The Power of Testimonials to Build Your Brand
Much like word of mouth, the raw and candid written words of a customer testimonial have long been regarded as a powerful marketing tool, and leveraging customer experiences to build trust with your target audiences and turn prospects into customers, considered essential for business growth.
Research shows that the unfiltered views of satisfied customers carry more weight than a brand’s own claims or even those of an influencer for 9 out of 10 people. Do you find that you’re the only one talking about how wonderful your brand is? If so, it’s time to turn the tide, and use social endorsement from your customers to your advantage.
In this post, we’ll cover the importance of embracing feedback and how to create a business environment that elicits persuasive yet sincere customer testimonials, which can then be utilised across your marketing and PR materials.
Feedback is Your Friend
The process of gathering feedback begins with acknowledging its importance to your business.
In today’s social media world, there are countless businesses operating purely on social platforms without a website of their own, nor a business profile on Google, hence no ability for customers to leave that business a review. Fear of being out there in the ether, without control over what others will say about them.
Even if your business is excelling, how much could it be missing out on from prospects who can’t see a thing about you online, other than what you have shared yourself? Potential customers may feel suspicious if your social channels paint a picture that can’t be found anywhere else online. Allowing an open forum comes down to, you guessed it, trust. Prospective customers will often research what previous or existing customers have shared online, and this is also why word of mouth is so powerful because people trust personal recommendations above a cold lead.
A website also allows you an additional platform to share customer testimonials that will likely lead to conversions. It’s a chicken and egg scenario. Apart from being at the mercy of social media algorithms, your website is your very own!
Crucially, if you have fallen short, how can your business improve if you have no one to hold you to account? All manner of feedback contains vital information that can incentivise you to continually raise your standards.
Ensure a Seamless Customer Experience
Hoping and expecting to receive testimonials from valued customers starts with a great customer experience.
If you are a service-based business or you rely on your e-commerce website and social media activity for sales, every touchstone that your customer journey’s through to buy or engage with your products or services should be, for the majority of the time, effortless, positive, and hassle-free.
In order to create a culture of feedback, you must be confident that you are giving customers an experience and providing service levels that they would be more than happy to shout about, either through word of mouth or written testimonial. You’ll find that people want to back you and cheer you on however they can; so, make it easy for them by providing a great experience!
Customer testimonials are an honest gauge of your business performance as much as they are for your prospects.
Have the Difficult Conversations
Things go wrong for customers from time to time and there is no one size fits all to ensure that every single one of your customers will be happy with all that you do. Though, things going wrong is much less the issue than how you deal with them.
Create a simple process for addressing complaints and establish an attainable time-frame for acknowledging the complaint and finding a solution. Be understanding and agile in your response to complaints. Avoid taking feedback personally, and aim to be objective and detached in how you respond.
Where you have the right to reply, use it, no matter how positive or negative the feedback. Too often, business owners react badly to negative Google reviews with defensive and lengthy justifications, whilst neglecting to express gratitude for the positive reviews; don’t take them for granted.
Take it on the chin, and keep your eye on the bigger picture by using negative feedback to your advantage, even if it stings at first.
Just Ask!
So how do you go about tapping into this gold mine of testimonials? Just ask! Whilst people are happy to leave reviews in theory, they also respond well to being prompted. Top tip: when asking for testimonials, include permission for potential future use in your marketing and PR materials.
Encourage your customers to leave reviews by enabling the review function on your website, and connecting your website to your Google business profile to allow public reviews.
Send after-sales and follow up emails to invite people to share their positive experiences, and show the human side of your brand by taking the time to thank everyone that left you a review.
Make sharing reviews across your own channels a marketing and PR priority, and as a bonus by doing this, you’ll find you implicitly encourage others to leave reviews too, creating a continual loop of feedback.