Customer Video Testimonials in 2022

Customers usually don’t trust a brand as much as they trust a fellow customer. According to a recent study, potential customers always consider ratings and feedback from previous customers as a crucial purchasing factor over aspects like discounts, free delivery, etc. The results of our study substantiate the belief that online shoppers look up to fellow customer reviews when considering doing business with a brand.

Customers need assurance from an unbiased third party who can honestly tell them if buying a product or service is worth their money. Compiling genuine reviews from your customers into a video format will provide you with a highly engaging marketing strategy. These videos, termed customer testimonial videos, trump all other sales tactics in the industry concerning conversion ratios.

Table of Contents

What is a Video Testimonial?

When a customer talks about their experience, thoughts, and reviews about a product or service of a brand in a video format, it becomes a video testimonial. Rather than posting feedback as traditional written content, the customers record themselves to share their input. The customers may also include other fundamental points like how the company solved their problem, the impact their products or services had on their lives, or why they like the brand.

Customer video testimonials are incredibly effective forms of advertising as potential customers tend to highly regard them and their experience to make the right buying decisions. A third-party opinion always has a drastic impact on your sales numbers. Most people will read at least ten written reviews before making a decision. However, a customer testimonial video significantly reduces that number and builds instant rapport with the viewer. A video testimonial comes across more authentic than positive written reviews, which brands could skillfully fabricate.

Do you want to understand how customer testimonial videos could be relevant to your business?

How Does a Video Testimonial Work?

Three main components make up a video testimonial, as detailed below.

1. Happy Customer

Arguably the most crucial component of the video. A satisfied customer who shares their positive experiences and thoughts about your brand or the product becomes the hero of the video.

2. Problem Positioning

It refers to the problems faced by the customer that made them buy from your business in the first place. The customer briefly explains the pain areas they encountered before testing out your product or service and how the purchase helped them.

3. Endorsement

It is a summary of the video testimonial. The customer concludes by stating how happy they are with their purchase and recommends other customers to buy from your brand. This authentic endorsement from an unbiased party encourages potential customers to shop from your brand.

These elements form the core of a video testimonial and are necessary to create a successful and influential one, directly addressing a hesitant target audience. The videos build a solid relationship of trust with your potential customers. They are integrated with marketing tools like case studies, social media graphics, infographics, etc., to increase the efficacy of their visual and audio content.

What Makes a Good Testimonial Video?

Making an excellent testimonial video is not as easy as it sounds. It is, in fact, a meticulous process that needs to fulfill set criteria to come across as persuasive and genuine to your target audience. Below are five steps that define the structure of a good video testimonial.

1. Introduce the Client and Challenges in the Project

The first step is to find a satisfied customer. Video testimonials that include customers who look like they are reading from a script may sound fake to your audience. It nullifies the objective behind making the video testimonial. The first few seconds of the video should include a quick introduction to the client and the challenges they faced before buying from your brand. The video testimonial won’t work if your customer’s problems are not believable or relatable to your target audience.

Ensure the customer remains comfortable throughout the recording of the video. The central focus of the video is the customer and not your firm. When viewers watch another customer talking about themselves, their problems, and experiences, it enables them to connect emotionally with the video.

2. Describe How You Resolved the Client Issues

Now that the customer has described their pain points, it is time to talk about how your products or services played a role in resolving their issues. Don’t get your customer to say something specific as it may sound scripted. Let your customers be themselves and allow them to describe how your brand solved their problems freely. It will help other people looking for real-time solutions for their difficulties connect with video testimonials. Tap into the emotional side of the customer to make the most out of your testimonial video. It is also vital to note that the video should focus on the benefits derived from the product and not its features. The product information is available on your website, and the viewers aren’t keen on getting repetitive information. Instead, talking about how the client benefited from the product will gain a solid emotional response from the viewers.

3. Explain the Success Strategy and Results Accomplished

Video testimonial should be a mini version of the customer’s journey with your brand. A critical component of consumer behavior is emotion. People are motivated by sentiments in making everyday life decisions. Let your customer narrate their story in the video testimonial. The more personal it is, the better. The story of another customer should trigger the emotions of your potential customers. According to research, if your target audience loves a brand story, 55% of them are highly likely to shop for your products in the future, and 15% of them will buy them immediately.

Furthermore, remember to show tangible results in the testimonial video. While praises and positive feedback from a customer are vital, it is certainly not enough. Specificity also plays a principal role in creating a fantastic video testimonial. Include evidence and reliable data to make your videos more credible.

4. Personal Touch and Humanizing Element

Customers don’t want to watch another individual robotically read off a script. The primary goal behind a testimonial video is to show your company’s human element and add a personal touch to your marketing strategies. Capturing real-time expressions and reactions of your consumer will make your video testimonial feel genuine instead of staged. It will amplify the effects and impact of the video. To underline the emotions of the video testimonial, show your customers were initially frustrated, struggling, and overwhelmed with their issues and how your product or service served as an innovative solution to resolve them. The journey ending with a smile and satisfied comments from your client will look convincing to the watchers.

5. Add the Viewer to Your Sales Funnel

A sales funnel represents the visual journey of a prospective customer from their first point of contact until the completion of the purchase. It helps your sales team map their marketing techniques and understand where to interpret or follow up in the sales funnel. Video testimonials are at the top of the sales funnel. This stage is when you are trying to create brand awareness for your company. The testimonial videos act as a compelling medium of customer engagement. Integrating the videos into your sales funnel will not only increase your ROI but also strikingly increase your conversion rate.

Why are Customer Video Testimonials Effective in 2022?

A website has a 53 times higher probability of reaching Google’s first page if it includes a video. Moreover, customers retain about 95% of the message after watching a video compared to 10% from a text. These statistics show a continuous upward trend, and it will extensively become a part of marketing campaigns in 2022. Our contemporary world is rapidly heading towards a video-first environment, and all prominent brands are catching up on this trend.

In 2022, business owners can harness the power of customer video testimonials to spread awareness and educate potential customers about their product or service. They can use these videos to boost the credibility of their brands and products with an unbiased endorsement. They could share the journey of a satisfied and happy customer going through relatable challenges and explain the product benefits and an ideal solution for customer problems.

Customers actively look for reviews and other proof to ensure they make a worthwhile investment by buying the product, and watching a customer video testimonial does the trick. 36% of the companies already use video testimonials on their top landing page to enhance consumer engagement and conversion rates.

Tips for Creating Successful Customer Video Testimonial

Testimonial videos are powerful marketing tools to build brand awareness, reputation, and increased sales. Follow the tips below to create a successful customer video testimonial.

1. Tell An Attractive Story

Consumers buy a product to fulfill a specific goal, need, or desire. They are utilizing your product to get over an obstacle. Divide your engaging story into two halves for the video. The first part includes the introduction of the customer and the problems faced by them. The consumer talks about the pain points in-depth. The second half of the video or the ‘after’ part includes the solution provided by your brand. It involves your customer sharing how the product or service significantly helped them tackle their obstacles and how satisfied they are with your brand. Viewers start to picture your product as an efficient solution to their problems. They get motivated to buy from your business. Remember, nothing beats a good story.

2. Showcase Quantifiable Data and Facts

Hearing about how a customer is happy with your product and physically seeing your product results are two notably different things. The customer testimonial should match the results expected out of the product. It is possible by incorporating tangible results like quantifiable data and facts in the testimonial video. You can also include research and case studies to showcase the potency of your product. Some hard facts add a punch to the customer testimonial video.

3. Make Your Testimonial Authentic and Honest

To reap maximum bonuses out of a video testimonial, you should ensure to strike a balance between authentic emotions and statistical data. Your videos should star passionate customers but not dramatic as they can come across as corny, fake, and overstated. Potential customers need to believe the testimonial video to be encouraged to buy it. Another crucial thing to remember is not to make your customer read from a script. Viewers can easily distinguish between honest and fabricated. Let your customers decide the video’s narrative to make it as authentic as possible.

4. Position Your Product as a Solution

Your potential customers need to view your product as a means to end their problems. For this to happen, the customer giving the testimonial needs to narrate their story so that your product hogs the video’s limelight. Without buttering up the product too much, the customer needs to emphasize how it served as the perfect resolution for all their issues. You can utilize this tip to make the ‘after’ part of the consumer’s story more convincing and relatable.

5. Multiple Camera Angles and Quick Cuts

The technical aspects can make or break a video testimonial. Ensure that you use top-notch equipment to record the video. It will enhance the quality of the video by increasing visual resolution. You should also possess basic filming capabilities like recording the video from multiple camera angles, editing the video, and quick cuts. Hiring a professional at this stage is highly recommended. Marketers should also focus on recording the video in a suitable environment, ensuring good lighting, and adding interesting graphic elements. Along with making the video visually pleasing, ensure it has superior audio quality. Try to cut down or mute background noises that can distract the viewers.

Get to know clever hacks on creating engaging video testimonial content for your business

Reasons Why Customer Testimonial Videos are Crucial for Your Business and Brand

There are many reasons why customer video testimonials are essential for your business as a whole. Consider the reasons stated below before curating video testimonials for your brand.

1. Increased Retention Rate

Statistics report a monumental difference between the viewer’s retention rate when watching a video versus reading a text. A lengthy paragraph may contain more information but is useless if the customer can’t remember any of it. Data presented in video format are easily digestible by the viewers. It creates an impression in their memory, and their brain recalls most of the information. An increase in retention rate leads to higher chances of the viewer buying the product.

2. Reinforced Brand Credibility and Trust

Video content enables your potential buyers to watch customers’ facial expressions and reactions to the product compared to written content. You can manipulate written content, but it is nearly impossible with video content.

Video testimonials provide visual confirmation to your target audience. It makes them more engaging, authentic, and credible to the prospective customers. For instance, a customer is more likely to believe a face-to-face or visual proof of the quality of the product than reading about it. It enables them to trust the company, thereby building brand reputation and credibility.

3. Humanizing Your Brand with Video Content

The standard image or opinion about enterprises is that they are cold, capitalistic, and profiting corporations that don’t care much about their customers. Organizations are changing this perception by adding a human touch to their marketing efforts through customer video testimonials.

Online customers are constantly searching for other customers who go through the same struggles and brands that have helped them solve them. The videos add a face, an identity behind the optimistic results of your products. Your target audience would believe when one of their own reaffirms your brand’s claims.

4. Improve Your Online Exposure

Generating video content is an excellent way of improving your online presence. One of the critical factors to ensure the survival of an online brand is to amplify its brand awareness. Almost all customers get information about a particular product or company from the internet.

If your brand is not prominent online, it will get lost in a sea of similar outfits. Video testimonials are proven to grab the onlooker’s immediate attention and hook them till the end. To improve online exposure, you can upload them on multiple platforms like official websites, social media accounts, emails, etc.

5. Highly Shareable Content Format

Videos are captivating and enjoyable to watch. Customers prefer them over composed texts. Video testimonials are versatile, and you can effortlessly share them across several interfaces. Customers in the video feel highly valued as they become brand ambassadors for your product by default. It makes them start a chain where they unconsciously share their videos with family and friends, spreading the word even further.

6. Trigger Emotional Responses in Your Audience

Consumer behavior uses psychological techniques to trigger emotional responses in their audience and heighten the reach of their advertising campaigns. Some factors that stimulate emotions in the viewers are body language, facial expressions, tone of the speaker, color theme, lighting, etc. Video testimonial captures all of the above, making it easier for your audience to resonate with your brand. It builds a deep emotional connection, encouraging them to try your products or services.

7. Strengthen the Confidence of Your Potential Customers

No customer would want to carelessly spend their money, mainly in middle and lower financial income categories. A lot of thought process and research goes in before a customer decides to purchase anything.

Customer video testimonials are ideal examples of subtle marketing and advertising efforts that subconsciously persuade viewers to buy from your brand. Seeing and hearing another customer talk about the product honestly enhances the confidence of your potential customers in your brand. It assuages their doubts and pushes them to do business with your company.

8. Intensify the Conversion Rates and Leads

Boosting the conversion rate is one of the predominant goals of the marketing process. It involves turning your potential customers into buying customers. The complex decision of whether to buy a product or not is made easy through testimonials. Your prospective customer will turn to and trust another customer who had an optimistic and satisfactory experience with your products. The more relatable the story is, the higher the chances of viewers buying from your brand.

9. Cost-effective and Powerful Tool

Advertising and marketing are expensive industries. Every year thousands of businesses spend an excessive amount to finance their marketing department. However, it doesn’t always yield the desired results like a higher ROI because the resources are underutilized. An alternative to expensive marketing strategies is generating video testimonials. They are economical yet optimized to give your better results. With the help of stellar equipment and a satisfied customer, you can undoubtedly create a powerful testimonial video.

Social media has become an integral part of our mundane lives. It is ideal to optimize every marketing campaign for social media platforms. Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and even Snapchat are making changes to incorporate more video content than other forms of content. Users prefer video content, showing a higher engagement rate than any other type of content. Firms should tap into this trend and use it to spread their video testimonials on social media.

Need guidance on creating an impactful positive customer testimonial video for your eCommerce?

How to Leverage Video for Your SEO Strategy?

SEO helps businesses cut through the noise and chaos on the internet and become easily accessible to customers. Videos are a powerful tool to optimize the results of your SEO strategy. Users are most likely to click on search results with a video thumbnail next to them. The video thumbnails make the search result a ‘rich snippet,’ which leads to higher click-through rates. Here’s how you can leverage your video for your SEO strategy.

1. Posting On YouTube

After Google, Youtube ranks as the second largest search engine globally, making it necessary for your company to own an official youtube account and consistently post videos on the channel. Include keywords in the first 25 words of your video description and similarly add them naturally throughout to increase your SEO rank.

Ensure that you don’t spam the content with keywords, and the description should be at least 250 words with necessary tags included at the end. Longer videos gain more traction than shorter ones. So make sure your video testimonial is at least five minutes long.

2. Live Streaming

Connect with your potential customers in real-time by live streaming your video testimonials. It will aid in increasing the integrity of the testimonial and facilitating a stronger connection between your audience and your brand. You can also host one-on-one interviews and Q&A sessions with your previous customers to discuss the product. Live streaming will result in higher engagement rates and SEO rank.

3. Webinars

Webinars provide immediate expected results and continue to boost your SEO rank long after they are over. A considerable amount of planning is required to execute a successful webinar, like designing a terrific landing page to sign-up for the webinar, promoting them on social media platforms, etc. You can boost profound linking ability on Google and YouTube by captioning your webinars. These webinars can include several customers sharing their unique experiences with your brand. Don’t forget to publish them on your website and YouTube channel with appropriate keywords in the captions.

Tricks to Collate Attractive Video Testimonials

You need to follow three crucial stages to create impactful and honest video testimonials.

1. Ask the Customer Directly

Contact your customer via email or phone and get quick feedback on your product. Then ask them if they would like to feature in a video testimonial for your business. This honest and authentic approach is sure to impress the customer and persuade them to make a video testimonial for your company. Make sure not to pressure the customer into making one, as some people are not as comfortable on camera as others. You can also reach out to them via social media and ask them to feature on your account.

2. Make the Customer Feel Valued

Talk about why sharing their experience with the world is crucial for your brand. The customer will indeed feel valued and heard. Send them a sweet and concise message that states how their positive reviews will be helpful to other potential customers. It will build strong connections with your existing customers and create a sense of brand loyalty.

3. Conduct Direct Interviews

Simplify the process of recording a testimonial video for your customers by offering to interview them personally. Most of the time, video testimonials recorded by consumers get trashed because of poor quality. Your camera can control the interview recording, and your customers will feel more comfortable answering questions than creating their content.

Looking for assistance in promoting video testimonials for your eCommerce business through social media platforms?

Wrapping Up - The Power of Testimonials

Marketers predict that in 2022, video testimonials will become the most influential selling point for brands as a marketing tactic. These testimonials will broaden your clientele and take your company to new heights of success. Video time has globally increased in the past five years. Moreover, the onset of the pandemic has also led users to spend more time on the internet, preferably watching videos. Seeing a product through a fellow consumer’s perspective has the power to change your target audience’s choices.

Customer Video Testimonials for Business - Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

1. Why are customer testimonial videos important?
Customer video testimonials are a crucial marketing technique businesses leverage to promote their products and services. It involves a past customer talking about your business’s personal experiences, thoughts, and opinions. It increases the integrity of your products in the market and facilitates a higher conversion rate.

2. How effective are customer video testimonials?

89% of the total marketers believe that video testimonials are effective marketing strategies. These honest endorsements feature real people talking about real-time problems faced by them. It highlights the benefits one can derive by using your product or availing of your service. Most brands witnessed an increase in sales after publishing video testimonials.

3. Why is a video testimonial more credible than written testimonials?

Companies can hire or pay people to write positive and outstanding reviews of their products or services. Customers don’t have the opportunity to verify it and believe whatever’s written in the review. In video testimonials, they can see the customer talk about their problems and give authentic opinions about your brand, making them more credible.

4. What questions can you ask in a video testimonial?

While interviewing the customer for a video testimonial, you need to ask them personal questions about their problems and experience using the product. Ensure that these questions focus on the customer and their impression using the product instead of your brand. You can start by asking them to talk about themselves, how they discovered your product, etc.

5. Can I use testimonials without permission?

It is unethical to use video testimonials without the customer’s permission. Video testimonials include personal details like name, profession, gender, and visuals of the customer. They need to be comfortable with companies posting them on different platforms on the internet. It is a legal requirement and aids in building trust with customers.

6. How do one edit customer testimonials?

Marketers never post raw customer video testimonials on their websites. The video undergoes an elaborate editing process to fit a desirable time limit and meet the requirements of your website and social media accounts. Unnecessary information captured while shooting the testimonials is deleted with video editing apps or professional help.

7. How do you increase the number of customer video testimonials?

Providing incentives to encourage customers to provide video testimonials is one of the oldest tricks in the book to gain more numbers. For instance, an online store can provide 15-20% on the customer’s next purchase if they agree to record a video testimonial for your website. Experts recommend disclosing this information in the testimonial video to avoid making it look staged.

8. What is testimonial advertising?

Testimonial advertising or campaign involves utilizing video or written reviews from a customer. In the review, the customer talks about the advantages of the product or service and how it efficiently solves their problem. This technique will connect your business to other potential customers and promote the sales of products.

9. How do I increase the potential of video testimonials?

Customer video testimonials are a robust tool used by marketers and advertisers. You can boost its power by combining SEO tactics with it. Adding relevant content, links, meta titles, meta tags, and keywords to your description will optimize your SEO rank and encourage consumers to buy from you.

10. Can I post the testimonial video on Instagram?

Instagram was previously optimized to share pictures for creating memories. However, a lot has changed since its inception in 2010. The change in consumer preferences and recent trends has modified Instagram to prioritize videos. It has come out with features like stories and reels, making it easier for businesses to share testimonial videos on the app.

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Practices to Employ Customer Video Testimonials as a Marketing Asset for Your Business in 2022

What is a Video Testimonial?