Telling Stories vs Testimonials

Most people leave money on the table when they capture their clients’ testimonials – they’ll get a quote from the customer and slap it on their website, job done. 

The issue with this is everyone’s doing the same & people tune out if you’re just sharing that same testimonial on social media. 

The best way to talk about your business is to tell the story of other people using it.

Here’s how to do it.

This week, we visited one of our clients, Lab Supply.

I threw up a post on LinkedIn about how great they were & mentioned what we’ve done as part of that story. 

Then I told people to go buy from Lab Supply.

This triggered a lead to reach out and say, I saw the work you’re doing with Lab Supply – I’d love to catch up.

If you’re struggling to tell the story of your customer, use this prompt and their testimonial to help:

“This is my company (www.kjgrowth.agency) and this is one of our customers company (www.acme.com), and this is a testimonial they wrote about us:

(insert testimonial)

Can you please write a 400 - 600 word social media post explaining what our customer does & then incorporate what we do with the provided testimonial that I can use on social platforms.”

 By promoting others’ success and the hand you’ve had in it, you’re promoting yourself.

This is a simple way to make testimonials go further without sounding like Johnny Bravo.

Marketing With Ai

Ai models have become so good at handling large contextual data-sets that I think you can now use them to run a small businesses marketing.

Two weeks back I handed over the marketing reigns for my gym to ChatGPT.

I asked it what information it needed to inform its strategy, asked it how to get that information like, analytics reports, search console, meta ads, Typeform and so on, then asked it what we should do and why.

And normally I’m very sceptical of Ai outputs, especially strategic thinking stuff — where it generally falls well short.

But its recommendations and reasoning behind those recommendations for my gym was awesome. Genuinely as good as anything I could have come up with in 1/10th of the time.

It helped me improve our lead funnels (lead volume is already up 25%).

It helped me fix our SEO (too early to tell, but it found some obvious errors in our previous work).

It improved our ads across Meta and Google (already higher CTR’s and on-site engagement).

Obviously the more context you can provide, the better - we have 3 years’ish of marketing data across those platforms mentioned as well as sales data via our CRM.

Regardless of what data you can provide, I’d encourage any of you with small’ish businesses to give this a go. I mean, completely hand off some part of your marketing, like SEO, where virtually every business could do better.

Ask it what information it needs to help, then follow the recommendations step by step. And anywhere you get stuck, get it to troubleshoot for you.