Testimonials Are One Of The Most Powerful Marketing Tools

The testimonials are powerful marketing tools that leverage the social proof and bring your customers to confirm the goodness of your arguments or what you sell. In a nutshell, your existing customers become your spokesperson, convincing potential buyers to make the purchase. Put in a very simplistic way:

“If we see others like us confirming that a product or service is of high quality, we are more likely to buy it”

This marketing tool is widely used by the biggest brands both online and offline. Thanks to the arrival of e-commerce and online shopping, the care and attention to customer testimonials has become a cornerstone of anyone who wants to do business. How is it possible for testimonials to be such powerful marketing tools? To answer we must show you the 4 principles of social proof that are at the base.

1) The fear of being excluded

The fear of being excluded is what the English define with the acronym FOMO, or Fear of Missing Out and is defined as “that psychological condition of anxiety thinking that others can have positive experiences while we are cut off”. More simply, it is the fear that others will have fun without us. It is a real phenomenon, which we all experienced at least once in our lives, at least from teenagers or children.

Most of the population feel the fear of being excluded from something, especially the 18 to 30 age groups, increasingly connected with technological devices. Their biggest fear is in fact not being up to date on news or events happening around them, triggering the vicious circle of social addiction that many experts are ringing an alarm bell with.

In this context, a product or service that receives many positive reviews makes us think that we are losing something really quality. It is precisely these testimonies and reviews that instill in us the fear of being excluded. Moreover, knowing that many people have bought and reviewed that product is a reinforcement of this fear. It is thought that there are only a few left (and of course the shops) know it, like Amazon who often writes “X articles left”) and we have to run for cover, buying as soon as possible.

2) The importance of transparency

It’s not news that people don’t trust companies. They never trusted each other, even more so nowadays, who come up as experts on the web ready to sell you something with their e-commerce. The risk (at least perceived) is around the corner. A few years ago, it was enough to see a product on television or a well-written advertisement in a newspaper to recognize a certain product or service as reliable. Nowadays the situation has changed radically: users are wiser and the internet has made research tools available that allow verifying the actual reliability of a brand.

Testimonials are the best among marketing tools to create transparency in business to do a marketing video production in Dubai, especially on websites. According to various research conducted on samples of the public, 84% of people trust reviews and testimonials online and buy (or don’t buy) something based on them.

3) The sense of belonging

The sense of belonging is one of the main motivating factors of the human being. All of us, deep down, want to belong to a group of people, be they friends, colleagues or teammates. With testimonials, you can create a sense of belonging in your customers or potential customers. If a potential customer sees that many people are interested in or have purchased a certain product or service, they will be more inclined to buy it in order to become part of this group of people.

There are various “tricks” to leverage this psychological factor through testimonials and use it in your arsenal of marketing tools. For example:

• Send customers subscribed to your site notifications of purchases for a particular product
• Ask an industry expert to act as your testimonial: people will automatically trust someone they automatically recognize as an expert (a doctor, a lawyer, any commonly recognized professional figure)
• Get the testimony of a celebrity. By definition, celebrities are part of a circle of “special” and “selected” people. If you can get a testimony from a celebrity, you will increase sales because people will want to feel part of this “special” group to brag to friends and acquaintances;

4) The sharing of values

Even if we want to belong to a group, we cannot feel represented by people with whom we share little or nothing. This is why we naturally tend to trust people who reflect our way of being and our values. People with whom we recognize ourselves.

The point is that we value the opinions of people who are similar to us. It is, therefore, a good idea for your business to indicate as much information as possible about the person giving the testimony in your favour. The ideal testimony contains a name and a photo of the person so that readers and users can easily verify that it is a really existing person and see if this person is similar to them and therefore deserves their trust.

Testimony is one of the most powerful marketing tools

Testimony as social proof is one of the most powerful marketing tools available to anyone who wants to expand their customer portfolio, whether they are freelancers or companies. It is a very powerful mechanism that leverages habits rooted in our brains from the beginning of time that can easily transform the visitors of your site or your physical store into loyal customers.