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Very few businesses can tell they don’t need marketing to keep existing.
The rest of us must find reliable ways to find new clients or, better, be found by them.
Some business owners decide to open and monitor online channels where customers can leave reviews or talk about their brand.
That is a good start and a great way to show prospects, customers, and competitors that their business cares.
The more experienced (and wealthier) entrepreneurs do something different… Something better.
They go one step further and adopt testimonial marketing as a critical element of their online reputation management plan.
In this article, I will introduce you to testimonial marketing and share the top 5 tactics you should start implementing today to stop losing money in your business.
What Is Testimonial Marketing?
To understand testimonial marketing, we must define “online reputation management.”
Online reputation management is the practice of influencing how internet users perceive your brand. It involves:
- Monitoring social media for mentions about your brand
- Responding to reviews, addressing negative feedback
- Establishing your company’s position about news and clarifying misinformation
- Finding opportunities to improve the perception of your brand
- Making sure the information about your business is consistent across the web
- Using content marketing to enhance your brand’s image
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As you can see, the scope of online reputation management's tasks is very diverse.
Inside content marketing, testimonial marketing is an important variable that only some consider.
Testimonial marketing is an element of reputation marketing that involves requesting and collecting client testimonials.
The real goal is to leverage those customer experiences consciously to improve how your brand is perceived and, more importantly, to make more money with new clients.
This post is for you if you are new to testimonial marketing or looking to improve the return on investment of your efforts in these tasks.
The tactics I share below will make you money very soon after you start implementing them in your business.
Use Authentic Testimonials Only
Let’s start by clarifying something: even though reputation management and testimonial marketing aim to influence others, this should never be done through deception or by seeding false information.
So, from day one, decide to avoid some of the harmful practices in today’s online environment, like hiring services that provide fake reviews or incentivizing people to share inauthentic experiences about your business.
Fake testimonials harm users because they are dishonestly enticed to purchase products or services that they would not buy if it weren’t for false social proof.
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These practices also harm businesses because they get used to relying on social proof to acquire new clients. When that happens, they also start underestimating the importance of improving their products and providing real value.
These products are usually very defective and die fast if the fake social proof or paying for advertising is stopped or limited.
In the meantime, businesses that don’t use authentic testimonials lose the ultimate benefit: building a product people love and turning customers into fans.
Companies that adopt a genuine testimonial strategy last longer make more money, and, in most cases, their customers’ opinions build a very hard-to-beat business moat.
I Am Not Getting High-Quality Testimonials
If you are getting new testimonials but feel they need to be more specific or focused, or if they differ from what you expect, please try a tool like Testimonial.
You can customize your collection page to give you control over the experiences your customers will share.
How do you achieve that? By strategically setting up prompts or guiding questions beforehand.
These guides are very useful because they give you the control you are looking for without falling into the harmful practice of forcing inauthentic experiences.
You can even add automatic or manual rewards to your testimonial flow sequences so that customers get a gift card or a similar incentive for sharing their honest experience with the world.
If you feel like needing extra help, check out this article, where we share 14 ways to get more authentic testimonials from your clients.
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Effortlessly Add Testimonials to Your Site
Another way a business loses time and money is by failing to add testimonials effortlessly to its website’s pages.
Most entrepreneurs are not designers or web programmers.
That means they can’t add new testimonials to their website’s design without a designer’s help or add scripts or lines of code to change their website’s backend behavior.
With those limitations, adding new testimonials to your website can be challenging, time-consuming, or represent a recurring cost.
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Your website-building software may have a template or image-with-text element that you could use to add testimonials or reviews.
Even with that possibility, a few cons may come with it. For example:
- The template may not fit your website’s appearance or brand identity well.
- You need to update the website whenever you get a testimonial, which may be time-consuming and result in technical challenges and unsatisfactory results.
- You can only feature a few testimonials without making your site look crowded.
Testimonial.to offers you an excellent solution for this.
Our tool lets you capture, organize, and add testimonials to your website in two minutes without needing a developer or designer.
You can create unlimited Wall of Love embeds with different levels of customization in record time.
Ensure the Testimonials on Your Site Are Attractive
Adding testimonials to your site without having to put time on it is one thing.
For them to perform at their best, you must also ensure they look good.
If you just add random screenshots from different communication channels in the same place, your site will look unprofessional and disorganized,
Just visualize this: a site with screenshots from Slack, Messenger, and WhatsApp on the same row.
The lack of coherence and aesthetic context will give your page a Frankenstein-like vibe.
Believe me, you don’t want that.
On the other hand, if you just add plain text testimonials to your site, you risk it looking boring or lacking emphasis, and thus, its impact will be diluted.
You want to find a way to customize the visual aspect of your testimonials without having to design, code, or invest administrative time or money in it every time.
Testimonial.to comes with dozens of different customization options for your testimonials.
You can play with the fonts, borders, highlighted text, attached images, links, source icons, the aspect of the video widget, adding captions, and a lot more.
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The combinations are extremely versatile and could fit any brand.
You can use our simplified dashboard to create new, visually attractive testimonials with a few clicks, export them as images to share on social media, embed them individually, and more.
The best part is that you just have to set up your preferences once.
After that, all the new testimonials that you receive will be automatically added to your Wall of Love in a visually attractive format, according to the preferences that you set, and without further action from your end.
Isn’t that amazing?
Stop Collecting Testimonials Manually
If you manually request and collect testimonials, you will work more and probably get fewer testimonials with lower quality.
Why do I know this is true?
Because manually requesting and capturing testimonials is a very time-consuming task in itself in many cases.
If you are in an industry with a large flow of customers, you probably have many opportunities to request and obtain new testimonials.
When that is the case, manually running the first steps of the testimonial marketing process (request and capture) is like running an outreach or sales campaign.
You need to follow up on customers multiple times to get them to leave you a testimonial via email.
Also, if they are not presented with the right technology, leaving a coherent testimonial becomes hard.
In that scenario, getting video testimonials becomes almost impossible.
In summary, the task is not easy, and it is always important to get the right tools to help.
Why would you want to do that when there are tools like Testimonial?
With our help, you can just set up your collecting page and workflow and use your preferred messaging platform to reach your clients.
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The rest can be automated, sequenced, and set up to remove the workload from your or your team members’ shoulders.
Use Creativity in Your Testimonial Marketing Strategies
Finally, the best thing you can do to stand out and maximize the return on investment of your testimonial marketing campaigns is to stop “playing safe.”
What do I mean by this?
To beat your competition, you need to stop following the status quo and dare to test ways to leverage your testimonials throughout your different processes and digital assets.
Some examples of things you could do are:
- Request testimonials in creative ways:
- In a banner on your YouTube videos
- As a PS. mention at the end of your newsletter
- While replying to comments on social media
- Showcase your testimonials in more places:
- Ads
- Checkout pages
- Pop-up windows
- Website banners
- Social media posts
- Inside your blog content
Pro tip:
Capture the best reviews about your company from Facebook, Google Reviews, Trustpilot, etc., and add them to your Wall of Love using the Testimonial browser extension.
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Then, if you want to go one step further, contact these reviewers and ask them to write you an improved version of their review or, even better, record a video testimonial for you to showcase.
When your customers have good experiences with your business, they become fans, and most of the time, all you need to do to get high-quality testimonials is ask.
In business, the most significant savings don’t come from cutting costs directly but from setting up tools and systems to work less and achieve more.
Because how much is your time worth?
I hope this post helped you realize some areas of your testimonial marketing strategy where, by applying small changes, you can optimize and save resources.
If you are considering a tool to capture and showcase your testimonials, feel free to check out
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