Testimonials: 5 tools to help you brag about your brand

There are, like, a million memes to describe how humans are inherently inefficient when it comes to receiving complements. Every now and then, this creeps into the world of marketing. While social media and Google have made generating reviews easier, they are still times when they sit dormant rather than in marketing materials. Additionally, as nice as these reviews are when positive, they can sometimes be vague. Here are 5 tools that can help business either get more and/or garner better testimonials.

Boast’s testimonials collection app

Arguably, the most difficult facet of testimonials to deal with is the very collection of them. Whether you’re having to track down your customers after the fact or meeting them at events, Boast has a solution. They’ve developed a mobile app that makes life easier for the testimonial seeker.

There are a pair of ways the app can be used. Business owners create a profile on the app and create unique codes. They send those to customers who download the app and fill in the blanks of the testimonial. Even better, business owners can record video testimonials on the spot through the app.

Boast’s templates for email collection requests

Speaking of testimonials made easier by filling in the blanks, Boast created an additional resource. For many business owners, the key medium of contact with their customers is email. So, they have to ping inboxes to receive a testimonial. Boast put together five templates of email requests that can be used to reach customers, each with different tones and additional CTAs.

Orbit Media Studio’s tips on writing testimonials

Even if you write the perfect testimonial request email, what you receive back from your customer may not exactly convey the value your business provided to them. So, Orbit Media Studios put together a blog post detailing the option of writing testimonials on your customer’s behalf. It was put together by Andy Crestodina, who we were lucky enough to see at the Unbounce CTA Conference last summer. He details the protocol for writing your own testimonials while keeping them real and legitimate.

HubSpot’s blog post with testimonials inspiration

Now that you have those kind words your customers passed along, how should you display them? The options are plentiful so HubSpot put together a blog post that outlines what the best of the best all have in common. According to HubSpot, they are:

1. “Visually engaging”
2. “Specific”
3. “Aligned”

While reading an expanded description of what these mean, you can also scroll through curated examples that showcase how other companies display their testimonials.

Google’s new Small Thanks offering

Businesses that have a brick and mortar space have an extra dimension of difficulty caused by the opportunity for physical testimonials. Google decided to have some fun with this. When a business owner tracks down their company at the Small Thanks with Google homepage, their Google Reviews are transformed into physical, promotional materials that can be downloaded or mailed to them.

This is only available for US-based businesses at the moment. But, we very regularly see features like these introduced make their way North of the border so stay tuned.