Reading, hearing, and seeing a business testimonial has a great impact on whether or not a client will choose your business for their needs. The average consumer reads 10 online reviews before making a purchase decision. This is why it’s so important to continually collect business testimonials from your customers.
In today’s episode, we are going to go over
-Social Proof & The importance of testimonials
-Where to get reviews to have the most impact on your business
-The magic of video testimonials
-The Best way to collect testimonials
-How to ask for good reviews.
Links Mentioned In This Episode
Episodes Mentioned in the Podcast
Episode 34-Product Review and Deep Dive: Mailchimp Email and CRM System
Episode 41 – Using Artificial Intelligence to Streamline Your Marketing
Episode 19- Email Sales Funnels For Lead Generation
Article – Small Business Marketing Tips
Love our Podcast? Buy us a cup of coffee to help keep creating for you.
Sign up for our newsletter at marketingmasterminds.co Free marketing educational content with how-to videos delivered to your inbox.
What we discussed
- Why are testimonials important?
- Where to get reviews?
- Prompts for good reviews
Why Are Business Testimonials So Important Transcript
*Not ready to give this episode a listen or watch just yet? Below is a rough transcript of today’s episode.*
What is the one thing we as business owners want, but never seem to focus on getting business testimonials? I’m guilty of it too for my business, but they are super important. In this episode, I’m going to give you an easy way to automate asking your customers for reviews and other ideas on how you can get a lot more impact out of reviews.
So before we start talking about testimonials, just a little housekeeping stuff. definitely go check out the show notes. In the show notes. I share links to tools that I may be mentioning in the article and other episodes that I refer to. As well. So you can click the link, watch the other episodes, and then there is a rough transcript of the entire episode there.
So if you’re looking for something very specific, you can go and, do a keyword search on the rough transcript to find what you’re looking for. Pretty cool. Alrighty. So for many of the links that I share, we are partners with those, software companies for those tools, because we use them on a daily basis.
We only become partners or do affiliates with products that we actually use. Ourselves for our customers and for us. So if you happen to need that tool and you want to buy that tool, please use our links. We do get a small commission, and it would help us a lot with creating all this great content for you if you used our links when you actually are gonna, purchase these tools.
Okay, so why are testimonials important? I’m gonna just lay some facts out there. And really what testimonials areare social proof, right? Social proof from other people that your business is as good as you say it is. So 87% of buying decisions begin with research conducted online before a purchase is made.
So that step right there is awesome in and of itself, great for social proof, great for, putting out educational content that. Whole nother episode, but 87% doing research, and part of that research is what other people are saying about you. 82% of Americans say they seek recommendations from friends and family before making that purchasing decision.
So they’re doing their research. They’re asking other people who they would use. Again, that’s what testimonials and social proof. And then 70% of people will trust a recommendation from someone they don’t even know 92 if they know you, right? So 92% if they know you, 70%, if they don’t, so the 70% of us that don’t are like Amazon reviews, but the others are like, if you’re in a Facebook group and someone’s asking for a recommendation, that recommendation falls into that 92% because they feel like they know you because you’re part of the same group. And buyers require an average of 40 online reviews before they believe the star rating of the product or the business. So in this case, it’s the, Google business profile, formerly known as,Google My Business. so you need at least 40. The last thing that is extremely compelling is that, when Google is putting up your formerly known as Google My Business, listing, which is now Google Business Profile, that panel that comes up on the right, and when they show you in a near me listing, your ratings and reviews factor in where you place on that list.
So if you’re in a near me listing, and someone is looking for plumbers. Your listing will come up before other plumbers if you have more frequent better reviews than the other guys on the list. So because of that, I think when you’re asking to put a review someplace for you, the best place to start and get a lot of reviews is in that Google business. Don’t worry about places like Facebook or other platforms. Start with that, business profile because that is the one that we as consumers use the most. If you have another platform that, generates a lot of business for you, maybe in your industry, there’s something very specific. And if it generates more business for you than all the activity that you get on your business, profile from Google than go there, but check your stats.
on the, Google Business profile first, and you can, you can see how many impressions, how many people click through your website, how many people clicked on you to call, all sorts of things. So check out those stats before you make a final decision. What I like about that is once you start getting all of those reviews in Google, you can actually copy and paste and pull, select.
Onto your website or, especially for WordPress. I’m not sure about everybody else, but definitely WordPress. There’s quite a few plugins out there that you can get where it’ll actually plug in all of your Google reviews and show the person’s name, their picture, whatever they put in their profile, the review, and then your star rating, which is very helpful.
And it scrolls through a lot of ’em. Me personally, I like having, select. On specific pages of your website, I think they create a bigger impact. So if you are that plumber and you put in water heaters and you also,put in piping and you have all these different service pages on the water heater page.
You put your reviews, your top reviews about people talking about your water heater service. And then for, putting in piping or installing or fixing things, you put those on those specific pages as well. I think having that, specific review line up with the content on the page. Helps tip that buyer into your favor when they get to that portion of the page.
Now, for another way to get a lot of great impact is.
Doing video testimonials. I love, love, love doing video testimonials for clients. These are great for your, website, for your email sales funnel. we did a whole episode on email sales Funnels in episode 19. If you’re doing landing pages for your digital ads, those are a great place to put them too.
People will actually watch them and because they’re actually seeing the person saying the things about your company, it has a higher sticky quality. They can relate to that person. They can relate to the sound cues of the voice. and if there’s hand gestures in there, there’s visual cues on how they’re really feeling about your company, and how they’re saying it.
So hands down, I love video testimonials. You still need, text in certain places, but if you can do it, grab a couple clients every year and have ‘ em do a video testimonial. . Now, the way to do it, the simplest way that I have found is you interview the client, set up like half hour, 40 minutes with them.
Either in person, where you have a camera on them, might need some lighting depending on where you are. Or you do it remotely via, a tool like Zoom or Google Meet. anywhere where you can record the entire session with them. Then the key to this is that as you’re asking them the questions and they’re answering it, you’re not gonna put that whole entire video up.
You’re gonna edit that down to like the best 60 or 90 seconds. And it’s a blend of what they’re saying, all those top things. And I know when I do the interview on behalf of clients, I know exactly where those spots are cuz I’m listening to the person speak. And as I hear them say something wonderful about the company, I kind of get goosebumps.
I’m like, oh, that one’s gonna be in. and then you string all of those together and, add an intro, add an outro, make sure that the logo is on every single frame. That video might be challenging for the average person to create. And this is where a professional video editor will come in handy.
they can do that for you. It’ll look great. It will sound great. so while you can do the interview, let them edit it up. If you do have to DIY the editing for whatever reason, you can use a tool like Canva to do your video editing. Canva is not my favorite choice for something like this. I personally, I use Camtasia.
I like it. video editors on staff. They use different products, but for you as a person who’s doing it just for your business and not doing it professionally, for everybody else, canva’s more user friendly. and instead of being a single task tool like a Camtasia, where it’s video only, Canva, you can use so much more.
You can use it for photo editing, you can create presentations, you can create business cards, you can do all sorts of things in Canvas. So it’s a better bang for your buck if you can’t afford to have two tools to do two different things. So Canva will absolutely work for you. the key. When you’re selecting the customers is one, you want them to be happy.
Customers of yours, you don’t want them to be kind of me about your business or lukewarm. That will come across in their tone, Also, they need to feel comfortable in front of a camera, right? They don’t have to be positively bubbling or over unhappy to be on camera, but they can’t be petrified.
I’ve. video where the person that was being recorded was petrified. They were pale. They were sweaty, they looked like they were in interrogation, not saying nice things about a company that they love to work with. So be very selective. Even though it might be a great customer and they’re like, I don’t like being on video.
I don’t like to do these things, then you kind of pass on that because you’re never. You. You don’t want that nervousness to come through because the person watching it may not realize, oh, they’re just nervous to be on camera. They may take it as a reflection on how they feel about your business. And then that defeats the purpose of what you’re actually doing, which is trying to get a really great video of clients who love your business and love what you do
So for those text base, Testimonials, I’ve got a great way for you to put together a process that automates the request and collection of them fairly easily. You’re gonna set it up once and you’re gonna let it go and maybe give it a, monitor once a month, And because it automates, it removes you, so you don’t feel like you’re constantly always asking, for testimonials, right?
We, as business owners, sometimes feel weird and awkward about asking people to say nice things about us. What I like to do is I like to create a, request testimonial email automation series inside of MailChimp. You can do it inside of other CRM systems like Constant Contact and all of those, but I know, we use MailChimp all the time and I know exactly how it works.
So I recommend three emails that will go out over the span of two to five days. Feel free to lengthen that timeframe if you feel like that five day window is, too upfront or too, in people’s faces. I don’t want you to feel like that. So the first email is the. And then the other two emails are reminders because people are busy, right?
They may have opened the first email, had every intention of giving you a referral, and then something happened. The doorbell rang, the phone rang the dog barked. The kids came home from school, who knows, right? And then that email gets pushed down in their inbox. The second and third email is just polite reminders saying, Hey, don’t forget to give us a review.
and then eventually they will click through and you’re gonna get a, a better open and a better click through rate by reminding them a couple of times. You can also have it set up that if they do click through, they don’t get the subsequent email, so you’re not bothering them So now let’s talk about what to put in that email. Cuz depending on what you put in there and the order in which you put it in there, you’re gonna have success or you’re gonna have weird stuff showing up, on your Google reviews. . So the first thing I want you to do is thank them for their business, right?
You’re acknowledging they’re a client. You’re acknowledging that they gave you business and you’re thanking them for it. The second thing you wanna put under that is to ask them if they’ve got questions, concerns, or issues. to reply to this email, so thank you for your business. If you have questions, concerns, or issues, please reply to this email.
Let us know what they are. We will resolve them for you. Keep it short. We’re not writing paragraphs here. We want them to skim and scan, and then thirdly. You can say, if you’re happy with the services you received, would you please leave us A review on Google? It helps us a lot, right? You wanna let them know that by them doing this, it really helps your business, right?
People are more likely to do it if they know that they’re helping you. . And then just below that last statement is you add an image button or a button depending on how well you’re working out in, MailChimp, that, when they click it, it takes them right to your Google Review form. you can actually deep link directly to that where once they click on it, it brings up the box to put in the review and then the star rating and hit submit.
Don’t make them work too hard to go and give you a review. Make it as easy as possible because you will actually get more reviews if you put that link in there so they can just do it very quickly.
If you are looking for reviews from a different platform, that’s where you would put that link. I would avoid putting multiple links in there and having them choose, especially if you know exactly where you want them to put, the review. Put the one choice in there. or the other thing you’d say is, respond to this email, but limit the number of choices that they.
So let’s talk about getting good reviews. We’ve all gotten that review where it’s like, company’s awesome exclamation point and they’re gone. Right? That’s, that’s a five star. It’s a good review, but it doesn’t tell the person reading it anything about you. The really good ones are the ones that share specifics about.
Their experience. The guy that came was on time, he was professional, he fixed and it was a wonderful experience. That’s a great review. things like, I recommended this to my friend. They had a good experience. and I felt good because I helped my friend. That’s a good review. So let’s talk about ways where you can add to that email to try to prompt to get a better review than just you.
And it’s similar to if you are going to interview a client to give you a testimonial, you’re gonna ask them questions. And so in the email you could say,if you’re not sure about what to leave in your review, here’s a couple questions you can answer in the review box. And you can do things like, why did you choose.
What was the best part of your service? Would you recommend us to, close friends and family? You can come up with your own set of, questions that are much more specific to your business for sure, but at least by putting those in there, the question is asked, and then they can answer it and go on merry way.
And you’re gonna get better quality reviews by doing that.
So now it’s time for you to take action. So the first thing I want you to do, cuz we keep talking about Google reviews and how important they are, is go find that, Google Review link and make sure you have it saved somewhere, right? That link is never gonna change for your business, because you don’t wanna make them search if they’re ready to give you a review.
and you can put that in different places. You can make a QR code for it. You can put it on all of your invoices if you have other, emails going out, aside from the request for testimonial, if you’ve got letters that go out, let’s say you send reminder letter. Postcards, you can put it there with, leave us a review.
always include things like, if you were happy with your service, leave us a review. don’t prompt them to leave a review if they’re disgruntled. You don’t want those. So you can do those with service reminders, refill reminders, anything else that you’ve got going out. If you are gonna do video testimonials, I strongly recommend that you host them.
A YouTube channel, your business should have a YouTube channel. We’re getting into that day and age where I’m starting to feel like it’s a requirement for every business. So you got your business cards, you got your website, you’ve got your social channels, and now you’ve got your YouTube page.
I think it’s becoming expected, but host them there. and then you can add them to your website from there. Then you can also add them to emails from there, because email won’t host your, Videos directly, and you don’t wanna host your own video on your website hosting, servers. One, they probably won’t let you.
And two, it will slow your site down, but you can easily embed that video into any page that you want from YouTube and it’ll feel very seamless and get indexed, by YouTube as well, which is really important because in this day, and. Search if they can find a video that answers the question that people are looking for, that’s gonna rank up higher, get pulled out of a page or an article first before text will.
So here’s my final thoughts for you on this one. Don’t forget that you have a primary call to action for new leads. that you want to work with. Sometimes when we get involved in these testimonials and asking for them, we forget that asking for testimonials is from, existing customers that are happy and that we still have our call to actions for people that are leads.
We’re not gonna ask people that are leads who’ve never worked with us to give us a testimonial. case in point, you might not wanna put that QR code for your testimonials on your business card. If you’re handing your business card out to a lot of leads, you want a QR code that takes them to your website, where your primary call to actions are prominent there.
You don’t wanna put it on all of your website pages to request for a testimonial. So think about it. It’s that second half of that process, they’ve become a client, they’re a happy client. Now you ask for the testimonial.
So here, atmo, we love to give back to the business community. I provide a 45 minute free consultation where we talk about whatever you want to about marketing. Maybe you wanna talk about testimonials, maybe you wanna talk about email sales funnels cuz I mentioned it. , just go to the website, inma.com, i k yma.com, upper right hand corner, schedule a marketing evaluation, pick your date and time, and we are on the calendar together.
Maybe you have a quick question or you want to suggest a show topic. I love getting those. go down to the bottom of any. And the contact form is there. Just fill it out. Those come directly to me. If you’re looking for additional resources on marketing, on marketing tools, we have our marketing Mastermind blog.
That link is in the show notes. you can go there, watch our how to videos, read through articles about de to reporting and all this other great stuff. We’re constantly adding content there as. or if you want that content pushed to you, you can sign up for the Marketing Mastermind newsletter on the Marketing Masterminds website.
That link is in the show notes as well. and then if you get that newsletter, sharing it to other business owners is a great way to help the overall business community. So I hope you found this episode’s information helpful, useful to your business. Hopefully you will get more testimonials. If you do, please consider sharing it with other business owners so that we as a small business community can grow and thrive together.
Thanks so much for listening, and I hope you have an amazing day.
