8 Reasons Why Testimonials Can Give You More Than Just New Clients

Title

8 Reasons Why Testimonials Can Give You More Than Just New Clients

Date

Dec 12, 2024

Description

Powerful customer testimonials can give you amazing and profitable benefits if you are proactive and consistent. A customer testimonial page will give you far more than just new clients through social proof. Learn why and set up yours today.

Status

Current Column

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Writer

Very few business owners can complain about having too many customers.

That's a "good" problem; one that most of us would like to have.

In reality, most founders face the opposite problem: their marketing methods seem to be either too expensive, yield very few results, or there never seems to be time or energy to create and run campaigns properly.

That happens because the rules of marketing have changed.

In today’s age, people prefer to find things to buy themselves. They don't want you to sell them directly, less say, abruptly.

So what can you do to get the sales you are looking for without interrupting your client's moments of leisure and peace?

That is when tools like SEO, content, and testimonial marketing come in.

You can still rely on methods like cold email and paid ads to grow your sales, but today, most of your efforts should be on the inbound marketing methods I just mentioned.

Testimonials, specifically, are evergreen, easy, and affordable to collect

Additionally, they have multiple benefits like increasing the trust of potential customers like nothing else, increasing conversions, and can be easily repurposed to any other content format.

And that is just if we speak about customer acquisition.

There are many other ways you can leverage your social proof to get business and personal benefits.

This article will give you 10 examples of the benefits of testimonials even beyond marketing and growth.

Customer Testimonials Can Help You Secure Investments

Many founders are actively looking for investors or open to investment offers.

However, getting other people to lend you money based on an idea or startup-stage business is not as easy as it seems.

You have two alternatives:

First, you can follow the average way, which is connecting with investors on a personal level, which usually takes a lot of flights and free lunches (after hundreds if not thousands of cold emails, DMs, elevator pitches, and of course a high rate of rejection) so they can listen to you face to face and hopefully your message will be strong enough to convince them.

Second, you can find a way to pass the natural barriers of doubt and distrust by building the opposite feeling remotely and even asynchronously: use testimonials to help you with that endeavor.

Recently, a long-time customer sent me a message.

This was great news: their testimonials helped this client secure investments for his business.

From the message, I assume that they weren’t actively using their testimonials to increase the trust of these investors, yet the fact that their social proof was displayed on their website as one of the key elements was a determining factor.

From this example, we can learn that social proof works not only on consumers but also on investors.

Do you imagine what type of impact you could have if you consciously used your testimonials to help you as you seek investors?

Next time, put your testimonials on a Wall of Love in your pitch deck, and let me know how that goes.

That is just the beginning of what testimonials can do for you and your business.

2) Great Testimonials Will Attract A-Player Employees

Businesses are started by visionaries, but in most cases, the size of their visions requires founders to grow their team by hiring employees.

For security, culture, financial reasons, and for the sake of the goal itself, finding the right people to join you as you build your business is crucial.

Hiring and all things team management should be core topics in the mind of every founder.

Some of them would agree that in the same way as marketing, attracting the best talent is better than chasing it.

Don’t forget that some extremely talented individuals prefer to be employees and not entrepreneurs.

These “A players” choose where to work. When they are tired or ready to grow they pick their next employer and move on.

If you want people like that to join your company you need to make sure it’s appealing to them.

Guess, what?

Your own words won’t be as strong as the words of your customers and even your former and current employees.

Test this advice by adding testimonials or a dedicated Wall of Love to your Careers page.

The principles are the same: A-player employees will try to find out if your company is the best fit for them beyond what you offer by learning what other people think about working with you.

3) Use Customer Testimonials to Land Speaking Gigs

Many people dream of a career that includes speaking at big conferences and sharing their life experiences with other people to teach, help, and provide value to them.

However, finding speaking opportunities at high-level conferences is not an easy task.

You should have a powerful, relevant message and make others feel the need to hear it.

To do so, you should perform specific tasks like:

Asking for referrals

Contacting event organizers

Attending conferences to get involved in the scene

Joining speakers associations

And more

It is also true that using testimonials throughout this process will increase your chances of closing your first speech.

The reason is very simple.

As we have explained in other articles people want you to show others, not tell them, what you can do.

It is not the same thing for you to talk about your experience through a landing page or portfolio as it is for you to talk about your experience and also have testimonials from people who support all your comments with their affirmation and approval.

Customer testimonial about Justin Welsh’s course “The Creator MBA”

If you want to increase your chances of getting your first speaking gig, follow steps like the ones I just shared above and include testimonials in the process.

Even With a Single Customer, Video Testimonials Can Scale Your Speaking Business

The best part is that you can take that momentum and request a video testimonial from people at your first speaking gig using the tools provided by Testimonial.

Then, you can use all of that social proof and start marketing your services to land additional speaking gigs.

Remember, this shouldn't be your main source of income at first, but you can patiently start promoting your new speaking landing page and get one, two, three, and more new speaking opportunities.

You can keep doing that on the side until you have an important source of income that would even allow you to leap from your salary or main consulting practice into a full-time speaking career traveling the country (or the world?) to share your knowledge, advice, mission, and calling.

4) Asking Customers for Testimonials Can Lead To Collaboration Opportunities and Partnerships

Gathering testimonials and building a robust social proof library can work wonders for your business.

In the same way as example number one, where we mentioned one of our customers secured investment opportunities thanks to his testimonials, many partnership and collaboration opportunities could be either attracted or “sealed” by the social proof on your website or by adding testimonials and other supporting assets (like a Wall of Love) to landing pages set up for these purposes.

Many founders or companies are actively looking for opportunities to collaborate with businesses that can:

Provide their clients with complementary services

Cross-promote services

Exchange referrals

Give them a paid shoutout

And more

If you are a solopreneur or freelancer, this could also mean companies or other creators can reach out inviting you to collaborate with them in podcast interviews and other content, become a co-founder, teach a class, and more.

Of course, when these companies and founders pick the best fit for the job, they will heavily base their decision on your past achievements and the quality of your social proof strategy.

5) Use Testimonial Videos to Get New Affiliates & Let Them Use Your Good Testimonial Examples

Affiliate programs are one of the best marketing channels to leverage as you try to grow your products and increase their visibility.

If you want to get others excited about promoting your product as affiliates, you can use testimonials to show how other affiliates from your program made good money.

If you gather that social proof from your affiliates' social media posts or by directly requesting a testimonial from them.

Using that tactic to increase the number of affiliates in your program has the potential to increase your revenue considerably.

Marc Lou implemented this strategy with codefa.st’s affiliate program and that generated $6000 in commissions for the affiliates and more for him in revenue.

What is the best?

If you are using testimonials to grow your brand, you can share your client testimonials with the members of your affiliate program and they can leverage those exact testimonials to drive traffic and sales to your business.

As you can see, you can use testimonials in both ways, to grow the number of members in your affiliate program and to help them thrive as they bring you new paying customers.

6) Asking for a Testimonial Can Give You Customer Case Studies (And More Assets)

One trait that differentiates a testimonial from a review is that testimonials are usually longer and more comprehensive.

Some reviews are just a five-star rating without comments or a simple “Great service.”

The details provided by your client on an average-length testimonial will usually give you good material to create a case study without having to interview your client or spend a lot of time on it.

In marketing, a case study is a thorough evaluation of a product or service.

A case study can take different approaches, but it is usually used to illustrate a business's quality, effectiveness, and veracity.

In B2B, case studies are normally written to portray how the assessed business helped another business succeed, thanks to their solutions.

Case studies are one of the ultimate forms of social proof, hence their importance.

According to a study, 90% of customers searched the internet for solutions in the past year, and 82% made it through online reviews.

The data is clear: people want to learn about other businesses from the voice and perspective of their equals and not from a sales pitch.

So, testimonials, reviews, and case studies should be part of your marketing combo if you are looking to get ahead.

These allow you to impress your potential customers’ minds in a way that ads and fancy websites can’t.

You can create custom case studies following a template, using a case study of your preference as an example, or even better having our free Case Study Generator do it for you.

The more detailed and clearer the instructions, the better.

Once you are done, just click “Generate”.

Voilá, your case study is ready to go.

The best is that you can create unlimited case studies!

This is a very smart way to expand the benefits of your testimonials by turning them into a marketing asset of higher value without incurring any major costs.

7) A High-Quality Customer Testimonial Page Will Help Your SEO

On the technical level, there are many reasons why adding a Wall of Love with many testimonials has SEO benefits for your website.

Without going too deep, these are a few of the benefits:

Similar to a blog post, the content of your client testimonials is indexed and improves Google’s perspective on your website’s resourcefulness

Using guiding questions during the testimonial request process (like the ones included on your testimonial collecting page) will help you get testimonials that are focused on the best keywords for your SEO strategy

If you share your clients’ testimonials on social media and add a link to your website, your clients will most likely repost or share the original post and give you some more benefits

Actively working on your testimonial strategy will naturally increase your proactiveness and involvement with third-party review sites which when properly managed are a great way to improve SEO

Domain authority improves with trust. Testimonials are the most effective way to show your website is trustworthy.

8) Testimonials Help You Build Community

Marketing is changing and evolving as you read this.

The future now belongs to community-based businesses.

You can’t expect to build a sustainable business that beats the competition if you only rely on paid marketing methods like ads to get new clients.

That is why building a business on trust and social proof is so important.

In the meantime, what you are building when your clients have a strong but positive opinion about your business and share it with others is just one thing: community.

There is something that happens psychologically when a person contributes to a cause. The act of giving provides them with a new sense of belonging.

Although I do not have the space to explain the scientific background in detail, you will see that every time a person leaves you a testimonial they will feel more committed to your business and the movement around it.

These clients will not only remain active and paying, but in the long run, they will be your best clients and invite their friends, family, colleagues, and business partners.

Why? Because they feel like they are part of what you are creating and the value you provide.

And what price can you put on that?

How Do I Start a Customer Testimonial Page?

To start, you need to request and collect testimonials from your customers.

Testimonial.to can help with that.

📖

Once you have your first testimonials, you can create a dedicated testimonial page or “Wall of Love.”

A Wall of Love is a digital page where you can showcase the love your clients send you through testimonials and reviews.

Imagine a landing page focused on the best experiences of your most amazing clients!

Put everything in one place:

Video testimonials

Text testimonials

Comments from social media

Reviews from external sites like Capterra or G2

And more

If it sounds cool, take a look at one.

For example, Blaine Anderson does a great job with her dedicated testimonial page.

The experience was able to say more than my words.

The best is that as a Testimonial.to user, your Walls of Love are fully customizable (they will match your website’s skin perfectly.) 🤫

Use your creativity to make it look amazing or get the help of AI to design the Wall of Love that best fits your website.

You can set your dedicated testimonial page in a few different ways:

Use the testimonial.to page that comes with your account

Use a custom domain with the testimonial page that comes with your Testimonial account

Add a link on your website’s menu that redirects to any of the two options above

Showcase Your Wall of Love on a Website

Whether you want to use a dedicated landing page or not, you can always create embed codes and add them at specific places on your website pages or landing pages to generate an overwhelming sense of positivity for your site visitors.

Imagine that after explaining how your product or service solves your prospective customer's problem, the next thing they see on your site is a perfect compilation of former customers testifying that your product is remarkable, outstanding, useful, and, in summary, it works.