FLEB Marketing Tactic #10 Testimonials as Triggers
This is Day 10 of How To Spot a Female Lifestyle Empowerment Brand (FLEB). ⠀
If you’re a consumer, this crash course can help you make an informed, powerful decision about who you offer your time, money, and attention to.⠀
If you’re an entrepreneur, download this free 10-day class to help you audit your own business practices, so that you can:⠀
- Bake justice into your business practices and marketing (and flourish while you do that)⠀
- Make sure you’re creating the social and client impact you intended
WHAT NOT TO DO⠀
FLEB Tactic #10:⠀
Use Testimonials as Triggers⠀
Client testimonials on sales pages are there to prove results & establish trust.⠀
But most of us only publish the most exceptional results achieved by a select few of our clients.⠀
Client testimonials like that are not an honest indicator of real outcomes for most people.
And so the social/mental trigger of “social proof” is being subconsciously activated to MANUFACTURE trust.⠀
In a high-risk selling situation, subconsciously-triggered trust undermines a client’s decision-making process — with potentially disastrous results for them.⠀
WHAT TO DO INSTEAD⠀
Culture-Making Business Practice #10⠀
What if we don’t need client testimonials on sales pages?⠀
What if it might be better for our clients if we don’t?
What if we can still achieve & even exceed our revenue goals without them?⠀
⠀
What is the female lifestyle empowerment brand (FLEB)
and why is it a problem?
Female
- Conform to the cultural demands of Ideal Femininity in order to rise
- Reinforces gender dualist/binary
Lifestyle
- Display wealth, privilege & leisure in order to manufacture social authority over other women
Empowerment
- Use the language of feminism & social change to bait a women into following/buying… while doing (oppressive) business as usual.
- Conflates individual success with collective empowerment (they are not the same thing)
Brand
- Teach women how to style themselves as saleable, consumable objects in order to ‘succeed’
- Asks us to erase ourselves in order to perform a brand character
I hesitated to post this. I do not want anyone to interpret this a wholesale ban on client testimonials.⠀
Let’s navigate this contextually, with nuance.
Dr. Michelle Mazur’s (@drmichellemazur) high-risk/low-risk distinction can help us discern when & where to use testimonials (see Day 9).⠀
High risk selling situation? Maybe testimonials don’t belong on that sales page.⠀
On my high-price offers, I currently do not use client testimony AT ALL…and I always hit my income goals. ⠀
(This year my sales are up 190% compared to all of 2020.)⠀
IT CAN BE DONE. No client testimonials required.⠀
h/t @toimarie for her critique of testimonials
