5 Keys to a Killer Customer Testimonial Video

No matter your target customer, a strong endorsement from a satisfied customer will give you a powerful tool to win over your audience. No matter how great your sales team is, nothing can beat the credibility of an outsider offering their positive experience with your product. But just as with any powerful marketing tool, a customer testimonial video is only effective when created and leveraged properly. To help you out, we’ve put together a few key bases to cover in order to optimize your next customer testimonial video.

Authenticity

Even through a screen, humans have an uncanny ability to sense when someone is not giving them the straight goods. It’s important to make sure that your customer is covering your key points, but your video loses any benefit whatsoever as soon as they misrepresent their experience with your company. For this reason, you want to be sure that you either use more than just one customer or that you work with one who has been partnered with you for a long time, and has had positive experiences with every aspect that you hope to cover in your testimonial video. In the end, the easiest way to ruin your customer testimonial video – and throw away everything you’ve invested in it – is to misrepresent yourself or your customers.

Another facet of authenticity is to use your real customers. Though it may sound appealing to use an actor to convey the same message, it isn’t authentic. Ultimately the best way to prepare your testimonial video is for people to deliver their own authentic opinions and experiences.

Preparation

Though it may sound a bit contradictory to the section on authenticity, it is also important to prepare your customer with the questions that they will be asked. This doesn’t need to be days in advance, but perhaps just some time to read over the questions, for clarification. Furthermore, you want to be sure that their statements completely cover the points that you want to convey in the finished testimonial video. Remember that the questions that you ask to the on-screen talent will not be included in the final product, so any topics they don’t directly speak about will not come up at all in your video.

Note that this does not mean that you should furnish your customer with a script. For clarification, see the section on authenticity.

Compelling Visuals

The customer testimonial video poses a particular challenge to your videographer, who must strike a healthy balance between revealing the authenticity behind the customer’s testimonial by showing her face, and compelling b-roll footage. Though it is true that human faces have a strong psychological draw on humans, there’s a reason that news channels try to cut between images of talking heads and more dynamic video shots. Combining the primary footage of your customer’s testimony with an appropriate amount of relevant, engaging, and dynamic secondary footage will help to keep your audience engaged and interested in hearing about your  customer’s positive experience with your products.

Results

As much as possible, encourage your customer to talk about their business and how they’ve achieved success with your product. Specificity with regards to growth in revenue, costs, profits, leads, or any other metric will help you by throwing some weight behind your value proposition and convince potential customers that your product will in fact help them to accomplish their goals. Of course, this can be challenging because customers could be apprehensive of disclosing vital information in your customer testimonial video, so it is also important to work with them and your script writer in order to ensure that all parties get the most out of the project.

Consistency

You can help bolster the effect of your customer testimonial video by ensuring consistency in your video content. Ultimately, the only thing that can top the testimonial of one satisfied customer is the positive endorsement of more than one person who’s had a positive experience with your products. As such, most companies choose to create more than one testimonial video to leverage the positive experiences of other satisfied customers. When creating the second, third, and further customer testimonial videos, you want to ensure that the main points covered in your video remain consistent throughout. If one of your greatest strengths is something as broad as your talented and friendly customer service team, then this should come up in all of your customer testimonial videos. If not, a potential customer could recognize this discrepancy and start to wonder why only some of your previous customers were so happy with it.

Furthermore, no company is capable of doing and being everything. You, as a savvy marketer, know this, and so does your audience. As such, it is important that you’re careful to stick to what your company is actually good at. You should avoid claiming to be something that you’re not. So should your customer in your customer testimonial video.
What has driven success in your customer testimonial video? Share your experience in the comments below!