You want potential customers to know just how good your business is. You want them to know just how reliable you are. You want them to know just what good value you are. And you want them to know and feel like they know this not because an advert has told them this. Personal recommendation is the answer, but how do you reach a wider audience? How do you grow your business? How do you move beyond your geographical starting point? Testimonial videos are the way to build your reputation.
What Are Testimonial Videos?
A testimonial video is a video where customers who have had experience of your business talk about what it was like to be a customer. Simple. They can feature one customer or many. They can be just snippets of interviews or they can be inter-cut with action and product usage. They can be quite rough and ready or extremely glossy. Today I’m going to talk you through how and why to make a testimonial video.
Polar Windows
Why Use Testimonial Video?
Testimonial videos let your prospective customers share the experience of someone who has used your business before (You’ll find some great research data here to show you just how powerful testimonials are). It lets them see your product or service in use. It lets them see the a customer like themselves using the product and it lets them see the impact the product or service has had on someones life. These are powerful messages that have a major impact on viewers. They have some of the influence of independent reviews and some of the emotional impact of face to face discussion with someone, but you get to control the content of the conversation. Your editor has the power to reconstruct to conversation to show your product in the best light possible. Let’s take a look at the difference between what raw interview footage might be like compared to what an edited interview might be like.
Raw Footage
A woman sits in an armchair. She is elderly and happy looking and she sips from a small glass of sherry.
“Oh I’ve been here for about five years now… is it five? Elsie is it five years I’ve been here? Oh she’s not listening, but I think… yes, about five years. I enjoy it though. The staff are very nice. Yes lovely some of them. We have nice meals and then there’s games afternoons. I always team with Betty for bridge, but she can’t call the tricks right. I like to sit in the gardens. Its lovely out there in the summer. The craft lady comes on a Tuesday and we do crafts, it was those rope pot holders last week. Mine was rubbish. But then we do other things and there’s the outings. I like those.”
Edited Footage
A woman sits in an armchair. She is elderly and happy looking and she sips from a small glass of sherry.
“I’ve been here for five years now.” Cut to footage of the gardens. “It’s lovely. I like to sit in the gardens. We have..” Cut to people having a meal in the dining room. “… nice meals. The staff are very nice.” Cut back to the happy lady with her sherry. “Some of them are lovely.” Cut to footage of people going on an outing in the mini bus. “…and there’s the outings. I like those.”
So by simple cutting your editor can take something that is disjointed in places and sometimes off point and turn it into almost a scripted voice over, but with the benefit of it actually being the spoken words of a real customer. There is no dishonesty here just trimming and re-ordering to best display the service provided by a care home.
Nicholson & Smith and Nouvelle Doors
[bctt tweet=”Testimonial videos let your prospective customers share the experience of someone who has used your business”]
How To Make A Testimonial Video
So here are my five steps to making a testimonial video that will display your business in the best light possible.
- Select customers who have made the effort to contact you to express how happy they are with their experience. Most happy customers never bother to tell you so someone who has made the effort must be ecstatic.
- When shooting the interview ask them to describe their experience of the product or service. How and why they bought it. Why they decided to choose you. What it was like to use your company.
- Shoot footage of the person using the product or experiencing the service. Show and tell.
- Ask the interviewee to describe the impact the product or service has had on them.
- Ask your interviewee if they would recommend your product or service.
When it comes to creating your video you will have footage of a happy client describing why they chose you, what happened when they decided to use your product or service and what a positive impact it had on their lives. All inter-cut with scenes of them using your product or receiving the excellent service you provide and finished with them telling you that they would recommend you or perhaps that they already have.
A final tip for making testimonial videos. If the interviewee is relaxed, natural and just chatting away, what they have to say will be so much more impactful. Always shoot your interview from the traditional three quarter angle you see in news interviews, never ask them to look down the lens. Your aim is to set up the camera somewhere they will forget about it and just sit and have a nice chat. That will always get the best results for your editor.
