What Are The Differences Between Signpost and VocalReferences
For the majority of small and medium sized businesses getting through to their target audience online is a huge challenge.
Even after you get a prospect to visit your website you still need to convince them that your company is trustworthy and can deliver on its promises.
That’s why it’s essential to have social proof on your website.
With the help of social proof such as testimonials, you can showcase your best customer experiences and instantly alleviate a lot of the skepticism and doubts that the prospect might be facing.
Since other people have used your products or services and achieved successful results trusting you becomes much easier for new visitors as well.
The statistics back this up.
88% of consumers trust user reviews as much as they would trust a personal recommendation, which means that online testimonials can basically provide the same effect as someone recommending your company to their friends or family members by word of mouth.
What’s more, testimonials help your site’s visitors identify with real people who had similar problems and were able to solve them using your company. Having a happy customer tell their story of how your product works will have a much bigger impact than anything that you could claim yourself.
But even though it’s clear that testimonials can be incredibly powerful, collecting them from your best customers and displaying them on your website can be challenging.
Finding testimonial templates that fit with your website design is challenging enough, and if you’re like most companies, you don’t really have the budget for designing your entire website from scratch.
The good news is you don’t have to.
With the help of existing testimonial software you can quickly add testimonials to your website and start showcasing your best customer experiences to every visitor that comes to your site.
To help you choose the best solution we’ll be comparing two of the leading solutions that are available today – VocalReferences and Signpost.
Both offer a full range of powerful features, including the ability to easily collect customer testimonials that engage your customers, but they have quite a few differences as well.
So let’s go over each of the most important criteria for collecting and displaying customer testimonials and figure out which one is best suited for small and medium size businesses like yourself.
Hands-On Support
When trying to get the most out of a testimonial software solution you will likely need guidance on how to use the features and apply them to your website and your business.
That’s why it’s crucial that the provider that you choose offers hands-on support and is willing to answer any questions that you might have.
And one of the biggest advantages of working with VocalReferences is the unparalleled support that it offers to all its’ clients.
If you opt for the Pro Plus plan, you will not only get assistance in setting everything up but will also gain access to their team of experts who will review your page and provide helpful suggestions about how to make the most out of what VocalReferences has to offer.
VocalReferences wants their customers to succeed, so they will not only help you set everything up but will even show you testimonial examples to give you ideas of the different ways that you could use testimonials on your site and beyond.
Signpost also offers email and chat support, but you will need to opt for the Pro plan if you want priority support, and their plans start at $299 a month, which can be a bit pricey for most small or medium sized businesses.
Text and Video Testimonials
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Having a diverse range of testimonials is essential if you want to get the most out of the positive experiences that your past customers are sharing.
Text testimonials are great and can be incredibly effective, but the truth is not everyone responds to text testimonials the same way and some people might even find them not as trustworthy, especially since shady companies have been known to use fake written testimonials on their sites.
That’s why it makes sense to diversify your testimonials and video testimonials are the perfect way to do that.
With the help of video testimonials you immediately eliminate any possibility of your testimonials being fake, as your prospects get to see a real, genuine person share their experiences on camera, which proves that they not only had success with your products but like your company enough to vouch for them in such a personal way.
Having video testimonials can make a huge difference to your conversion rates because they not only provide an undeniable proof element to your claims but also help engage your prospects who may not respond to text as well as they do to video.
Signpost on the other hand, does not offer video testimonials as part of their services, which can significantly limit your ability to cater to different types of prospects and prevent you from maximizing your conversion rate.
Import Reviews from Third-Party Review Sites
Whether you like it or not, conversations about your business will happen outside of your website or social media pages.
But while you can’t completely control what types of reviews you get on third-party review sites it’s important to at least be able to get the most out of the good ones and prominently display them on your website.
VocalReferences makes it very easy to import reviews from third-party sites: Facebook, Google, and Yelp allowing you to display them on your website and tell your brand’s story through a diverse range of customer experiences.
As we mentioned before, telling stories through the words of your customers is much more effective than trying to talk about your product’s features or services yourself. This is why VocalReferences’ import feature is so valuable, turning the software from a simple testimonial tool to a marketing solution as well.
On the other hand, Signpost can help you get more reviews on third-party sites by requesting feedback through marketing messages, but they do not offer the ability to import those testimonials to your site.
Integrations with Web Platforms
Integrations are an integral part of using testimonial software solutions – you need to be able to integrate with the most popular platforms such as Zapier and Infusionsoft.
But even though it’s important, there is more than one way to make it happen.
Signpost integrates with quite a few platforms, including Quickbooks, Constant Contact, MailChimp and others, allowing you to import your customer lists and reach out to them automatically, gaining feedback and reviews.
VocalReferences takes a different approach. Since there are so many new and diverse platforms that businesses are using today it can be difficult to develop integrations with each one. Instead, the company focuses its attention on making the process super simple and adaptive to any platform.
With VocalReferences you can simply copy and paste a unique code to your site, and use the intuitive and simple widget system to customize the testimonials as well as their placement on your site.
Instead of worrying about integrations and how to set them up, you can be up and running in minutes and achieve great results on almost any platform.
SEO Enhancements
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We’ve already established a range of reasons why testimonials are crucial to your success online – they help position your company as an authority in your field, showcase your best customers experiences, and enable your company to be seen as more trustworthy and reliable to prospective customers.
However, there’s an added bonus to having testimonials on your website that wasn’t mentioned before which can deliver incredible results if you know how to use it correctly.
Since SEO can be one of the best ways to gain a steady stream of website visitors each month VocalReferences has developed an effective system for getting your testimonials ranked and displayed for the relevant keywords in your niche.
VocalReferences submits all of the testimonials that you receive to Google, which gets them indexed on the search engine and can help your result climb higher in the rankings.
What’s more, they also use the Review Markup, which helps separate your reviews from others and give it an attention-grabbing STAR reviews on the results page.
If you opt for the Pro or Pro Plus plans, VocalReferences will even provide you with a Recommended Merchant badge that will help position your business as reliable and credible in the eyes of prospective clients.
Signpost doesn’t offer similar SEO services, but it does offer a separate Google AdWords service, which can drive traffic to your site, although it doesn’t really have anything to do with testimonials.
Recognition Badges for Online Reputation
Since social proof has so much influence on your website conversions and revenues, it’s important to use a range of social proof elements on your website and in online communications.
That’s why VocalReferences provides a Recommended Merchant Badge to its Pro and Pro Plus clients. The badge changes colors from bronze to gold, depending on the number of reviews that the site has received, which can provide additional reassurance to prospective buyers and help sway them to try out your products.
What’s more, VocalReferences also provides a Social Ratings Badge, which showcases your rating averages on various social media sites. Again, highlighting the best of your business.
Meanwhile, Signpost does not provide recognition badges and doesn’t even have a clear process for importing reviews to your site in the first place.
Price
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When choosing a testimonial software solution, you want to look at the features and the value that they can provide for your business and only then assess whether the cost is justifiable.
However, at the same time, you can’t ignore the important role that price can play in your decision process. If one solution can offer just as many, if not more, features at a fraction of the cost then it’s obvious that that option is superior.
And that is exactly the case when comparing VocalReferences and Signpost.
The pricing for Signpost starts at $299 per month and you would pay even more for their more comprehensive plans with advanced features, which is way more than many small or medium sized businesses are willing to pay.
On the other hand, VocalReferences offers a breadth of powerful features such as video testimonials, easy integration, importing third-party reviews and much more for around ten times less.
The Pro Plan, which comes with unlimited testimonials, unlimited displays and Google Optimization only costs $20.99 per month and even if you choose the Pro Plus plan that comes with Premium and personal support you still only pay $29.99 per month. VocalReferences is just simply more affordable for a business of any size, especially if you’re just starting out.
When you look at the range of features offered by the two solutions it becomes clear that the price difference is completely unwarranted.
Ease of Use
As we discussed at the beginning of this article, a testimonial software solution needs to be intuitive and easy to use – most business owners don’t have the time to spend weeks learning how to use it. It needs to be simple and straightforward and not require coding skills.
In that regard, both tools are relatively simple, although there are differences.
One of the best things about VocalReferences is that it doesn’t use integrations, so you can basically paste the code on your site and start inserting testimonials or importing them from third-party review sites immediately.
That’s about as simple as it can get, so you shouldn’t have any problems using it right away.
Signpost tries to automate a lot of the marketing processes by automatically contacting your list of customers and asking them for reviews or promoting offers, which is also quite convenient.
However, you’d still have to integrate it with your current workflows and that can be a hassle.
SMB Fit
In this review, we’ve covered a range of features that are essential for collecting and displaying testimonials and reviews on your website and online.
However, we also understand that the people who are looking for these types of solutions likely aren’t representing multi-million dollar corporations and are often small or medium sized businesses that need an affordable yet powerful solution that’s easy to set up and use.
That’s where VocalReferences really stands out among the competitors.
The developers of VocalReferences have taken the time to understand the needs of SMBs and have created a solution that’s simple to set up, can be used by almost anyone, and can help get the most out of the current positive experiences with your customers.
On the other hand, Signpost, with its heavy price tag and features that don’t help use testimonials on your website, isn’t ideally suited for a business that simply wants to increase sales by adding more social proof elements on their website and the search engines.
Therefore, when it comes to a good SMB fit, VocalReferences clearly wins out not only against Signpost but against most, if not all, competing solutions that are available.
Final Verdict
At this point, there’s little doubt about which of the two solutions comes out on top.
While Signpost is an interesting solution with a range of features, it’s actually more of a lead generation or customer engagement tool than a testimonial software solution, so it can’t really compete with the wide range of features offered by VocalReferences.
With VocalReferences, being able to add text and video testimonials to your website can make a huge difference to your conversion rate and your bottom line, so these features simply can not be ignored.
So, whether you’re an established medium-sized business or are just starting as a one-person small business, you can’t go wrong choosing VocalReferences – especially considering the affordable price that it offers.
