A powerful technique for organisations wanting to develop credibility, trust, and social proof is testimonial marketing. It entails leveraging pleased consumers’ glowing testimonials and successful experiences to advertise a good or service.
Testimonials can take many forms, including written testimonials, video testimonials, social media posts, and more. Using testimonial marketing, you can even increase potential clients’ confidence and credibility while demonstrating the utility and worth of your product or service through using third parties.
Adding this method to your marketing strategy becomes super important because it enhances your brand’s customer conversion rate. We recommend that you include customer testimonials in prominent locations across your marketing campaigns (such as on a landing page that receives a lot of traffic or in an email marketing campaign).
Testimonials are a form of social proofing. When you run your ads with your copy to inform your customer how your product/service benefits them, testimonial marketing puts your existing customers in the spotlight, and they speak for your product/service on your behalf.
Here’s a look at some quick stats that tell us the importance of testimonials from your customers
- An estimated 72% of customers say they trust a business if it has positive testimonials
- Regularly leveraging customer testimonials may increase your brand’s revenue by 62%.
- An estimated 92% of consumers believe a non-paid endorsement (testimonials) more than paid advertisements before making purchasing decisions
Why is Testimonial Marketing Important?
Testimonial marketing can be one of your most powerful instruments for building trust and maintaining customer credibility. As a marketer, you have a ton of marketing strategies to boost your brand’s sales and expand its customer base.
However, we feel that video testimonials are the best marketing strategy. Here are a few reasons why –
- Social proof: Testimonials provide proof that your product or service is valuable and effective. When potential customers see that other people have had positive experiences with your business, they’re more likely to trust and choose your product or service.
- Emotional connection: Testimonials can help potential customers feel emotionally connected with your business. When they see that other people have had positive experiences with your business, they’re more likely to feel good about choosing your product or service.
- Increased Credibility: Testimonials from real customers are often seen as more credible than marketing messages from the business itself. When potential customers see that other people have had positive experiences with your business, they’re more likely to believe that your product or service is effective.
- Improved SEO – Search engines like Google prioritise video content in their search results. Video testimonials drastically improve the search engine rankings of your business when you embed those testimonials on your website or YouTube channel. This paints a positive picture of your brand and drives more traffic to your site.
- Showcase Unique Selling Points – Video testimonials offer an opportunity to showcase your business’s unique selling points in a way that text or images can’t. Having customers share their experiences with specific features or benefits of your product or service can highlight what is setting you apart from your competitors.
As we’ve established, testimonial videos from your customers help build credibility and trust with your brand. Moreover, it attaches a face and a story to your brand that your target customers can relate to.
But how do you create your business’s most effective customer testimonial video? Listed below are some ideas that you can implement while making a video testimonial for your brand –
Tips On How To Create Video Testimonials
1. Choose Video Testimonials Over Written Testimonials
A testimonial video allows you to highlight your satisfied customers and their interactions with your good or service, which can help you establish credibility and trust with newer clients.
If you have a written recommendation from a happy client, you might be debating whether making a video of it is worthwhile. The response is a resounding YES! However, you shouldn’t hesitate since a video testimonial is considerably more compelling than a written one.
Choose a group of satisfied clients and let them talk candidly in front of the camera rather than flashing plain, simple text testimonials. Depending on your requirements, these bytes can be handled collectively or separately.
Seeing your customers talk about their experiences gives your ads a human touch. The likelihood that your audience will choose your brand over others increases when you receive direct customer feedback.
2. Keep it Crisp and Engaging
We live in the age of instant solutions where our attention spans have been reduced to less than a minute thanks to the wave of reels and short videos presented on social media platforms. Therefore, you need to be mindful of the duration of your customer’s video testimonial and plan accordingly.
Ensure that the videos are crisp and concise. Gone are the days when people enjoy lengthy advertisements. Always remember that the ideal length for a video testimonial is under 2 minutes.
Making a video out of all of these brief but effective testimonials is one of the effective ways to use them. Such compilations might be utilised for lengthy video platforms, or you can publish the sharper bytes one at a time on your other business channels.
3. Directly Address Your Target Audience
Anybody who might be interested in your product or service is your target audience. You must first determine their problem to write a testimonial that concentrates on it. Once you identify it, you can create a message that explicitly tackles the problem your potential consumer is experiencing.
Remember that your testimonial videos reference what you can do for prospective clients, backed by several satisfied clients who can attest to it.
Remember that the primary goal of these testimonial videos is to persuade your audience to choose your goods or services. Therefore, focus these video testimonials on how your products can change your potential customers’ circumstances.
4. Build An Emotional Connection
Using statistics and data is essential to persuade potential clients about your business. For example, it’s crucial to relay that you assisted a particular number of individuals in resolving their issues or that your services are designed to match the budgets of those most in need. You must realise, nevertheless, that the majority of your potential customers are trying to find a solution to their difficulties.
The emotional bond comes into play at this point.
There is a good possibility that your viewers will convert if they relate to the people in your testimonial videos. In addition, you’ll have a wonderful marketing tool if an emotional quotient supports the testimonies.
Viewers are more inclined to trust your brand to assist them in overcoming their pain points when they see your existing customers who were frustrated or struggling with similar problems and how your products or services helped them overcome those problems.
5. Different Sizes for Different Platforms
Considering the various video sizes depending on the platforms used to post these testimonials is crucial. Different platforms accommodate videos of varying sizes and lengths. A 30-second testimonial video, for instance, can be made for an Instagram reel, or a 2-minute video can be submitted to YouTube.
When making video testimonials, it’s important to keep in mind not only their length but also their size. While YouTube allows for the upload of landscape-format videos, Instagram advises adopting portrait-style video formats for reels. Like YouTube, other platforms, including Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Pinterest, have natively set aspect ratios and lengths for videos.
To get the most views, it’s essential to keep in mind that your testimonial films should match the platform’s stylistic requirements. And that’s when you need to use your skills as a video director.
No matter how you handle the video dimension in post-production, make sure your subject—in this case, your satisfied customer—is positioned so they are visible in the frame. Taking numerous footage supporting a distinct dimension is another approach to accomplish this.
6. Make Use Of Visual Aids In Your Testimonial Video
This is a simple trick to emphasise your USPs and ensure your audience understands the main points without watching the complete video.
There is no denying that all of us have limited attention spans. Thus, consider how you’d convey your point if the audience watching the testimonial video needed to be more focused. Supers are the simplest way to accomplish it.
The texts that sporadically pop up in the video are called supers. These supers may take the form of a declaration, a quotation, or simply some words.
Insert supers between each byte as you edit the video testimony. The supers can be used to emphasise your primary offerings. You can even display statistics on how you have assisted your current clients, the different problems you have resolved, the positive customer feedback, etc.
As a result, even if the spectator is off-screen or muted, they can still learn something by reading the supers. Also, your video receives a break, making it less content-heavy but still educational.
Now that we have considered the importance of video testimonials and various tips and tricks on creating video testimonials, here are a few examples of how brands showcase their video testimonials to attract new customers and build an aura of credibility around it.
Examples of Customer Testimonial Videos to Improve Business
Zoom became an incredibly popular household name since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic – so much so that “to Zoom” is an entirely acceptable form of the verb!
Sonos is an audio equipment company with sites spread across the globe. For seamless communication, the brand needed a comprehensive solution that’d allow them to discuss projects and tackle problems in real time.
This superb testimonial uses a “behind the scenes” approach, giving the viewers a glimpse of how Sonos manufactures its products and how the teams work together across different time zones. People love taking a peek at how things are made by their favourite brands, so ask your client to show how they use your product/service to make their day-to-day operations easier.
We’ve all known about Samsung being a tech powerhouse and a pioneer in the field of smartphones, but how many of us knew about Samsung Display Solution?
This video testimonial is all about a product in action. It shows how Samsung Display Solutions is lighting up the Superdry Norway store. The Superdry team members quickly jump on to the product’s benefits and how it helps increase their visibility among prospective clients.
Another noteworthy aspect of the video is how it focuses on the result and the current standing of the store after the screens have been installed rather than the screens themselves, lending the way to building the perception in the minds of potential clients that Samsung Display Solution is a result oriented brand to work with. As a result, there is a premium feel in every result that they churn out.
The primary callout in this customer testimonial video is the beginning. It is essential to grab the attention of your audience in the first few seconds in a world where the internet is flooded by video content. This video has one of the members of the team interacting directly with the viewers while walking outdoors, which acts as an instant hook.
The rest of the testimonial is straightforward, where they switch between the various team members talking about the various advantages of the product. Another callout about this video testimony is the ending. Just as the video starts in a very interactive way, it also ends with a bang, where they showcase the clients holding a flag with the ChurnZero logo on it. Again, using visual cues apart from the people talking is a useful technique in keeping the attention of your viewers pinned to your video.
This customer video testimonial works well because it shows the Herschel team utilising Hootsuite to market their products on their social media. It also presents the viewpoints of various team members, giving a pretty extensive summary of how Hootsuite is used by every organisation member, from the Digital Marketer to the Managing Director.
Another aspect that was highlighted in the customer testimonial video was growth. It dwelled on how Hootsuite can act as an additional team member if your marketing crew needs to be bigger. Again, this is something that will be attractive to your prospective clients because it focuses on results and how it helps teams work effortlessly together.
This testimonial video for Dropbox puts the customer(s) in the spotlight, with each brand operating in a distinct industry. It explains how each of them has benefited from the Dropbox for Business service by Dropbox.
The video also features the logos of well-known companies worldwide that use Dropbox: National Geographic, Kayak, and Spotify. This is what the power of social proofing does. If you have a well-known client in your bag, make sure to leverage their presence in your video testimonials. This further reinforces the power of your brand in your target audience and does wonders for roping in new customers.
Testimonial marketing is a powerful tool for businesses to build credibility, trust, and authority with their target audience. By showcasing the real-life experiences of satisfied customers, businesses can communicate the benefits of their products or services in a more authentic and relatable way.
To make the most out of testimonial marketing, businesses should follow key strategies, such as identifying the right customers to ask for testimonials, crafting compelling stories, leveraging social proof, and using various channels to showcase testimonials.
Out of all the options you have at your disposal when it comes to testimonial marketing, video testimonials are an ideal method of ensuring that your current customers are really happy with your product/service and building a certain level of trust in prospective customers. It is also an excellent way to highlight the features of your product and the quality it brings to the table. The most important facet of this is that you put your client in the spotlight and let the quality of your product/service speak for itself through their experiences.
Buzzproof is the perfect place that helps brands create and curate video testimonials from their customers. Learn more here.
