Are you using testimonial marketing to its complete advantage?

Happy customers are one of your most powerful assets and their testimonials offer you social proof—an invaluable source of credibility and brand awareness through word of mouth. Why? Because your consumers tend to trust other consumers more than they trust your marketing team.

Once you’ve got it set up, testimonial marketing will keep churning away in the background and require very little input from you (aside from monitoring the comments and responding from time to time). What’s not to love?

Four ways you can deliver social proof to your target audience

1. Testimonials

A stock standard marketing approach, testimonials are straight up short and sweet written recommendations from happy customers. They’re great to use on your website, landing page or on social media.

2. Reviews

Similar to testimonials, reviews usually also capture a rating as well as provide customers with the opportunity to share their experience. While also great on your website, they’re usually listed on Google or your Facebook page.

3. Case studies

Your case studies offer a deep dive on a customer’s experience with your company. Usually data-driven and written from your perspective, they take the reader on a journey of what brought the customer to you, how you dealt with them and the outcome achieved.

4. Numbers

Another data-driven approach to testimonial marketing, adding numbers can convey another perspective on customer satisfaction. For example, “Not only have X people engaged our services but X percent of them have given us 5 out of 5 stars.” This allows you to easily share how many people you’ve helped and that the majority of them would highly recommend you.

Using testimonial marketing on social media

According to recent research, 54% of social browsers will research products and services via social media platforms and 93% claim that their buying decisions are influenced by online reviews. This makes social media an integral part of your testimonial marketing as over half your customers will look you up this way before considering to engage with your brand. There are a number of ways you can both showcase and capture social proof via social media. It will differ slightly based on the platform.

  1. Facebook
    As mentioned, you can add a “review” component to your Facebook page which allows you to both capture and highlight customer testimonials. Additionally, using video testimonials in Facebook advertising can help you to increase engagement and glean impressions from newbies exposed to your brand.
  2. Instagram

    Testimonial marketing is not as straightforward on Instagram, however, that doesn’t mean you can’t use the platform to demonstrate your happy customer base. It’s common for many brands to use their stories as a way to create customer review content. If you’re thinking “well stories are only available for 24 hours”, don’t forget you can compile anything in your “story highlight” section and users will be able to access past stories for as long as you have them there. Stories and reposting are also a great way to capture organic customer testimonials and share them with your audience so look out for people who are tagging you in their own content and share that.

For more like this, check out this quick guide to building brand awareness on social media.