Your Guide to Boost Brand Credibility with Testimonial Videos

A survey from Small Business Trends has shown that 84% of consumers are now placing a lot of trust on online reviews from consumers to the point that they trust these reviews as much as personal recommendations from family and friends. You will be missing out if you are not placing a priority on reviews for your business and products. Testimonial videos allow you to display your trustworthiness and expertise which will enhance your brand credibility. In this article, we will share more about these videos along with our experience in creating high-quality and engaging videos for your business.

What are Testimonial Videos?

Testimonial videos feature real customers sharing the positive experiences they have had with your company. While you can make use of written reviews, positive feedback holds more weight and credibility when it is said in front of a camera by a real person. This leads to more genuine, interactive, and engaging content coming from the customer as you can see and hear their reactions and expressions while they talk positively about their experiences.

4 Important Benefits of Making Testimonial Videos

Not sure why you should invest in testimonial videos? Here’s how they can benefit your business:

1. Videos Have a Higher Retention Rate Than Other Content Types

Consumers can retain 95% of a message when learning about it through watching a video. If the same content is communicated via text, they can only retain 10% (Insivia). People are able to retain more information because videos offer more information and narratives compared to just seeing it in text and photos. Along with the message, you are also communicating through audio cues like music and voice overs, video effects, and other visual cues. These all play a part in improving message retention.

2. Consumers Place a Lot of Trust on Feedback and Reviews Made by Fellow Consumers

According to Wyzowl, 95% of consumers said that reviews, whether positive or negative, have had an influence on their previous purchasing decisions. This shows how powerful testimonial videos can be for you. Remember to keep your videos genuine and authentic.

3. Testimonial Videos Are Capable of Converting Interested and Potential Customers

Ultimately, your testimonial videos will only succeed if they are able to convert potential customers into actually purchasing your products or services. Reviews from customers are one of the most effective types of content which can influence and push consumers to an eventual purchase. Wyzowl states that 66% of consumers are more likely to purchase a product after watching a testimonial video that shows the product helping someone like them.

Testimonial videos are a great way to help your business to have higher retention rates, increase your conversion rates, and help build the credibility of your brand and its products.

6 Important Tips to Help You Create Great Testimonial Videos

Here are 6 important tips that will assure you of great and successful testimonial videos for your business:

1. Always Feature Real Customers Who Are a Part of Your Target Audience

Nowadays, customers are always looking for authenticity to decide what brands to support. If you try to use fake reviews or testimonials to manipulate your customers' expectations, people will be able to notice it immediately. This is why it is crucial that you use real customers who have had actual positive experiences with your brand. You should also keep in mind that you should get customers that represent your target audience so that the video can be more relatable to them. 

2. Create a Script

While sharing real experiences from real customers is important to establish your credibility, you will still need a script that can properly cover the points you want to mention. The script will be helpful for both the reviewer and your business because it can provide an outline that you will both use. This guides the reviewer to prepare their train of thought and gives them time to properly arrange the ideas and experiences they will be talking about in the video. You don’t have to script it word-for-word. An outline of the key points is sufficient.

3. Start Out With Presenting a Problem That Your Product Can Solve - Use the Inverted Pyramid

Using the inverted pyramid structure is an effective way to stage your video's narrative. This means starting out your video with the most important piece of information, the main pain points, before diving deeper into the details. Starting the video with the problem that your customers face is a great way to immediately grab your viewers' attention. This gives them a reason to watch all the way through to learn more about how your product helped solve this problem. 

4. Make Sure to Back Up Your Information With Proven Facts

Whatever your business or industry is, including numbers, facts, data, and statistics in your testimonial videos will definitely help build your credibility and trustworthiness among consumers. One example is you can give the actual number of people who have bought your products, or how much time your customers saved by employing your services. Before your video shoot, you can already work with the customers that you are featuring so you can discuss the significant, relevant, and interesting information that they would want to bring up in the testimonial video.

5. Focus On the Features and Benefits of Your Product That Are Most Relevant

You should not forget to put a focus on your product's key features, especially those that are the most relevant in addressing the pain points of your target audience. While you might be tempted to showcase a lot of your product's benefits, you should make it easy for viewers by focusing on one or a few crucial ones. Trying to talk about too many features may make the video feel like the spotlight is more on your business and not on the customers you feature. 

6. Remember to Include an Inviting and Compelling Call-to-Action Prompt

If you do not include a call to action in your testimonial video, you will risk losing interested and potential customers. These videos should urge viewers to take an actionable step towards your brand. Let them know what you want them to do after watching your video with a compelling and inviting call to action. This can help bring viewers to the next step and will also help you measure the success of these videos.

You’ve Got a Great Testimonial Video. Now What?

Having a great testimonial can still be wasted if you don't have a good distribution strategy in place. While it is still important to focus on the video's content, you should also plan out where your videos should go once they are done. If you want to maximize the success and results of your testimonial videos, you should post them on these platforms:

1. Social Media Accounts

Your current social media followers can be a great source of potential customers. A great thing with social media is that for most platforms, video is the most consumed type of content in everyone's feeds compared to other content types. That's why you have to make sure to put your testimonial videos on your content calendar so that you can reshare them frequently.

2. Emails

Since not all your subscribers are purchasing customers, you can use these videos to persuade them to potentially convert. To make your email effective, your testimonial video should be relevant to the content that is in the actual email. You should personalize these emails and videos but also make sure that you won't overdo them.

3. Your Website

Your website is one of the most important places for your testimonial videos. When people visit your website, they are expecting to find believable and credible proof that you are the real deal.

You can immediately display social proof through your testimonial videos when you place them on your homepage and your landing pages. For eCommerce businesses, you can also put your testimonial videos on the pages of the products that were featured in the video.

4. Video Platforms

One more viable option where you can post your testimonial videos will be video streaming platforms like YouTube, Vimeo, and Dailymotion because of the millions of viewers that visit their websites and apps.

Out of all the video streaming platforms, YouTube is the largest one while also being the second largest search engine and the second most visited website in the world. This is a huge opportunity for your videos and your business that you should definitely explore.

To Summarize

Testimonial videos are a great way to enhance your brand credibility, conversion rates, and customer retention rates. To make great testimonial videos, they have to be authentic, well-planned and uploaded on the best platforms to maximize their success and achieve their goals.