Testimonials: How To Get Them and What To Do With Them

When you begin to map out a marketing strategy, you start by hitting all the main points. They include launching a website, creating content, having a social media presence, and creating a sales funnel. Each of those tactics are crucial for crafting your brand message and getting it out to your target audience. However, there is no marketing tool quite as unique and powerful as the customer testimonial.

 

A testimonial is created when a satisfied customer takes the time out to write a few sentences about their experience with your company’s product or service. It is so valuable because it shows your audience that you can back up your claims. It is one thing to say that your product solves a specific problem, but to point to a real life example is what will seal the deal with most customers.

 

 

What Makes A Great Testimonial?

A testimonial is pretty easy to write. However, a great testimonial takes effort and must include several key elements. First, it’s important the client opens their comments with a positive statement. Then, they should call out the specific product or service they are speaking about. Finally, it should close by pointing out how it solved one of their problems. The best testimonials tell a short but powerful story to the reader.

 

Example

360 Gateway Brands are the unquestionable experts when it comes to helping you launch your business. Their knowledge in creating a brand message is amazing. As a business owner, I feared the marketing element of starting my own company. 360 Gateway gave me tools I need to be as successful as I know I can be!

 

 

How Do You Ask For One?

It can be a bit uncomfortable to reach out to a customer you don’t know personally and ask for a testimonial. They may be hesitant to put their thoughts into writing or share their information on the internet. The easiest way to ease these fears is to address them in your initial outreach. When you are requesting a testimonial, it’s important to lay out who you are, what you are looking for, why it is helpful and what you are going to do with it.

 

Example

Hi,

My name is Kyle and I work with 360 Gateway Brands. I know that we just wrapped up a brand launch strategy with your company. Your account manager tells me it went very well, and that you were quite pleased with the outcome.

Nothing makes us happier than when a customer talks about how satisfied they are with our services. Therefore, we have a small favor to ask. Would you mind giving us a customer testimonial? It does not have to be long. It just needs to talk about how you were happy about our service, the products you used, and the problems we were able to solve.

We have provided a template below for you to get started. Ideally, we would like to use your first name and company underneath the testimonial when we publish it on the website and in our marketing materials. Please let us know if you have any questions or concerns.

 

Provide A Template

As we mentioned earlier, a testimonial needs to follow a specific formula. You cannot assume your client will follow this formula. Also, if you ask them to write a testimonial with no guidance, they may be hesitant and decline. The last thing you want is someone who is ready to say great things about your product or service shying away because they don’t know what to write. Therefore, it is crucial you provide a template and basic guidelines for them to follow. You can also include a previous testimonial to guide them.

 

Example

In your testimonial, please be sure to mention the following:

• The specific service you used
• The problem that was solved
• The outcome you experienced
• Why someone like you should try this service

 

 

How To Use It To Your Benefit

Now that you have your testimonial, you must craft a strategy on how to use it. First, it’s important that all testimonials be logged in one central database. It can be as simple as an excel sheet as long as it includes columns that identify the type of customer who wrote it and the service or product they are talking about. This document should be shared with both your sales and marketing teams. They should be encouraged to pull testimonials that are most relevant to what they are doing.

The most common place to put your customer testimonials is your brand website. However, it’s important that you regularly update the site. You do not want customers seeing the same testimonial every time they visit. Ideally, your testimonials will rotate through on a feature called a carousel. In most cases, the template you chose to host your website will offer this feature at no additional cost.

To take it a step further, you can collect your best testimonials and place them in marketing materials such as an infographic. If you have several reviews talking about different topics, try to create an infographic that focuses on just one. For example, 360 Gateway Brands would collect four of our best testimonials that talk about our social media strategy and place that into one piece of content. Then, you can share that content on social media, in a newsletter, and in followup emails with leads and customers.

The last place you can utilize your new testimonials is in your pitch decks. After spending a few slides talking about how awesome your new product is, you can close the pitch by focusing on what customers just like your audience has to say about it. This proves your point and can erase many doubts your audience may have about whether or not the product in question can really solve their problems.

 

 

Conclusion

Satisfied customers lead to more customers. Nothing beats the power of one consumer telling other consumers how great your products and services are. The key is to put a rock solid process in place to collect powerful testimonials and maximize their impact across all your marketing and sales channels. Brands that do this end up miles ahead of the competition when it comes to winning new business and producing consistent growth and revenue.

 

 

Let’s Talk

Are you ready to create a marketing strategy that will help you find new leads and turn them into satisfied customers who talk glowingly about your brand? Then, we should chat!

Please send us a note at contact@360gatewaybrands.com to set up your FREE intro call!