Advertising agencies and marketing research firms learned long ago that credible testimonial messaging can do more to bring in new customers than just about anything. If you think about it, it makes sense.
When you’re new in town and need a dentist, what do you do? Ask your neighbors and co-workers, right? Their recommendations are testimonials, and you trust them more than that “Free X-Rays” coupon you got in the mail. Trust is an important component of successful marketing. Difficult to gain, easy to lose, the trust factor is often the difference between success and failure.
Asking around about flight training is a little trickier. Not many people have taken flying lessons, so you'd probably have to ask a lot of random people to find one who could give you any advice on the subject. That's where advertising and marketing efforts come into play, and where well-done testimonials can take the place, to a large degree, of that missing trusted friend.
Here are a few tips on where and how to use testimonials, as well as some do's and don'ts when integrating them into your flight school's promotional campaigns:
Never use someone's words or image in a testimonial without their written permission. Casual approvals or handshake deals are never good enough. That doesn't mean you have to write a 10-page contract. A plainly worded paragraph will suffice.
Researchers have surmised that testimonials work so well because of something called social proof. “If everybody says the sky is blue, it must be blue, and if people are comfortable going along with that, well, who am I to disagree?” It gets a little more complicated than that as variables related to the person giving the testimonial change. As a professor at Yale, Stanley Milgram conducted a series of social science studies in the 1960s in which he tested the willingness of people to follow leaders who varied by age, familiarity, occupation, and social status. People were more willing to follow leaders who were older, of higher perceived social status, were well-dressed, and from high-status occupations. Taking a page from Milgram's playbook, managers are advised to consider these parameters when choosing testimonial providers. Just make sure they're real people.
William Woodbury is a flight instructor and freelance writer in Southern California.
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