The majority of the people you’re trying to convert have trust issues. They are only humans, after all. So what can you do about it? Well, considering that today’s buyers tend to believe what fellow buyers have to say about your services or products more than anything else, customer testimonials can prove to be one of your biggest assets.

Testimonials are a very efficient marketing tool when it comes to establishing credibility, building a reputation and reducing customer anxiety. There’s nothing like it.

But here’s the catch: They have to be written in a certain way in order to work properly. In this article, we’ll go over some of the most important practices that will help you leverage satisfied customers for powerful marketing results.

Your customer testimonials need to be impressive, but also believable

One reason fake testimonials never work is because they don’t look genuine. Make no mistake, your customers can spot a sleazy marketing trick when they see one, so let’s not even go there. If you’re going to use testimonials, and you should, they need be real. Like it or not, trust can’t be bought. It needs to be earned.

If you get positive feedback from one of your customers, use it as it is. Don’t embellish, don’t add adjectives that sound good in your head, or else the testimonial will appear too “salesy”.

Short, on point testimonials tend to deliver the best results because they are easy to read and don’t take up any of your customer’s time. To make them look authentic, it’s best to include a full name and a company or job title, if suited.

Make it visual

It’s great when your prospects can read what other people have to say about your business, but it’s better when they can actually see the person who said it.

Real faces boost credibility. Adding an image to a statement makes it more believable, as long as it’s a picture of the actual customer being quoted, and not just a stock photo you downloaded online.

Another great way to make text-based customer testimonials more visually appealing is to use bold and italic. This will also help you emphasize the main points of a statement so that even those who are not willing to read the whole thing will get the message.

Placement matters

A lot, actually.

It’s not enough to have great customer testimonials, be them written, photos or videos. You also have to make sure people notice them. A well-positioned testimonial can drastically improve your conversion rate, but there is no hard rule telling you what the optimal placement is.

Placing customer testimonials on your homepage or your product page seems like the obvious decision, but don’t be afraid to experiment with different placements on different pages of your website to see which ones deliver the best results for your business.

Your turn

We hope the information provided in this article will help you capitalize on positive customer testimonials and build trust. But if you still need some help putting the theory into practice, you can always just reach out to us, and we’ll be more than happy to assist you with your needs.

Feel free to take a look at the content marketing services we offer to see which ones best fit your requirements.