Video

Testimonials
Strategy Guide

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What is a
Video Testimonial?
A video testimonial is a video that showcases a former or existing satisfied
customer’s experience with your product, service, or brand.

Customer testimonial videos often appear on landing pages, product pages,

about pages and other core pages, for their ability to build trust and
confidence in your product or service. Video testimonials are also excellent
assets to have in one-on-one sales scenarios.

As a marketer or salesperson, the customer testimonial is one of the most

effective tools you have at your disposal. Short of talking face-to-face with
one of your satisfied customers, nothing converts a prospect into a customer
faster.

Testimonials are great.

Video testimonials are better.

Everything in the first part of this guide can be applied to all testimonials,
written or video. That said, if you’re opting for written testimonials over video
testimonials, you’re really limiting your marketing and sales potential.

When your prospects are able to put a face with a name, and see your
customer’s passion for your solution – with their own eyes – that trust and
confidence gets amplified, many times over!

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Benefits of
Video Testimonials
Testimonials are already one of the most powerful tools for marketers
and salespeople, for their ability to build trust and overcome
objections. Customer video testimonials take online reviews and case
studies to a whole new level, by getting to the emotions that lie
beneath the usage story, success metrics, and satisfaction of the
typical written testimonial.

When properly deployed, either on

your website or in 1:1 sales situations,
video testimonials can be especially
effective at moving prospect to the
next stage of your marketing funnel.

Since they are typically deployed at

the bottom of your funnel, they are
often the last piece of content that
prospects see, before deciding
whether or not to buy from you, so
it’s important that you get it right.

Why Use Testimonials? Why Use Video Testimonials?

Testimonials build trust and People are more likely to watch

credibility with your target video testimonials than read 3

customers. written ones.

Testimonials helps prospects Video testimonials inspire greater

understand how your product or levels of engagement and action.
service works in the real world.
Video testimonials create a deeper
Testimonials turn leads into emotional bond and build greater
sales at the bottom of the trust.
funnel.

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Why Customer
Video Testimonials
Are So Effective
There’s not a whole lot of trust out
there, these days.

We live in a post-truth world. A world of

alternative facts, where cherished
institutions and favored brands alike, are
now scrutinized like never before.
Who are you going to believe?

Well, in the case of brands, it’s often

the testimony of other customers that
sways us, one way or another. It’s called
social proof, and it’s one of the most
powerful weapons in a marketer’s
arsenal.

Ask yourself this question: When was

the last time you made a major
purchase decision, without first
checking out reviews for that product or
service?

That’s social proof, and research shows4

that it’s powerful force, when it comes to

online buying. In fact, 85% of consumers
trust online reviews as much as a
personal recommendation.

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Customer Video
Testimonials
Are a Great Example of
Social Proof at Work

A good video testimonial captures not only your customer’s story of how they
use your product or service, it also captures their passion for how you’ve helped
them. It’s not at all unusual to hear customers say things like:

Their product has I don’t know what

completely changed we would possibly
the way we do do without their
business. . . help…

Working with them has really elevated my

reputation, and the reputation of my
department, in the minds of the rest of the
company. . .

A good interviewer knows how to elicit deeply-felt, emotional responses like

these, from satisfied customers.

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Video Testimonial
Best Practices

So, how do you make a

testimonial video that gets
results?

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What makes a good testimonial?
The secret to the success of testimonials in business is social proof, so a good
testimonial is all about amplifying this effect.

A good testimonial video speaks to your target audience. Testimonials

should help prospects imagine how great it would be to become your
customer, and you can’t do that if the customer presented in the
testimonial video, doesn’t have some overlap with your target prospects.
Having a testimonial video for each of your target personas makes it easy
to build trust and overcome objections, no matter who you’re engaging.

Testimonial videos should get in-depth and detailed. When making a

purchasing decision, specifics matter. Prospects will use specifics to
gauge the authenticity of the testimonial, and to confirm that you’re able
to deliver what your product or service promises. The more details you
provide, the easier it is for prospects to understand the value of your
product, and how it works in the real world. 7

Testimonial videos focus on your customers – and not your products

and services – as the heroes of their own stories. Rambling on about
this feature and that feature, without ever getting into the customer’s
experience, shuts down any opportunity for prospects to get immersed
in the story, and to start fantasizing about becoming customers
themselves. Learn more about using the hero’s journey in video
testimonials.

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 Testimonial videos are credible. A good testimonial video makes
prospects forget they’re being marketed to, by appearing to be a real (and
it should be – see next point!), unsolicited endorsement of your offering.
People are highly skeptical of what they see online (especially these days),
so anything you can do to play up the authentic enthusiasm of the
customer in your video will go a long way.

Testimonials should NEVER be fake. If you want to actually connect with

prospects, save yourself a lot of potential embarrassment, and avoid a
possible visit from the Federal Trade Commission, your testimonials need
to be 100% real. There’s certainly some leeway when it comes to hiring
actors to deliver testimonials based on feedback from real customers –
but prospects can tell.

Testimonials need to help buyers overcome objections. This is what the

sales process/marketing funnel/whatever-you-call-it is all about, right?
Video testimonials are SUPER effective at overcoming buyer objections
because, in the prospect’s mind, it’s not your company doing the selling.
Just a really satisfied customer sharing their experience. It’d be a real
shame to not hit on as many of them as possible in your video.

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How Long Should a
Video Testimonial Be?

There’s no hard and fast rule for how long a testimonial video should be. It’s
often recommended to aim for 90-120 seconds, when it comes to online video.
However, because it’s bottom-of-funnel content and prospects are more
invested in finding answers, video testimonials often have runtimes between
three and seven minutes, sometimes much longer. We find three to five 9

minutes to be the sweet spot, between production investment and results.

The beauty of video content is that it can be edited almost indefinitely for
different channels and audiences.

Here at Thoughtcast Media, with each full length testimonial video order we
include a much shorter edit (sometimes as short as 30 seconds), for use on
social media. But you could also use a slightly different version of the same
video for your product pages, or completely change the narrative and use it
as an endorsement of a particular aspect of your business, like support or
integrations.

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What customers should you ask to be in your testimonials?

It's tempting to ask only your most complimentary customers to sit for a
testimonial video, but that strategy may prove a little short sighted. See this
post for tips on asking for testimonials from B2B clients.

If you serve a wide variety of different verticals, or if the people who

actually buy from you come from different persona types (i.e., job titles, 10

roles, etc.), you'll want to make sure that all of them are represented, as
best you can.

Of course, not all verticals or personas may have a representative champion,

when you begin shooting testimonials.

That's another reason why it's so important to have your testimonials

driven out of a broader satisfaction/reference program, which will allow you
to target the customers you need, to represent the different verticals and
personas you serve.

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A Word
About
Strategy
The most important step in any
video marketing project is
establishing a strategy for
individual videos, and for your
broader video marketing effort.

Videos that are not part of a

guiding strategy, and based on
best practices, are doomed to
fail.

For customer video testimonials in

particular, it’s crucial that your
video efforts be part of a broader
customer satisfaction/reference
program.

If you’re not working

systematically to take care of your
customers, understand their
satisfaction levels, and continually
work to encourage them to testify
to their satisfaction in support of
your sales efforts – video won’t save
you.

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Video Should be part of a
Broader Satisfaction or
Reference Program
There are a variety of methods for
gauging your customers’ satisfaction.
Research methodologies, like the Net
Promoter Score, seek to boil down
customer satisfaction to a single
number, while more traditional
satisfaction research efforts can provide
a more contextual understanding of
customer satisfaction.

No matter which methodology you

choose, you should always be testing
programmatically for customer
satisfaction, both for individual
customers and for your customer base
as a whole.

Use your research to find satisfaction

gaps, and then work as hard as you can
to fill them.

This will have the twin effect of creating

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happy customers, and identifying

customers who are the best prospects
for your video testimonials and other
reference activities.

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Don’t Treat Customer Video Testimonials as a Novelty

This advice goes for all your video projects, but it has special application for
testimonials, because customers are involved.

For best results, you should invite customers to sit for a testimonial, every
time they cross whatever threshold you’ve established for customers
expressing certain satisfaction level, or willingness to support your sales effort. 13

By treating video testimonials as part of a larger customer

satisfaction/reference program, you will be much more successful at
securing a steady stream of these most valuable marketing resources.

More Resources

How to Get More Testimonials from Your Customerss

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Video Testimonials
Rank High on the
Value Spectrum
When you look at all the different activities your customers can participate in to
help you win and keep customers, sitting for a video testimonial is probably
the most helpful thing an existing customer can do to support your sales
efforts.

Which is why we recommend customer testimonials to those who want to get

into video content, but need to deliver a big win, in order to get the rest of the
company on board.

The high-value nature of testimonials means you should be looking for ways to
use video testimonials wherever it makes sense.

There are a range of less valuable activities your customers may participate in
that can help encourage them to do a video testimonial; like jointly issuing a
news release when they become customers, speaking at your annual meeting,
or liking, sharing and commenting on your social media efforts.

Whatever those activities may be, it’s

important to have a plan for moving
customers through that spectrum of
activities, until they finally arrive at
sitting for a video testimonial, and
ultimately speaking with your
prospective customers, in person.

How you ask your clients for a

testimonial is going to have a big
impact on your response rate, and
the overall quality of the
testimonials that you acquire.
Learn how to ask for a testimonial
here.

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What’s the best way
to collect
Video Testimonials?
The first step is to simply ask! But then there’s the matter of getting a
customer schedule to appear in your video testimonial, which is easier said
than done.

There are a lot of apps and SaaS products out there that simplify the video
testimonial collection process, by enabling customers to easily record quick
videos using their smartphone or webcam, for you to embed on your website.

These can be really handy tools,

especially for B2C businesses, where
it doesn’t usually make sense to fly a
camera crew and interviewer out to
your customer’s location.

However, nothing beats the

engagement and sales power of a
professionally shot video
testimonial, with an interviewer
that’s able to elicit
soundbite-worthy responses from
your customers.

15

In part 2 of this guide, we’ll be

focusing primarily on producing
professional-grade video testimonials,
in the off-camera interview style.

You’ll also find tips for recording video

testimonials with your smartphone. A
testimonial recorded on your
smartphone isn’t ideal, but well worth
the effort, because you should try to
get your hands on customer
testimonials anyway you can. They’re
that powerful!
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 Coming up in the next
chapter...
Now that we’ve covered the benefits of video testimonials, why they’re so
effective, some video testimonial best practices, and how to establish a video
testimonial content strategy, and what it takes to build a compelling story
around your customer’ experiences.

In the next chapter, you’ll learn how to interview customers, and produce
testimonial videos that do your customers’ stories justice.

Here’s just a taste of what’s coming up:

- How to conduct a customer testimonial interview

- How to pick a location for your testimonial video

- How to establish and control a productive film set anywhere

- How to select a style for your testimonial videos

- Video framing, lighting, and video equipment

- And how to take your video testimonials to the next level in post production.

NEXT: VIDEO TESTIMONIAL

PRODUCTION

Try our Video Testimonial Package Builder - we make harnessing the

power of video testimonials easy!

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About
Thoughtcast Media
Thoughtcast Media is a marketing agency that specializes in video marketing
and the allied marketing capabilities necessary to make video work in the real
world. We make video marketing affordable, easy to buy, and a profitable
extension of your marketing mix.

Our fixed-price solutions combine the necessary components of strategy and

digital marketing, with quality video production, providing marketers with
what they really need – both quickly and affordably.

Learn more about our video marketing services.

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