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According to Small Business Trends, 84% of consumers now trust online reviews from fellow consumers as much as personal recommendations from their family and friends. If you are not focusing on getting reviews, you are missing out on a huge opportunity. Testimonial videos are one of the best ways to showcase your expertise, trustworthiness and improve brand credibility in the long run.
However, to get this right takes a bit of planning. To make sure that your testimonial video strategy works, you will need to take note of a lot of different factors to ensure that you are able to communicate your customers' experience in the best way.
In this post, you will learn more about testimonial videos together with actionable tips and tactics to maximize your success.
What are Testimonial Videos?
A testimonial video is a form of video marketing which features customers sharing their real, positive experiences with your company's products and services. This can be similar to a review, but the format is different. In this case, the reviewer is speaking about their experiences in front of a camera. Hence, the message is much livelier, more interactive and you can communicate so much more than static texts and images.
5 Reasons Why You Should Make Testimonial Videos
Online users prefer to consume video content
Because of how dynamic they are in nature, videos are one of the most preferred types of content that is consumed by online users. Most users will prefer to watch a video about something instead of reading blocks of text.
72% of customers would rather learn more about a service by watching a video about it. (HubSpot)
When it comes to showcasing your products and its features, it is also more likely for your customers to watch a video about it instead of just learning about it through an online post or article.
Testimonial videos are shareable
Since a lot of consumers have a strong preference for videos, this means it is also more likely for them to share these compared to other types of content like photos and text posts. If you want your content to reach a high number of people, you will need to make a video for it.
Videos can generate 1200% more shares than photos and text posts combined. (G2 Crowd)
More and more online users are sharing a lot of videos on social media and as long as your testimonial videos tell a great and relatable story, they can be shareable as well.
Video has a higher retention rate compared to other types of content
Online viewers are able to retain 95% of a message when they watch it videos while they can only retain 10% when just reading text. (Insivia)
This higher retention rate is because videos are more capable of telling stories compared to text and photo posts. Besides the message, you are also communicating via visual effects, the tone of voice, facial expressions and many other visual cues. All of these will help with message retention and make your testimonial videos more memorable for the audience.
Consumers trust feedback and reviews from fellow consumers
As stated above, 84% of consumers trust online reviews as much as they trust a personal recommendation. Potential customers will be more likely to purchase your product if they trust the testimonials and reviews that they read or watch.
In a research by Wyzowl, 95% of consumers indicated that reviews, whether good or bad, influenced their purchase decisions.
This shows the power of testimonials. Do take note that your videos need to be genuine and authentic.
Testimonial videos are able to convert potential customers
At the end of the day, the goal of your testimonial videos is converting potential customers into actually buying your products or services. Customer testimonials are one of the most effective types of content to influence consumers’ purchase decisions. Wyzowl also stated that two-thirds of consumers are more likely to make a purchase after watching a testimonial video featuring the product or service helping someone like them.
Testimonial videos can really help your business to improve customer retention, boost credibility and at the end of the day, increase your conversion rate.
If you are looking for more reasons to create testimonial videos and just corporate videos in general, you can also check out this article: 5 Reasons Why Your Business Should Start Video Marketing Today.
Top 6 Tips To Create Successful Testimonial Videos
Make sure to feature real customers who represent your target audience
Unfortunately, many marketers have used fake reviews to manipulate their customers’ expectations. However, consumers nowadays are fully aware of that, and they can tell if a review seems fake or not.
Hence, when choosing who to feature in your testimonial video, you should keep in mind to choose someone that can represent your target audience. Get in touch with your existing customers and incentivize them to talk about their views on what kind of customer experience you provided and give a testimonial on camera.
Have a script
Featuring real reviews does not mean that you can’t have any control in the content of the video. In fact, it will be tremendously helpful for both the reviewer and your business if you create an outline of what the video is about.
This helps guide the reviewer’s train of thought, give him/her time to arrange the ideas and know what they are going to talk about. Not everyone can be fluent in front of a camera, and even the professionals make mistakes when they don’t have a script, so make sure to prepare it in advance.
If you need help in creating a script for your video, this blog from StoryXpress provides detailed instructions on how to make it: Step-by-Step: How to Write a Video Script in 2021.
Present a problem that your product can solve - Use the Inverted Pyramid
You can use the inverted pyramid structure to stage your narrative: start with the most important piece of information, the pain points, then move on to the details. Starting off your video by presenting a problem that your customers face is a great way to hook them in and give them a reason to watch all the way through to learn about how it can be resolved.
Back up your statements with proven facts
Depending on what your business is about, your testimonial videos can also feature some numbers, facts and statistics. For example, you can talk about how many people have purchased the products, or how much time your customers have saved by employing your services. You can work with the customers you are featuring ahead of the shoot to discuss interesting data and information that they may want to bring up in the testimonial video.
Focus on relevant product features and benefits
It is important for you to highlight your product's key features, especially if the ones that are directly related to the pain points your customer is referring to.
While your product may have a lot of benefits you want to talk about, you should make it easy for your audience and focus on just one or two key ones to avoid overloading the message. Showcasing more than enough may make the video appear too promotional and hence lessen its authenticity.
Don't forget to include a clear and compelling call-to-action prompt
If you don’t have a call to action, you will risk losing some potential customers. Your testimonial videos should urge your viewers to make a certain action towards your brand . What do you want them to do after watching the video? A great call-to-action prompt will bring the viewers to the next step and will help you measure the success of your videos.
If you want to learn more about how to make the CTAs in your videos more effective, you can read up on how StoryXpress can help you out by clicking here.
For more corporate video production tips, check out this article.
You Have Created a Testimonial Video. Now What?
A great video without a good distribution strategy is a wasted effort. While you should focus on the content and production process, you also need a plan to make the most use of your videos. Below are some of the channels you can utilize which can maximize the effectiveness of the testimonial video you have made.
Your Social Media Accounts
Your existing social media followers are an excellent source of potential customers. It also helps that for most social media platforms, video is the most consumed type content in everyone's feeds compared to other types of posts.
Hence, make sure to put your testimonials on the content calendar and reshare them frequently. You can use social media management tools such as Buffer or Hootsuite to manage your content easily.
Emails
You can send testimonial videos through email to your email subscribers. Not everyone on your email list is a purchasing customer, so these videos could be what persuades them to convert.
To make the email effective, the testimonial video should be relevant to the content in the email itself. You should personalize the emails and videos and make sure that you do not overdo this to avoid being pushy.
Related article: How to Use Videos in Your Email Marketing Strategy
Blog Posts
You can also create blog posts that would focus on all of the testimonial videos that you have made. Creating a blog post that features your testimonials will make it interesting to all of your customers if you can add more information and content.
What is great with including testimonial videos into your blog posts is that it helps these posts in your website gather organic traffic. When you gain more traffic, you can lead more users to your sales funnel and generate more leads and purchases.
Websites
This is one of the most important places to feature testimonial videos. When people check out your website, they expect to see social proof that you are credible, so put these videos on your homepage and landing pages. If you are an e-commerce business, you can also have them on relevant product pages.
Case Studies
You can also use testimonial videos from your customers and convert them into case studies. To make these more effective and understandable, you can share these in a step-by-step case study with your customers so that they can be inspired from it.
Adapting these testimonials into case studies can work well if you are in the B2B service industry. If you were able to aid a client in obtaining great results, you can make a study that would include all of the vital information and share it online.
Video Platforms
Video streaming platforms are another viable option where you can post your testimonial videos because of the millions of viewers they have. You can upload testimonial videos platforms like YouTube, Vimeo, and Dailymotion. Amongst these, YouTube is the largest video streaming platform, the second largest search engine, and also the second most visited website in the world - a huge opportunity to explore!
In summary, testimonial videos have great potential to improve your brand credibility, customer retention and conversion rate. Make sure that your videos are authentic, featuring real customers, well planned and are accompanied by a good distribution strategy to reach your desired outcomes.
