What Makes a Good Testimonial for Your Business

Testimonials are important for your business. They should help to portray your business to others and to help others understand your business value proposition. There are a number of factors that makes a testimonial a Good Testimonial for your business.


  1. * Believable.
  2. * Meshes with your value proposition.
  3. * Includes multi-media.
  4. * Matches your target customer profile.

Believeable

If no one believes your testimonial, it is just a waste of space on your website. If a testimonial sounds like ad copy, it probably is. Real people don't speak in slogans and often they speak, and write, in imperfect grammar. Avoid the temptation to edit and re-write your testimonials, or the will all come out sounding like your own style of writing.  So if a written testimonial comes out with "outfitter ABC is Saskatchewan's Best Black Bear Outfitter",  it reads as fake, it sounds rehearsed, it sounds like its a part of your marketing copy.

Meshes with your Value Proposition

The Testimonial should, however, contain words that make sense with what you have to offer. If your guest describes your fishing camp as "a wonderful place to enjoy the birds and pick flowers", well, that's nice, but not a useful testimonial. A good testimonial should put a positive spin on what you strongly promote to your guests. If you are a fishing lodge, fishing should be a primary aspect of the testimonial. The secondary attributes of your fishing lodge, like your amenities, your lodging, your meals, your guides, are all great content for testimonials.

Includes multi-media

The unfortunate truth is that many testimonials are fake, are made up by the website owners. As mentioned above, these are easy to spot and cheapen the impression that a potential future customer may have of your business.  So the challenge is to ensure your real testimonials are viewed as real. Images of your clients/guests with the testimonials as captions is an excellent way to attach a real person to a real statement.  Of course, this can be faked as well. But what can not be faked is a video testimonial, your client on digital media, speaking their truth. Watching and listening to a customer speak the virtues of your business is a powerful piece of Marketing gold. For a fully integrated way to maximize your video testimonial content, see our blog article on Content Clusters.

Matches your target customer profile

Along with your testimonials meshing with your Value Proposition, your client/customer/guest should have some resemblance to the customer profile you wish to attract to your business.  If you are selling high adrenaline remote country back pack hunting, you don't want to be profiling youths or elderly clientele, even if they have participated in the adventures. Similarly, if your fishing trips are low effort and suitable for all, make sure to have a wide variety of people featured in your marketing materials, children, and women and men of wide age ranges.

How to get great testimonials

First of all, make it exceptionally easy for your guests/clients/friends to write you a testimonial, such as leaving a guest book by the front door of your main lodge.   Secondly, ask your guests to leave you a Google review or a Facebook review.  You can send them a reminder a couple weeks after their stay and give them the links to the review locations. Thirdly, invite them to sit down and video record an interview with them. Most importantly, if you don't ask, don't expect to get this marketing content for free. Happy customers are often more than willing to speak well of you and all they need is a little prompting to get them started. Consider writing a prepared list of questions which you can carry in your pocket or better yet on your phone so you always have them handy. A great time for a testimonial is when the client is actively involved in sport. Just after a successful trophy hunt, with the excitement and adrenaline still running or just after the release of a trophy quality fish. You don't need high end video equipment to record a good testimonial.  The content is more important than the format. Besides, today's smartphones are as good of a camera/video camera as you really need.

How to spread the word

If your website uses a content management system, like WordPress, you should be able to find a content slider and put your testimonials in the slider then distribute them around your site. Social media is another opportunity to post. If the quote is short enough, you can even included them in digital ads, such as Google Ads. Lastly, maximize the opportunity in Google Business Profile to post a testimonial as an update.  See more on this topic in our recent article about Extending Your Content