As a business owner, your most powerful asset is happy customers or clients. Testimonials from satisfied customers are an invaluable marketing tool that will add credibility to your brand as well as help increase brand awareness in an organic way. It’s not just something to boost your ego – they’re user generated content!
A 2018 study shown 54% of social media users look reviews up to research products and services. That number can only climb higher with the expansion of social media as an everyday tool for marketing. The use of testimonials and reviews are not limited to living on their platform, however.
Let’s get creative — these words are GOLD and should be one of your best pieces of promotional tools.
Here are my five ways to use testimonials and reviews to boost your brand messaging.
social media posts
Your reviews and testimonials do not need to just live on their platform they were submitted on! By using a client’s words as proof of a job well done, you’re televising the proof in the pudding. Having collected reviews on various platforms, you need to share the good news with your audience.
Presenting a social media post (like the one on the left), you can highlight the meat of a testimonial and provide a designed graphic that matches your brand. These help break up a sales-centric social media page that may be fully trying to convert followers to customers and reinforce your brand’s visual identity. Having one or two testimonials highlighted a month will give your client’s the spotlight, allowing them to tell their stories as well as speak highly of your business.
Followers are most likely to see these testimonials during their “daily scroll”, so make sure to utilize a platform like Canva or hire a designer to turn your testimonials into engaging visual stories being told!
website
Your website should be a hub of confidence that your business can provide the solution to your ideal client’s problems. Curated testimonials provide real experiences that site visitors can view 24/7 – kind of like a billboard lit up when you’re sleeping or working. These testimonials not only promote your work, but they are able to help tell your brand’s story.
When hosting on your website, there are a few ways to promote these testimonials. One way is to have a slider such as the one pictured to the left with multiple testimonials dynamically scrolling through every 5-8 seconds. Another way to showcase your testimonials is to make them appear on different pages. By having new and diverse testimonials sprinkled across multiple pages, even when your client navigates to a new page… they will continue to feel comfortable knowing the testimonials are plenty.
video marketing
Video marketing is a powerful tool that can add diverse content to your marketing strategies. Many large corporation use studio-styled “interviews” with clients that are willing to promote their experience or help encourage a narrative set by a marketing campaign. With video marketing, you’re able to use real people to capture emotion in a simpler way than text ever could. A smile goes a long way!
With how much social media has changed the marketing game in the digital world, there are diverse ways to capture this lightning in a bottle. Traditional studio settings where a customer is interviewed is a common, professional way to earn valuable words and a clear story. Another way to use video is to go “live” on your social media platform for an impromptu interview. Perhaps consider wrapping up a service call with asking your client if they’d like to be promoted on your social media feed with a live video. On the flipside of this, even recording a brief testimonial on your phone for later use can have the same “impromptu” feel, but less stress of being live.
These videos can live on social media, on Youtube channels, and on your website.
case studies
If you are a detail-oriented business owner, case studies are a superb way to dive deep not only for promotional reasons, but to catalog success of your business.
You can use case studies on websites, in newsletters, included with brochures, as part of press releases, in magazines and newspapers as ways of building brand awareness and generating leads. Many companies actually hire businesses to write case studies for them, taking the work out of your hands and into professionals that know how to provide fresh, customer-driven prospective.
The benefit of case studies are they are not often just word-of-mouth from a client, they are objectively writing about something far more expansive. The client’s problem, the business solution, the working relationship, the numbers involved, the wins, the results — those are all things case studies cover to paint the bigger picture.
print ads
Testimonials don’t have to be long-winded expansive novels. When preparing your next print-based advertising spots, consider using a client’s testimonial as proof of your word and bond. This adds a level of discussion that isn’t merely sales-driven.
Don’t be afraid to pull out a simple sentence of a really great review that describes your business and the quality of work best. By using a highly impactful, simple headline… you can turn a print ad into a story-driven campaign. If you’re promoting locally, you may even earn brownie points with readers recognizing their friends, family, and members of the community!
For a business to grow their loyal customer base, they must establish credibility and a level of expertise that customers can trust. Similar to how people evaluating a purchase might read relevant comments, by featuring a client in a print-ad, you’re highlighting their experience as the standard.
closing thoughts
Testimonials increase conversions as they help customers make the decision to buy or trust your brand. By utilizing them outside of the space you receive them, you have user-generated gold that you can utilize across multiple platforms of marketing. My advice is simple:
-
Have release forms ready for legality. If your testimonial is online, try to contact the customer directly (if the name is attached) to gather permission for promotion.
-
Don’t use every testimonial. Think of the big picture. Is the testimonial about a new service you’re wishing to promote? Use that one! Is the testimonial about an employee no longer there? Don’t use that one! Think current and think about the impact of the words.
-
Don’t be afraid to reach out privately via e-mail to receive a testimonial. This will encourage a personalized, emotion-driven testimonial as opposed to a simple 5-star review.
-
Keep them short. Shorter reviews help make the headlines more dynamic and engaging.
