3 ways to make the most of customer commentary

Ten of your customer’s words are worth a thousand of your own. That’s why making use of customer quotes and commentary in your marketing content is so important; potential customers want to learn how others have used your offerings to solve a problem or achieve a goal, and they want to learn straight from existing customers.

According to research from Wyzowl, nine out of 10 people trust what a customer says about a business more than what that business says about itself. That’s what makes customer testimonials or case studies essential to effective marketing strategies; prospects will seek out what customers say about your organization or offerings, and might give up on you altogether if they can’t find those perspectives that validate you.

So first and foremost, it’s important to create a library of customer case studies on your website, organize them logically (and make them searchable by many different filters - product or service, industry, geography, customer size, etc.) and update them frequently.

But don’t stop there. Customers’ words are so valuable that they shouldn’t be confined to traditional case studies or testimonials - including your customers’ words in a variety of different asset types is one way to boost the impact and authenticity, and ultimately the performance, of content.

Here are 3 ways to include customer commentary in your marketing content:

● Use customer quotes to highlight the benefits of your offerings. Whether you position them on web pages next to product features, include them in brochures or overviews, or splash them throughout product videos, customers’ words offer big impact in a small amount of space. It’s also worth considering adding customer comments about your organization to your home page, because visitors who haven’t heard of you before or don’t know much about you will want to see what existing customers think of you. Quotes that talk about trustworthiness, reliability, integrity and other positive characteristics will interest the uninitiated in learning more about you.

● Include customer commentary in your social media posts. Customer testimonials typically come into play in the later stages of the buying journey, when prospects want to hear how a company -- hopefully one that resembles theirs - used your offering to solve a problem, and what the benefits were. But you can use snippets of these testimonials earlier in the customer journey to add credence to your social posts and pique interest.

For example, let’s say you’re running a social media campaign to promote a lead-generation ebook that talks about the challenges of complying with recent privacy regulations and the asset’s call-to-action (CTA) links to a solution overview of your related services. You could include a quote from one of your customers of those services that describes the challenges they faced before becoming your customer. While the quote wouldn’t directly endorse your services, it would add authenticity to the post and potentially increase the number of people who click through to the ebook and, in turn, the number of people who convert. This practice is especially effective when you target your social media posts to specific demographics.

● Encourage customers to write product or service reviews on your web pages. According to BigCommerce, 92% of customers read online reviews before buying. Giving prospects a chance to read what other customers think of your offerings can increase chances of turning them into customers, particularly when you consider that, particularly in the business-to-consumer (B2C) world, many won’t even think about making a purchase without reading customer reviews first.

Interested in learning more about how customer commentary can improve your marketing efforts? Check out our services page.