67% of all consumers on the internet are influenced to make a purchase because of online reviews and customer testimonials.
If you want to increase traffic and sales for your business, online or off, you need to consider customer testimonials as a powerful digital marketing tool.
To help you understand more about how testimonials work, we’ve created this post. Keep reading to learn more about how they can help your business grow.
What Are Customer Testimonials?
Simply put, testimonials are written or recorded statements by someone outside of a business that testifies about a person or product.
In the online world, testimonials are a wonderful marketing tool that helps to attract the attention of potential clients. This then helps to make you and your business more successful.
How Testimonials Work
Testimonials work by creating bridges between your existing and potential clients. They don’t necessarily work as a pitch strategy to get more sales but rather a channel of communication to establish trust.
Real people’s experiences are used in testimonials to show the success and benefits of a specific product or service. This not only helps you enhance your brand, but it also creates credibility for your business.
Four Elements That Make Customer Testimonials so Powerful
Now that we went over what testimonials are, let’s get into more details about what makes them such a powerful marketing tool.
1. Provides Social Proof
By nature, your potential clients want to know if a business or product is trustworthy before they pull out their credit card.
Testimonials create social proof by addressing a potential client’s questions and objections. Since testimonials are made by other customers rather than you, this makes them trustworthy in the mind of consumers.
2. Connects on an Emotional Level
As we said before, a testimonial is a powerful marketing tool. It can transmit a whole set of emotions to your potential clients.
This works by connecting to your potential customer on an emotional level. When consumers are engaged emotionally, they are more likely to buy, which is one of the reasons testimonials are so powerful.
3. Captures Customer’s Attention
Like other forms of storytelling, testimonials have characters (your current clients), a problem or unfulfilled desire (customer pain points), and a resolution (your product or service).
A good testimonial will captivate an audience like a good story. It also makes it easier for people to identify with your current clients by seeing their own problems reflected back to them.
As they see how your current clients resolved their own problems with your product, they’ll be ready to buy themselves to solve their own issues.
4. Explain Specific Benefits
When a potential customer is looking for a certain product, their heads are often full of questions. It’s impossible to know all of the specific questions of a customer in advance, so your website won’t address all of their concerns.
However, when you have a large number of people providing testimonials, it’s likely that through their online reviews, they will have shared their specific struggles. These can then answer questions you hadn’t thought of.
Want to Improve Your Online Ranking? Get More Customer Testimonials
Now you know how testimonials work and how they can help your business grow. As you can see, they play an important role in building relationships with new customers.
Customer testimonials can be written as online reviews on various review platforms like Google My Business, Facebook, and Yelp, as well as directly featured on your website.
Even more compelling, if you can get them, are video customer testimonials. Video testimonials have the ability to grant a deeper level of authenticity to the review and have a higher probability of convincing a potential client.
If you want to improve your online presence and increase your testimonials, contact us today.
We have over 12 years of online marketing experience and would be more than happy to assist you in growing your business.
