Herman, with Vertical Axion, here again with some tips to help you create marketing that works.

Earlier today a client and I were talking about completely free tools that you can use to market your business. The one that we really ended up spending a lot of time with were testimonials. Testimonials are fantastic, because what your clients or customers say about you is way more powerful than you promoting yourself all day long.

Testimonials are believable, they are used in infomercials all the time and the reason is because they work.

What I am going to share with you today are five strategies for successful testimonials.

Ask at the Right Time

First off, we have to ask at the moment of happiness, and what I mean by that is when you deliver your product or service and you do the good job that I know you do because you’re an expert, that’s the time to ask. The customer is happy, they are responsive, they are attentive, don’t wait two weeks down the road to ask them for a testimonial. Ask right then.

Ask for What You Want

When you’re asking for that testimonial, ask for the customer testimonial you want. If you sit there and you delivered your service in record time and that’s what you want people to know about, say I’d really appreciate if you mentioned how well we did for you today and how quickly we resolved your problem.

There is nothing wrong with helping them shape their testimonial because a lot of times they might not know exactly what to say, nothing you’re saying is going to be untrue, you’re just going to be helping them send the message you need out there.

Take a Picture or Video

Thirdly if you can get a picture of the client or a logo of the business, something so that you can include it with your testimonials, the image will help bring more legitimacy to however you use your testimonial. You can use it as text, text with image. Here is something even better, if you got a chance and you don’t want them to have to write it down, what we do is we ask for video testimonial.

Video testimonials are more powerful, we can use them on our YouTube and all of our social media sites, embed them straight into our website, we might be able to use them in a commercial, if we shot good enough video with a nice enough camera, even cell phone cameras now do high-definition video. They don’t have to write anything down, they can just come off the top of their head. You can guide them. After a couple of questions you’ll get a perfect testimonial, and you’ll both be happy.

Cross Promotion

Make sure it’s a win-win. And what I mean by that is, if you’ve got a business customer, let them know you’re going to promote their business in this testimonial. They are going to have their name out there with the name of their business, and potentially a website link if you’re going to use it on the website.

What’s good for you is good for them.

Make sure you get permission to use your testimonial photo or video wherever possible. A lot of people might be weird down the road with you using their testimonial, but if you’ve got their permission ahead of time, there is no hard feelings later on.

Create a Process

Most importantly of all this guys, we have to create a process for testimonial gathering. So if you’re in your office, you need to sit down with your staff and figure out what the most efficient way to get testimonials is. For us, at our point of sale we have a video camera that sits behind our point of sale system, and when a customer comes in we ask them if we can shoot a little video of them being happy about our service, and they usually say yes. And then we take that video, we edit it down, we stick it on YouTube, we split it up into different sentences that say what we want them to say for different campaigns. We can use testimonials in all sorts of different ways, because our procedure is to get video at the point of sale.

Other people might want to use an auto-responder to send out an email seven days after the service with a survey and at the end of the survey ask for a testimonial. That’s fine, too. I just prefer personally to get the testimonial right up front.

Hopefully you can take these five steps to getting testimonials and start getting great testimonials for your website, print marketing and social media campaigns.

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