Testimonials. Testimonials. Testimonials!

Your website doesn’t have enough of them. I promise.

If you’re a small business owner, it’s crucial to understand there are two different types of content. Analytical content and emotional content. Do you know the difference?

Both are crucial. I’ll talk more about this over the next few posts if you like. Just shoot me an email if it’s a topic that interests you, and I’ll use your questions to develop the articles on this subject. For now, please understand that VERY FEW people are going to take action to help you, contact you or buy from you just because you have cool content on your blog. If someone is going to do BUSINESS with you, they need to feel comfortable with you, and they need to feel compelled to take action.

These two factors cannot be skipped. If you skip them, your website will not get the results you want. Period.

And no amount of education or information is going to make this happen. Know this:

1. People don’t take action because they’ve learned everything they need to learn.
2. People don’t take action because the time is right.
3. People don’t take action because they’re “in the market”.

So why do people take action? What causes us to make buying decisions? We make buying decisions emotionally. We say we don’t. And we’ll flat out deny it if you ask us directly. But we do. It’s just how it works. We make buying decisions emotionally, and then we back those decisions up with logic and data. We justify our emotional decisions with logic. Every buying decision is a logic sandwich. Yummy (high carb btw) logic on the top and bottom…but the meat of the decision is emotion.

The test most small business websites fail

The most crucial test for any small business website is to be emotionally compelling. And interestingly…this is usually the last thing any of us thinks about when it comes to putting content on our site. We want to load our website up with all the most helpful information possible. And that’s important. But it’s not the whole story. If you want your site to generate leads and business for you consistently (the ongoing topic of this blog), it needs to be emotionally compelling…not just informative.

The topic of engaging your readers emotionally is a huge topic, and it’s one I’m happy to answer any questions about. Just hit me up with any of your concerns via email, or let’s chat on Twitter. I’m shooting to cover this a lot more in depth in future articles. But for now, let me share a secret weapon with you. One of the most dangerous tactics of all…liberal, strategic and aggressive dispersement of testimonials on your website.

Testimonials are your most powerful opportunity to share what OTHER people are saying about you. Clients, customers, readers. It’s not you talking about yourself for once. Your readers WANT to feel compelled to work with you, and testimonials are a great way to encourage it. Testimonials get read. They get noticed. They make a difference.

After working on hundreds of client websites over the last several years, I can report definitively that very few small business websites out there are fully utilizing this crucial type of content. If I were to point to a single type of content that was more emotionally compelling than any other, it would be a stack of high quality client or customer testimonials. Yet on most websites I see, testimonials are hard to find. In many cases they’re not there at all. Big mistake.