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Leads are great, but if they don't count for much unless you convert them into customers. This may sound harsh, but, hey – it's 2022, and competition is tough.
Leads are great, but if they don't count for much unless you convert them into customers. This may sound harsh, but, hey – it's 2022, and competition is tough.
As you read this, there are thousands and thousands of companies trying to attract the same customers as you are, so you have to ask yourself, what makes you so special and unique? What makes you so different that customers will want to come to you and try your product or service?
This is the same question your customers will have while researching your business. One of the best ways to answer it is video testimonials – recommendations not from you but from your customers.
Video testimonials use positive references from their satisfied customers and promote their experience offline and online. They can have a significant impact on your business results, especially if you use the right format.
Why Video Testimonials over Regular Testimonials?
Now, there are a lot of experienced business owners who use customer testimonials to promote their business. Is a simple testimonial enough to increase sales?
It used to be. People are attracted to honest experiences said in an an-easy-to-understand manner, which won't ever change. However, the industry has evolved – having a simple testimonial on your website might not be enough anymore. There are more advanced ways to convey your message, engage your audience emotionally, provide exciting content or even repurpose content.
This is especially true for B2B video testimonials, where word-of-mouth is crucial, and decision-makers are looking at all the angles before making a decision.
How Testimonial Videos Can Boost Your Sales
By definition, a testimonial video is a form of video content where satisfied and current customers speak openly and honestly about their experience with a company, product, or service.
These testimonials are a great way to utilize user-generated content and provide proof of customer satisfaction: 47% of people claim that they love testimonial videos because they help them visualize how a product or service actually works.
Here is how video testimonials can add to your business:
- Endorsing reputation
- Developing trust quickly
- Adding trustworthiness to selling claims
- Strengthening your existing audience
- Attracting a new audience
- Standing out from the competition
Here are seven straightforward ways to create video testimonials that will easily increase sales.
1. Use Real Emotions
People connect with people. Personal stories are so powerful that text can significantly impact customer decisions because they believe in your customers' beliefs. They live what your customers love because they find themselves in your values, etc. This is what testimonial videos should aim for – to connect.
A testimonial video can have tremendous power when done right. It can quickly connect with our leads emotionally, engage them, and empower them to make that desirable step – to make a purchase.
This is the main reason why any great testimonial video will always focus on emotions.
It's also the best way for customers to showcase their ideas and transform them into a value easily added to the service or products.
Always create testimonial videos that will highlight the emotion that an audience can easily connect with.
It's essential to lean on empathy and envision yourself in other people's shoes: If your customers are young single parents and you are selling baby products, speak to their issues and emotions that they share and experience on a daily level. Have them sit together, facing the camera, maybe even holding their toddler on their lap.
Focusing on the emotional pull is always an effective and result-oriented strategy.
2. Should You Script Video Testimonials?
As a general rule, video testimonials should be spontaneous and genuine – which is why many brands feel like they need to be unscripted. Sure, there is always a chance that your participants will deliver the message spontaneously without a need to consult a plan or script.
Additionally, people tend to stress out when they have to memorize, perform, and stick to the script, so a bit of improvisation can do wonders.
However, if you prefer to keep things more organized, you should have some structure. Instead of a word-for-word script, you can give participants some pointers – this way, you will let people be themselves and share their original thoughts. A script would then be more of a bullet list of the key points you want to be covered.
For a great video testimonial script, you should have straightforward guidelines to enable great storytelling and testimonial flow.
Here are some tips to help you go through the process:
- Write a catchy title
- Start by highlighting the customer’s problem
- Create an emotional connection
- Describe how your product or service can help solve problems using a practical example
- Always have a CTA (Call to Action)
3. Set The Right Tone For Your Testimonial
Sometimes it's not about what is said, but how it's said.
This is especially important when it comes to living images like videos where the tone of a person can set the whole stage.
When the tone is right, your audience will be hooked and glued to the screen until they see that CTA (Call to Action) and make the final step of purchasing the product or service. However, when it comes to testimonial videos, things can be tricky tone-wise, because most pieces are built around a simple interview.
That person you choose as the face of your testimonial needs to show the excitement, passion, and company's overall vibe – this is something that's commonly seen in the best customer testimonial videos.
The right tone is what gets the audience enhanced and hooked.
The very best video testimonials have a relaxed and honest tone that looks like a regular conversation, like a conversation that flows between two people who know each other.
Inform your participants about the dress code and let them know there will be a hairdresser to support their best video look – you want them to look natural and happy.
Spend extra on refreshments and food. Humanize your business: let people get to know each other and fool around – all this will contribute to the overall relaxed, human feel of the entire testimonial video.
Pay attention to those testimonial videos that you love so much – you will see every video element, from inserts, video's pacing, and even sound and tweaked in such a manner to reinforce the sentiment that the person in front of the camera sends.
Do your best to transmit the energy you want people to associate with your brand.
4. Many Voices, One Message
Never be afraid to try something new and risk a bit inside the business world. People love different approaches, fresh angles, new solutions, and constant improvement. This should be seen in testimonial videos as well.
As mentioned above, it's common for testimonial videos to focus on a single client, on a single customer, or even a single organization and get the most from it.
There isn't anything wrong with this, but it can be done better – it can involve more people and result in more leads and eventually customers. Over the past few years, creatives started experimenting with different approaches to shake things a bit.
Instead of focusing on a single customer, some testimonial videos are collages of different people, collected with a single idea. It's ok to include more people, as long as the organizational part works smoothly.
Don't be afraid to try a different approach – just make sure that you back it up with the right photos, sounds, and scripts.
5. It's Not All About You
Always have in mind that the testimonial is not just about your business and its values – at least not directly.
Testimonials represent a big part of the customer feedback definition for companies of all sizes, but first and foremost they are all about the people and their experiences with your product or service. So, don't focus the story too much on your services' specific features and selling points. Your customers' stories are what people want to hear and what will ultimately sell your product.
The best customer testimonial videos show what a specific product or service can do – live, on streets, inside someone's company, within someone's home. At the same time, many people comment, share their thoughts on specific services and products.
This way, the brand gets additional validation because multi-sources share how a single touch helps them improve their lives.
6. Feature Different Target Customers
Did you know that up to 70% of consumers prefer product videos from people similar to themselves? When you think about it, this makes a lot of sense: relating to someone has immense power.
Again – connection matters.
Reaching thousands if not millions of people is great, but what matters, even more, is getting the right people.
This means that each of your testimonials should aim to engage a particular target audience, a specific subset of your customers. This is especially important if what you’re selling is intended for a broad audience. In that case, you might want to segment your testimonials much like you should be segmenting all of your marketing efforts to engage with various customer personas on a deeper level.
You can segment testimonials by:
- Demographics: men and women don’t respond the same way to the same types of messages. Neither do people of different ages.
- Location: if you have many customers from a specific location, using one of those customers in a testimonial can help connect with the rest of that demographic.
- Products: if you have a wide range of products, you can film different testimonials for different products, targeting different audiences with each one.
- Behavior and interests: some of your testimonials can be geared towards people of specific interests or purchasing habits. In that case, using a person with those same interests in your testimonial would make a massive difference.
7. Edit Like A Pro, Or Hire A Professional
Once you record everything and thank customers for participating, it’s time to jump into the final step – editing.
Editing is something that professionals should always do. You will get raw, long-form video material that must be cut and sorted out to keep the viewers’ attention and inspire them to buy.
As a final result, the video has to be short, engaging, and inviting. It also needs to have a logical flow, so your audience can see and learn how you can fix their problems.
Allow yourself to work longer on editing until you are 100% satisfied with the outcome.
Extra Tips On Creating Video Testimonials That Increase Sales
Finally, here are some minor tips on how to execute video testimonials without missing a step.
- Use engaging visuals
- Focus on key ideas and takeaways
- A short video always does better
- Focus on actual results and numbers
- Have a compelling theme
- Write questions beforehand
- Don't have a distracting background
- Plan logistics in advance
- Promote on different platforms, including social networks
- Use video testimonials as a newsletter to reach your existing customer base
- Upload video testimonials to your website
Wrapping Up
All in all, creating content that stands out isn't easy. It will demand time, energy, devotion, and the same super awesome organization skills.
Plus, you will have to find the one charismatic customer who is totally in love with your brand or service and be willing to do whatever it takes to get that person to share their story. If you ever find yourself in doubt of thinking that testimonial video is too costly, think of the long-term benefits and focus on that revenue that will eventually come.
Get started. Don't plan for too long and let that spark fade away – if you feel that the time's right to have a testimonial video now, do it.
It's your business, decision, testing, and customers – do what is best for your business, and it will return to you multiplied. Be confident of the success of your business, and don't be scared to share it with the world. There are millions of people looking for your solution: reach out to them today!
About the author:
Sam Shepler is the founder and CEO of Testimonial Hero. 150+ B2B revenue teams at Google, UiPath, Medallia, InsightSquared, and many others use Testimonial Hero to easily create customer videos that engage prospects, reduce friction in the sales cycle, and drive more revenue faster.
