Even remotely, testimonials matter more than ever
When deciding who to buy from, the people customers tend to trust the most are other customers. The data back this up: 92% of B2B customers become more likely to buy from a company after reading a positive testimonial, for example.
But you can also see this by thinking about your own experience. For example, when considering what restaurant to go to, what online product to buy, what cleaning service to use, do you just go by the business’s own promises? Or, do you go by customer reviews?
This is exactly why it’s important that your business uses your customer’s voice — not just that of your salespeople — to convert leads, using their positive experiences to reassure new customers.
But nowadays, many businesses have an excuse against collecting reviews and testimonials: “Everyone’s working remotely now, so how am I supposed to collect their feedback?”
Like most excuses, this one isn’t a good reason not to put in that work. The fact that remote working has increased doesn’t mean you should throw away all old conceptions of marketing; it just means you should adapt previous strategies to our new situation.
The biggest, most important tool you have on your side in this scenario is videoconferencing. As I just said, when it comes to building trust with your customers, nothing is more effective than seeing and hearing a real fellow customer talk positively about your business. And a straightforward way to get such a testimonial is to simply video call your customer.
Yes, seriously — just schedule a time to video call your customer, and conduct a short interview with them. That’s all you need to get a video testimonial these days! Most video call systems, like Wildix, feature a convenient built-in recording function to let you quickly save off video files for marketing and sales purposes.
In some ways, gaining testimonials remotely is even more relevant to today’s customers. With so many of us working from home now, there’s a familiarity in seeing fellow potential customers also working outside of their office; it tells your customer base that people just like them are using your company! (Take note: even professionally filmed ads nowadays feature masks and work-at-home environments.)
And if you can’t record a video call? Then schedule a voice call instead. With a VoIP system like Wildix, recording a voice call is actually even easier than recording video, giving you your client’s actual words to use for a voiceover track in a video.
Or, if you’d rather not use the video medium at all, voice recordings make it easy to get exact quotes to use for case studies, white papers or components in your advertising.
Speaking of text advertising, if all else fails, it’s also not a bad decision to fall back on getting email testimonials from your customers. Yes, this doesn’t have the same instantaneous punch of a video — but, again, this still counts in a potential customers’ mind as a strong recommendation. When even virtual meetings are impossible with your clients, asking them to write you just a few words of praise can make the difference in your marketing.
So don’t let lockdowns and closed offices be an excuse for avoiding your customer’s voice. Your clients used technology to work around tough situations and keep on going — and you need to do just the same when it comes to creating effective advertising.
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