Great Ways To Get Customer Testimonials

If you have been in the online business for a significant period, then you certainly know the importance and power of a testimonials page. This is where most of your potential customers, if not all, come to look for honest opinions regarding your products and services. It is a page that tells people that your products are legit, and other clients have obtained excellent results from it.

But as we all know, not all testimonials are believable. Some scam businesses abuse the power of this page to lure people into their traps. That makes even positive testimonials on legit products and services seem unbelievable. So, how do you change all that? Well, this article will give you tips on reviews collection and insight on ways to encourage testimonials and reviews from your clients.

1. YouTube Video Reviews

We know that text reviews can be helpful, but video reviews are even better. Given the huge numbers of people who rely on video reviews nowadays, it makes sense to tap into this strategy for your products as well. So, encourage your fans or customers to talk about how your products and services have helped them in a video and upload them to their channels. Add these videos as your favorites in your channels and share them across the other social media platforms. This not only gives your brand exposure, but it reassures that your products are legit and worth trying out. If there are any cons, give the people a chance to discuss them. All positive video reviews tend to come out as marketing schemes which can be detrimental to the entire campaign.

2. Facebook Reviews

If you have a Facebook page, which you should have, especially if you are a local business, you will notice the reviews tab on it. This can be added on your visible tabs and helps potential clients see what other people have to say regarding your business. According to digital reputation management business Reputation Communications, the sheer power of Facebook reviews can be enough to make and break industries in some businesses.

3. LinkedIn Recommendations

You may not know this, but LinkedIn can be an excellent source of reviews. However, you cannot get reviews on your company profile as they are only available for individuals. So, if you are a sole proprietor or a freelancer, this can be an ideal way to get reviews from your recommendations. However, if you're a company with an array of employees, you can ideally encourage them to be active on LinkedIn. These employees may get recommendations from the customers they work with, and you can use the recommendations on your site (with the customer's permission of course).

4. Google Alerts & Social Mentions

If you are an established business online, there's a high chance that a lot of people have talked about your products and services. You will find your company reviews on other sites like personal blogs and other companies sites. You can take advantage of Google Alerts, which is ideal for keeping track of brand mentions across the internet and even social media. Brand mentions include your company name, specific names and even the word review in conjunction to any of your business products and services. You can use the alerts to know about any reviews and ask those who have done it if you can feature their comments/reviews on your company's testimonial page. In most cases, they will oblige, especially if you offer to link back to their site.

5. The Local Search Directories

Local search directories are websites that allow people to post reviews about various local businesses. Examples include Yahoo local, Google Places, Citysearch and Merchant Circle. If you find positive reviews about your site on any of these places, you can post or share them on your testimonial page.

You might be wondering, why encourage people to write reviews on such sites rather than posting directly on your testimonials page? If you are SEO conscious, these reviews help the search engines learn about your business. If your business comes up on the first page of the search results, you are certainly going to get higher traffic and eventually more sales. The other reason is that these directories are ideally interconnected. For instance, Google gets reviews from users and also pulls in reviews from other review sites such as Yelp. Merchant Circle does the same. All this helps your business from a SEO perspective.

For your business to get reviews on these directories, you need to claim and update your listings on them and promote the listing on your site to let your clients know where to post reviews.

6. Rewarding Those Who Review Your Company, Products and Services

Putting in mind all the sites that you can get your clients to share their reviews on, what can you do that will really drive them to post their opinions? Offering rewards or incentives is an excellent way of encouraging people to post reviews and testimonials regarding what you have to offer. If you have been to a restaurant recently, you might have seen an offer on your receipt giving you a chance to win a certain prize if you do a review. It might be a phone or an online review.

You can employ the same tactic and have people talking about your products. Most of the local search directories allow companies to share coupons as well as discounts on the sites. Facebook has a feature where you can share special offers with your fans. You can also send giveaways to people who do video reviews about your products and services. There are so many ways to reward people and the better the offer, the more positive reviews you are going to get. This gets your business in the light and ultimately increases your sales and customer loyalty.