In every aspect of our lives –including how we behave and the online purchases we make –we seek out and rely on social evidence.
It makes no difference if the social proof comes from acquaintances or total strangers: It’s important to have confirmation from our peers (in this case, other consumers) that the choice we’re about to make is the best one.
Any restaurant owner should make obtaining favorable restaurant reviews a top priority to showcase their exceptional service and food. It determines how guests select the restaurants they will continue to support, as well as discover new establishments where they would like to dine at.
Testimonials from your staff and customers are almost-free advertisements for your restaurant. The reviews will speak for themselves if your restaurant provides top-notch customer service and scrumptious food – two things that all customers are looking for in a restaurant.
In our digital world, relying on online reviews and testimonials are akin to listening to friends and family members. The testimonials could either strongly recommend or discourage your potential customers from visiting your restaurant. This is because your customers are more likely to trust other customers than the brand itself.
While you can take control of how your restaurant is viewed online by paying close attention to your online reviews, responding to them as soon as you can, and encouraging customers to offer you more feedback, there is a lot more you can do with your positive testimonials.
Here are five ways you can incorporate your positive online reviews and testimonials to your marketing strategies and everyday operations.
5 ways you can use positive testimonials for your business
- Place relevant testimonials at relevant places
Testimonials are one of the most authentic kinds of marketing tools at your disposal. The term authenticity is frequently used in marketing, but there’s a good reason why.
Customers connect best with marketing material that comes off as authentic rather than pushy.
Repurposing customer reviews, social media postings, and images is one of the simplest and most efficient ways to establish an authentic brand for your business. It makes it even more powerful if these testimonials are placed in the right places rather than picking spots blindly.
According to data, 89% of customers wait to act until they read reviews. You can receive notable results without incurring significant marketing expenses if you know how to present reviews to your target audience effectively.
For instance, you may place reviews at the bottom of landing pages so that customers can see right away how pleased other people are with your products. Apart from adding reviews to your sites, don’t be afraid to use stellar customer reviews in your emails for your upcoming email marketing campaign.
Another method to draw readers’ attention to your blog posts is by including relevant reviews in them. Viewing a nicely integrated review can lead a visitor who arrived at your website looking for information farther down the marketing funnel. You can increase the likelihood that a visitor will click a button or complete a contact form by displaying another person’s favorable review of your menu and services.
- Post testimonials to your social media accounts
In our connected world, social networking is now used as a tool to compare services at restaurants. People no longer rely solely on advertisements; instead, they seek out genuine testimonials posted by numerous users on well-known social media sites like Twitter, Instagram, or Yelp. Restaurants can post testimonials from customers as user-generated content and promote brand awareness.
For starters, you can locate numerous photos that your customers may have shared on social media. Additionally, searching the content with your location’s geographic tags from Instagram is a quicker approach to achieve this. Search for user-generated material using the name of your business, the name of the location, or nearby hashtags.
Bonus tip: Make your restaurant and plate of food look “insta-ready” – meaning it looks too good to pass up the chance of posting online with glowing reviews.
- Reward customers for their testimonials
To encourage customers to leave more testimonials and reviews, you might want to consider incentivizing them for doing so. You’ll see a dramatic increase in the number of answers if you make it abundantly obvious from the beginning that they will be rewarded for their efforts and successful posting of a review.
For instance, you may offer customers a gift card or a discount voucher for a future purchase in exchange for a review. This procedure has several advantages because it will motivate customers to buy from your restaurant again in the future, increasing repeat sales and customer retention.
In the absence of customer reviews, you can use information from customers’ purchase histories to create a relatable narrative. For example, you could talk about what menu items sell the most at a particular time of the day and why people love them so much. This can be helpful because studies show that giving testimonials names, faces, and titles can increase reader trust.
Bonus: Using subject lines with phrases like “coupon,” “discount,” and “save,” shops may, on average, improve submission rate by up to 18.5%, according to data from over 3.5 million emails.
- Use testimonials as feedback
One of the most powerful marketing tools you have at your disposal is your satisfied customer base. You can make changes to your sales or customer service strategies thanks to valuable customer reviews. Additionally, it can boost your SEO efforts, increase conversion rates, and improve brand loyalty.
Every testimonial helps you to determine whether or not your menu is pleasing your customers. You will be able to add or remove things from the menu depending on the situation if you ask your customers for thorough feedback on it. After all, a restaurant’s success depends on its menu and how effectively it is designed to improve the dining experience for patrons.
Additionally, customers frequently divulge information regarding why some of your competitors are doing better than you in some aspects, providing you with a chance to enhance your offerings. Gaining insights into such customer behavior and response is one of the main advantages of customer feedback. Marketing and sales efforts can also employ data and analytics relating to customer behavior.
- Use testimonials to upsell
Knowing how to upsell in a restaurant is more crucial than ever because restaurateurs need to increase the amount spent by each customer who makes business with them. One of the easiest ways to upsell your menu items is by using customer testimonials.
You can add testimonials or feedback under some of your expensive menu items on your website, so that when customers are contemplating ordering it, the testimonial will be the driving force behind the successful orders. Plus, some insightful recommendations from your previous customers can also help other customers in figuring out what wine might best go with the steak meal.
You must be able to communicate clearly with your customers if you want to keep them coming back. This may be done by adding testimonials via QR codes on in-store menus, on your website, during the reservation process, when using an order and pay app or click & collect, while connecting to your restaurant WiFi, or while using an order and pay app or click & collect.
The Takeaway
Utilizing authentic testimonials from pleased customers strategically to win over new consumers can do wonders to scale your business. Now that we’ve covered what you can do with testimonials, you can start by requesting testimonials from some of your best, most loyal customers and watch your sales grow!