Look in any platform that houses video marketing content nowadays, and you'll find more than a fair share of testimonial videos.
No exceptions.
The reason is simple: testimonials excel at providing an unbiased perspective that most potential buyers look for before committing to a purchase. They allow you to tell a story that informs them and primes them for conversion.
However, making a genuinely effective testimonial is not as simple as you think. It's easy for these videos to fall short of expectations due to common pitfalls that undermine their core intent.
In this piece, we'll go over how some of the best video marketing agencies create unique and unforgettable testimonial videos that can help customers make the right choice and help brands shine!
Let's get to it, shall we?
Different Strokes for Different Folks
While every testimonial video is after the same thing at its core, more than a few roads lead to Rome. In this case, not all testimonials follow the same formula, and some styles are better or worse suited to fulfill your particular goals!
So, let's start by reviewing some of the most popular styles of testimonial videos you can find and see what each brings to the marketing table.
Results-driven Testimonial Videos
This is the quintessential type of testimonial video, which revolves around showcasing and exploring a happy customer's experience, results, and perspectives on your product.
To that end, you can guide your customers through a well-written interview that keeps them focused on the sought-after touch-points and helps them explore their story and results.
With these videos, you'll want to start by having your interviewee talking about their initial pain-point – the one that drove them to your product.
Then go over any relevant data, numbers, figures, and finally explore the results and the positive impact your product or service had in their life.
Story-driven Testimonial Videos
This is probably the most complex type of testimonial because it is a mix of a company's story and the customer experience or testimony.
These testimonials usually tell the brand or product story and link it to a specific customer's personal experience with said product.
This style can be compelling because it combines branding elements with social proof that guides viewers through a customer experience with a company combining advertising and testimony.
Still, you run the risk of biting more than you can chew and ending up with a piece that's great at neither.
Customer Process/Journey Videos
These testimonial videos portray the shopper's journey from beginning to end. They usually introduce the customer's problem and reveal how they found the product that solved that issue.
This type of testimonial tends to have a more personal tone.
As they revolve around the point of view of a customer as they go about their daily work-lives, making choices and decisions on how to solve a particular problem, and describing how your brand and product helped them.
Multiple Testimonies Videos
This video style is a variation of the typical testimony, but instead of focusing on a single customer experience, it features an array of satisfied customers. They focus on a brief but enticing succession of testimonies from multiple customers that share similar stories and conditions, forming a narrative throughline for the piece.
Quantity is necessary, but you'll want to stick to three or four testimonies at most, to keep the video from growing too confusing or overstaying its welcome. Also, flawless editing is essential here, as you need to work with effortless transitions between speakers.
These videos include brief testimonies (20 to 30 seconds) from customers attending a store, shopping mall, or other venues where the company sells its products.
The key here is to avoid being pushy, ask one or two guiding questions, and be respectful to the customers. Each customer appearance is usually short, and the idea is to weave them all into a single piece that ties all their short testimonies, reviews, and clips.
Tips for Creating the Flawless Testimonial Video Your Brand Needs
Testimonial videos are all about building trust and establishing credibility for your products. The focus of this type of video — regardless of the specific style you go for — is to create a reliable testimony that feels genuine and helps customers make up their minds.
Things such as telling your own story, avoiding using a script, and focusing on results and benefits can help your video shine and be authentic. Let's see about all of that in a bit more detail.
Have Them Tell Their Stories Using Their Own Words
The video's protagonists should use their own words to describe their experience and express themselves when providing testimony. It's best to avoid using scripts because it will cut away all-natural expressions from the video, making your customers sound, well, scripted, boxed, or trying to follow a template.
Instead of wasting your energy on writing a script here, you should develop a quick interview process that helps the customers relive their experience with the product and the company selling it.
Try to ask for
- anecdotes
- results
- how they felt about it,
but above all, keep things conversational and friendly.
Focus on Benefits
So, the first thing to consider when making a testimonial is to tell a good, authentic story. However, following the tried-and-true explainer video formula is an easy recipe for success. After establishing the problem that your product helped solve, your testimonial piece should focus on the outcomes of such an experience and the positive impact on the customer's life.
Make sure to explore the benefits customers derived from your product during the interview, and make sure their statements take up a prominent place in the final piece. When in doubt, focus on the product's positive impact on the customer's life, and go from there!
Make it Visually Attractive
Make sure your visual treatment helps the person look natural and relaxed, not boxed-in or performing, as it will lead to a more approachable video for your audience to attach to.
A great and easy way to do that in an interview is to use a couple of fixed camera shots and avoid camera movement or odd angles.
Using mid-shots and keeping the camera angle horizontal is your best bet when making testimonials, as you can combine all these elements in post-production to create a more dynamic video.
Also, consider that potential buyers prefer a quick and direct-to-camera video or interview to a long-winded piece.
So, even though you have to get as much footage as possible during recording (to have more to work with), remember that the final piece shouldn't last longer than a few minutes at most in the end.
Use Soft Transitions and Color Correction for Cohesiveness
A testimonial should convey the look and feel of a naturally occurring conversation. As such, avoid jump, smash cuts, or any other transition that adds too much movement to the material.
Use soft transitions to connect different shots and segments and establish a natural and cohesive look.
Also, use color correction to keep a standard configuration throughout the clip, especially on multiple-testimonies videos.
Make sure the colors match up on the different shots, and everything looks even.
You can also use color grading to communicate a lighthearted tone and mood — a staple of the testimonial style— and always focus on a neutral tone that favors a natural look!
How to Use a Testimonial Video to Boost Sales
A few ways to make testimonials an integral part of your sales playbook are often to include sharing them on your site and distributing them through social media and streaming platforms.
Let's go over some of the most popular ways to deploy your brand-new, excellent testimonials!
Share Reviews and Testimonials on your Site
Many brands use testimonials in conjunction with other video styles and reviews on product landing pages or within their e-commerce platforms.
In fact, e-commerce giants such as Amazon combine reviews with video testimonies to produce a compound form of social proof that is highly effective when it comes to closing a sale.
Make sure you make the most of your site's traffic and include your testimonials on your landing pages to support your sales efforts.
Analyze your capture pages and decide if your reviews or testimonies belong on your landing pages or on their own sections — it varies depending on your type of products and niche — or you can also A/B tests to see what delivers the best results.
Leverage the Power of Social Media
Social media sites are bursting with content-hungry users, and testimonials play into the social selling nature of the medium.
Video testimonials that connect with prospects should be shared on LinkedIn or Twitter, given that customers there look for and want to share valuable content with their followers and connections.
However, not every social network will work for the content you produce.
When sharing your testimonials on a particular social site, you have to be careful. Make sure you analyze your content, brand, audience, and industry beforehand, and research what social media sites are the best to share your content.
Testimonials can be very popular on social media given the right conditions, but you don't want your audience to feel like you are forcing the content on them.
Get the Most Out of Streaming Platforms
Sharing your video on streaming platforms such as YouTube practically guarantees that you'll get viewers.
But to get the most out of such sites, make sure you check out video testimonials from relevant brands and analyze and compare their content to yours.
There is a lot to be learned from how your biggest competitors use this type of video, and you can improve your own content and your own results.
And you must follow the insights and tips that we've shared in this article to ensure that your testimonials are natural and conversational!
Also, consider how you will use the platform to display your videos. You can choose to create your channel and let the potential buyers watch your testimonials on YouTube, or you can merely use it as a hosting service and set up a plug-in on one of your landing pages so your customers can watch the videos on your site.
Turn your Reviews and Testimonials into Ads
Testimonials offer targeted content because they show customers talking about their success with your product or service.
As such, they make for excellent advertisement pieces under the right circumstances that can help you move more of your ever ever-growing product list – all while telling a company's story, like the Meet the Maker series does for Intel.
Your best bet with this hybrid style is to follow the three-acts storytelling template and conduct an interview to guide the customer's testimony, then make them short and impactful enough (while adding the proper CTAs at the end) to make them effective as ads.
Parting Thoughts
By and large, making a flawless testimonial video that boosts sales is all about telling a story in your own words and making it visually attractive. It also depends on choosing the right video style representing the testimony you want to record.
Hopefully, after reading thus far, you're better equipped to produce testimonial videos that will boost your sales.
So, what are you waiting for? It's time to implement some of these tips on your testimonial videos and see your sales soar!
About Victor Blasco
Victor Blasco is an audiovisual designer, video marketing expert, and founder/CEO of the explainer video production company Yum Yum Videos. Besides running the business, he’s a lifelong student of Chinese philosophy and a passionate geek for all things sci-fi.
