Financial marketing

Testimony, Now More Than Ever, is Vital in Marketing

19th September 2023

Promotional copywriting is littered with glowing superlatives. But if they are self-anointed, how do they answer the most important question every financial customer has – ‘Is this company a safe pair of hands?’ Answering that most important question is vital.

Not Easy

External validation and proof points are one of the most overlooked but most important aspects of marketing. This is because it is hard to do – it relies on capturing the authentic voice of customers who are so proud of what you have achieved for them that they are willing to put it on record.

Showcase Marketing

Over the past decade, Financial Marketing has developed its own approach to creating and sustaining evidenced-focused marketing programmes for its clients.We call it Showcase Marketing.

It is the ability to deliver powerful insight into the skills, capabilities and competitive advantage of a brand through the investment in creating key, evidenced-focused, marketing assets and ensuring their optimal utilisation through multiple channels to support sales.

Or to put it another way it’s about helping your customers give you praise. B2C, B2B, B2B2C, it doesn’t matter. Testimony engenders trust, keeps your marketing authentic and encourages recommendation.

If competitive advantage in business is about creating key valuable assets that are hard to replicate, then testimony is right at the top of the list.

Key Activities

Creating a powerful showcase marketing programme is about being thorough in a number of key activities and being relentless in discovering opportunities to gather evidence and transform them into testimony.

Here’s our run down of these key activities:

Ask – Create a culture to naturally elicit customer testimony. Testimony emanates from great products and service. It is a team wide endeavour.

Brand Match – Testimony and brand need to marry together. Review, and possibly refresh, the core brand essence, supporting pillars, key points of difference and the elevator pitch to reflect the business today and tomorrow.

Mapping – Identify key events in the customer lifecycle where testimony must play a core role in communications and dovetail these to key points of difference.

Creation – Expert interviewing and copywriting is necessary to capture the customer’s authentic voice.

Permission – Create multi-channel/multi-platform client permission to be able to produce modular copy assets that can be utilised for multiple purposes.

Versioning – Craft assets by channel and also by media (written, video etc) and length.

Planning – Ensure optimal utilisation by channel, frequency and longevity.

Leadership – Incorporate both testimony and powerful external commentators to create compelling and useful article assets

Creativity – Visualise evidence-based assets to enhance their communications value

Lifecycle – Renew testimony to maximise its validity over time. Moving the advocacy forward through the customer journey.

Now More Than Ever

No matter how anyone tries to play it down, we are in for an economic rough ride. Pockets are shrinking. Budgets are tight. Buying decisions will become ever more rigorous. Testimony is going to be vital in the communications mix as the marketing environment gets tougher.