#69 - How to get more (+ better!) testimonials from your offers

They really are so, so important to the success of our businesses, of our launches, of any of our offers and sales. And the reason for that is because they are some of the best social proof that you'll ever have.

This is the Doing It Online podcast with your Host, serial entrepreneur, 6 and 7 figure funnel strategist and super nerd Kate McKibben, where every week we're here talking nerdy and sharing the things that actually work to help you do what you do online, but better EAs and with a ton more profit too. Are you ready? Let's do it.

Hello. Hello everybody. It is Kate here from HelloFinals Co and welcome to episode 69 of the Doing It Online podcast. I was trying to think of some kind of little talking nerdy kind of pun to go there, but I think I'll just leave that one up to your imagination. But today, rather than waste your time with puns and wordplay, instead of going to dive right on into some really, really good, valuable stuff, that's how we roll over here at Doing It Online Today. I wanted to talk about something that I think is often overlooked but is so, so important and that is getting amazing testimonials for your offers and services and how to get more of them, how to get higher quality ones and how to sort of have it baked in as a bit of a system that it's not just sort of them being dribbling in here and there. And the reason that, you know, I want to talk about this and help you guys to go and get more and better testimonials is because they really are so, so important to the success of our businesses, of our launches, of any of our offers and sales. And the reason for that is because they are some of the best social proof that you'll ever have in, you know, these days it's rare that someone's going to get some word of mouth, although word of mouth is obviously, you know, very, very powerful as well. But when you have audiences all around the world, people still want to know, like, is it as good as it sounds? Like anyone can whip up an amazing sounding sales page if they hire a good copywriter and, you know, grab a good sales page template or something. It doesn't take that much these days to make something sound really amazing. And of course the founder and owner is going to come out and tell you how great it is, but is it, is it actually any good and, you know, one of the best sort of little, I suppose, ticks or just little extra little pieces of validation or reassurance that your potential clients are going to find is through testimonials. That's why we need them. So how do we get them? How do we get and which are the best types? Well, it really depends again on what you're planning on using them for. I would say the holy grail of testimonials is one of two things. It's either a video, short video testimonial, you don't want one where people go on and on. If it is a longer one, you probably won't jump in and edit it. Keep it under three minutes if you can. Or it's an actual, you know, like a Google review or a Facebook page review. So people, when they're looking up your survey, when they're googling you, when you're coming up on their socials, they might see X number of people gave this five out of five. Like those, both of those are really, really powerful. However, you really only ever want to go choose the one that's going to be most useful for you in whatever you've got coming up next. And always just focus on one at a time. So that's tip number one really, is to stop and think, okay, what kind of testimonial is going to be useful for me? And of course, you know, if someone's leaving a Google review, you can obviously grab little snippets or screenshots of that review and use it on sales pages, share it on social media. Same if someone is leaving a review on your Facebook page or another sort of more third party reviewing service. So you'll still be able to sort of grab what you need and use it in all those other places. The same with the video. If someone does a video review for you, you can obviously share that in ads embedded on sales pages and write out verbatim what they say and include that in any sort of written testimonial area. So they both kind of COVID off all of those uses. I guess it really comes down to which one of the two you probably is going to be most useful for you next. If you have like an online store or something like that where reviews are a lot more common, you might want to go that side of things. If you have a sort of a higher ticket offer, then going for a video review is probably what you want to focus on choosing. Either, either, neither's wrong, but just pick one and ask for one. Don't give people too many, you know, too many options. Otherwise they're going to be like, oh, too hard, come back to it later and you'll lose them. And that's the thing that happens. I think that, I mean, and I'm really guilty of this as well, you know, even when I have, you know, I've purchased products or I've purchased services and it's been great, I've gotten great results, I'm like, yes, I definitely want to give you a review, but then you get busy, then it's. Or it's a bit too complicated. So that brings us on to point number two. Is that the second most important thing? So number one is just choose one, choose like pick one type of testimonial and just go all in on that for a while. So you've got enough of them anyway. And then tip two is you have to make it as easy as possible for people. Like just stupid, simple. It cannot take or feel like it's going to take more than a minute or two for them to do it or you will lose them. Like yes, you will still get a few Die Hards coming through, which is great, but you really want to get more than that. You want to get a bit of a range. You want to, particularly with video testimonials, you want to be able to show as many as you can and show the diverse range of people that you've worked with and been able to help and in all the different ways you've been able to do that. Like it's really powerful for people to be able to go, oh, that person's like me, they have a similar industry or they've got a similar background or you know, their home situation or life situation is similar to mine. For them to be able to relate that way is going to make it much more powerful whatever that person says. So you need to obviously go out there, try and make it as easy as possible. How do you do that? Well, a couple of things. First of all, if you're going to use some kind of, whatever your sort of testimonial collection method is, it's got to be just super, super basic, super, super simple. So an easy way of doing, if it's just going to be a written based testimonial would be to send someone a link to a Google form or a type form. But a common mistake is that people then try and use this as a time to do some customer research and they add in all these questions and no, too hard. What you need to do is you want to get their name, their business name. If you're going to be sharing that, don't even ask them to upload an image if like you can put that in there as a optional, but otherwise you can usually go and find their social media image and just grab that and then just the box, like, please let us know. Pop your testimonial in here, pop your review in here, Let us know what you thought in here. The second thing I would recommend, regardless of what sort of format it is that you're going out and asking for, or whether it's a form or you're sending them to, you know, leave a review on Google or whatever is give them an example. Give them like two to three potential questions to answer so that it gives them a starting point. Because that's another thing I've had, like I said, I've had times before when I've definitely intended on leaving a review for somebody. And then I've gotten around to it, I've opened up their thing and it's just like, leave us the review. And because there's no starting point, you're like, oh, I don't even know what to say. Like, it was good. Like, I don't want to sound like an idiot. I don't want to make them sound like an idiot. And then all of a sudden it becomes a bit hard. And that's what you want to remove. You want to remove all of those hurdles. So if you include on that, like in the email instructions and also the form, like one or two questions like let us know what was your biggest aha. Or what did you think? What did you like best about it? Or what's. Can you give us an example of a result that you got? Just those little prompts can give them a starting place and then after that, you know, they'll be able to kind of roll a lot easier. Another really great service that I would highly recommend if you are going out there looking for video reviews, because again, that's video reviews. It's a bit more difficult, right? Because normally what you have to do is say, hey, can you record me a video? Then can you upload it somewhere, which is usually a big file? Then can you send me that file? And there's. It becomes clunky, it becomes hard. And again, that's where you can have people dropping off because it goes into the too hard basket or the I'll do it never basket. A great service that we're loving. We'll link to it below is called Boast. And it's, it's really, really simple. What it does is it allows you to create an online form which you can put whatever fields on that you like. But like I said I'd recommend name maybe a like asking them a question or two tops. Preferably just one question for us because we're going for video reviews, we actually don't ask them any questions. We just go, what's your name? What's the program? And then there's literally a button they can click. It connects to either the camera on their PC or the camera on their phone and they can just do like straight into the camera, do their little video review. They can review it if they want, make sure they like it, click submit and it's there. They don't have to do anything complicated. And then it all kind of upslow uploads into a really easy to up, you know, to jump in and have a look at kind of backend for you and your team. And it's just makes life super simple. It's not free, it's paid, but it's definitely worth it. And if you were going to go and do it for a couple of months and collect as many as you could in that time, it would be well worth the investment even if you're on a shoestring budget. So the third thing, now that you've decided what type of testimonial you're going for, you've created a really, really easy way for people to submit it. Now it all comes down to timing, but three sort of examples of great ways that you can ask for testimonials and be more likely to actually get them. So first of all is an actual manual process and this is something if you have a va, I would brief them on. Otherwise it could be something that you do and to make it as easy as possible, you just to have this saved as like a little canned response or snippet somewhere. But basically when you have a client going through a program like don't wait until the end to ask them for a testimonial because quite often they've disengaged by that point, they've moved on to the next thing. So what tends to work better is wait until someone posts a win or someone posts an aha or someone posts oh my gosh, I love this in your community. And when they do that, because you know that they're currently in there loving it and feeling really engaged personally, you know, personally reach out to them, either you or your team. So maybe DM them, send them an email, whatever works for you, let them know how much you would appreciate getting a testimonial, how it really helps your business and helps them to grow and you know, helps you to get sorry helps you to grow, but also you to get some great feedback and know what's working and then send them the simple instructions, the simple link and maybe follow up with them once just to give them that extra little prod. So that's something we've been doing and it's worked really, really well. Another idea is when again it's kind of about the picking, the timing and this time also having a bit of an incentive is maybe at the end of a key module or maybe even at the end of a program for people before they unlock either the next step, that next module or even some bonuses. Ask them to give their honest feedback and in that you can ask for them to say what they liked, what could be improved and maybe share a quick testimonial that if they'd be happy to, you can use in for marketing purposes. That's another little thing guys. Just make sure it is clear that if you are going to use these in ads that people understand that and that they have an option to say, you know, yes, I give permission for this to be used on, you know, sales pages, promotions, ads or not. Like should have said that at the start, but that's, that's really, really important. Right? The third thing you can do if you're wanting to get a quick boost all at once of testimonials and some people do this in the, you know, if you've got a launch coming up and you go I need some testimonials for my sales pages, I need them for my ads. How am I going to get a boost of these is to go back to your previous clients and run some kind of competition. And in that competition, basically you're going to ask them to the entry is for them to go and give you a testimonial and you've got to make the prize juicy for this to be worthwhile. Now you can do this at the end of if you've done a live cohort of your program or offer as well have a big competition at the end, ask people do testament. So it really depends on what timing is going to work best for you. But again, keep it simple. Give them a form to fill out, give them a deadline and a great prize. So maybe that prize, if it was something you were running during a program, it could be they win a place in the next level in your next program, maybe they win a one on one with you, maybe they win a little goodie pamper pack, whatever is going to be relevant. Sometimes people just need that little extra push that's my tips guys on how to go and get not just more testimonials but really really great testimonials and have them coming through in a really, really either steady flow or all at once if you do need them in a short time frame. I hope this has been really useful. If it has, make sure you share it. Make sure you hit us up. Let us know over at hellofunnels on Instagram. We always love hearing what you've loved and what your aha moments have been about any of our episodes. And then make sure you head back here next week, same time, same place, same bat channel for another episode of the Doing It Online Podcast. Can't wait to see you all then. Bye.

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Sam.