Five Things to Remember When Gathering Testimonials

by | Jan 17, 2019

 

  
 

TRANSCRIPTION:

Hey, it’s Clarence and I’m coming to you from the home office today.  Today, I wanted to talk about reputation because it’s a big, big deal.

You know, all of your customers, clients or patients, everybody has a megaphone nowadays.  And one of the things that people always ask is “How do I ethically get more reviews?”

And really it comes down to asking for it…

I see a lot going on. People are getting, you know, 5,000 5-star reviews? You know that’s not real. You’ve got call centers that are just calling until somebody gives you a review. If you want to call a couple of times, that’s fine. But there are some people taking it really to the extreme.

What I wanted to do was just give you five true things to consider when you’re getting reviews…

And number one is this: Don’t give prizes.

I know that is something that marketers have come up with and kind of sold you on this, “Give us a review and we’ll put you in the drawing for a $10 gift card or whatever.”

That is so 1999. Or it’s 2019 now, so I can say that is so 2016. It’s pretty old. Stop doing it.

You want your reviews to be sincere. I don’t understand why so many business owners want to have fabricated reviews. Get the real deal. This is an opportunity for you to make a change. If you need to make a change, right? And you know, just do good by people and get real reviews.

Now what you do want to do is when you send the email out to ask for a review or maybe you ask for a review while they’re at the front desk, ask them – “Hey, we’re going to send you an email” – in that email, put links to specific sites that you want reviews from.

Don’t leave it up to them. If you leave it up to them, they’re not going to leave you a review.

But ask them and give them a link to a specific review place. If it’s Home Advisors that is top for you, and not necessarily Google … (I know Google is big for everybody, but you want to have Google.)  Give them three options. Google. Home Advisors. Facebook is really big now also. So give them three options where they can go and give you a review.

Now, when you get the reviews, add them to your site. That is one thing that I see hardly anyone doing. You should have a review on every single one of your service pages that relates to that service. If you do oil changes, have one or two reviews on oil changes. If you do braces, orthodontia, (I like the word orthodontia…)

Then have one or two reviews about a particular product or service on that page, because this is what’s happening in the mind of your visitor. They visit the page, they’re kind of looking at you. They’re evaluating you and they’re evaluating this service. You want to get into the conversation that’s already in their head.

“Do I need this service? Is it worth it? Are these people trustworthy? What? Oh my goodness, there is a review about this service, about these people being trustworthy, about customers being glad that they did it, about them saying, Hey, I was skeptical, but I did it anyway and I feel awesome!”
So specific reviews for specific pages and definitely somewhere on the home page or whatever — get one or two reviews that are general if you have those.

Let your people give you a review and take the ones that are specific to products and put those on the related page. I don’t want to beat that up. But that’s really good. It’s called social proof.

One thing to remember is that the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) is serious about claims. So one thing you don’t want to do is have unsubstantiated claims. We have a review from a client that got I think it was $300,000 in a year from us them on their AdWords, right?

So that’s great and we can prove that. But what we don’t want to do is say “$300,000 in 12 months.” you know, when you add that “12,” it’s risky enough to just say this amount of money or this result. But if you say this result and this time, then you’re really asking for it. And I think for a lot of Facebook ads, you can’t even run them if the landing page has some type of claim like that. You want to be careful about the claim.

Also, if you can use a picture, it’s better. Picture, name, and city. If you can do all of that, that’s better. You know, you used to have the first name and then dot “s” — right? And use the last name or last initial if you have to. Some people just want to stay completely anonymous. They don’t want you putting all their business out there. Which I don’t know why … everybody knows everybody’s business nowadays. But if you can get a name, a picture, and the city — you’re golden.

If you can get a video, you’re golden. Because if you get a video, you can take the video, you can take out the audio, you can make text out of what they said, so you have written a testimonial there.

So the video is king. Second to that would be written. Video. Written. And then use a picture if you can. A full name if you can, if not, use the “S.” If not, use just the first name and then definitely the city. Okay?

So, there you have it. Five things.  Five things and I’m going to let you go. If that helped you then pass it on. A little goodwill. Nothing wrong with a little goodwill. Pass it on and I will talk to you next time.