If you have a product that has been on the market for a long, what is the factor that’s driving its demand? Its quality, its cost, or its review. Status says that 80% of customers take the advice of online reviews before buying, which makes it not just a novelty, but a necessity for a company to get a portfolio filled with existing customer reviews and case studies to appease online visitors in hopes that they become your customers.
Are you letting your prospects know what your existing customers think?
Times have changed. Risk-taking, during the times of purchase, is not something that customers do anymore. To appease an audience, you need to provide them with a tried and trusted product. But this begs the question –how would your customer know that your product has all the qualities they need? That’s where case studies, reviews, and testimonials come into play.
Through testimonials, you can create a positive ecosystem surrounding your product that will act as a magnet that attracts leads.
For instance, suppose you’re running a shoe company, let’s call it “Glintz”. Glintz markets itself as a fashion-forward, gen Z brand that takes a green and vegan approach to make shoes. You create the best content to market it and run the best ad campaign that combines all the bells and whistles, from powerful words to an attractive image. As a result, you find some leads. These leads visit your website and peruse through your offerings –but it is when they see something is wrong.
There are no ratings for any product, and the reviews are not present. Their initial interest morphed into doubt which then transformed into disinterest, and they see your website as “just another cash grab”. What did you do wrong? Well, you missed half your marketing task.
Marketing is no longer an attractive presentation of an attractive combination of relatable pictures, great content, and a great message. It needs something else –customers’ first-hand accounts.
InGlintz’s case, the lack of reviews turned interested visitors into disinterested bouncers, and all the efforts you put into this company were in vain. People had nothing to believe that your product works a certain way. No amount of certification or “awards” will be a substitute for the account of those who have used your products. That’s why testimonials and case studies are important –they give people something they can count on.
Why do Testimonials work?
Testimonials tackle the one part that stops your visitors from clicking on that “buy now” button –doubt.
People have a better time trusting products that have been used before. They want to “verify” a product’s quality before trusting it. Below listed are the ten reasons why testimonials work.
Better word-of-mouth marketing
Nothing beats word-of-mouth marketing. The added advantage of the customer talking about your product with vigor and excitement is something that cannot be replicated using a simple ad. And if you have a good product, your customers will enjoy sharing their experience about it with their friends and family. Getting genuine feedback won’t only prove that your product is legitimate but is also impactful. This golden combination of authenticity, transparency, and dependability that comes through in the testimonials is a natural cosmetic for your brand that makes it look even more attractive.
Through testimonials, you can turn these customers into brand advocates who will use their word of mouth to attract more customers. Furthermore, putting those testimonials on your website will also put you in sight of your customer’s acquaintances. Simply put, it will allow you to go beyond the realms of your target audience as well.
Those words will then act as a force that will push your brand even further; when more customers are talking positively about your brand, your brand authority increases –which will drive even more people toward your products.
Connecting with your target audience
Customer case studies have shown that emotional attachment is an important factor for your brand because of one reason –lack of complex language. Customer testimonials aren’t the most grammatically well-off, and their sentences aren’t the most poetic. But little imperfections lend them an air of authenticity that strikes an emotional chord with the reader.
Customer reviews have three essential components. First, they are written in simple and everyday language. Secondly, they contain them talking about USP. And third, reviews establish how your product added value to their lives. Combining these three elements properly in a non-fluffy and non-literary fashion creates an open, honest conversation about your product.
Furthermore, the content writer of your company can take cues from the tone of testimonials to all the marketing content of your brand. It will compound the impact of testimonials, and your entire website will look more appealing to visitors.
Enhancing your brand registration
Getting positive customer reviews will allow you to establish a positive reputation for your brand. When visitors read these reviews, it will boost their confidence in your product.
But you don’t have to limit your reviews to your website, either. Through strategic sharing, you can post the reviews on your social media handles,including LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and Tiktok. It will demonstrate that your brand is committed to improving itself, which is another reason that more and more people will be inclined to buy from you.
Those who view your website are also concerned with how you deal with negative feedback. The conversation you can establish with people who posted negative feedback should have a positive, informal, and empathetic tone; it will help those “viewers” to get even more attached to your brand.
Increasing your credibility
Customers put equal weight on testimonials and personal recommendations. For instance, if you have not posted any customer reviews on your website, your visitors will ask their acquaintances. It is that acquaintance’s words that will act as the foundation for whether or not the customer buys from you.
Therefore, make sure to post your customer testimonials on the home page itself. It is good for creating a good first impression if you’re not able to hit the mark through your homepage.
One of the best tools to generate customer interest through homepage testimonials is video testimonials.
Since it follows a “show, don’t tell” approach, it can instantly incite interest, evoke positive sentiments and persuade the visitor to buy the product. Another major benefit of video testimonials is saving space. You can’t create testimonials that offer multiple pieces of information through one video, from product features to customer experience. That said, taking a video testimonial isn’t easy, as not everyone is comfortable talking in front of the camera. Choose a more passive approach instead, which is to interview them about their experiences with your product
Testimonials allow you to talk more positively about your brand
When you talk about the positive features and benefits of your product, you walk around eggshells. You want to ensure that you’re as subtle as possible and, as a result, appear as modest as possible. However, such a passive way to talk about features is not good for your brand.
With testimonials, however, you can open the floodgates and the flow of positive words flow. Positive words from your customers, coupled with the simple way they give it, will allow you to reap the benefits of your marketing efforts.
For example, whenever a recently released movie wants to entice other viewers into watching it, the posters use the words of their reviewers, like “It is the Rock at its best,” and they underpin it with the name of the reviewer or the publication. This approach allows brands to humblebrag while still getting the benefits of straightforward bragging.
Your Happy Customers can Stick with you for a long time
When your brand is growing, having testimonials is not only good for you but also for your customers. Suppose your brand becomes a unicorn (we hope it happens soon), and you request one of your long-time customers to feature their message on your website’s home page. How do you think they will feel? They will feel elated, of course. Who doesn’t their words highlight a popular brand?
While it would not give them any monetary compensation, it does make your customers feel thankful. As a result, they feel part of your brand, which makes them want to associate with you more.
Appreciation creates satisfaction that can increase your market’s traction. What do these words mean? When the customers feel they are appreciated, they feel more satisfied with your product, which then causes them to spread positive words about your product, leading to you getting more traction in the market.
It also hints at one important fact –you don’t need many testimonials; you need a few good ones that align with the sole of your brand.
Testimonials are Free Promotion –And Free promotional material
With testimonials, you get free promotions for your business. Highlight the selected words of your customers on your website’s homepage and see the natural aesthetics of their words naturally attract others towards your brand. Testimonials give you free promotion.
Testimonials also give you free promotional material.
Think about it. Promoting your business is getting increasingly costly. There are way too many brands, and all of them employ the same powerful techniques to grow. And most of these powerful techniques consist of using the same way of words uniquely weaved together. However, there comes a time when people see anad with all the words they have seen before –no uniqueness remains. What happens when you lose the unique voice of your brand? You become obsolete.
That’s where customer testimonials come to your rescue. You can leverage their unique words to market your brand naturally. Integrating your brand message with their life experiences will allow you to come up with compelling and unique quotes that are sure to turn many prospects into new customers.
Better Engagement
As we already mentioned, if a good website can bring visitors to your website, testimonials can push them through the finish line and get them to buy from you. Without a good testimonial, people get doubtful –which is natural. What incentive do they have to invest in your product if they don’t already know of its quality?
With testimonials, you can remove their doubts. Positive words from your existing customers allow confidence to instill in your prospects, who can engage with you properly. As a consequence, the bounce rate of your website will become lower and fewer people will likely abandon your cart.
Better SEO
Customer insight adds valuable context to your brand and social proof to your product, landing pages, social pages, blog posts, and other website assets. It has a snowball effect on the search engine results as your SERP ranks will start to improve.
Additionally, since Google loves authentic content –which content do you think would feel the most authentic than the reviews of your happy customers who praise you with their honeyed words? Their words may stumble, yes, but Google has gotten good at picking up the context, which would be better for you in the long run.
Better Conversion Rate
BrightLocal did a survey in 2022 that exposed that over 98% of people read customer reviews of local businesses. Over 89% say they are open to buying from companies willing to interact with all kinds of thoughts –whether they are positive or negative.
You can extrapolate from this that customer reviews play a big role in generating a positive return on investment –ROI –for companies.
It all comes from the fact that logic and emotion dictate the purchasing decision of the target audience, and with testimonials, you can appease both. When people read the positive reviews that you have posted on your website, people feel more confident –which is their emotion that’s in play. And when they realize that your product has other customers with positive feedback, they make a logical decision to choose your business. This interplay between logic and emotion can be achieved easily using testimonials.
Challenges with getting Testimonials
Thinking about the ten major benefits of testimonials may make you believe that you have found the golden geese of engagement, conversion, and traffic all rolled up into one –but hold up. There are challenges that come with customer testimonials that you mustn’t ignore. Two of the biggest ones among them are as follows;
Google and Facebook Reviews are extremely Customer-Focused
Google and Facebook reviews are great and are known to be transparent. However, because of their extremely customer-focused nature, you don’t have any control over who “reviews” your product.
For instance, trolls with a lot of time on their hands often make it their mission to shame the name of the company by posting fake reviews. And since Google doesn’t actually ask whether these individuals have used a company’s services, there is no way to focus on that. Therefore, it is more important to have customer reviews, positive or negative, in both controlled and uncontrolled environments. In an uncontrolled environment, you can address the trolls empathetically or not respond to them. In a controlled environment, you can engage with your real users.
B2B Businesses Cannot Get Customer Testimonials easily
B2B businesses have a harder time getting testimonials for two reasons. One, their niche is small, so their customer base is small. Secondly, companies are not always inclined to offer reviews of those they have gotten service from. The best options available to you are LinkedIn, and even that is hard to come by.
The second reason is that companies, due to their privacy-oriented nature, don’t necessarily want to divulge their identities –which leads to many anonymous responses that, in the long run, do nothing to instill confidence in other businesses.
The compounding impact of these reasons makes it difficult for companies to get great testimonials.
Taking a Fresh Look at Things -Unlocking the Power of Testimonials
Before we address the challenges (because we will), let us dive into how to implement case studies and studies and testimonials in the way they work for you.
Developing a Case Study
The standard meaningof a case study is a delicate study of a specific subject, which can be anything from a group, a person, a place, an event, an organization, or a phenomenon.
Within the context of business testimonials, a case study is an assessment of how a customer’s pain points were addressed through your solutions. It is the narration that involves your customer’s circumstances before they took service from you, when they were taking the product/service from you, and what happened afterward. By creating comparisons between the past and peasant, customer case studies aim to create a story that provides visitors a deeper insight into how your company offers products/services and how qualified are those services/products in addressing the customer’s pain points.
A case study has three elements:
Situation
The situation deals with the pain points that your customers are going through. Here, the goal is to state, as clearly as possible, the problems your customer was facing. In order to add authenticity to those circumstances, it is better to add quotes that your customers gave you.
That allows the reader to lend credence to what is written before moving forward. Writers must be careful when it comes to vocabulary. They can use industrial slang, but making the case study simple to understand is equally important.
Challenge
This element states the challenge that the service provider (your company) was faced with when you first encountered the problem. Specify all the details of the challenge in order to give the readers insight into how you deal with unexpected situations. You can use this section to further expand upon the issue and explain the root of this issue.
Solution
The final section is the solution your company came up with to help the customer. Explain the results of your answers and your customer’s testimonials into that. And, in the words of your customer, explain how satisfactory the solution was.
Combining these three factors allows you to create a story similar to a dragon quest. The customer is the captive of the dragon, which is the issue, your company is the warrior, and the sword is the solution that slays that dragon (solves the issue). The narrative impact of a case study allows you to truly show an authentic experience to your readers, which will then engage them and turn them into customers.
Listing The Situations that you have Addressed
To leverage the power of testimonials in a massive way, you can create a list of unexpected situations that your company has encountered. Write about the solution you provided in detail, and then give the quotes from our customers to add credence to your solutions. You can even make it more authentic by listing the names of those who helped you.
It is a great and open approach to using testimonials. Use this method to go beyond just pasting the words of those who have praised you on the home page. Use those words as hyperlinks to these case studies to take your readers on a journey where you delivered solutions that led to satisfied customers.
Creating a Portfolio to Entice the Readers
Create a portfolio of the outcomes you were able to reach through your solutions. Go deeper into the problems you have solved and the solutions your company was able to provide.
But don’t be a space hogger. You need your portfolio to be diversified; let your team members contribute and have a go at them as well.
It will help you create a wildly diversified portfolio that combines the voice of you, your team, and the customers.
Now we know that this approach might look a bit chaotic, but bear with us. Use listicles and arrange the data carefully so that you provide the most value to the reader. Start with the
solutions you provided and the client you provided them to. Then dive deep into the elements that went into giving those solutions.Since you are not going to write them as a case study, use lists. And when your team arrives to give their contribution, tell them to stick to this format. I
t will do two things:
- It will give your audience a wider view of the milestones you reached.
- Secondly, it will humanize your company and elicit a positive emotional response from the reader.
Using video testimonials
As we mentioned in the earlier sections, video testimonials are versatile, for they provide a deeper insight by taking a “show, don’t tell approach”. It will also allow you to talk about niche services that you provide. Recently, we did a series of video testimonials for our clients that were posted on specific industry pages. It is a nuanced approach to creating video testimonials, and they make a much better layer of authenticity to your already content-populated website.
How and When to Ask for a Good Testimonial?
Let us first get the when part out of the way. The ideal time to get the review from the customer is right after you have provided them with good service. However, there are still nuances that you must take care of.
- If your business provides products, then ask for a review within one or two weeks after the customer has used the product.
- If you’re a service provider, you can ask right after providing the service.
- If you’re a B2B company, the approach is different. It is better to ask the company to give you a positive testimonial before you provide service to them. Since B2B companies often sign an agreement before starting the job, you can make the testimonial part of the agreement. It will help you prevent any legal repercussions down the line.
Now that you have gotten the timing to ask right let us jump into the how.
Giving them a reason to say yes
Don’t expect to get any results by emailing “Please give us your feedback”; you have to be more strategic about it, which means you must give your customers a reason to say yes.
No, we are not talking about providing good services; we are talking about providing them some incentive to give feedback. You can give them a small discount or a gift card. Add why giving the feedback would benefit them and your company.
Make it easy for them
Accessibility is the biggest roadblock in getting a testimonial. Even those satisfied with your services won’t give you any good words if they don’t have the right way to give it. You can ask them to:
- Film a short video.
- Write two paragraphs about your service/product.
- Post good words about your product on social media in return for a special discount.
- Get into a live interview with you.
Simple questions only
“What did you think about your product?” is much better than “Did our product solve your issue?”. Posing simple and right questions will help your customers respond to what you and they want. Check out this list of helpful testimonial questions by Hubspot to get started.
Provide your Customer Backlinks
This is a big benefit for those running B2B; the need and greed for backlinks are real. You can leverage it to get your customers to give you testimonials. Tell your clients how giving feedback can be better for their Google rankings (you won’t be lying because backlinks would help). Having high-quality backlinks and added publicity is going to win a definite yes from the audience.
Give them the option to give short testimonials
Remember, your customers aren’t content writers; they won’t waste time writing two to three paragraphs to tell how your services made them feel –not when they have something positive to say. Secondly, we have already discussed how you must use the testimonials according to your needs.
Therefore, give your customers the option to provide a short and sweet testimonial.
“I can’t believe you guys helped me so quickly” -is an example of a short and effective testimonial as it focuses on how quickly you were able to deliver the solutions.
Find out what your customers are saying on social media
You don’t need to always ask for the services, you know. People are now more open than ever. And if your service was impactful enough, chances are that you will see your customers raving about it on social media. You can use those testimonials as well.