So, what do you feel is the strength of your online presence? Great responsive landing page, rich and engaging content, solid link building structure, well planned social media presence or your user’s enriching website experience. While the presence of all these qualities are great have one particular website but if you don’t have any Testimonials or Reviews from your industry specific people pertaining to the overall quality of your service then it may act as a major downfall in terms of the bottom line of your business existence. In this rather brief article, we’ll try to explain the necessities of such testimonials and how they can actually improve the bottom line of your business.
The Basic Premise of Testimonials
A lot of businesses come out with testimonials on their official pages lack more of clarity and doesn’t look the part as such. But they more or less do their job in terms of improving your sales figures. This is what testimonials are meant for in the first place.
But more than anything else, a good testimonial must talk about the USP of your business value and how it added value to their existence. This is more than half the job if you get it right. Besides that, you can even leverage testimonials for your latest discount offers and money back schemes. This will give out positive signals to your prospective click-throughs that all your products and services have been commercially successful.
However, there are some concerns with testimonials that extend beyond your product reviews. Instead of doing harm, it further boosts your sales margins with more customers actually searching for your products online to make a purchase.
In short:- It adds value to the promotional aspect of your products by informing your potential consumers about the benefits on making a purchase.
How to Leverage Testimonials
Testimonials can be leveraged to create a friendly environment not only in terms of your online presence but also for your offline needs as well. It’s been found time and again that positive customer feedback can actually surge your profit margins. In fact, it instills a sense of belief in the online visitors about your online presence. But again, it will take time for your testimonials to weave its magic of trust around your click-through visitors and evoke a sense of trust about the overall credibility of your online presence.
But in the hindsight, don’t just delete the negative comments of your customers, which can actually be leveraged to create a better impression on your potential customers.
For instance, you can make use of some negative comments to further improve your services and then highlight it on your website that you actually had acted upon your customer’s concerns about your products and services.
This way you can probably kill two birds with one stone and that will further strengthen your online authority and reputation. Hence, it’s all the more important that reviews must look real and trustworthy and not the fake one.
Get creative with your Testimonials
In recent past, a lot of business ventures took to storytelling just like a duck takes to water. This craze caught up with every alternative business, who went gung-ho about it. This practice became a sort of rage with a lot of business owners because research evidence supports the fact that the stories do have a positive influence on the customer’s perception about a particular product or services. In fact, stories that resonate well with your audience can inculcate intent of purchase in them.
The Use of images with Testimonials
Similarly, images were associated with the trustworthiness of your website. In fact, research conducted some three years ago found that pictures irrespective of their relevance, impact the buying behavior of your target audience. On top of that, some studies were of the opinion that images help instill the lost faith in your nonperforming, poor quality of products & services and vice versa. Even Worse – the reaction to your products/ services may vary depend upon the ethnicity of your target audience.
But in general, it’s not a rocket science stuff to know that Images with testimonials increase the credibility of your business but the results may vary depending upon the nature of your business. Test it know it for yourself.
The HALO Effect
Testimonials from influential public figures, who are an expert in their field of work, can actually make a difference to the bottom line of your business. This according to Wikipedia is due to the HALO Effect of Marketing. Hence, it’s clear that testimonials from influential figures do positively influence your target audience’s buying behavior as such. But there’s certain limitation in terms of use that needs to be followed to make its maximum impact. For instance, you can’t have a Pop diva of the status of Madonna pitching for the benefits of your SEO services. That won’t be much of help, ain’t it?
Get right with your placement
Testimonials are indeed a great way to influence the behavior of your target audience, but they will do their bit of magic only when they are visible to your visitors. Hence, their location on your page is just as important as their presence. So, having them on your landing page or around your CTA buttons that can actually do a world of good to the bottom line of your business.
Conclusion
Having said that, it’s up to you to make the best use of the testimonials when leveraging them for your business needs. And in case if you haven’t used this form of marketing or finding it difficult to use it then just help us to help you out with a FREE Analysis of your website highlighting major local, on-site, offsite and social metrics OR email us your concerns at sales@ebrandz.com or call 1-888-545-0616 (Toll-Free) for help.
