Without that trust, prospective guests are not willing to book.
In this blog post and video, we’re discussing testimonials, credibility, and social proof. They’re an essential element on your tour description pages because they help you build trust, and they help you build confidence with your potential guests.
Let’s start from the shared understanding that testimonials and social proof are really important for sales. We could go through all kinds of quotes and scientific studies or break down the psychology of why word of mouth recommendations mean so much.
Testimonials & Social Proof on Your Tour Sales Pages
But if we just agree on that already – which most tour business owners understand – then we can move on to the much more interesting question of why is it that so many tour operators do such a terrible job of implementing testimonials and social proof on their tour sales pages?
Don’t get me wrong, a lot of tour business owners are crushing it when it comes to getting online reviews on TripAdvisor, Google, and Yelp. Most tour businesses do a pretty good job of having some social proof and testimonials on their homepage and about page. But so many fall flat when it comes to tour description pages.
Don’t Link Out From Your Tour Sales Pages
At Guest Focus, we strongly recommend that you do not link out to other websites from your tour description pages. That includes linking out to your review profiles. When someone is on a tour or activity sales page, we have one goal in mind for them, and that is to click on your call to action button.
Now you can link to your review profiles on your homepage, and your about us page. We don’t have an issue with it there. But once you’ve got somebody on your tour description page, the last thing we want to be doing is sending them over to Facebook or sending them over to TripAdvisor (who, by the way, you may be competing with, in terms of them being a reseller of your tours, or they might cross sell your prospective guest a competitors tour!).
How to Display Testimonials Effectively
So how should we effectively display testimonials on our tour sales pages?
A simple heading, ‘What our guests are saying’, with testimonials underneath in slider format is ideal. Sliders make it a little more mobile friendly, but you don’t have to use these. The implementation is less important than actually getting some guest quotes on your website.
Which Testimonials to Display
Okay, but how do we know which testimonials to choose?
Using testimonials should be done strategically, meaning you want to choose testimonials that overcome some of the main objections to booking your tours.
Let’s say people are nervous about coming on your aerial zip line tour because they’re a little bit nervous about heights or they’ve never done this before. A really effective testimonial to choose would be somebody who says, “I was really nervous about doing an aerial zip line. It was my first time, but I felt so safe and secure. Their guides were wonderfully supportive and I would highly recommend this to any other first time flyers.”
That is a strategically chosen, super powerful bit of social proof that’s going to put a prospect’s mind at ease. That’s what you need to be thinking about when you’re choosing testimonials.
Avoid the generic testimonials that say, “Great tour. Highly recommended.” And get laser focused into choosing the ones that are overcoming objections.
Where to Find Testimonials to Display
Any quote that you receive in your own business is fair game to display on the website. In terms of reviews that are collected, let’s say on TripAdvisor, we recommend that you use those quotes, though always reference where they came from.
We don’t believe that you have to explicitly link to the review site where it came from. But we do recommend attributing it. Much like if you had a quote in a magazine or media or a newspaper, you could attribute that quote to that particular journal.
Try and keep your testimonial quotes punchy – only a couple of sentences. A common mistake is to have them run quite long and you ask people to burn a lot of calories to read them.
Other Credibility Boosters to Consider Adding
So what are some other credibility boosters that we could add directly to your tour sales pages? How about some information about your business?
A simple quote like, “Over 10,000 happy guests”. That’s an indicator that you’re doing something right. If you can get to 10,000 guests or whatever that number might be for you. You’ve been in business since 2010 or 2015. That’s another great credibility indicator.
What about awards or media mentions? A lot of tour businesses get great coverage or are even recommended in guidebooks, but they don’t tell their potential guests about it.
If you are recommended by a guidebook, if you have been featured in a magazine, in a publication (even local ones) these are credibility indicators worth mentioning on your tour description pages.
Don’t assume that people are going to click through your website and see all of that social proof on other pages. Testimonials, credibility, boosters and social proof need to be directly on your tour sales pages, at the exact moment of commitment for your guests.
In this blog post, we’ve given you some very simple best practices and some inspiration for how tour businesses can implement social proof to drive more sales.
One last note that’s pretty important.
Your online reputation and brand profile really does matter online. So make sure you have fundamentals like load speed, mobile responsiveness and design aesthetics done well. Without these fundamentals in place, any other attempts to establish credibility will be in vain.
Your tour sales pages will do a better job of converting prospects into paying guests if you add testimonials, credibility boosters and other forms of social proof.
If you need help implementing any of these tactics, please reach out to us at [email protected] and we’ll point you in the right direction.
