A marketer discovered that showing commonality with prospects builds trust and drives conversions. He increased sign-ups 30% and book sales 10% by adding a wedding ring to his website photo, a visual cue that resonated with his ideal audience of female entrepreneurs who distrust male authority figures.
Commonality is another powerful, powerful technique to attract customers and be the biggest in the lake. You ever travel internationally? I went to Russia a long time ago. I was sitting in Russia and everyone's speaking a different language with different Letters, like you can't read or understand a thing that's going on. It's very intimidating until one person said one thing in English. And I was like, what? Who's that? I walk over to the guy, he's from Parsippany. Parsippany, New Jersey. I'm like, oh my God, I think you're my brother. Like this is so awesome. I grew up in Boonton. I'm from Boonton. Oh my God, you know, we're talking. Commonality, we bonded like this. The day I left Russia, never talked to him again. I don't care about him. I ran into him here, he's from Parsippany. Loser. Putin. Don't talk. We are designed, people, to look for commonality in situations. When we go to a networking event, we look for stories that the person's sharing so we can share our story right back. It's a look for a bond of commonality. We're all wired that way. In our businesses, we point out how different we are. We're the best at this, we're extraordinary at this, you don't understand a thing about us. That's why you need us. We can draw you here. No. Make yourself of the people. Tell them how you are and have been in the client's shoes. How you've gone through every step. Show them the Phoenix Effect, your weaknesses, and then say how you get them and how you understand them. And show them and find as many ways as you can to connect with them. This is so important. One of the most powerful things, I don't have my website up here, but my website, Draws a tremendous amount of traffic. And I do this thing called multivariate testing, testing a website and how it behaves and how people respond to it. The first thing I had to figure out was for my readership of my book, I had to figure out who my perfect ideal customer was. It's actually female entrepreneurs. And why this is important is as I studied this demographic, that many of the women that were attracted to my books, like Toilet Paper Entrepreneur, why would a woman read that? Was that they were married and their spouse was an emotional, I'm sorry, a verbal supporter saying, hey, hon, that's so great, you're starting a business, go for it, you're gonna rock out, but an emotional detractor saying, that's our vacation money, you're gonna destroy us. So they're saying the right words, but they don't freaking mean it. And there was more things I found about this demographic, but what I learned was there was inherent mistrust for a male authority. If you're a male author, if you're a female reader, you're probably going to pander to me. You're probably going to say stuff just to make me feel good, but you don't mean it. So women were trying to read my book because there was no pandering to it. As I studied this, I said, what's the common thing that women want from a male author? They want trust. They want confidence. They want to know I'm not going to pander. I looked at all the other male authors, ring was off. I said, oh my God, the ring is it. If you look at my website, I always have my wedding ring showing. For a female reader, it's a trust symbol. This guy's not a perv. He's not going to go all crazy on you. He's not going to pander to you. There's inherent trust to it. When I, when we, what I call a multivariate test is when you have your site come up many different ways over time to see what people respond to. When I had my ring on, my book sales went up 10%, my sign-up went 30% up. Exact same picture, exact same everything. A wedding ring. 30% increase in signups, 10% increase in sales. That's the power of commonality. Seek it out with your customers.
