Using Testimonials To Your Advantage

Testimonials can be used as very valuable online marketing tools as any SEO expert can tell you. They have been proven to increase sales. It’s interesting because testimonials are undergoing a great change in the United States right now. The Federal Trade Commission has come down really hard on testimonials, so everybody is backing away from testimonials here right now. If there is any sort of financial claim or any sorts of claims about anything pretty much, if you can’t demonstrate it, the fines are tremendous right now. So people are backing away from testimonials.

Having said that, if you have legitimate testimonials you can use, particularly in Australia where the rules might be slightly different, testimonials integrated every step of the way increase sales. Social proof, which is what a testimonial is, social proof is a psychological premise that basically is best described as monkey see, monkey do.

The seminal research around social proof was done when they had a person in New York City stand on a street and stare up at a spot on a building. Pretty soon three or four people were looking up at the spot and when those people stopped and looked, then a dozen people were. When a dozen people were, a hundred people were and shortly after that, they had a giant crowd that was blocking up the street, looking up to see what was up on the building. The original person had gone.

People do what they see other people doing. Very few people want to be a pioneer. They don’t want to be the first ones to break new territory. What they used to say in the United States was, nobody wants to be a pioneer because you can always tell who they are because they have arrows in their back. That was back from when we were settling the West here, and the native Americans shot the pioneers with their arrows.

That’s sort of the same thing in business. Nobody wants to be the first one to go out and break the ground and yet entrepreneurs do it all the time and they’re successful. From a consumer standpoint, no one wants to be that first person, to be the first one to try whatever the product or service is.

So what happens is, when they see a group of people trying it and those people are happy and excited, then they’re much more likely to try it. Their resistance goes down, their natural inclination to question goes away and they’re much more likely then to engage and do whatever it is you’re asking them to do. Social proof of testimonials is an incredibly powerful tool. It’s highly persuasive and I strongly recommend you use them as much as you can because they will encourage people to do whatever it is you’re asking.

Here’s what’s interesting with social media. You get people who are retweeting or talking about you on Facebook or creating response videos or all these kind of things and they’re doing it organically. They’re providing social proof to people who trust and follow them without you asking them to do it or without it seeming contrived, as often testimonials do. Most people don’t know how to give a good testimonial and most people who are asking for testimonials don’t know how to direct a good testimonial.

What ends up happening is they end up sounding like one of those hucksters on the street or on television and you don’t come up with really good genuine heartfelt testimonials that move people. What happens with social media often is, whatever people say extemporaneously is often very heartfelt, truthful, transparent and full of emotion. Those are the ones that convert best. If you want to learn more, visit www.melbourneseoservices.com today.