5 Tips for Better Customer Testimonials
Persuading a site visitor to purchase in a short period of time is no easy feat. Let’s make the decision easy!
After understanding your features and prices, prospective customers often immediately turn to the next most important stage in the decision making process: a second opinion.
Video testimonials can often have an incredible effect on your business. By showcasing a real customer’s opinion about your product or service, they help establish credibility and trust.
Creating an Effective Testimonial
A video testimonial is fundamentally similar to all of your other marketing tools. It is a conversion tool being created to help viewers feel more confident about your product. And the formula for an effective testimonial video is similar to other videos:
- Showcase real customers who are representative of your [target] audience
- Present a specific problem that your product can solve better than anything else
- Backs up promises with evidence
- Demonstrates key benefits in action
- Has a clear call to action
When a customer shares their story about how your product helped them solve a particular business problem, it’s easy for the viewer to imagine themselves in their shoes.
Find your best storytellers
Whether your business is small or large, when constructing your testimonial strategy, you only need a few customer contributions. While you may have some flagship customers, it’s important to initially focus on customers who are great story tellers.
Doing so creates a more intimate setup and lets viewers get to know the person’s unique personality. If a customer testimonial is focused too much on features, it can come across no different than an in-house technical product video or a sales video.
Keep in mind that whomever you choose to feature should from the target career and role you are hoping to speak to. Front-end engineers, IT, executives, or end-users, each experience and interact with a product differently. But each are involved differently in the purchasing process. Your testimonial should be composed of whomever is most influential to the person watching the video.
For example, executives may be influenced more by the opinions from the IT department and the training department for an enterprise product, because they may be more influenced by with the installation and training opinions when deploying a product across all their employees.
Send your product to the rescue
In addition to featuring a great storyteller, including a dramatic story arc can boost viewer engagement. By laying out the stakes and ending with a resolution, you’re creating a compelling case for your audience to watch all the way through. Moreover, you’re establishing your product as the one that has the power to solve problems no other product can.
When selecting your customer, narrow the focus of the story to a specific scenario or problem. While your customer may benefit from a number of product features, focusing on a single pain point can help heavily emphasize a competitive advantage.
Provide Evidence
When deciding which customers to feature in a testimonial, look to your data first. Find facts and figures that are detailed and irrefutable — skeptical viewers will want to see the proof behind their success.
It’s important to make sure your customer has all the data necessary to summarize their experience. Numbers to set up the “before” as well as “after.”
Focus On a Single Feature
When it comes to video testimonials, it’s important to underline how a feature benefited a customer. Many times, your customers will benefit from a number of features and can speak in length about how all the features benefited their company.
When Houston Video creates customer testimonials, we advise discussions focus on a single feature, allowing you to break each separate feature into entirely separate testimonials. We do this because data shows multiple short videos perform better than single long video. Viewers are able to select the feature (or situation) immediately relevant to them.
Call the viewers to action
Without an effective call to action, your testimonials won’t help you convert viewers in the way you want them to. A quality CTA funnels the interest and excitement you’ve built for viewers into a logical next step.
Our study of CTAs proved that when placed directly after a crucial piece of information in a video, CTAs can actually generate more conversions than those that are placed at the beginning or end of a video.
Solid Strategies
Don’t think you need an expensive looking highly produced testimonial video to generate sales. Making an engaging and relatable video is more about knowing what captivates your audience and discussing something relevant to their situation so they feel confident your product will solve their problem.
Houston Video Customer Testimonials
I have helped companies build incredibly successful video campaigns built entirely around customer testimonials. Houston Video specializes in producing affordable, effective, and engaging customer testimonials to help you create and scale a profitable marketing campaign. Contact us below to see how you can incorporate customer testimonials into your video marketing strategy.