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Getting the Most from Testimonials and Case Studies in Your Marketing Initiatives

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Most businesses today pull out all the stops when marketing their products or services. The use of flashy advertisements, dynamically responsive websites, and heavily promoted brand benefits and features is par for the course for many competitive brands trying to stand out from their competitors. However, when it comes to setting up your business for long-term success, there is one thing most organizations need the most – credibility.When you’re able to provide social proof of the value of your products and services, you’re able to establish a strong foundation of trust with your current and potential customers. Showcasing client testimonials and case studies is a great way to achieve this.

Testimonials vs. Case Studies: What’s the Difference?

Both testimonials and case studies are valuable forms of social proof that can be used to help validate a business’s feature or benefit claim for its brand. However, the format for both of these varies, as well as how they’re delivered:

  • Testimonials – Testimonials are a collection of customer quotes, often originating from client feedback surveys and online business reviews. They typically focus on specific brand highlights such as their customer service, product benefits, pricing, or other experiences.
  • Case Studies – Unlike testimonials, case studies are conducted by the business specifically and offer an in-depth look and analysis of a particular customer’s experience when engaging with a brand. These are formatted in a PAS (Problem, Agitation, and Solution) framework to help quantify exactly how and why a solution positively impacts a client.

Using the Voice of Your Customers

Your customers are one, if not the, most valuable asset to your business. When you work hard to take care of them, it’s important to leverage this effort and turn their experiences and opinions into brand advocacy.

The Benefits of Publishing Testimonials

Builds Trust and Credibility

There are very few industry markets today that haven’t been heavily saturated with competition – regardless of the quality of brands that represent it. Establishing your brand as one worth engaging with takes more than just great product development practices. Testimonials are a great way to establish credibility quickly. Positive feedback from current customers is often much more convincing to potential clients than simply hearing about feature benefits from the brand itself.

Helps Address Brand Doubts

It’s only natural for individuals to be skeptical about the new products or services they’ve just discovered. While the affordability of certain products will likely increase or decrease this level of skepticism depending on how high or low the costs are, it’s still important to look for ways to help new buyers get past their initial reservations. Having published testimonials is perfect for addressing this.

Humanizes the Brand

Brands will often have products that are very similar to those of other companies in the market. While individuals are likely to compare features, benefits, and price points when measuring their options, knowing that a brand provides a great experience to their customers overall is a great selling point. Testimonials help to humanize your brand, giving potential buyers peace of mind that it’s worth giving your brand a shot.

Strategies for Gathering Useful Customer Testimonials

  • Ask Customers Directly – There are plenty of opportunities to gain more useable feedback from your customers – you just need to ask. Whether sending an email request for feedback or attaching surveys at the end of customer service tickets, the more customers you ask for feedback, the more usable social proof you’ll have to leverage.
  • Make the Feedback Process Easy – Even though customers may have a great brand experience, this doesn’t necessarily mean they have a lot of time on their hands to write a glowing review. You can increase the likelihood of receiving more feedback by simplifying the submission process and asking fewer questions.
  • Provide Incentives – One way to encourage your customers to leave their feedback is to provide various incentives for their additional support. This could include small tokens of appreciation like gift cards or discounts on future purchases.
  • Obtain Consent – An important element of collecting customer testimonials is obtaining consent from customers if you ever want to publish their statements on public-facing mediums. You should clearly explain where and how the feedback will be used and provide them the right to either allow or decline public posting.

Creating Compelling Case Studies

Case studies are another powerful way to add more substance to your feature and benefits claims. These in-depth reviews of how your brand’s products and services impact others can be incredibly convincing by providing real, tangible proof of how and why your brand offers something different than others.

Below is a common framework used for creating these studies:

1. Present a Clear Problem or Challenge

To begin a case study, you’ll want to choose an ideal customer where your product or service specifically benefited their situation. Start the process by creating a compelling narrative about a specific problem a customer was faced with and why they needed a certain type of solution. This helps add important context to the reader.

2. Introduce Your Solution

You’ll then want to describe exactly how your solution was introduced and used to help address specific pain points the customer experienced. This is the chance to highlight many of the feature benefits of a product or service by using real-world examples.

3. Showcase Quantifiable Results and Data

The most important part of a case study is providing tangible evidence that your solution was the right choice for the customer. To do this, it’s important to present quantifiable data and metrics (often provided directly by the customer) that help to tell the “before and after” effects of implementation. Many times, it’s helpful to provide visual aids such as charts or graphs that can help increase the impact of the messaging.

4. Highlight Any Key Findings

Finish off the case study by summarizing the key takeaways from the customer’s experience. Emphasize the value proposition of your product or service and its potential to address similar challenges for other customers.

Start Providing More Social Proof In Your Marketing Initiatives

Both testimonials and case studies are great ways to add highly valuable social proof to your marketing initiatives. By strategically incorporating these powerful tools into your website content distribution, you can create compelling narratives that resonate with potential customers and drive more conversions.

Author Bio:

Jacob Sussman is the CEO and Co-Founder of BX Studio, a Webflow Enterprise agency widely recognized as one of the top agencies building on the platform. Jacob has launched sites for clients including Headspace, NBC, and Pentagram, and been recognized by Webflow itself with awards and speaking opportunities. Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sussmanjacob/

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Reaping Testimonials of the Right Kind

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A new marketing rule issued by the Securities and Exchange Commission has now opened the door for financial advisors to incorporate testimonials, and Andrew Johnson, writing in ThinkAdvisor, wants to make sure advisors reap testimonials of the right kind and in the right way….

Many of the cautions and concerns Johnson mentions are centered around compliance (legal) issues. For example, advisors should disclose if the testimonial is coming from a current or past client, if that client has been compensated in any way for providing a testimonial, and if there are any conflicts of interest.

But at least two of the questions the author raises are relevant for any business owner or practitioner, I believe:

  1. How will you request a customer’s feedback? What will be the timing of the request?
  2. Once testimonials have been received, will all of them be displayed? If not, how will those used be selected?

Remember the 1977 movie about aliens called “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”?  As I like to remind both the content writers at Say It For You and the clients who hire us, the goal of a blog marketing is to not to attract customers per se, but customers “of the right kind”. These are customers who have a need for and who will appreciate the services, products, and expertise being showcased in the marketing content.  On our end, “getting it right” takes planning and thought. Ask yourself: Are you selecting the right keyword phrases? Are you establishing the right clear navigation path from your posts to your landing pages? Are you blogging for the right reasons and with the right expectations?

In one of my earliest Say It For You blog posts, I recommended using testimonials and success stories to boost credibility. I quoted an observation by Webcopyplus.com that testimonials help your business in two ways, helping new customers decide to do business with you, but also fostering commitment from those providing the testimonials.

One common practice I’ve been careful to avoid when it comes to testimonials is writing remarks, then asking the client to approve and “own” them. In every one of the testimonials shown on my website, the words were created by the customer, never by myself or by another of the Say It For You team. I strongly disagree with Quora contributor Michael Stephen who says the following: “If a customer agrees to provide a testimonial, don’t wait for them to write it. They are busy, they are distracted with life, they don’t have the time. The solution? Write it for them forward it to them and let them know they can change it anyway they like.”

Yes, we “say it for you” in case study, blog post, and newsletter content, but, when asking for (“the right kind” of testimonials, we want our clients to say it for themselves!

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Signs They’ve Found the Right Place

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they've come to the right place

“How can you be assured your hundreds – or thousands – of dollars have been well spent?” James R. Healy asks, writing in the AARP Bulletin about finding the right auto repair shop. Reading through those 9 “signposts” Healy suggests shoppers use as guidelines to quality assurance, it occurred to me how very relevant those are to blog marketing.

Just as consumers would not be searching for the right auto shop unless they already felt the need for one, online searchers who land on your blog are already interested in and have a need for the type of products or services you offer. Several of the signs attesting to the competence of the auto repair shop are those you can stress in your blog content that will serve as “signs” to those readers that “they’ve found the right place”…

People you trust say good things.
Testimonials from clients and customers are a powerful form of social proof; we are more likely to follow actions others have already taken,

The shop has the right stickers in the window.
What needs to come across loud and clear in business blog writing is what preparation, training, and effort it takes – on your part and on the part of your employees – to be able to deliver the expert advice, service, and products customers can expect from you.

The shop shows pride in its appearance.
The main message of a blog is delivered in words, of course. Where visuals come in, whether they’re in the form of “clip art”, photos, graphs, charts, or even videos, is to add interest and evoke emotion. You should take pride in your blog’s appearance, ease of navigation, and correct grammar.

Management will stand by its work.
Blog content writers need to need to keep up on what others are saying on the topic, what’s in the news, what problems and questions have been surfacing that relate to that industry, and use the blog content to show how this practitioner or business owner has stood by his/her work.

Not all these things can be accomplished in any one blog post. But, if you’re consistently creating content that’s helpful for your target customer, it’ll help establish you as an authority in their eyes, and prospects who have reading your blog posts will typically enter the sales process more educated about what you have to offer.

Welcome blog visitors by offering signs they’ve found the right place!

 

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