Confidence & Momentum

Today I want to talk to you about confidence and momentum. 

The problem in marketing, and in business to some degree, but certainly marketing, is it’s a bit chicken and egg. 

You want your customers to flock towards you. 

You know that they’re going to need confidence in your product or your service. 

They’re going to need to feel confident about your brand, about your checkout process, and about the fact that the delivery is going to arrive. 

There’s so many points at which the customer has to make a decision about whether they feel confident in you or not. 

And that happens painfully sometimes because it takes time to build up that confidence in your brand. 

What you really want of course is momentum. 

Momentum is immediate. 

It’s now. 

It’s buy. 

It’s book. 

It’s go. 

It’s checkout.

The problem is that confidence is long-term thinking and momentum is short-term thinking. It’s a bit like the chicken and egg conundrum really, if you think about it because what comes first? Confidence or momentum? 

Perhaps if there was lots of momentum, if lots of people were buying from you and talking about it on facebook that in itself would give people lots of confidence to buy from you. 

But the problem is if they don’t have confidence, they’re not going to check out.

The customer values confidence more than anything. 

The customer values confidence. 

They want to know that you’re going to do what you say you’re going to do. So you need to address that. You need to back up how you’re going to do what you say you’re going to do. From the provision of a product or service, from the creation of that product or service, that journey is important; 

How was it built? 

What’s it made of? 

Where’s it from? 

How are you going to deliver it to them? 

Why can they be sure that you are a legitimate safe organisation for them to work with?

These are all things you need to tick off to make sure the customer has confidence in you.

The problem is you value momentum. 

Because you have targets. 

You’ve got bills to pay.

You’ve got a MD to impress and shareholders to impress, and a team to inspire. 

Momentum for the business is absolutely everything.

But for the customer it’s all about confidence. 

These are really tricky bedfellows, because both of them can tee up the other. 

If your customers have lots of confidence, you will achieve momentum. 

If you achieve momentum, people will have more confidence. 

Ticking the confidence boxes is easier because those are things that your customers value. 

So just going through a checklist of all the things I just spoke about, making sure that all of the customers’ fears are relayed is a bit of a no-brainer. 

If you’re not doing that already on your websites, if you’re not giving them social proof about the work you’ve done, if you’re not showing them your working out, just like in school you get bonus points for working out, how did you create that product or service? 

What is your process? 

Why would they believe in you? 

And when it comes to momentum, how can you convince them? 

It’s the hardest part because you can’t fake momentum, but you can incentivise it, you can encourage it, you can reward it. 

You can run various types of events, giveaways, prize draws to create a sense of energy and momentum. 

Ultimately confidence and momentum are a real yin and yang that you’re going to have to work out in your business how to get the balance right for. 

But it is a choice between energy and movement and being flat and static. 

How can you create energy to build confidence? 

How can you create energy to build momentum? 

How can you create movement around the confidence piece so that people feel actually confident? 

And how can you create movement to create momentum? 

I’d love to hear your thoughts and if you need more help get in touch.