Reviews and testimonials can be a great way to develop trust with potential customers. I’ve talked about reviews a bit lately, but there’s an angle to testimonials that I think often gets overlooked. My friend Tom Tortorici recently posted something on Twitter that I thought summed it very well:
Having testimonials that say “they’re great!” certainly don’t hurt, but I don’t think they help much either. People may question if they’re true statements or not, but beyond that they don’t really tell you much.
Instead, if we go back to the problem –> solution that your marketing should be showcasing, a well-written testimonial can help showcase that.
- “I needed more traffic to my site, so company x helped me rank higher and doubled my Google traffic.”
- “My website was loading very slowly, and company y improved the load time from 3.2 seconds to just 1.3!”
- “We were getting a lot of traffic to our site, but only 1.3% of visitors were buying our products. Company z helped increase that to 3.5%, nearly tripling our sales for the month!”
The key to that kind of statement is that new potential customers can put themselves in the shoes of your past customers. Knowing that you are “great” is fine, but knowing that you can solve the specific problem that they’re struggling with is gold.
