Can you almost hear wind whistling through the unpopulated streets?

When you set it up, perhaps the pressure was on to simply get something on line, and you didn’t really have any client stories or depth of content to load anyway?

Ok. I mentioned in the tangerine skies post about how you can build content like press releases to make your company look established – even when your business is new or newish.

One of the things that visitors to your site, particularly those who might be potential clients, are looking for, are stories and examples from your existing clients.

They will be looking for testimonials of some kind, and case studies that clearly demonstrate the benefits of your products and services, and show how you work with your clients.

So what do you do when you are just starting up and you don’t have any clients to talk about yet?

I have two suggestions:

1. Give your product or service away to a few clients/customers (or provide it at a reduced cost) in exchange for their agreement to provide you with client testimonials for your site. Please be clear that I am not suggesting you buy their support, but rather, that you provide something in exchange for them helping you out. If they don’t enjoy your product or service, don’t try to persuade them to say otherwise. These testimonials need to be genuine to really work for you.
2. Create scenarios of how your product or service works. Create a “case A”, “case B”, “case C” that show pricing structure, how your product or service resolves a particular problem, how it is delivered etc. Once you have some real case studies you can replace these, but they at least provide a base for your customers to see what the experience of working with you would be like.

I suggest you stay away from creating fake (sometimes badly written) testimonials from non-existent customers and illustrating them with stock photography. The chances of it being very apparent to visitors to your site that these are not genuine, is very high – and immediately your credibility is undermined.

So, be creative, do what you need to do to get your product/service in front of customers – even if they are not paying full price, and focus your attention on getting their feedback as soon as possible.

Another source of testimonials that are becoming widely used, particularly in the tourism and hospitality sectors, are sites like Trip Advisor, which provides a free widget that can be added to your website, and a chance for your guests to make comments about your business and rate it. These can be incredibly powerful – for good or for evil … but of course, if you are getting bad reviews, then you need to do something about your product/service – don’t blame the reviewers!

That’s all I have for tonight.

Have fun driving the ghosts out!

Karen