How and Why You Should Create Customer Testimonials [Concept of the Week]

Learn How Customer Testimonials Can Help You Improve Your SEO, Leverage New Markets and Make Customers Feel Good

If you’re anything like HubSpot, you have awesome customers (yes, that’s you!), so why not promote your business and your customers at the same time?!

Here are five good reasons why you should create customer testimonials:

1. Show the value of what you have to offer: Nothing says that better than a happy customer talking about how much your product helped him or her drive revenue or identify a cost savings.
2. A picture’s worth a thousand words: Use an easy-to-follow use case to help explain the more complex features of your business to the people who may not understand why they need those features in the first place.
3. Create more content: By creating a new website page showcasing the customer testimonial AND the product features, pain points or industry buzzwords (e.g. keywords for which you’re trying to rank) you’ll be creating more indexed pages for your site around those terms.
4. Break into new markets: Help get past the “that’s not for me” stage by showing how your products or services are applicable in numerous different industries.
5. Spread the love: Give your customer a little love (a.k.a. an inbound link) and ask them to love (a.k.a. link) you right back.

How to Create a Customer Testimonial

• Make a list of the customers who have either seen success using your product or who are using it in a unique way. 
• Reach out to them and ask them if they’d mind being featured in a customer testimonial (most people will be flattered you asked!).
• Determine which elements of the experience you’d like to highlight and make them accessible: use quotes and statistics. 
• Choose a format: case study, testimonial or customer story.
• Determine the medium: a paragraph on your site, a PDF they can download or best yet, a video they can watch.
• Make it fun, interactive, and keep it to 2 minutes (whether they're reading or watching).
• Create a new web page to highlight your testimonial(s). We here a HubSpot use the a blog tool easily post and publish new testimonials. 
• Promote it! Send it out to the customer you featured, your sales staff or even to your other customers if you think they'd be interested.
• Don't forget to add a link to your new testimonials page in your About Us section or as part of your overall navigation. 

So go forth! Create those testimonials and then share your success stories back here on the Blog when you do.