achieve a much stronger human connection. 
 
These can be in the form of videos about recent jobs you have done or new goods that you are stocking. You can even create ongoing stories, releasing a new episode every week. This way you keep customers coming back for more. 
 
Videos are a much more effective way of evoking emotions than written texts. For instance, you can make a video of a project you’ve worked on recently or of your employees to show how passionate you are about your business. 
 

Appeal to emotions 

As humans we are emotional beings. So, if you want to give your user experience a human touch then you need to find a way to engage their emotional side. This may be more of a challenge for some businesses than others – and often it depends on what goods you sell or services you provide. 
 
However, the easiest way to find out what hits your customers’ emotional buttons is to ask them. Ask them how they were feeling when they were on your site, what made them want to continue looking and why they made a purchase or booking. This way you can find out what made them passionate or excites them about what you do, and you can create more of the same. 
 

Be consistent 

If there’s one thing we like when we start to trust people, then it is consistency. Making sure that your messaging is consistent across your site is a great way to establish yourself as a stable and trustworthy presence. 
 
Make sure that all your branding elements are in place on every page and that details have been doublechecked to be correct. If you really want to be a source of trusted information, then you need to make sure it is 100% accurate. 
 

Don't overdo the SEO 

If there is one area of online marketing that people misunderstand more than others, it is SEO. Yes, your website needs to be optimised to appeal to search engines. But this should never be at the expense of the user. Stuffing your website with keywords that don’t really scan, in order to shoehorn in a few localised search terms, does not appeal to human readers. 
 
As search engines get more sophisticated then they can spot this kind of behaviour and it won’t do you any good. What they are looking for now is good quality content that provides their users with answers and information. 
 
Make sure all your content is geared towards human consumption rather than bots. It can be a big turn off to visit a site and realise that you are a secondary concern to the search engine optimisation. 
 
When trying to humanise your website, remember that people do business with those that they know, like and trust. It should be one of your primary online aims to try and build this trust. And by following the above you should be able to do just that. 
 
If you would like to know more about how to give your website a more human feel, or to find out more about our services, get in touch with a member of our team here at it'seeze Web Design Knutsford. We are dedicated to growing your business through good quality design and consistent branding. 
 
We look forward to telling you more about what we do. 
 
Tagged as: Branding, Web Design
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