10 Creative Ways to Use Testimonials for Marketing

Key takeaways

1. Customer testimonials are the easiest way to control revenue for your startup
2. Customer feedback is crucial for any business to grow
3. Testimonials can be used for marketing your business

The internet has the power to get you traffic, but does that translate to sales? Definitely not. According to Statista, demand generation is the second biggest problem startups face. One of the easiest ways to generate revenue is to generate demand first. In fact, just focusing on demand generation will take care of revenue.

In industries like healthcare, tech startups, and e-commerce, trust is a decisive factor and customer testimonials will not only fill that trust gap, it will also create an entry barrier for your competition.

This post is for you if you want to use customer testimonials in your marketing to generate demand or build trust.

What is a customer testimonial?

A customer testimonial is a validation of your product/service by your paying customers. It acts as social proof for the prospects who are comparing or researching. Customer testimonials come in various forms like video testimonials, customer reviews, case studies, shoutouts on social media, and more.

You can use those testimonials to create landing pages, ads, and email copies to sell your products to a segment of the audience who haven’t purchased from you. You can even incorporate testimonials in content pieces that are optimized for users who are in the earlier stages of their buyer’s journey.

You can even consider paid collaborations with influencers who have similar/same audience as yours but the business model is different, like Pepsi and KFC, McDonald’s and Coca cola. Since this is a paid collaboration, the trust factor usually is low depending on the influence of the person you’re collaborating with.

Creative ways to use testimonials for marketing

If you already have testimonials, or simply want to learn how to leverage customer testimonials for marketing, we have compiled 10 creative ways.

#1 Interactive Testimonial Storytelling

When you have to leverage the testimonials to tell success stories, the easiest way to organize your thoughts is to divide all the customer testimonials in relevant categories. These categories are the stages of the customer journey that the prospect is in. This helps you define the narrative to the prospect and establish yourself as a defined solution.

If you’re going to use testimonials as case studies, make sure to use an user-friendly CMS like WordPress. It becomes so much easier to manage all the content and link specific tags to a landing page. You can even use quotes of testimonials clubbed with a CTA as seen on Maruci Sports.

#2 Testimonial-Driven Product Bundles

If you want to cross-sell or upsell products, you can find/record testimonials for bundles of products. Focus on benefits and identify users who have leveraged those benefits. Create a case study with a narrative of how they used multiple products to get the solution for their problem. What this will do is open a feedback loop for your products/services that will not only help you create educational content for your potential customers, but it will also help you with cross selling/upselling products as a package. You can even explore special pricing for such bundles, the customer feedback and testimonials will justify the price.

Amazon does this by suggesting what people usually buy along with what they have bought. Obviously, Amazon doesn’t make use of reviews to upsell/cross sell, but hey, who said you can’t?

#3 Testimonial-Powered Gamification

Gamifying the engagement creates enough social proof for potential customers to try your product. This method usually works out if you are planning (or already have) to have a community to promote your product/services. Having a gamified leaderboard for the community turns out to be a really fruitful option. That’s how Duolingo’s streak feature has worked in their favor. These leaderboard achievements easily go deep in the personal network of existing users, helping you gain a lot of organic attention. The trick is to create an experience that people love to talk to their friends about.

Wouldn’t you share these streaks with your friends via social media stories? That’s the point.

#4 Customer Testimonial Competitions

The best part of having customers is you can ask them to share their feedback any time. People just knowing about your brand aren't going to pull out their wallet, in order to make people buy from your brand, you will need them to trust you. Authenticity and transparency will help you build trust.

Airbnb called out their customers to share their host experience and the results were priceless. People who used Airbnb, shared their experience with hosts which increased the brand value of Airbnb through the roof. The best stories were rewarded by Airbnb for sharing those experiences with the world.

#5 Testimonial-Backed Niche Guides

Being a founder requires wearing a lot of hats. One of the hats is being a sales guy managing questions from customers. One of our customers wasn’t comfortable with recording video testimonials using our tool and this triggered an idea to create a guide on this. The trick is to use customer feedback to create a full-length guide covering other related questions and steps on how your product/service can help users overcome the hurdles and grow.

However, there are various ways by which you can collect video testimonials and make your customers feel comfortable sharing them. We have covered the best strategies on how to collect video testimonials here.

This is exactly what Get Response has done in this guide based on the testimonial from Ken Furukawa

#6 Testimonial-Personalized Landing Pages

Landing pages are money printing machines if done right. One of the most important elements of a landing page is the testimonials you add to the page. It tells people that others have tried your product and are satisfied with it. The best part of a landing page is you can cater to every single intent of a user that you think will land on your page. How you ask? Include testimonials negating the questions people might have or covering that in FAQ section of the landing page.

See how Justin Welsh is using testimonials on landing page for one of his products, Content OS. Imagine how trustworthy his products become because of these customer reviews.

#7 Testimonial-Powered Virtual Events

Remember when the before and after story caught your attention and you wanted to know? Several brands are using such case studies to attract several prospects to join for a webinar or virtual event. Apple has incorporated this in their annual Apple event where they share video testimonials of people who have tested their products. 

You can attract B2B or B2C prospects to your webinar and leverage the power of social proof within your webinar. With short form content gaining more popularity, you can create snippets of webinars including the testimonials to reach relevant audiences on social media.

#8 Testimonial-Infused Chatbots

Chatbots have been in a gray area since they became a normal element in the digital marketing space. But with AI joining forces with chatbots, you can leverage a lot from this. You can create a testimonial database and feed that into chatbots, use tools like Botpress for this.

When a use comes up with an objection, the tool can fetch testimonials from the database and address their issues. With AI, taking care of such objections has become very easy and efficient. For example, as an e-commerce business owner, you can have your chatbot detect when a user asks about the durability of a particular product and respond with a testimonial emphasizing its durability.

To make the experience even more fruitful, you can link FAQs based on the objections and testimonials shared. This requires one time setup, but it’s worth the effort.

#9 Testimonial Video Mashups

Video ads make up 35% of all online ad spends. That’s a lot considering how big the market is. If you’re into paid ads, it’s going to be so much more fruitful if you’d create video mashups for your target audience. Video ads are becoming so popular, a whole industry is born out of it. What do you think influencer marketing, especially on vertical screen is?

Checkout this massive list of video ads for inspiration.

#10 Testimonial-Powered AI Recommendations

Personalization is the future of entrepreneurship. Just like you can train chatbots to tackle objections based on testimonials, you can leverage the same data to divert users' relevant products/services. You can train the bot to make product recommendations by including the testimonials related to that product’s benefits. 

Just like Netflix’s “Top picks for you” and LinkedIn’s Job recommendations, you can recommend products to your prospects who’re window shopping and increase the chances of conversions. Again, these giants do not include testimonials in the flow, but who’s stopping you from not using it?

If all this feels like too much work and you don't have the time or bandwidth for it, Testimonial Donut can help you with that. Our platform features user-friendly interfaces, templates, and guidance, enabling customers, employees, or anyone, to easily share their thoughts and experiences. Additionally, various channels, such as email, intranet, or dedicated platforms, allow for effortless submission of testimonials.