Potential customers & clients around the world are increasingly favoring video content. In order to modernize your business and position yourself properly in your market, creating excellent video content is essential. Solvis Media helps businesses take their company to the next level through video production. In our eyes, testimonial videos are the most important to produce for business. In this brief guide, you will learn about the benefits of testimonial videos, and the process behind creating great testimonial videos.
What are testimonial videos?
Testimonial videos are cinema-grade videos produced for businesses of all sizes. Testimonial videos showcase past or current customer success stories, backed by data or emotion. Sometimes, these are also called case study videos. At Solvis Media, we believe great testimonial videos are always customer-driven & industry specific. We’d recommend starting with a recent customer success story that has can’t miss data. In other instances, we’d focus on an emotional story, where a client felt a real difference in their life from a product or service.
What makes for a great video testimonial?
For small to mid-sized businesses, we film testimonial videos with actual customers, sharing real results and authenticity, instead of actors. For enterprise, Video testimonials may be less focused on specific customer stories, and more focused on advertising benefits in a similar storytelling style. Enterprise & larger businesses traditionally use actors for a controlled, polished look on television or for social media advertising. We’ll interchange both methods for companies of all sizes. Have a look at a recent example of a testimonial video we produced:
Each testimonial video should tell a great story, and have a clear beginning, middle, and end. We like to film testimonial videos in the customers’ place of business for maximum impact & great mis-en-scene (fancy film-school term for ‘the physical atmosphere of a location’). Now, how long should a video testimonial be? For time, we recommend video testimonials to be anywhere from 30 seconds to 2 minutes in length. Anything shorter isn’t in-depth enough, and anything longer may bore customers.
How to ask clients for a video testimonial
It can be a difficult task to ask customers for reviews. First and foremost, we recommend setting up an automated review collector, which we do here at Solvis Media. This way, you can easily gauge customer satisfaction. Inviting customers to appear on camera for a testimonial is all about creating a fun and inviting filming day. We encourage companies to have representatives show up on filming days with food, gear, or even discounts on future services. Or, offer to pay for dinner. Everyone loves free stuff. Some customers might only be willing to share a quick, positive remark about their experience. We recommend finding those willing to talk in-depth about their success story. By providing easy prompts & questions to expand on, we make filming a breeze.
How to create a testimonial video
Well, we’re going to recommend hiring a production company (hi). We do everything from concept to completion. Writing to filming to editing & more. Not ready to spend on a cinema-grade testimonial video for your business? Want a quick video for social media? User generated content (UGC) can come in handy. UGC is filmed by customers themselves – typically on a smartphone. Small businesses, cash-conscious companies & startups can benefit from these types of testimonial videos. Production is simple: Send out a quick request to customers, asking for a 1-2 minute, ‘user-generated’ testimonial video, filmed on their phone. The best part of these videos? They’re (usually) free.
