What other people think about products and services makes a significant impact on whether you choose one supplier or one product over a competitor. 70% of people trust reviews from strangers (Source: Nelsen); 86% of people hesitate to buy from a company with negative online reviews (Source: Invesp).

People can be sceptical of testimonials, which is understandable. Imagine you have never dealt with a company before and all you have to go on are positive words written on their own website without a verifiable source.

Sure, potential customers may feel confident enough to buy your product or service once they have spoken to you, but they need some confidence in your offering before taking that course of action.

What are the best ways to get verified testimonials for my business?

Testimonials are a crucial part of any business’s content marketing strategy, and one way to get more is by asking for them. But asking for testimonials is a different story and one we’ll cover that in a later blog post. The first thing we need to establish is what format and platform you should be requesting testimonials on.

One technique that companies can use to add believability to their testimonials is using external platforms which displaying the credibility of the reviewer, and verifying that they are the ones who made it.

TrustPilot

TrustPilot is a free tool that is available to any company in the world, free of charge (for the initial 100 reviews per month limit). 100% of their reviews are screened by fraud detection software and they removed over 2.2 million fake reviews in 2020 alone. Their transparency report highlights what steps they take to safeguard the platform and ensure all feedback is genuine and remains genuine.

Pros:

• The sheer force of tools used to keep things genuine should make you confident about malicious stuff not being posted about your business.
• It’s free for the first 100 reviews in each month.
• Reviews are published instantly.
• A support team so that you can flag up malicious reviews in real time.

Cons:

• It’s the most technically challenging tool to set up (out of the ones we are discussing in this blog post).
• TrustPilot has been used in high profile cases of fraudulent businesses, as seen in this BBC Watchdog feature.

Google Reviews

If you have set up a Google My Business profile, as shown in this article, you are already able to collect reviews from customer already – if you have already got reviews via Google’s platform, it will look like this:

Pros:

• All of the reviews on your account are verified because you must have a Google account in order to leave a review.
• A high Google review score will be one of the first things that people searching for your business will be able to see.

Cons:

• In order to leave a review, the customer must have a Google account, as well as the business needing to have a Google My Business profile. to the Google way of life, it probably won’t work out.
• There is no way of reporting malicious or excessively negative reviews.

LinkedIn recommendations

Recommendations are written by LinkedIn members to recognise your work. If a connection writes you one, you’ll be notified of the message via LinkedIn and have three options: accept it as is, ask for revisions or dismiss it altogether. Once accepted from a connected member’s recommendation request, they will show up on your profile automatically whether or not that connection has shared them with their network yet.

Pros:

• It helps raise your profile on LinkedIn – which is already a crowded and ever-growing marketplace.
• Viewers of your LinkedIn profile get to learn more about you (which is why they visit your profile in the first place).
• Viewers can easily find out who has been writing the review by visiting their profile.
• You have to approve the testimonial before it appears on your profile and you can send back a request for alterations, which nicely prevents anything malicious or negative being said without your permission.

Cons:

• It’s on LinkedIn and you have to be on there to view it. You can, of course, copy and paste it onto your website and credit LinkedIn as the source.
• The process of getting LinkedIn recommendations isn’t always smooth – it can be time-consuming for both the company owner and reviewer to answer all the questions that LinkedIn poses.

Linking it to your website

One thing that you can do is add the testimonials themselves to your website in text format and have a link to the review source.  This is much easier and less prone to error than using third-party plugins which can be prone to crash if not dealt with properly. It simply involves copying and pasting an email or testimonial onto your website – and putting in a link to the source; although a bit of formatting will make a big difference to how it looks and feels for site viewers.

Conclusion

There are many different options available to you for adding “believability” to your testimonials.

It’s about finding what will work best for the particular needs of your business and its audience or customers. So, experiment with all these different ideas and see which ones make a difference!