TMCnet Online Community News
Add Credibility to Your Online Community with Customer Testimonials
A powerful marketing tool, customer testimonials are a guaranteed way to build authentic credibility through the people who stand by your business. Even further, they can function as an additional layer to the branding, content and assets that have been created to lead your community’s visitors to your website.
While a white paper, case study, or original article leads prospective clients to your community, it then becomes an excellent chance to show off your credentials and demonstrate the impact of your products and services by highlighting a positive experience – right from your customer’s mouth.
Highlighting a testimonial is easy, and we recommend doing so in a variety of ways to reach every kind of customer. In addition to writing a traditional article, shoot and upload a quick video (easy to do with a Flip video camera or even computer camera), get a quote and have it scroll across your community screen, or interview them on a Podcast. Using a variety of methods and multimedia for your testimonials are a great way to make them interesting and grab a viewer’s attention, making them more likely to stay on your site and learn more about how great your products are.
“This is the stage where a lead becomes an opportunity,” as an article on CustomerThink.com puts it. “Your prospects are educated about the industry and it’s time to make the case for why you are best positioned to help them address their challenge. It’s the time when you answer the question, ‘Why buy now?’”
Over the last few months, the Least Cost Routing channel, sponsored by TransNexus (News - Alert), has been populated with personal, enlightening accounts from several of TransNexus’ current and past clients. For instance, one company shared with TMcnet how TransNexus helped to lower its termination costs for its VoIP phone services; while another revealed TransNexus’ ability to tackle the “man-power effort” of managing carrier rate plans.
All your editor needs from you is your customer’s permission to be featured on the site, and your editor will do the heavy lifting by contacting your customer for an interview and creating an article based on their conversation.
“It’s a great idea for good content, and good content is what search engines are looking for” Jim Dalton (News - Alert), CEO of TransNexus, told TMCnet. “We had a customer lead that asked us about a certain implementation, and I was able to give them the link to one of the customer testimonials and I said, ‘Look, here’s another customer doing exactly what you want to do.’”
Not only can a customer testimonial help to solidify a potential customer’s decision for choosing your company’s services, but it can certainly solidify the business relationship between your company and the featured customer -- and keep them coming back for more.
Connect with Us and Join the Conversation: Have you featured testimonials on your online community? How successful has this been for you?
About TMCnet Online Communities
TMCnet Online Communities are news-generated, content-rich portals that position your company as the leading “go-to resource” for your industry group. TMC (News - Alert) has been building Online Communities for over 10 years, and continues to be the market leader at developing these successful sites for our customers. To learn more about the TMCnet Online Community program, please contact Anna Ritchie or call 203-852-6800 x 107. You can also visit us online.
Tammy Wolf is a TMCnet web editor. She covers a wide range of topics, including IP communications and information technology. To read more of her articles, please visit her columnist page.
