Social proof is a piece of the marketing puzzle that has a growing amount of impact on the way people think. With the increasing number of social outlets that are used on a daily basis, consumers are taking the opinion of their peers with greater weight. Studies show that 90% of consumers take into consideration customer reviews before making a purchasing decision. With this staggering number, it’s clear that it is a necessity to have testimonials on your website.
Having a strategy to collect testimonials for your company is only half of the battle. The other half is how you showcase them to your potential customers. These 5 strategies will help to ensure that you’re leveraging testimonials to provide social proof most effectively on your website.
1. Front Page Exposure
The best way to lead consumers to your testimonial content is by making them known right on the front page of your website. Whether through a link, small preview sample, or a testimonial section right up front, putting testimonials to convey social proof right in front of your consumers will increase initial impact. Here are a two examples of brands that put their testimonials right on the home page of their website:
2. Organization System: Reach the Right Audience
Chances are your company has a few core target audiences that are all impacted in different ways. By creating a system to organize your testimonials, your chances of influencing each audience the correct way is much more achievable. One way you could organize your testimonials is by creating a tagging system that organizes testimonials that speak towards similar content and showcase them in strategic places on your site. For example, if you have a certain product page, group together testimonials that are specifically referring to that product and show them off there to increase conversions. Here are a few examples of companies who organize their testimonials based on content or industry:
3. Natural Click-Through Layout
Think of how you surf through a website and update your testimonial page to reflect that. Give the user steps to follow by creating clickable links that lead to something new. Having a natural next step will allow you to optimize your testimonial page with the most valuable traffic.
An example of a natural click-through flow would be to lead your customers to a page of all of the testimonials you have collected right off the bat from the front page. Then, once they have a chance to surf through those testimonials, they are prompted to submit one of their own.
4. Multiple Ways to Find & View the Content
You shouldn’t limit your testimonial reach by only having one way for viewers to see them. Build your testimonial webpage interaction by leading to the page from multiple places. Some ideas to increase traffic would be by creating full case studies from submitted testimonials, and leading to the page from other marketing mediums like email newsletters or social media posts. It can be helpful to organize your testimonials with a video testimonial service.
5. Variety & High Quantity of Testimonials
To make the most of the testimonials on your site, you need to work to obtain a variety of testimonials. One way to achieve this is by creating varying questions or prompts that change the way customers answer in order to obtain the best testimonial. You should be updating your submission form and collection method to facilitate change. This will help you to create a naturally diverse feed that appeals to a broader group of people. By increasing the diversity of your feed through people, content, and even length, you can create a more dynamic feed that will encourage an increase in user engagement.