When it comes to marketing your brand, one of the most important measures of success is the ability to improve your brand’s reputation and build trust amongst your audience. The more brand trust you’re able to generate, the easier it will be to attract and capture leads. This is because most people are initially wary of anything a company has to say if they’ve never engaged with them before. Your audience and prospects are much more likely to trust what other consumers have to say about your reputation. This is why we recommend leveraging customer testimonials to help with building your brand trust.
The Benefits of Using Customer Testimonials
Here are a few benefits of customer testimonials:
- Build credibility – Arguably the most significant advantage of a customer testimonial is that it provides social proof to your audience that your product or service works. Explaining how your product or service is the perfect solution to a problem or need sounds a lot more credible coming from a past customer than it does coming from you.
- Use storytelling to engage the audience – The customer in your testimonial is the main character of the story you’re telling. This makes it easier for your audience to relate to their needs and problems on a personal level. The problem or need becomes the inciting incident and how they use your product or service acts as the climax, with the results being the conclusion. By using customer testimonials as a storytelling tool, it will be easier to engage with your audience.
- Inform your audience – Besides providing social proof of your product or service’s function, customer testimonials offer you the opportunity to show audiences what the benefits of your products or services are and how they work. Essentially, they can double as product or service demonstrations.
- Boost your SEO – Your customer testimonials are an excellent way to improve your SEO since they are a form of content. This means that they can help increase your page rankings and bring in more traffic. Additionally, if you were to create video testimonials, you’ll likely increase brand awareness since video content is extremely shareable.
How to Get Your Customers to do Testimonials
Customer testimonials aren’t that difficult to create. A basic customer testimonial is just a review written for your website. While you could go a step further and generate video testimonials, this does take quite a bit more work to do — although it’s worth noting that video production is not nearly as difficult as you might think, especially when considering how reasonable it is to produce video content these days.
However, the real challenge lies in finding customers who are willing to provide a testimonial on your behalf. The following are a few tips that will help you do just that:
- Ask politely after following up – Once a customer has made a purchase, make sure to send them a thank you email right away. A few days after, send an email politely asking if they would be willing to provide feedback. Asking right after they’ve gotten use out of your product or service is generally considered good timing.
- Target repeat customers – Customers who have made multiple purchases obviously like your products or services. Thank them for sticking with your brand and ask them if they would be interested in offering a testimonial. They’ll notice that their loyalty is appreciated and may be more willing to help out.
- Offer an incentive – Offer a small incentive for doing a testimonial on your behalf, such as a free product, an upgrade on their service or even a discount on their next purchase.
- Make it easy for them – A lot of customers will decline to do a testimonial just because of the effort involved. Make it easy for them with a short list of questions that they can answer so that they don’t have to put as much thought into what they should say.
- Ask your general audience – While targeting individual customers is a good way to go, you can also simply ask your general audience on social media for testimonials and provide a link to a page where they can fill out a few questions.
Customer testimonials can have a significant impact on your ability to build brand trust, which is why you shouldn’t let the challenge of reaching out to customers to request feedback stop you. In fact, odds are that you’ll find many of your customers will be more than willing to provide a positive testimonial on your behalf.