It’s often said that the best form of marketing is word-of-mouth praise from happy customers. People are more likely to buy products or services if they hear a positive review from another consumer in their position.
Your company can promote its offerings and leverage peer-to-peer trust by amplifying customer testimonials and mobilizing organic brand ambassadors. To help, we asked members of Forbes Agency Council how marketers can make the most of testimonials from satisfied customers. Here’s what they had to say.
Forbes Agency Council members offer strategies to leverage customer testimonials.
Photos courtesy of the individual members.
1. Collaborate With Your Customer Advisory Board
Generate these from your customer advisory board. Your CAB members are likely not only your biggest fans, but also invested in your products, having helped shape and improve them over time. The CAB members may have extensive networks to tap into and may also write blogs or speak on industry webinars where your product can be included. – Eyal Danon, Ignite Advisory Group
2. Leverage Testimonials To Humanize Your Brand
Share them on social media and on your website and weave them into blog posts. Customers respond best to others’ stories. And be sure to respond to testimonials to show your commitment to the customer experience. – Laura Cole, Vivial
3. Retarget Warm Audiences
One great way to leverage customer testimonials is by using them as creatives in ad campaigns, especially when retargeting warm audiences. Oftentimes users visit a website or social profile and leave without taking action, and that is a perfect time for brands to stay top of mind and retarget those users with customer testimonials, giving them the last push they need to convert. – Jonathan Durante, Expandify Marketing Inc
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4. Share New Product Lines With Brand Ambassadors
Customer testimonials are gold. When those customers are truly engaged, they are the best brand ambassadors and marketers for your product. By supporting them with additional or new product lines within your brand, you can encourage them to naturally push out organic social content that supports the features and benefits of your brand. – Jessica Hawthorne-Castro, Hawthorne LLC
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5. Nudge Prospects Down The Sales Funnel
Leverage customer testimonials to abet your prospects who are in the consideration phase. Showing testimonials is an effective way to push your prospects down the funnel. – Mandeep Singh, SEO Discovery Pvt Ltd.
6. Incorporate Testimonials Into Social Media Ads
One of the most effective ways to leverage testimonials is to create social media ads promoting the product. The experience customers had using that product, not the product itself, is the main focus. – Stefano Mongardi, TheWebMate
7. Rotate Testimonials On Your Website
The best way is to feature testimonials on your website, rotating them so that they don’t get stale. Another very effective way is to use them in publicity efforts by either quoting happy customers in a press release or by steering reporters their way to talk about your company. – Jeff Bradford, the Bradford Group
8. Empower And Incentivize Ambassadors
Don’t tell ambassadors what to do; empower them. The key to a successful testimonial is authenticity—not just of the testimonial, but also of the action. Create opportunities and incentives for others to act, but make sure both the action and the message, while on brand, are theirs. Top-down doesn’t work. Empowerment does. – Craig Greiwe, Rogers & Cowan
9. Encourage Customers To Record Video Testimonials
Make heroes out of your existing customers and put them at the center of your marketing and communication strategy. The most powerful way is to get them to record a video explaining their challenge and how they resolved it (hint: with your help), and then provide that to sales to put into a pitch deck or to share with prospects by email. Video is incredibly powerful and easily shareable. – Mike Boogaard, MOI Global
10. Target Your Brand Ambassadors’ Networks
The most effective way to leverage testimonials from customers and organic brand ambassadors is to identify and locate the social audience for those individuals. Then, share the testimonial feedback within an organic structured campaign directed at their family, friends and followers. – Greg Carney, Freedom United Social
11. Embrace Customer Review Tools
There are great tools for B2C products, such as Yotpo and Bazaarvoice. Then, there are tools and sites like Clutch.co, where you can ask for reviews. Public reviews go a long way in building credibility. – Michael McFadden, eAccountable
12. Provide Social Proof In Facebook And Instagram Ads
The best way to leverage customer testimonials or organic brand ambassadors is to use them for retargeting ads on Facebook and Instagram. This provides social proof and a great visual to let your prospective customers see others using your product or service. Also, featuring them on your website will help to establish credibility and trust with your visitors. – Jonas Muthoni, Deviate Agency
13. Fold Great Reviews Into Other Content
The great thing about reviews and testimonials is that usually they’re usually public, so we can repurpose them into other content, emails and social posts. If we have a great review regarding the SEO results we achieve for a client, then folding this review into our own SEO content makes it that much more valuable. Positivity from a client will almost always speak louder. – Bernard May, National Positions
14. Create Assets To Engage With New Clients
Customer testimonials are fantastic content assets for web and social platforms as well as case studies, brochures, proposals and any other asset that you might use when engaging with new clients. If you can get those reviews on video, that is marketing gold! – Jason Wilson, Strategy, LLC
15. Place Video Testimonials Up Top On Your Website
Many times, when customer quotes are used on websites, the testimonial sections appear at the end of the home page, and consumers do not scroll down far enough to see the quotes in that section. Video testimonials are much better tools. An explanation of a problem that was solved by a brand or a campaign that was successful is a great way for customers to organically endorse a company. – Sherri Nourse, Ambition Media
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Author: Expert Panel®, Forbes Councils Member
