Stealing Your Own Testimonials for Marketing

Does it feel weird to toot your own horn? Or are you ok with shouting to the whole bar about your latest acomplishment and then buying a round for everyone? Either way – testimonials can be a powerful marketing tool.

They are social proof that your services are valuable to your clients. You know you are good – but when someone else says it people pay attention. Asking satisfied customers for testimonials is a great habit to be in, but it’s easy to just let that valuable testimonial gold sit underutilized in a dark corner of your Facebook page.

Don’t let those glowing testimonials go to waste! Shoot them at your audience with a flaming arrow. Here’s how to not burn their face off.

Gather Your Testimonials for Marketing

It’s much easier to market using testimonials if you gather them up in one place. You can use a spreadsheet or a Google doc or even a kanban board system like Trello. The important part is to make sure you have the nice thing someone said about your business, their name, their business or other identifying info, and if you can, a headshot. LinkedIn makes that particularly easy since every Recommendation already has a link to their profile headshot.

There are a lot of places you can grab your Testimonials from:

• Facebook Page Reviews
• Google Reviews
• Yelp Reviews
• LinkedIn Recommendations
• Your website testimonials
• Emails from clients
• Video from satisfied customers
• Instagram Comments
• Asking for New Testimonials!

Make sure you’re always asking for new testimonials from clients. As you add services or change your work you’ll want to freshen up your content to reflect an up-to-date vision of your business. Add your testimonials to your document and decide how you’ll mark them “used” after you’ve created graphics to go with them. Highlighting or underlining can work well rather than deleting, just in case you end up wanting the complete list, you’ve got it.

Create a Catchy Visual

Once you have gathered up your glowing testimonials, it’s time to make some graphics! It’s tempting just to post some text to Facebook or LinkedIn, but it’s been proven that images capture people’s attention and stay longer in memory than just text. Now you know it’s worth it to take the extra time to create some on-brand visuals to go with your testimonials. Canva is a great free option to make your own template. Make sure to include your logo and keep your visuals on theme for your Brand Archetype.

This is a testimonal for Lisa Fisher Associates Coaching, a Zeedia Media client. It’s branded with the logo and look of the client, has a headshot of the client, and shows their testimonial in a way that is genuine and authentic.

Note: If you don’t have a headshot it is ok to use relevant generic photos, images of products or something related to their testimonial, or no image (like the one below).

Include your logo and branding on your graphics so it is immediately recognizable as your brand social media. This is important since if someone shares your post, you want it to function without the post text. This next testimonial is for another Zeedia client, District Publishing. Their brand style is very different, which is reflected in the clean graphics and black and white colors. Their logo and website is displayed on every testimonial so that it’s easy to take action once social proof has done its work.

Text & Hashtags!

Once you’ve got the list of testimonials, and you’ve made some on-point graphics to match, it’s time to write the text! Whenever you’re posting on social media it’s vital to have great words to go with the graphic images. #WordsMatter

You can thank your customer for their kind words, talk about the services that they used, and include the text of the testimonial.

Once you’ve written the text, you’re still not done. You gotta use hashtags. Hashtags are one way that new eyes see your content. Use a combination of branded hashtags and industry-appropriate tags in order to reach the widest possible audience. It’s worth it to do some research on hashtags to make sure that your testimonials will reach your target market’s eyes. Don’t worry, if you need help with it, we do that too.

Schedule that Pure Testimonial Marketing Gold

Once you’ve gone to all that effort to gather your testimonials, create branded graphics, write some heartfelt words about how great it makes you feel that those people said nice things about your business, and you’ve also added a solid group of hashtags at the end of your post, you’re ready to schedule!

It’s important for social media to be regular and consistent. Posting a dozen testimonials in one day isn’t going to make anyone happy with you – unless you follow it with a round of drinks. It saves a lot of time to make posts up ahead of time but remembering to post them every day is crazy. Save the daily tasks for brushing your teeth and making sure the kids remember their homework. Schedule your social media. There are a lot of free options that are pretty straightforward once you get them set up and learn the system. MeetEdgar, Hootsuite, and the Facebook Business Suite all have different kinds of functionality that can help you get a system going.

Testimonials for marketing are an incredibly useful social marketing tool. Social media is made for this kind of interaction, and your clients will love to see their words on your pages. It’s a tiny bit like being famous. They might even share your post so that their friends will get to see their glowing words. Imagine how many new eyes might see your brand for the first time. It can be hard to speak up about how great your business is. Try imagining you’re doing this for a friend. It’s time for your business to shine.

ProTip: It’s better to have some raving fans and some who don’t like you (haters gonna hate) than be mediocre to everyone. Curate Raving Fans