Your customers are your product or service’s biggest advocates. Their reviews, glowing or otherwise, can make or break your brand’s reputation. In fact, did you know that over 7 in 10 customers look up online reviews of local businesses before making a purchase decision?
This implies that you need to provide social proof of your product’s effectiveness. And how do you do that?
Enter testimonial advertising!
Testimonial advertising is basically a statement from your customer citing how your product/service has helped them resolve their issue, and that they’d recommend it to other people in similar situations.
This type of recommendation advertising is the perfect way to establish your relevance in the market. The more testimonials that you provide, the higher your brand trust and credibility in the eyes of the customers!
Here, we’ll discuss everything you need to know about testimonial advertising, and how you can make the most of it.
If you’re just relying on brand messaging to build trust and credibility among your target audiences, you’re missing out. The audience knows that, as the origin brand, you’ll likely state the best aspects of your product. However, if you really want to make a mark, you’ll have to get reviews from real people, like customers or influencers, to make yourself heard.
This is why testimonial advertising is crucial in today’s business landscape. With so many brands and organizations vying for the customer’s trust, your audience is weary of any brand messaging that constantly tries to sell products without fostering a connection first.
Instead, with proof and recommendations from real people, you’ll likely get a much more positive response from your target audience!
Now that you know how testimonial advertising works, let’s take a look at its benefits in more detail.
Cost-effective: Getting a testimonial is close to free advertising. All you need to do is provide an incentive to the user, such as an extra couple of months on their plan or a small discount.
We’ve covered the benefits of testimonial advertising, but not all testimonial advertising is the same. Here are the different types of testimonials that you can use:
If you’re planning to use testimonial advertising, there are a couple of things you need to consider:
Here are some mistakes that you should avoid when you're doing testimonial marketing:
Testimonial advertising shouldn’t be an afterthought to your marketing efforts. It’s a key element that adds authenticity and credibility to your brand, and should be treated as such. Here’s how you can implement it efficiently:
Social media is a potent tool to advertise your brand, especially if it’s through testimonials. You can
Repurpose testimonials into a reel format for easy consumption
Post your testimonials (written or video) to your brand’s social media pages
Pair your testimonials with product launches
Tag the customers who provided the testimonials (with their permission, of course) to add more depth and credibility
Want to increase your clickthrough rates? Adding testimonials in your email campaigns can increase CTRs by 300%. Here’s how you can take advantage of this
Include authentic customer reviews or quotes in the early stages of your campaign to build trust
Add video testimonials to pair with CTAs for greater impact
Use dedicated emails to discuss case studies of growth through your product or service
To make your paid ads more convincing, it’s a great idea to add video or written testimonials to drive your point home.
Use actual quotes from testimonials as part of your ad copy to instantly grab the audience’s attention
Add testimonials in video ads, even if it’s for as little as 10 seconds
Correlate your ad’s promise with your testimonials, and don’t use unrelated testimonials, as this will result in cognitive dissonance among your audience
Life Inside is an interactive video platform that helps you create, collate, and distribute your videos across all your channels. With Life Inside, you can create a testimonial video with real users and make it a part of your interactive video funnel, covering the entire sales lifecycle.
These videos can be linked to product videos, demos, and even live video sessions to ensure a seamless experience for your prospective clients. The best part? Life Inside helps you automatically collect these videos with little to no effort on your end.
Once the videos are collected, they can be edited and added to your video campaign funnel. This funnel can then be added to your landing pages, blogs, social media posts, and email newsletters!
Plus, the platform is easy to use and comes with analytics features for A/B testing, performance monitoring, and optimizing your campaigns. It integrates into your existing tech stack with minimum friction, and you get the help of the dedicated Life Inside in-house team for day-one setup!
Ready to add social proof and drive revenue with testimonial advertising? Sign up for Life Inside today to experience the benefits of interactive testimonial videos that both engage and convert!
Testimonial advertising is no longer what it was—you don’t rely on JUST written testimonials anymore. With interactive video, here’s how the future of testimonial advertising looks:
AI-enabled Testimonial Distribution: Life Inside is at the forefront of this evolution, with automatic collection and distribution of interactive video testimonials. However, it won’t be long before AI will be able to analyze sentiments in videos and suggest the most appropriate sections of the video to highlight in different channels. This data-driven approach will ensure that you deliver what your customer needs.
Interactive Video: Interactive video allows your customers to engage actively with your testimonial videos and the video funnel’s narrative. They can check testimonials that are suited to their requirements, without ever leaving the video format.
Real-Time Social Proof: You’ll find quite a few e-commerce websites adding popups of “XYZ bought this [10] seconds ago” to boost their social proof. This tactic is becoming increasingly common, but if you plan to go this route, we recommend that you only do it with real users.
Testimonials increase your brand trust and credibility in the eyes of the consumer. This highlights the fact that other consumers are benefiting from your products, thereby convincing the customer to convert.
Yes, testimonial advertising works wonders for small businesses! If you’re low on budget, authentic written reviews on your landing pages, blogs, or newsletters can boost conversions through added audience trust. Video testimonials work even better, especially if you work with platforms tailored for this requirement, like Life Inside!
Fake testimonials completely shatter the audience's trust, which directly impacts your online standing and conversions. Plus, it reduces the trust of search engines, which can either lead to manual penalties or complete delisting.
Video testimonials provide a more authentic look than written testimonials. Since the audience is able to watch a real person speaking about how your product solved their business problem, it leads to greater trust and brand credibility. However, the video shouldn’t be overly polished, as this might seem suspicious to the audience.
On the other hand, written testimonials are easier to acquire and less expensive in the long run. However, their social proof benefit scope is lower than that of video testimonials.