Building Trust With These 3 Tiny Changes In Your Communication Will Get International Visitors To Listen To You
It is often said that working in international business is like working in a minefield, where the mines are cross cultural communication blunders.
There are not really minefields online. It’s more like quicksand or a scene from a horror film where your friend, or in this case your international prospects or clients, just vanish without a trace.
Since the first time one culture tried to communicate with another there has always been at least one major stumbling block in cross cultural communication:
Trust
Trust is something businesses strive to create with all of their clients. But if you decide on a strategy to build trust that works with your domestic clients, you have a great possibility that you will lose many of your international clients in that cross cultural quicksand.
Obviously, trust is very important in your domestic markets but it is critical in international markets.
- Trust
- Lack of trust
- Fluctuating trust
All three of these can be summed up as the number one difficulty you will have in doing business internationally. You have to continuously work to build trust in cross cultural communication. Your international business success depends on it.
Most cross cultural communications begin without trust, or a very superficial level of trust, or a trust totally dependent on some unidentifiable criteria you have little or no knowledge of or control over. Usually this trust is the stereotypical expectations that one person has for another culture.
It is very hard to build trust on quicksand.
As hard as it is to build trust, that trust can simply vanish from any cross cultural communication within the batting of an eye.
This is why all of your international communication should be targeted primarily at creating the best possible environment for trust, and this is not necessarily easy.
Building trust can be boiled down into these two words: consistency and clarity.
Consistency
Consistency may seem intangible. You may not know how to create consistency in your communication. Or you may think you have all the consistency you need in your communication.
Consistency is all about the little things. It is fitting all of the little things into the same picture to make the picture look… consistent. If you are consistent you can remain clear.
These little changes may seem small or insignificant to you. And yet these are probably the little things that will kill trust in your foreign visitors in a heartbeat, without you ever realizing what you are doing wrong.
Consistency In The Words You Use
International readers are ruthless. They may also not be as proficient in English as you would like. Or maybe in their part of the world they use a slightly different English vocabulary.
Here are three things you can do to create better consistency in the words you use:
1 – Use One Word Per Meaning
Do not think you are being creative by using two words to refer to one thing.
When your international readers reads two words, he is thinking that there are 2 things. Do this for anything on your website and you will generate confusion that an international visitor will not take the time to figure out.
Or, even worse, they might understand something totally different.
As an example: a study is not a report; a report is not a guide; a guide is not a study. If your mind they may be, but in the mind of the reader you may as well be saying that a submarine, a car and an airplane are all they same thing – they are all intended to transport people, right?
Always – use one word to refer to one concept.
2 – Check To See If Everything On The Website Consistent
This can be difficult to do by yourself. You might need to have a friend or someone outside of your business to help you look over your website.
A major problem here is a bad choice in photos.
If the photos you use do not clearly represent what you do, they may well be misleading.
Example: A company that sells software for dispatch management has photos of vans on their front page, without any mention of their software or specific indication of what they did. These images may work fine for returning customers, but for the first time visitor they will think…. What will they think?
An American may think – Here is a web site with a large van – it must be a moving company or a vehicle rental company. Your foreign visitors can come up hundreds of different ideas, and it is doubtful that one will think that this company must make software.
Of course this creates bad conversions even with domestic prospects. But it is bound to be even worse for international visitors.
Again, the clarity aspect becomes obvious. Make sure every image is clearly related to the idea that you want it to represent.
3 – Show You Want International Business
This is something people often forget.
Yes, you can put something like “We appreciate requests from outside the United States” or “Unfortunately or staff only speak English, but please email us your questions and we will get back to you as soon as we can”.
But if this is all you do and then continue to cater solely for your domestic markets, your international readers will notice big time. Your message will not be consistent.
- Remember to make all the necessary adjustments on your order form
- You need to be able to accept a foreign address
- The US State can not be a drop down menu and should be able to hold 60 characters
- Some international Zip Codes include 10 numbers and letters
- Foreign phone numbers vary in length and need a country code. They will be between 8 and 14 digits
- According to IETF standards, an email address can be 320 characters long – 64 characters @ 255 characters
- Remember to provide a non-800 number so people abroad can call you.
Do you need to provide a glossary to help your international readers? A simple, clear explanation in English of your industry related terms is best – leave any translations to industry professionals.
Do not use acronyms, or clearly define the acronym at its first use like this: “In the Get International Clients (GIC) newsletter you will find inspiration and ideas for products and markets”. After this you are somewhat safe in using the GIC acronym. Remember that there is not one acronym that is known worldwide.
Does your sales page read like Robin Williams in the movie “Good Morning Vietnam” where he said “Seeing as how the V.P. is such a V.I.P. shouldn’t we keep the P.C. on the Q.T. ’cause if it leaks to the V.C. he could become a M.I.A. and then we’d all be put out on K.P.”
Unless you are in one of the major cities, why not put up a little portion of your country map, highlighting where you are located? Not on such a small scale that only your neighbours will know where you are, and not the whole country with a tiny impersonal dot.
Follow up your online presence by greeting your international visitors appropriately and consistently throughout your website.
If you purposefully try to create this atmosphere of greeting your international visitors with tiny touches in the right amounts, your international visitors will feel this warmth and visit longer with you.
Ongoing Review
Sometimes we are just so close to our own product, our own company and so familiar with our own language. Our products are so obvious to us that we are not able to see any lack of clarity or anything lacking in consistency in our own communication.
In any field it is easy to reach a level of knowledge that we can not even imagine that people don’t understand what we are talking about. If you know nothing about cars, ask a mechanic what is wrong with the car on which he is working.
So listen closely to any feedback you have. Pay special attention to any difficulties your foreign readers have with your website.
Ask yourself if you are actually communicating what you want to say? Test what you are planning to say. Ask a friend or family member that knows nothing about your field and ask them to listen while you speak. If they do not understand and they speak the same language that you do, how could a person from another culture be expected to understand.
Creating consistency is a mindset. It is like building a relationship with your international visitors in your own mind and making sure that you transpose that mindset into your communication.
As you get to know your international markets more, you will want to review your communication again.
It is just as like learning cross cultural communication in person, the more familiar you are with foreign cultures the more you will know what to say and how to say it.
With a little conscious attention you will be able to position your communication more consistently with what you want to say.
Your international readers will notice the difference with these little changes much more than your domestic readers.
You will lose the feeling of navigating on quicksand. You will be building relationships on more solid ground.
Read The Whole Story
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This is part of the Get International Clients Business Guide 4 Build Your International Marketing Strategy Be sure to check out the other useful tips to build your international marketing strategy |
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