The Importance Of Testimonials

Having testimonials proudly displayed on your website could be the difference between a potential customer choosing your business over a direct competitor. Facilitating social proof (like testimonials and reviews) is the simplest way for you to appear as a trusted, reputable business to inquiring eyes. So how can you best incorporate testimonials into your landing pages and marketing activities?
These are our top tips for gathering and integrating testimonials:

Who should display testimonials?

Essentially, all businesses can benefit from the trust and reputation-building advantages of displaying testimonials, but they might be more beneficial to certain types of businesses than others. For instance, services provided in a customer’s home (like trades, cleaning, or lifestyle services) would greatly benefit from testimonials attesting to the professionalism, respect, and trustworthiness of the operator.

If you’re thinking about gathering and displaying testimonials, it’s also important to consider industry standards and ethical requirements- like ensuring patient and client privilege, and not disclosing sensitive personal information. Remember that you also need to ask if you can display testimonials that you’ve already gathered, or check with clients when they respond to a testimonial request if they object to being identified in marketing activities.

How should I gather testimonials?

The easiest way to yield meaningful testimonials is to ask specific questions, relevant to the client’s experience with particular products or services. Try pointed questions like:

“Why did you sign up for our service?”

“How have you used your product?”

“In what ways has this product changed your business?”

Also try to include a question along the lines of “Would you suggest any changes?” to ensure your respondents feel as though their contribution is meaningful, rather than just flat marketing collateral.

Where relevant, feel free to extract testimonials from reviews on your social media channels, and Google, Yelp, Zomato, and similar platforms. While these sites have the potential to see your average score severely impacted by one dissatisfied customer, your owned site allows you to retain complete control of the impressions that contribute to forming your business’ social proof

How do I incorporate testimonials into my marketing activities?

When selecting the testimonials you’ll display and promote, we recommend choosing the “greatest hits”. Despite the work that you put into constructing your questions, you’ll never get meaningful, interesting responses from every client- so choose the best, most specific responses that will help you promote yourself and your product offering.

Don’t hide great testimonials away on their own page or in a separate section- testimonials will add the most value when they’re smoothly incorporated into the relevant sections to which they refer. By all means, compile them on their own page of your website, but remember that testimonials provide the best text-based opportunity for your customers to form more of a sense of what your business stands for.

Consider formatting dedicated testimonial posts in a visually attractive style to distribute across your social media platforms- they’re a simple and effective way to establish a trusting and informed audience.

If you’re looking to integrate testimonials into a landing page for your business, contact our digital marketing experts on 1300 859 600

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