Testimonials – a marketing tool or just hype?

You’ve seen them on other event websites, comments such as “I had a wonderful time at this event” or “I learned a lot that I was able to use to get a promotion.” These are testimonials, and you may have wondered whether they’re useful in event marketing or even if they’re real comments from actual participants. We’re here to tell you this kind of feedback does carry weight with your prospective participants, as long as the testimonials are authentic, specific and credible. In this article, we give some guidelines as to how to generate and use effective testimonials for selling registrations to your event, but these guidelines can be used to gather testimonials in any business.

Word of mouth is highly effective advertising, and testimonials are social and public proof of the worth of a product or service. Studies from the Neilsen company have shown that people trust recommendations from those they know but also from strangers online. Making public the positive feedback about your speakers or any other aspect of your event serves as supporting evidence that it’s worth attending.

This may be surprising, but a testimonial is not about you or your event as such; it’s about what your event did for the participant. It’s results-driven, and an effective testimonial speaks about the benefits for the participant.

It’s about what they learned and what it added to their life.

It’s about whether they’ll come back next year.

It’s about whether they felt welcome and whether they were able to find their way around easily.

It’s about whether they had fun or feel they got value for their money.

In short, it’s about their experiences, their time at the event and their feelings about it all.

An effective testimonial needs to have substance, with specific examples of these experiences as they related directly to a benefit. This gives it authenticity. And it needs to be verifiable. Both of these together lend the testimonial credibility and save it from just being a comment.

Given the power of personal recommendations, you need to persuade people to write testimonials for you. It helps to understand why people may be reluctant to do so, and many people do say no. Here are some common reasons for this reticence:

Having a blueprint makes it as easy and painless as possible for people to write you an effective testimonial, by leading them through the process and addressing upfront all the reasons they may have for not providing feedback. The blueprint consists of the testimonial questions and a brief explanation as to how you’re going to use the answers.

These are the basic questions to cover. If you have the opportunity, you can expand in these questions in response to the answers you’re given.

Will you attend next year? Why or why not?

When you ask for a testimonial is linked to how you’re going to collect the information. You can always ask people if you can contact them later for their feedback. You can do this:

Providing people with a variety of ways to contribute a testimonial increases the likelihood of their participation. Each method has its own pros and cons, not least of which is the time commitment on your part to collect the information.

You could:

Don’t forget indirect ways to see what people are saying about your event:

Full disclosure about how you plan on using the testimonials addresses the fears of those respondents who are unsure of what to write or how to write it.

On your testimonial request, make clear whether you plan on rewriting or paraphrasing the response or using the respondent’s exact words, or perhaps a combination of both. You’ll also need to ask whether you can use the person’s full name and/or company affiliation. This ties in to the verifiability requirement of an effective testimonial. It also offers an answer to the “what’s in it for me” question if you offer a back link to the website of the person or company for using their testimonial.

Putting all the testimonials on one page of your event website neatly corrals them in one place, but their messages will reach more people if you also scatter them around the entire site. Save the longer stories that people give you for the dedicated testimonial page and use the short, pithy comments to illustrate your event’s benefits throughout the rest of the web pages.

There’s an old advertising adage: “You can’t buy good word-of-mouth advertising.” But you can ask for it in the form of effective testimonials. Let your satisfied event participants help you sell registrations to your next event.

Using Event Testimonials to Sell More Registrations

Using Event Testimonials to Sell More Registrations

What a testimonial is

Why people say no

Your testimonial blueprint

What to ask

When to ask

How to collect the testimonials

How to use the testimonials

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