We've been helping a lot of businesses with their marketing during the pandemic.  It’s been inspiring to work with people who own businesses that are taking this Covid time in their stride by introducing new ways of bringing their product to market, or bringing their product to an entirely new market in a different way. Something that has come up quite often is the need to get good testimonials. This is important whether you are in B2C or B2B.

Why Every Business Needs Customer Testimonials

Best Customer Testimonial Types Ranked

1. Video Testimonials  - In The Wild

Where the person is doing their thing while saying nice things about you. This is the ultimate type of customer  testimonial. Why? Because we see the person in their natural habitat. It adds to the authenticity and makes people know it's real. 

Have a quick flick through the testimonials below and you can see what we mean by having them speak to your greatness 'in the wild' 👇

James Livingstone Wallace is a quinoa importer. Here he is talking about our social media training course from a field in Peru! The ultimate customer testimonial. See if you can reach these heights for your business!

Theresa does the marketing for a dental practice. Here she talks about our social media training course surrounded by dental apparatus!

2. Video Testimonials Against White Background

Where the person is speaking highly about your business, but it's against a white wall or a clean background. This works well if their business is digital and not tangible. 

Where possible, add captions because 83% of people watch video with the sound turned off. Hopefully the words of the testimonial will be sufficient to entice these viewers to turn the sound on, and then they get to hear about how great you are. 

3.  Image Testimonials

If your client is too busy to make a video for you, or they are shy in front of the camera, the next best type of customer testimonial is an image. What you need to do here is ask them for the testimonial (we’ve got a great post over here on how to do that with 0% awkwardness).

Then design a lovely looking image that you can use to showcase the customer's words.  It’s important to have space for the client’s name and photo on it, as well as their logo. The logo is social proof and will strike a chord deep down in the subconscious. Here are some of ours 👇 

When you’ve got lovely visual customer testimonials like these, you can share them all over the place! Add them to your website, to proposals, to slide decks, and schedule them as a content type in your social media.

What Not To Do ❌

You must have the customer's face appear alongside their text. This is essential if you want to make it look real. People love to see people, and this works especially well if the people look like them.  If your web designer delivered your site with lots of testimonials  that look like these, go back with photos and ask them to update the style to include headshots (and their logo) at a minimum!

Get Started On Making Great Customer Testimonials

Make a list of people you are going to contact to ask for a testimonial. You could look back over previous invoices paid to stimulate your memory!

Consider who would be willing to make a video for you and make a special ask of them for that.
For all others, follow our advice in this post on how to ask for testimonials and go out and ask for them today. 

Trust us – when you do this, you will not regret it.
It’s such a joy to get lovely words back from clients you have delivered for and they don’t mind doing it.