Your goal: Win sincere testimonials and
recommendations – so you can make it easier for other
clients to say “yes” - and of course, to develop additional
repeat or recurring business.

Please note: While it is essential to provide great client
service, you must never assert that your
marketing/business strength is providing “great customer
service”. This is ineffective. If anyone asserts this fact
(assuming it is true), it should be your customers
themselves, through their actual experience and
testimonial statements, either written (or even better) in
video format.

That said, there are some things you can do beyond
delivering an incredible client experience. These include:
• Developing an expertise and reputation building
content creation strategy (blog, white papers, videos);
• building a truly effective website; and
• adapting your website and content to responsive social
media relationships and concepts.

None of these strategies requires much money, though
they all require some effort and co-ordination. I’ll outline
some approaches to succeeding in these three focuses.

Content creation
The goal here is to make it easy for current and
previous clients to say good things about you, and to learn
valuable information to build on your quality/expertise
reputation. Your blog provides a good starting point –
because by regularly writing/videoing your insights,
observations, and stories, you add to your reference
points and knowledge.

8 – Winter 2018 — The Canadian Design and Construction Report
Your blog messages can easily be posted to your
website (see below) and then auto-posted to social media.

Videos don’t need to be slick or fancy. In fact,
testimonial videos that are grainy and rough are in my
opinion more credible and effective than slickly narrated
commercially produced efforts.

However, I think your writing should be solid and well-
edited. If you don’t have someone who writes well on your
staff, you may need to contract with a freelancer to
generate or edit your material. This will cost you some
money, but will be far less expensive than conventional
paid advertising.

Developing your social media relationships
Company profile pages for Facebook, Twitter and
LinkedIn can be created without fee, and you can easily
connect them to your website so that every time you add
a relevant post, it will auto feed to the relevant social
media sites, leveraging your marketing presence, without
costing you any additional money.

You’ll want to develop tools to monitor and manage
your social media image, inducing positive testimonials
and comments while avoiding negative comments and
reviews. There are some third party services that help this
process. They invite your clients to provide a “satisfaction”
report, and if it is excellent, they will encourage customers
to post their positive comments directly on the social
media sites. If they are negative, they will encourage your
clients to communicate with you privately so you can
resolve the issue and avoid negative reviews.