What’s more effective: a website that relies on marketing language and unsubstantiated claims, or one that’s filled with raving reviews and evidence that lots of your customers have been successful with your products?
By using customer stats, testimonials, and case studies effectively, you can convert leads with convincing content that demonstrates the real value of your product. From validating your marketing claims to illustrating your use cases, there are many ways to leverage customer feedback on your company website.
We combed through our customers’ websites to find 6 brilliant examples of companies that put customers front and center on their websites. Read on for best practices and helpful tips inspired by current TechValidate customers, and start making the most of your customer stories today.
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1. Gusto supports marketing claims with customer stats.
Gusto is a software platform that helps companies stay on top of employee payroll, benefits, and human resources. To prove to buyers that its services are effective, Gusto points to customer feedback sourced from TechValidate throughout its website. Its human resources product page, for example, goes beyond stating that their product is easy to use—it also features quantitative data on how many customers have seen a reduction in tedious tasks and an increase in ease of compliance since using its software.
Tip: To increase your credibility with leads, back up your marketing claims with the voice of your most credible spokespeople—your customers. By collecting and transforming customer feedback into case studies and more with TechValidate, you can tease out your most effective value propositions and present them to buyers with convincing social proof. Like Gusto, place customer feedback at the top of a product page or the beginning of a product pitch to quickly establish trust with a potential customer.
2. Zendesk puts customers first by highlighting their success.
Zendesk is a customer service software platform that helps companies provide integrated customer support and knowledge bases. As a company that helps businesses put customers first, it’s no surprise that Zendesk has itself built a reputation for being very customer centric. One of the ways the company champions its customers is by featuring a breadth of customer stories on its website. For Zendesk, these stories are not about extracting marketing value from the customer, but about inspiring buyers and making the customer the hero of the story. For Zendesk, customer stories are, first and foremost, about the customer.
Tip: When you use customer feedback the way Zendesk does on its website, you end up spending less time talking about how great your product is and more time talking about the great things people do with your product. Most buyers find the latter more engaging, which is why case studies are better at converting B2B leads than any other type of marketing content. Show your leads that you really put your customers first by highlighting their success in the customer stats, testimonials, and case studies on your website.
3. Intercom makes it personal with testimonials.
Intercom is a customizable messaging suite that helps companies communicate with prospective and existing customers across digital channels. As a messaging platform, Intercom understands the importance of making the communication between a company and its customers personal. In line with the company’s mission to “make business personal again,” Intercom frequently validates the marketing claims on its website with testimonials from real people at real companies. These testimonials add a personal touch that helps potential buyers picture themselves as customers.
Tip: Testimonials are one of the most powerful drivers of purchasing behavior. People are 4 times more likely to purchase a product if someone they know recommends it and almost 85% of people trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. Because most people listen when someone recommends a product even if they tune out other marketing messages, using testimonials like Intercom does is an excellent way to convert skeptical leads.
4. SendGrid features logos to highlight their diverse customer base.
SendGrid is an email platform that helps marketers deliver emails in a timely, secure, and scalable manner. Like many of the companies we work with at TechValidate, SendGrid’s customers include companies of all different sizes and industries. To ensure any potential buyer will find a customer story that’s relevant to them, SendGrid’s customers page includes a large logo wall of customer stories, case studies, and video testimonials that can be filtered by industry and product.
Tip: To reach diverse leads, point them to diverse customer stories. SendGrid helps its prospects find relevant information by making a large number of customer stats, testimonials, and case studies available on its website. If your company doesn’t have the capacity to create the volume of customer stories you need to represent each of your target buyer segments, look to TechValidate to do the heavy lifting. With TechValidate, it’s easy to gather and transform customer feedback into case studies, testimonials, reviews, and more in a fraction of the time it would take with traditional, more manual methods.
5. Star2Star reinforces their credibility with customer stats.
Star2Star provides telephone voice and data communications services. Because reliability is a key value prop and one of the top priorities for Star2Star’s ideal customer, the company makes sure to back up their claims about reliability with—you guessed it— 3rd-party validated customer stats and stories created using TechValidate.
As a result of using TechValidate proof points across their sales and marketing efforts,—or example, pop-ups that inspire leads to take quick action—Star2Star has seen a 10% lift in website engagement metrics, including time on site.
Tip: By using a 3rd party like TechValidate to verify and validate your social proof, your customers stories and data points are even more credible and compelling. TechValidate confirms the identity and organizational affiliations of participants and verifies the accuracy of the content before giving each published piece a validation stamp. The result is more persuasive customer stories, testimonials, and proof points that boost your marketing materials and enable your sales team.
6. NetApp builds authenticity with reviews.
NetApp is a cloud-based storage platform that helps businesses secure and manage their customer data. To win over buyers, NetApp must make its case to infrastructure professionals with a technical understanding of cloud-based storage. By featuring honest customer reviews on their product pages—and not just the glowing 5-star reviews—they keep their messaging authentic and believable to their audience. Each testimonial cites TechValidate as the source and includes a unique TVID code, so that prospects can also access the original review on TechValidate.
Tip: Don’t be afraid to publish your less-than-5-star reviews. A SurveyMonkey study found 74% of people think a product with lots of 4-star reviews is of higher quality than one with a few 5-star reviews. Cherry-picking the top, highest-rated reviews, though tempting, can backfire—buyers can often see through this and may even perceive your brand as inauthentic or untrustworthy. A study at Northwestern University found that people are actually more likely to purchase products with average online ratings of less than 4.5 stars because they find mixed feedback more believable.
How are you shining the spotlight on your customers? If you’d like to learn more about how our customers use TechValidate to put their customers at the front and center of their marketing, visit our customer stories page.
