Overwhelming proof.
It's the most powerful force in marketing.
If you watched late night TV infomercials you've seen it in action.
Customer faces appear, one after the other, talking about how their life changed thanks this incredible ab-rolling machine.
They just keep coming. Another happy buyer. Then another.
Wow, this product really must work...
And yes, I bought an ab-roller many years ago. I even used it.
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Humans trust other humans.
Especially when they look and sound like us.
We are herd-animals. We follow.
Decision making is hard and we don't like making mistakes.
It's easier to make the same choice others did.
This is why ad campaigns include testimonials.
Sometimes it's overt and obvious, like online ads with testimonial after testimonial.
It can be indirect, an influencer on social media showing how they use makeup or a celebrity drinking a vodka brand.
The idea is to show that people make the choice to buy what you sell and they benefited.
Thus it must be a good choice for other potential customers.
Buyers talking about their experience with your product or service is also a disarming way to deal with objections and highlight specific benefits.
If you explain why your product is worth the cost, you sound like a salesperson.
When a third-party details the value they received using a deeply personal example, expressing emotion and appearing 'normal', that's compelling.
With my company InboxDone.com, we've been recording short testimonial interviews every chance we get from the first year we were in business.
Podcast host Lex Fridman became a client of ours over a year ago.
I'm justifiably eager to get a testimonial from him, but he's very private, so no luck yet!
Recently my marketing team and I put together some 'overwhelming proof' videos.
We made three versions of different length, each featuring short clips stitched together taken from our client testimonial videos.
You can see one in action here:
These videos are in rotation in our LinkedIn, YouTube and Meta ads.
With several years of data to look back on, I can report that our best performing video ad so far is a simple one minute clip from one of our testimonials.
Having lots of media to test gives you options and data.
Having many testimonials to create media from, gives you a variety of messages to experiment with.
I love it when a client says something during a testimonial video using a story or concept that I haven't heard before.
The words they say become the ad.
For example, in the most recent video I filmed, our client used the phrase...
"I was traumatized by email before working with you."
That's some powerful wording that just came out naturally.
It's also a heartfelt experience this person went through before finding our company.
I'm currently cutting up clips from the interview to give to my video editing team.
If you're not getting testimonials and you're not demonstrating 'overwhelming proof' to your audience, you need to change that.
Go talk to your customers and start collecting their stories.
It should be fun, hearing your customers say nice things about what you helped them with.
It just happens to also be great marketing media.
Keep growing,
Yaro
