Jaseem is the founder and CEO at WowMakers. He's a video marketing enthusiast, soccer lover and always curious to figure out how the world works. Beware, he can be annoyingly happy all the time!
Almost every consumer in the world today has similar buying habits. Before deciding to try a new bistro in town or buy a must-have item online, you find out what other people have to say. You don’t want to waste your hard earned money on something that won’t live up your expectations.
90% of consumers admit their buying decisions are influenced by online reviews (Marketing Land)
Word-of-mouth advertising is still considered as the most effective marketing tool there is.
Why? It’s all about knowing the experience before the purchase. When you decide to purchase a product or avail a service, you are not just buying a material object.
You are buying the experience you expect after using it. And that’s what customer testimonials are all about – sharing experiences.
And with the ever-growing popularity of social media sites, sharing those customer testimonials with a worldwide audience couldn’t be easier.
Customer reviews have a big impact on your brand perception and sales growth. Here are its major benefits:
But over the years, the consumer has grown smarter and now it’s difficult to prove the authenticity of these testimonials.
Anyone could have written this! – is the general thought consumers get when they read a testimonial.
In most cases, they are right. Many businesses have earned a bad reputation by fabricating make belief testimonials just to boost sales.
So what is the scenario now? Is there really no way to protect the credibility of testimonials anymore?
Definitely Not.
Customer testimonial videos work because:
This blog is about the best tips to shooting an inspiring customer testimonial video. We will be covering two major areas in this blog post.
So let’s get cracking
Whatever the content of your video is, if there is no story, people are going to lose attention. It’s just human nature. Nothing sparks curiosity more than a story.
By this I don’t mean you start off your video with “Once upon a time..” (Although some brands could pull it off). By story, I mean there should be a flow to the message of the video.
Not a natural story-writer?
Not to worry, here’s what you need to know.
Yes, It’s that simple, but don’t underestimate its value because of its simplicity. A lot of stories don’t seem quite put together because it either lacks a good start or ends quite abruptly.
An Example of this would be like
You would be surprised at how many brands out there fail to implement a structure like this. When you watch a video without a structure, you have no idea where things are going and all you hear is the client go on and on about the boring features of a brand.
Always remember that your viewer is human; to catch his attention you must tell a story.
Customer Desire – This is what the customer wants to achieve ultimately . You need to think and find out what your customers deeper desires are. Let’s say you are a business like Skype.
What your customer wants – Technology to make video or voice calls to anyone around the world.
Your Customer’s Desire – To stay more connected to friends and family.
As you can see there’s a big difference.
Rarely is your character’s desire the product that you’re offering. Look deeper than that, and find out what they truly want—the thing that your product can help them achieve. – Wistia.
Always begin a testimonial video by making the client state what his desires are. All your potential customers will have similar desires, and reminding them of this is a powerful psychological trigger.
Pain Points: These are all the obstacles that come in the way of the customer achieving their desire. It’s important to mention these in the video as these are problems that potential customers can relate to. By reminding them of these pain points we are creating an urge or necessity to purchase
Solution: This is where your brand comes to the rescue with the solution. It’s important that the customer feedback sounds genuine. For instance making bold statements like “These guys are the best” or “Nobody does it better than these guys” can seem manipulative. Instead, as your client to talk about how specifically they benefited from your service. We will talk more about this below.
Outcome: Finally end the video with a statement of how your brand’s product or service brought the client closer to their customer desire.
The whole point of having a customer testimonial video is to show the human side of business. People love to hear about genuine clients and their experiences with doing business with you.
How do you expect to be genuine if you have your client in front of a screen talking like a robot?
This is why you should urge your clients to speak from the heart.
Here are some pointers to keep in my mind
The objective of having a testimonial video is to convince and convert potential customers. But if there’s anything that sales persons and ad men have taught us, it’s that people are inspired to act based on emotion and not facts. So if you want your video to convert, you need to touch the viewers on an emotional level.
What can you do about this:
Slack’s testimonial video is a good example of this. I would describe Slack with words like playful and simplistic. Now take a look at their video to see if you can relate to this
It can be tempting to have your client talk about all the cool features of your product or service.
But the important thing to keep in mind is that people don’t care about the features.They care about how exactly these features will benefit them.
Think about Apple’s marketing tactic. Rather than say that iPods have 8GB of memory they told the people exactly how many songs or videos you can store with that kind of memory. The latter is what customers want to know.
Before the shoot, create a list of all the key features of your product or service and identify the benefits of those features from the clients perspective.
So if your client wishes to talk about the features of your product or service ask them how exactly those features helped them.
Let’s take a look at another example by iAuditor, a safety report management app for miners, firefighters, and safety inspectors.
You will notice that the technical features of the app are not even mentioned. They have really focused on demonstrating how the app has benefited them and made their lives a lot safer.
Suggested read: Ryan Waggoner’s Addicted Process To Get Customer Testimonials.
Remember that the lead actors in your video are your clients. They may not be the most impressive actors. But that’s okay. We don’t need actors, we need real people.
The thought of being in the spotlight and in front of a camera can be overwhelming. It’s your job to make sure that the client is comfortable because if he screws up that means more hours shooting and that’s more cash out of your pocket.
With the explosion of content on the internet, you might have noticed that our attention span has decreased dramatically. But have you wondered exactly how much?
According to a study conducted by Microsoft Corp., the average attention span of humans have reduced from 12 seconds to 8 seconds. Let’s put that into perspective – The average attention span of a goldfish? 9 seconds.
This is why it’s important that you keep your videos as short and simple as possible.
A majority of the testimonial videos out there use a standard format of a single angle shot of the client talking directly to the camera. But viewers are tired of seeing the ‘talking head in front of a screen’ format. This format is not visually engaging enough.
Why do you think movies are so entertaining. The same scenes are captured through different perspective camera angles that make sure the audience are visually stimulated.
Here are some pointers to make your video more engaging:
Jaseem is the founder and CEO at WowMakers. He's a video marketing enthusiast, soccer lover and always curious to figure out how the world works. Beware, he can be annoyingly happy all the time!
Jaseem is the founder and CEO at WowMakers. He's a video marketing enthusiast, soccer lover and always curious to figure out how the world works. Beware, he can be annoyingly happy all the time!