I was having dinner with a friend of mine last week, chewing the fat about all manner of topics.
John Thompson’s a great guy, and – among other things – he’s a Mortgage Advisor.
Inevitably, we talked about business, and about the various marketing strategies, people deploy to get more customers and grow their businesses.
One of the things that became really obvious during the conversation, was the truth of what’s known as ‘The Pareto Principle’, aka the ‘80:20 Rule’.
Pareto was an Italian Economist, and his proposition was that – in life as well as in business – roughly 80% of effects come from 20% of causes.
If we contextualise this for local media, you’ll get something along these lines:
80% of your profit comes from 20% of your customers.
80% of your sales come from 20% of your sales team.
80% of your product sales come from 20% of your products.
And so on, and so forth.
Anyway, when it comes to marketing, John’s recognised The Pareto Principle at work in his business.
He’s done a lot of marketing over the years: Leaflets, AdWords, Facebook, Email, the list goes on and on. But, 90% of his customers come from ONE thing…
Three testimonial videos on the homepage of his website.
People find him on Google, but they choose him because of these videos.
People tell him this week in, week out.
I was so staggered by this statistic that I just had to share them with you, and there’s a simple reason why – when you discover something in business that has such a disproportionately positive effect, it simply doesn’t make sense to ignore it.
Video testimonials WORK, and here’s why:
People trust customer testimonials more than anything you can say about yourself
Video is hard to fake or stage, so they’re viewed as much more reliable than text-based testimonials.
It’s much easier to be emotive in video - and as we know, we buy with emotion and then justify with logic.
Long story short, if you haven’t got video testimonials from your advertisers who’ve had a great experience with you, that needs to change. Like John, they stand to bring you a lot of business too.
And the best place to put them? The page with the most amount of traffic, which in almost every case is your homepage. (The homepage on what should be your B2B advertiser-focused website.)
