Can You Back That Up? How to do a Proof Inventory (And Why You Should)

I’m referring to the sorts of phrases you see all over marketing copy, like “industry-leading,” “world-class” or even just “the best.”

I want to expand on that topic, because there’s a lot I couldn’t fit into one small block in our newsletter. Let’s talk about the ways different kinds of unsubstantiated claims can hurt your marketing and affect how your audience perceives your brand. Plus, I’ll show you how you can effectively audit your claims.

Nobody Believes You

Fact-checking these kinds of claims is easier, and arguably, more necessary than ever.

If you ask Google today “is X company really industry-leading in Y area,” the AI will automatically determine how that vague superlative can be measured, scour the web for proof and produce a full evaluation of the truthfulness of the claim, all in seconds.

Ironically, though, this process itself primes users to be in fact-checking mode when they land on your website, since many people are rightly wary of AI hallucinations and they will fact-check the fact-checker. Even a hallucinating AI chatbot can indirectly create a more savvy consumer. The AI might hallucinate your customer support first response time, but now the user knows to look for that data point themselves.

This isn’t hypothetical. TrustRadius surveyed over 1,800 B2B buyers this year and found that 63% used AI somewhere in their purchase journey, and 94% of those buyers fact-checked what the AI told them at least some of the time. That skepticism is the posture your reader is in when they get to you.

Still, there are a lot of readers who won’t formally check your marketing copy. That doesn’t mean their skepticism isn’t a problem for you. We’ve had evidence of that for nearly 30 years.

Nielsen Norman Group tested this back in 1997 and suggested that unsubstantiated promotional language (“marketese,” as they delightfully called it) makes your reader do unnecessary work. They have to mentally filter out the exaggerations to find the facts underneath. The example in their study was a page that opened by announcing Nebraska is full of internationally recognized attractions. The average reader’s first reaction is “no, it’s not,” and that thought pulls them out of the page. The page that stuck to facts about popular Nebraska attractions without baseless marketing claims about international recognition performed measurably better in their study.

As anyone who has worked with websites knows: users will bounce at the slightest provocation, and that includes even faintly tripping their BS alarm. So, don’t provoke them.

You can’t really write your way out of this problem with style, but that doesn’t mean you should ditch style. The failure isn’t so much the superlatives themselves as the superlatives standing unsupported. A page of dry statistics is just as bad as a page of pure fluff for its own reason: nobody will actually finish it.

The real fix is substance alongside style, which is having the receipts to back up what you’re saying.

So, let’s talk about receipts.

How a Claim Fails

There are two ways a claim can fail under reader scrutiny. They also fail at different times and demand different fixes.

A soft claim, like Nebraska’s international recognition or “industry-leading customer service,” fails at the moment it’s read. It raises questions that pull the reader out of the material, and at best requires the reader to determine what exactly you mean by it, even if subconsciously. At worst, it makes the reader’s eyes glaze over because they’ve seen it before and didn’t believe it from those companies, either.

A hard-but-unsourced claim will almost always pass the first read, because people generally aren’t looking for citations or footnotes on marketing copy. But where it can lead to trouble is in sales calls further down the buyer’s journey, when prospects can (and usually do) ask follow-up questions. If your sales team isn’t prepared to talk about a statistic you’re promoting on your homepage, that’s not a great look.

Despite their differences, the problem in both cases comes down to defensibility. For the hard claims, that’s as simple as knowing where the evidence is and being prepared for the follow-up questions.

For a soft claim, you have two ways to go. You can replace it with a more concrete version citing specific facts, which is usually the stronger move because it gets ahead of the objection. Alternatively, you can keep the copy as-is and treat the claim like you would a hard one: know where your evidence is and be prepared to talk about it. That’s the fallback option for when the copy can’t carry that level of detail.

Here is a method for working out which of your claims you can defend, so you can decide what to do about each one. I call this a “proof inventory.”

Proof Inventory: Take Stock of Your Claims

Block out some time and look at as much of your marketing material as you can, starting with the most visible. More on where to look below.

I recommend a spreadsheet for this exercise, with three pages. For each claim you find, imagine someone asks you: “How do you know that?” Then sort it into one of the three pages, based on whether and how you could answer the question:

• Can answer now
• Need to make a call
• Can’t answer

Where To Look

Most of the time, your website is your most visible marketing asset and you should start there, paying special attention to your homepage, about page, services or product pages and any other page that gets high traffic.

Other places to look include:

• Sales decks, especially any template material that never changes
• Boilerplate on press releases and proposals
• Social media bios, especially on LinkedIn
• Brochures, one-pagers and other collateral

Boilerplate is a common offender, since it often gets copied forward without a second look, potentially going years without an update.

Group One: Can Answer Now

This is the easiest group to manage, though it might be smaller than you think. A claim goes here when you know immediately what the supporting evidence is and where to get it. For soft claims, that means you already know how you’re defining it and can point to the evidence: “we’re industry-leading in area X, because of stat Y, and that stat can be found at Z.”

I would be ruthless about what “now” means. If you’re fairly sure you know the source of a claim but have to go digging to confirm, that might be a sign the claim really belongs in group two.

On your sheet for this group, I recommend four additional columns for each claim:

• Where the evidence lives
• Who owns it
• When it’s dated to
• When it needs to be refreshed

This information collectively tells you where others can look this evidence up for themselves, who is responsible for maintaining and updating it and when it might be time to rerun the numbers or find a new piece of evidence.

The dates are especially important. A retention figure from 2022 is a historical claim at this point, and if you are going to keep using it, you need to either own that it’s dated or replace it. Make a habit of proof maintenance after your initial proof inventory, treating this not as a one-off project but an annual one.

Once you have this down, you should be able to decide what to do about each claim. That might be updating your copy with reference to the third-party analyst who produced the stat in the first place, updating a dated number or simply ensuring everyone talking to prospects is fluent in the evidence, its source and what it means.

In this group in particular, since these are already your best supported claims, you may not need to do anything at all. Congratulations!

Group Two: Need To Make a Call

This group contains the claims for which the backing exists but has been forgotten or incompletely recorded. These are the ones that make you say, “I think Dave pulled that number at some point,” or “I’m pretty sure we can prove that.” The fix is generally a matter of asking people things.

Sometimes, that’s reaching out to clients. Here are a few tips for getting the most out of that:

• Ask right after a win, not at renewal. Goodwill is highest and the details are still fresh and specific. If you wait too long, you tend to get “they were great to work with,” which is nice, but is the testimonial equivalent of “industry-leading.”
• Ask for a number, not a compliment. Fish for the hard details. “Would you be willing to say what your sales volume did in the first quarter after launch?” gets you something a prospect will notice. “Would you write us a testimonial?” usually gets a paragraph of pleasant adjectives that fades into the background.
• Draft it for them. Write your ideal version of the testimonial, send it to the client and tell them to change it as much as they like or rewrite it entirely. Plenty of people are willing to go on record, but a lot fewer enjoy writing, especially for someone else’s benefit. Be clear, of course, that you don’t want to put words in their mouth, but are just trying to be helpful.

Sometimes you don’t need to reach out to a client at all. Your company is full of expertise and knowledge that your marketers may not be taking advantage of, which is a common state of affairs according to research by Content Marketing Institute. There’s a solid chance nobody has asked your experts for numbers that show what your company is really good at. Your operations lead can tell you your real average turnaround time off the top of their head. All it takes is walking down the hall (or a Teams message, as the case may be these days).

If none of what you get back from these sources supports the claim, bump it to group three.

Group Three: Can’t Answer

This is where a lot of vague superlatives land, because they’re written to sound impressive rather to intentionally reflect an underlying reality. They’re not lies as such, but nobody has ever pinned down what they really mean, so you can’t really test or prove it.

When you have your list, look at each claim and consider what would prove it.

If you’re the Nebraska Tourism Commission and you really want to say that your state is full of internationally recognized attractions, see if any international publications have rated Scotts Bluff or Carhenge as must-see destinations. If you claim to have “world-class customer service,” think about what stats demonstrate that concretely: customer satisfaction score, net promoter score, first response time, average resolution time and so on. Run your numbers. If any of them could reasonably be considered outstanding (especially compared to your competitors), slap them on your website, either supporting or replacing the claim.

Sometimes you won’t be able to find the evidence you want for the claim as written. So consider changing the claim to something you can support. Smaller but true is still more compelling than big, showy and wrong.

You may also find that the evidence does exist, but you can’t use it. This is especially common with clients that are hesitant to go on the record. “Smaller but true” works here too. Even if they won’t let you use their name or logo, they’ll often be fine with a description: “a credit union in the Southeast with roughly 40,000 members,” for example. That’s not even a less useful claim, in some ways. For a prospect, a logo tells them who you’ve worked with, but a description can help them see themselves in the copy.

And if all else fails, consider just deleting the offending claim.

This group presents your greatest opportunity. By interrogating these claims and coming up with something real under them, you’re no longer asking a skeptical audience to take your words on faith. You’re showing them an actual persuasive argument.

Defensibility Is the Advantage

The companies whose claims land better don’t necessarily have better writers, it means they are just better prepared. They’ve worked out what they can defend and used that to build more persuasive marketing.

If you want to see how rare that is, go read any random website and see how long it takes before you hit a claim you have to take on faith. It probably won’t take long.

If you get through your own inventory and find that group three is uncomfortably large, let’s talk. We can help you sort through it and come out the other side with a stronger, more believable brand.