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

I hope the example in the previous post helped you write a brand statement that can guide you in building a great set of testimonials.  Oh, but I was just getting warmed up!  First let’s backtrack a bit, then move forward to “the ask.”

In earlier posts I didn’t mention the importance of audience research, so here it is:  Your brand statement should be based on more than your own “gut feeling” about which benefits of your product matter most to your target audience.  You need some real feedback from those people, who should be defined as specifically as possible.  For our fictional Sunrise Rent-a-Car, the audience is not just “travelers” or “Central Florida visitors,” but “budget conscious families and business people visiting Central Florida.”

The more your product is like those of your competitors (and chances are your offering is more like theirs than it is unlike), the more essential it is to know how your specific audience prioritizes benefits.  If your company is small and can’t afford to hire a research firm, at least do some online surveys.  Free, web-based tools like surveymonkey.com make it easier than ever to create and administer surveys, and even allow you to graph and analyze your survey results.  Especially if you have a relatively small number (say, fewer than 100) customers and prospects willing to be surveyed, these online research providers can be an ideal solution.

The main point is to take what you learn from your research and use it in creating your brand statement.  Others in your organization may feel a particular benefit has to be the star of the brand statement . . . but if you have the facts on your side, stick to them. If your research shows that benefit X is by far the most important one to your target audience, your brand statement should “lead with it,” and you know you’ll need more than one testimonial focused on it.

In the April 12 post, we looked at a strategic approach to getting customer testimonials for your product or service (we’ll say product from here on, but the advice applies to services as well).  I thought it would help to give an example of this approach in use:

Let’s suppose your product is a car-rental service, operating exclusively in central Florida, called Sunrise Rent-a-Car.  Here’s how your brand statement might look:

For budget-conscious families and business travelers coming to central Florida, Sunrise Rent-a-Car provides higher-quality vehicles and better service than the national car-rental giants.  Sunrise makes your visit to central Florida easier and more pleasant, because we:

- deliver your rental to you at curbside, just outside of baggage claim

- add points to the airline-miles account of your choice every time you rent from us

- guarantee that every car we rent will get at least 35 mpg, saving you on fuel costs

- provide with every rental a Garmin GPS for the customer to use during his/her visit

Remember, you don’t need–and probably shouldn’t have–one testimonial that covers all these points.  The impact on your prospects will be greater if you have (on your web site or other marketing communications) a series of shorter, easier-to-read testimonials, each focusing on one or at most two of these benefits.  It’s usually much easier to get these shorter statements from your customers, because you will be asking them to “testify about” a specific benefit(s).

That doesn’t mean all your testimonials are equal in value, of course.  In the brand statement above, the words in bold type are your product’s primary benefits–the words that you want your audience to associate most strongly with your product.  For each of these benefits, your first step is to acquire either one great testimonial, or a minimum of two very good ones.

For now I’ll leave it up to you to decide what makes a testimonial great (or very good), based on your own knowledge of your industry and the players in it.  But don’t wait until you’ve got these primary-benefit testimonials before pursuing the ones that reflect your brand statement’s supporting bullets.  You need ”stars” as well as “supporting actors” in your testimonial production–because neither type can win over your prospects all by themselves.

Sure, customer testimonials are everywhere . . . but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use them on your web site or in other marketing communications.  Do testimonials right and they still can help lift your product or service above your competitors.

Doing them right means doing certain things before you ever ask someone to give their opinion of your product (we’ll say product only from here on, but the advice applies equally to services). The first thing to keep in mind is that you’re going to need multiple testimonials in order to get the overall impact you need.  You don’t want your testimonials to all sound the same, so it’s best to plan out an entire set of them all at once.

Your planning should be guided by a brand statement for your product.  Make it as concise as possible–just a paragraph or two that describes who your product is intended for, the one or two primary benefits that it provides, and the ultimate desired result that it produces or helps to produce.

This brand statement should be supported by bullet points,  some of which “prove” the claims made in the statement, and others that briefly explain additional, less-important benefits of the product. Now, use this brand statement to define the focus of each testimonial you\’d like to have.  Testimonial #1 should focus on one of your product’s primary benefits, and #2 should emphasize a different primary benefit.

Additional testimonials can focus on the support points in your brand statement, but should also refer (at least briefly) to one of your primary benefits.  Focusing like this helps in two ways:

- First, it makes it much easier to ask for and receive a testimonial from your customer.  “Pat, I appreciate your business, and I was hoping you could give me a testimonial about [benefit #1] for our marketing materials” is a specific request that your customer can respond to fairly easily.  On the other hand, “Pat, could you give me a testimonial?” is too broad.  Don’t make Pat (or anyone) figure out what to focus on when crafting their testimonial.

- Second, because the focus ensures that the testimonial will be about something, it’s more likely that the testimonial will have a real impact on the reader.  It also ensures each testimonial will be different enough to be worth reading.Important: Don’t tell your customer exactly what to say.  Assume they are capable of some original thought, and let them express their thoughts in their own words.  No matter how good an original testimonial is, it almost always needs at least minor editing.

Key question, however: If your customer says, “Oh, I’m too busy . . . just write up something for me, e-mail it to me and I’ll let you know if it’s OK to use,” are you really getting a valid testimonial from that customer?