Social Proof.
Easy concept to understand: Get people to say nice things about you and other people will be more likely to buy.
Nearly 63% of consumers indicate they are more likely to purchase from a site if it has product ratings and reviews.
Testimonials are the most common way to display social proof and they are the easiest to create.
But most websites and marketing material either; don’t use testimonials or don’t use testimonials that sell.
Testimonials are like evergreen referrals from your clients. Take a webpage and place your client testimonials in them and you will improve the conversion rate.
Here’s one of mine: https://www.facebook.
Testimonials build trust and credibility. Whether a customer would say that you have done a great service or rave about a product that they have bought or tried, they reflect a positive experience.Some industries like coaching and consulting are challenging to get good testimonials in but not impossible.
Testimonials are not sales pitches and they stand out as unbiased. They help to remove skepticism.
We hate being sold to. We tend to run away immediately when we see a copy that tells us to buy these before we see the clear benefit or see someone having a great experience using it.
With testimonials, you don’t have to do a hard sell. Seeing that it made someone’s life different or someone’s business more efficient would help remove doubt in your mind
That said, impressive testimonials are seldom used by a few businesses for one reason or another and powerful testimonials are even rarer.
1. Expose the expectation the client had before buying your product or service
If you are trained in selling you are told to deal with objections upfront. Testimonials can do this in a powerful way. By tackling a common objection or misconception about you upfront you get a metaphorical ‘tick’ in the customers mind. You have removed an objection in a powerful way – with social proof
2. Providing a solution to fix the problem
Listing a particular feature of your product or service is a powerful way to expose what is really working for clients – and embed it in the mind of prospects. Putting a little FOMO in your prospects mind is good as they don’t want to be missing out on what other people in their industry are experiencing by working with you. Explicitly stating what problem it solves is great as that problem probably exists in the majority of your customer base
3. State the result that was solved by using the solution
You do deliver results don’t you. Good. Well you need to tell people about it. This doesn’t come naturally to all of us (especially Kiwi’s) but you have to be clear about the benefits you product or service delivers in the real world. Bonus points if you can deliver the solution in a particular timeframe eg “He doubled my business in 5 months”
A word of warning: never make testimonials up.
Humans have a finely tuned bullshit detector.
Even if they don’t know for sure; made up testimonials often feel wrong.
A good testimonial has:
- An image of person
- Their full name
- Their job title (if relevant)
- A link to verify that they are a real person
Video testimonials can work great but depending on your product and context your mileage may vary.
