The Copywriting & Design Blog

We’ve covered a lot of ground on testimonials in the last few posts . . . but you know how it is when the ideas start flowing, right?  Let’s review the basic steps which have been recommended in building your collection of testimonials:

Research: Find out from your customers (and if possible, from your competitors’ customers) which benefits of your product or service they consider most valuable.  Talk to them directly, or survey them, or conduct focus groups . . . but find out somehow.

Brand Statement: Develop a brand statement for your product that reflects how your audience prioritizes the benefits of your product.  See the earlier post here (Part 3, “The Art of The Ask”) for details.

Ask for Testimonials, using the best practices outlined in the previous post.  Sounds fairly simple, doesn’t it?  Probably the most challenging part is #3, for a variety of reasons: Your customers are busy, some of them may not want to be “featured” by name in your marketing communications (even if they love your product), or there may be other reasons.

Obstacles such as these are why many companies, even smaller ones, choose to hire a copywriter to work on obtaining testimonials for them.  A good marketing copywriter can create or help refine your brand statement, and then use it to ask your customers for the specific testimonial you want from each of them.  Another advantage: the writer can work with your customers to ensure that each testimonial is focused on the benefit it should be.  A professional copywriter also will ensure a consistent level of quality across all testimonials.

The point here is that testimonial editing is a key part of the process, it should begin as early as possible, and it should be handled by a professional.  The result you’re looking for is a group of testimonials that work together to reflect and increase the power of your brand statement.  In editing your customers’ testimonials, your copywriter should seek a balance between broad superlative statements (“Their product is the best I’ve ever used”) and specific, factual statements that prove the superlatives.  Too much of either is not a good thing: all of us absorb so much advertising day after day that our minds tends to dismiss short, empty claims of how ‘great’ a product is.  On the other hand, testimonials shouldn’t be too long.  So cramming in too many facts about why a product works so well is likely to lose the reader.

One other thing to remind your copywriter is that even customers who say they are going to provide a written testimonial . . . sometimes just don’t get around to it.  Always start by giving the customer an opportunity to submit a statement of their own, but if they keep putting it off, your writer should offer to interview them, develop a testimonial based on the discussion, and give it to the customer for review.  The more testimonials you’re trying to get, the more likely it is that your writer will need to do this at some point.  And as long as the customer gets to review and comment on what’s been written, it is a valid way of creating a testimonial