We had a client who didn’t know what to do with their glowing positive reviews on a third party peer review website. They missed out on a huge sales potential by not including these reviews in their offline marketing materials. After consulting with our team, they have since learned to value each positive review and embed them in their online and offline marketing campaigns.

For sure there are thousands of business owners out there who don’t know how to build their credibility by simply asking for testimonials or feedback from their clients. If you haven’t thought of using this powerful marketing strategy, feel free to refer to these tips:

1. Testimonials are essentially anecdotal evidence. Preserve whatever your clients said about your company or your services, and however they said it, for authenticity. Your clients’ testimonials should reflect their natural expressions — including slang words and local expressions. 

2. Do not over-edit the testimonial. Correct the wrong spellings, but allow mistakes in grammar. Using ellipses is normal to indicate pauses, while avoiding the excessive use of exclamation marks.

3. Provide the client’s name, location and job title for credibility. Someone with a professional background and lives in the same area as your target audience (if your business is location-centric) is more believable in the eyes of your potential customers.

4. Place as many types of testimonials as possible. Gather testimonials from different types of people of varying ages, gender, and location, especially if your have a wider business scope than your city. Potential leads relate more to people of the same age, gender or location as they are.

5. Place testimonials in every marketing copy you have, and not just on your website. Use them in articles, direct marketing emails, and press releases, and even in offline materials, such as brochures, posters, and print ads.

You can also place them on a separate area at your site or you can weave them into the text of any article, blog post or squeeze page. Make sure the testimonials are immediately visible at your site so potential leads read them a few seconds after they arrived.

6. Be strategic in placing your testimonials on your website. Testimonials act like lubrication in people’s minds: they prepare the way for your marketing message to influence your audience’s mind. Additionally, the more relevant your testimonials are to the marketing copy of your homepage or landing pages, the more powerful your marketing message will be. For example, if your copy discusses the product’s benefits, then strategically place a testimonial that praise your products enthusiastically. Emphasize the good and the positive in the testimonials by typing them in bold or italics.

7. Ask your clients the right questions in order to get the right content in your testimonials. Clients appreciate direct-to-the point questions that also allow them freedom to express the positive and negative points of your products or services. Take the positive ones and use them in your testimonials, and take note of the negative ones as bases to improve your products or services.

8. Prepare your customer survey questions well and ask clients to answer immediately following an after sales checkup or after you complete your project for them. Ask them at their happiest or giddiest moments because they will be most motivated to give you a great testimonial during that time.

9. Include a photo with the text of your clients’ testimonials. Better yet, use videos or audio recordings for greater impact and stronger credibility. Once other people have seen that the testimonials came from real people, they will trust you more.

10. A much more effective testimonial is something served up from credible third-party sites, such as review sites or blogs. Reviews from peer review websites, such as Yelp, can more powerfully influence people to seek out your product or service than ordinary customers can.

These tips are just a few of many techniques that you can use in order to build you business credibility. Although these tips focused more on using client testimonials on your website to attract more leads, the same techniques work well in other marketing media, such as posters, print ads and TV ads.