When you’ve worked with a client or customer do you ask for a testimonial or review afterwards? If you don’t you need to start.
Testimonials or reviews play a large part in capturing your customer’s attention. Think about it from a shoppers point of view. Everyone tends to go to Google to search for a product or service and we tend to search for reviews before deciding to approach that company further. If someone leaves a fantastic review your chances of gaining another customer increase as opposed to the business that doesn’t have any reviews.
How to make it easy to ask for a review or testimonial
It can be daunting to ask the question but more often than not if you ask you shall receive.
- If you have completed a once of job for a customer attach links in your email to where you want them to leave a review. Write a small paragraph asking if they would kindly leave feedback and then send it with your invoice. Make it as easy as possible for your customers to navigate to where you want them to go, if it’s too difficult your chances will decrease.
- If Facebook or Twitter was used to gain the work in the first place you could always send a message through Facebook. Ask if they would mind leaving a review and attach a direct link to your page.
- If you have ongoing customers/clients I tend to wait til after 3 months to approach them and supply the links.
Now it’s great that you have taken the steps to get your customers to give you a testimonial or review but where is it being displayed?
Website
The obvious choice for displaying your testimonials is your website. By displaying your testimonials on your website your potential customers are getting an overview of you and your business but also getting insight into your happy customers and why they should choose you over the competition.
Google+
By asking your customers if they are happy to leave you review on Google+ the testimonial will actually display on Google My Business. What’s that? I get asked this question a lot.
Basically what this means is that if someone was to type in your business name into Google it will display your Business name, a map, contact details and also any reviews that customers have left for you (see screenshot). If you happen to get more than 8 people leave you a Google+ review it increases your chances of Google taking more notice of your business. Your customer will need to have a Google account to leave a review this way.
With so many people using social media to promote and display their business of course Facebook would be a great channel to leave a review, and really most people tend to have a Facebook account. If you don’t you need one!
The best part is that any reviews left on Facebook will actually show up now on your Google My Business listing (see screenshot).
Your Facebook page listing which is displayed on Google shows your star rating as it would through Facebook, once someone views your page they will just need to click the Reviews tab to view all your displayed reviews.
LinkedIn is another platform that we seem to forget about. Because LinkedIn is your online resume it would make sense to have your testimonials displayed on LinkedIn. You can then direct customers or clients to your LinkedIn profile where they can see your Work History, Experience, Qualifications, Skills and any recommendations.
Having social media buttons and links attached to your website is a must. It will definitely increase your chances of having that potential customer see your reviews and even following or liking your pages. By having those social media links tied to your website you are also increasing your SEO. I hope this has helped point you in the right direction in regards to asking & displaying testimonials and start asking today!