How to Get Awesome Testimonial Videos from Your Clients

Every business should be using video testimonials to move more product and close more deals.

Marketing, in essence, is all about building trust and demonstrating value.

With that in mind, you it should be obvious that customer testimonials are incredibly useful for leveraging the value you’ve created for current customers, and turning that into new customers.

If it’s not so obvious, let me explain…

72% of buyers will take action only after reading a positive review.
-BrightLocal

At the bottom of the marketing funnel, where prospects are seriously considering your product and comparing your solution to the competition’s, rave reviews from real customer can go a very long way in convincing them that what you have to offer is worth every penny.

Testimonials also help prospects make a more real-life connection with your brand or product by showing them how a person’s life has been positively impacted by what you have to offer.

88% of consumers say that they trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations.
-BrightLocal

Want to really see what customer testimonials are capable of? Video testimonials help create an even stronger emotional connection that takes the social proof to the next level, making them particularly effective in this regard (more on this later).

There’s a reason customer testimonials have been a staple in the marketer’s tool belt for so long, and that’s because they work.

Unfortunately, customer testimonials usually don’t just fall into your lap.

Customer testimonials are considered the most effective content marketing tactics, as identified by 89% of B2B marketers.
-Pardot

So, if you want to get testimonials from your clients with some serious selling power, you’re going to have to put some work in.

That said, to get you started, there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit that can be harvested and used across various pieces of marketing collateral.

For example, some businesses can go to social media and online review site and have plenty of candid testimonials at their disposal.

In case you don’t already have a plethora to choose from, you’ll be surprised what a simple social blast asking for feedback can produce.

If your customers lack any kind of online presence at all — don’t fret! Social postings and online reviews are rarely going to result in the best customer testimonials anyway.

The best testimonials are going to be the ones you work harder and smarter for, because by working smarter, to develop a repeatable, measurable and improvable process for collecting testimonials, your process itself can do much of the heavy-lifting. Dramatically more impactful testimonials are just the cherry on top.

WHY YOU NEED MORE TESTIMONIALS

Any testimonials you can get your hands on have the potential to greatly benefit your business.

Accumulating multiple testimonials, however, affords a few new advantages:

• Each testimonial can be aligned with your different buyer personas, in order to connect with a specific type of person, job role, company size, company type, etc.
• Each of your customer will have a different set of reasons to buy from you, and multiple testimonials give you multiple opportunities to address very specific problems your prospects are facing.
• Plus, each testimonial is an opportunity to learn more about your customers and improve your offering!

And, again, the best way to maximize the number of testimonials you’re able to accumulate is by developing a process for doing so.

HOW TO GET MORE CUSTOMER TESTIMONIALS

Although a defined process will bring some much-needed structure, every customer you approach for a testimonial is unique, so don’t forget that your process should adapt depending on who you’re working with.

Keeping your process lightweight should make this easy, while still minimizing a lot of the time-sink associated with gathering customer testimonials (scheduling, interviewing, editing, approvals, etc.)

Here are several things to consider when outlining your testimonial-gathering process:

• When should you and when shouldn’t you ask for a testimonial?
  Not all customers, companies, or projects will make good testimonial subjects.Obviously, a difficult customer that’s not all that happy with how things turned out is not going to be a story you want to share.But sometimes it’s a project or story that just not that compelling, or doesn’t fit the narrative you’re trying to build.
• What’s the best way to ask a customer for a testimonial?
  Will you reach out to customers over phone or email? Email may be faster, but it’s less personal than a phone call. But in some industries, people just don’t answer their phones.Who’s going to be in charge of contacting them? Will there be follow-ups until a response is received?
• When will you ask a customer for a testimonial?
  In B2B cases, it’s often best to ask for a testimonial as close to the closing of a project as possible.With B2C, there’s a lot more variation to account for. You want to get commitment from a customer sooner than later, but you also want them to get the full experience of your product, first.
• What form will your customer testimonials take?
  Will your testimonials be longform or shortform? Should they fit into some sort of template? Will graphics accompany them? How about video?Video testimonials can be turned into written testimonials, but not the other way around. Although video testimonials can be more complicated to arrange, the return on that extra effort is huge.
• Who will interview customers for testimonials?
  The account manager? A member of the marketing team? An outside expert?You want your customer to be comfortable and frank in their interview, and sometimes having an interviewer that’s already built rapport with the customer can help them open up. But it can sometimes have the opposite effect.
• How will customers be interviewed for testimonials?
  By phone, email, Skype, in person, on camera? Each has its pros and cons, and it’s likely you’ll have to adopt a few different methods, depending on your customers’ needs.
• What approvals are required from the client for testimonials and endorsements?
  Who at your customer’s company is going to have to sign off on the edits? Wait a second, did you get approval for a testimonial in the first place?! Some organizations strictly govern what employees are publicly allowed to endorse, so make sure you can actually use what you get from them, before going through the effort to get it.
• When and how will new testimonials be rolled out internally and announced externally?
  The sales team will have to know how to best access and utilize the testimonial you now have.And now that you’ve got your testimonials ready to go, how will make sure the rest of the world finds out how awesome you are?

It may seem like a lot of work is required to answer all these questions, but they’re all fairly straightforward, with common sense answers.

The important thing to remember is that systematizing your testimonial-gathering will have huge payoffs!

Before you know it you’ll have a deck full of “just the right thing” for each and every prospective customer.

Thoughtcast Media is a video marketing agency that specializes in the production of video testimonials, traveling up and down the East Coast of the U.S. (and beyond), helping B2B businesses tell their customers’ stories.

If you want to make video testimonials a part of your marketing mix (and why wouldn’t you?), be sure to check out the Ultimate Guide to Video Testimonials and Video Testimonial Buying Guide.