It’s understandable that there’s a perpetual race to the top in terms of sales and marketing claims. We all want to be the best, and in the competitive world of search engine marketing, a big claim can get big clicks.
But is it a sensible strategy? There’s a lot of evidence that more than ever, buyers are settling for ‘good enough’ and are shying away from questionable claims. Of course, settling-for-adequate goes back to the “never got fired for buying IBM” days, when technology scared most people, but we still shouldn’t ignore buyers’ fear of things not living up to expectations – or worse, going wrong.
Setting expectations that are going to be hard to meet risks an unhappy customer long term, of course. But it could be that it’s not a good strategy to get the enquiries and sales either, by turning off suspicious prospects right from the start. It’s got to be more sensible to ask yourself: “Can I back up this claim easily, perhaps even within the same marketing material where the claim is being made?”
Throwing around terms like ‘market leader’ has become second nature to some businesses. It might be a dangerous habit though.