How to Leverage Customer Testimonials to Increase Leads

Customer testimonials are one of the most powerful instruments you can have in your marketing toolbox. Why? Because they’re vital to growing your business by increasing your leads. Nine out of ten people trust what a customer says about a business more than what it says about itself. In this blog, we’ll dive into the power of customer testimonials, how to get them, and how to leverage them.

The Power of Customer Testimonials and How to Get Them

Your audience wants to see proof of what your business has done to help others like them. By sharing customer testimonials as social proof, you can turn visitors into leads. Using testimonials regularly can generate approximately 62% more revenue. Not only that, 70% of consumers agree that positive testimonials increase their trust in a brand.

Increase in leads, revenue, and trust? Indeed, customer testimonials are a powerful tool to grow your business, but how do you get them?

How to Get Customer Testimonials

Collecting customer testimonials can be challenging if not done correctly. Testimonials can be found online through review sites, on social media, through your conversations, and by requests. The most effective method to collect testimonials is by asking for them and asking multiple times.

Now, simply asking for testimonials is easier said than done. It’s helpful to have a guide with all the tools and information you need to request testimonials from your customers. To get started, you need to know how your customers prefer to communicate. This includes email, text message, social media, face-to-face, and so on.

Email is one of the most common methods for requesting customer testimonials. There are a variety of testimonial request templates available you can start with, or you can write your own request explicitly catered to your customers.

Keep in mind customer testimonials come in many forms. They can be a quote, a video, an image, a verbal conversation, social media post, and more. We recommend leveraging a variety of customer testimonials to share across multiple channels. For example, you can use quotes from your customers in social media posts or compile video testimonials into an advertisement.

Knowing how to get customer testimonials is only the first step. Read on to learn how you can leverage customer testimonials to increase leads.

Featured Resource: Testimonial Request Email Templates

Download the Testimonial Request Toolkit

How to Leverage Customer Testimonials

We understand customer testimonials are a powerful tool for building trust and boosting sales. Knowing how to get customer testimonials is only the first step. Once you’ve created your library of praise, you can begin to leverage them in your marketing.

Social Proof on Social Media

Today, over 3.4 billion people use social media, which amounts to about 45% of the world. For many consumers, social media has become their primary channel of communication. Therefore, your brand needs to have an active presence on social media to meet your audience where they are.

Social media is perfect for sharing your customers’ stories. You can leverage hashtags like #testimonialtuesday or a custom hashtag for your brand. Turn your testimonials into a single image, carousel highlighting multiple customers, or share a short video of your customer. The possibilities are endless when it comes to social media as it’s constantly evolving.

Another thing to keep in mind is user-generated content (UGC), or content created voluntarily by your customers about your brand. UGC is a powerful marketing tool and can be re-purposed in many ways. The benefits of leveraging UGC on social media include increased audience reach, a boost in brand awareness, and increased brand loyalty.

Featured Resource: Testimonial Request Email Templates

Download the Testimonial Request Toolkit

Website

Your website is the holy grail when it comes to learning more about your business. Once a person hears about your brand and is intrigued, they’ll want to visit your website to learn more about what you have to offer.

Including customer testimonials throughout your website ensures your visitors have the social proof and information they need about your business. However, adding testimonials to your website is more than just putting them someplace where they fit. You want to think about your targeted audience, what elements to include for each testimonial, link to your customer’s website (if applicable), and so on.

We highly recommend adding video testimonials to your website and landing pages. Consumers spend 88% more time on a web page that includes video content. Ultimately, this can increase the chances of turning a visitor into a lead.

Customer Testimonials Page

We know consumers intentionally seek out customer testimonials, so why not make it easy to find them? You can help your website visitors quickly locate your testimonials by dedicating a page to them on your website. However, this doesn’t mean you should exclude them from other pages on your website.

Your customer testimonials page is the one place anyone can go to see your entire library of praise. This form of proof-based marketing provides the social proof your website visitors need to become leads and, eventually, customers.

Video Testimonials as Advertisements

Video testimonials are one of the most influential forms of customer testimonials. Compared to written testimonials, a video can draw readers in and create a deep emotional connection through your customer’s story. If you want to increase your leads, then we recommend creating video ads with testimonials.

Over 70% of marketers admit video converts better than any other medium. Furthermore, video content is twice as likely to be shared on social media. Even if a social media post is sponsored (AKA an advertisement), it can still be shared. This means video ads often perform better than text or image ads.

If you have the right tools to capture video testimonials, we recommend leveraging those in video ads to promote on social media.

Case Studies

Customer testimonials, by themselves, don’t often share every detail of their experience with your brand. That is why businesses leverage case studies. To share in-depth information about your customer’s story and how your product or service helped them.

Case studies are an excellent way to show how your business operates. Indeed, case studies share a customer’s story, but it does much more than that. You can share how the customer approached you with their problem, what you did to personalize the product to them, and how you’ve been able to support them as a customer.

Featured Resource: Testimonial Request Email Templates

Download the Testimonial Request Toolkit

Customer testimonials should be a critical component of your marketing strategy. They’re authentic, tell a story, and build trust in your brand. Testimonials are social proof your audience needs to see before making any commitments. If you haven’t started building a library of praise yet, we recommend starting there. Once you have multiple testimonials, you can leverage the methods above to start increasing your leads.