Table of contents:
Key takeaways:
- Video testimonials are powerful: They increase conversions, humanize your brand, and build trust more effectively than written testimonials.
- There are different types of video testimonials: Interview style, success stories, the ‘before and after,’ and real-time reactions.
- Creating video testimonials is easier than you think: Platforms like Riverside help you record high-quality videos remotely.
Customer testimonial videos are a powerful way to demonstrate your product or service's impact on your customers' lives. They help build trust in your brand, showcase real, relatable experiences, and demonstrate your company’s worth.
Best of all, creating these impactful videos doesn’t have to be complicated or time-consuming. In this guide, we’ll walk you through simple steps for creating authentic, compelling testimonials that enhance your brand’s credibility and resonate with your audience.
What are customer video testimonials?
Customer video testimonials are recorded endorsements in which satisfied customers share their positive experiences with a product, service, or brand.
These videos provide authentic social proof by showcasing real people and their success stories, building trust and relatability.
Video testimonials are especially impactful, capturing the emotions and enthusiasm of customers in a way that text alone cannot.
These testimonials can be used to highlight the value, credibility, and impact of your product/service offerings.
Types of customer video testimonials
Customer video testimonials come in various formats, each with unique strengths for showcasing different aspects of customer experiences.
By choosing the right type, you can highlight specific benefits, address common questions, or share compelling success stories that resonate with your audience. Here are the different kinds of customer video testimonials:
The classic interview
This style features a straightforward interview with a satisfied customer, allowing them to share their experience, challenges, and how the product or service helped them.
It’s a versatile format for diving into personal stories and detailed feedback. In this type of testimonial, a customer gets in front of a camera and shares their experience with your product or service.
Simple and straightforward, this kind of video relies on the customer’s sincerity shining through.
Success story
A success story video focuses on how a customer achieved a specific, impactful outcome with the help of a product or service.
These videos often use narrative approaches, emphasizing a journey from problem to resolution to showcase tangible results.
This type of video highlights how a product or service helped customers achieve specific goals or solve problems. To make success stories impactful, use data and concrete results to demonstrate your company's impact on the customer.
Before and after
This format highlights a customer’s situation before using the product or service compared to their experience after, making it easy to see the transformation or improvement.
It’s a compelling format for illustrating measurable changes and the value provided.
Before-and-after videos are a great way to showcase the transformation your customers experience due to your product or service. They’re particularly effective for visually driven industries like fitness, beauty, and home renovation.
Real-time reactions
Real-time reaction videos capture a customer’s immediate response to using the product or experiencing the service. These authentic, unfiltered reactions emphasize genuine emotions and can be especially effective for new or exciting products.
People love watching reaction videos. That’s why leveraging this genre is a great way to make your customer testimonial videos more engaging.
These videos also capture customers' immediate emotions as they experience your product for the first time, making them highly persuasive due to their perceived authenticity.
What are the benefits of great customer video testimonials?
Customer video testimonials offer a range of benefits that make them a powerful addition to any marketing strategy.
Let’s explore the key advantages of investing in a customer video testimonials strategy.
Builds trust and credibility
Customer testimonials are real, unbiased accounts that provide the social proof potential customers need to trust your brand.
Seeing someone genuinely speak about their experience fosters authenticity, especially when viewers can relate to the testimonial.
Humanizes your brand
Video testimonials show the people who benefit from your products or services. This human connection helps create a brand image that is relatable and trustworthy, making it easier for potential customers to engage emotionally.
According to recent research, 81% of consumers need to trust a brand before buying from it.
Increases conversions
Videos are engaging and capture attention quickly, which can guide customers toward a purchase decision faster.
Testimonials show tangible results, helping hesitant prospects feel more confident in taking action.
According to a recent HubSpot survey, 38% of marketers say video is the landing page element that impacts conversion most.
Boosts SEO
Video content boosts website SEO by keeping visitors on your page longer and increasing engagement metrics, which search engines favor.
Optimized testimonial videos can rank on search engines, helping attract new customers organically. Putting brand videos on YouTube automatically gives you access to the second largest search engine after Google, with over 2.5 billion monthly logged-in users.
Highlights specific product benefits
Testimonial videos can be tailored to emphasize unique features or benefits of your product or service.
This helps potential customers visualize how the product meets their needs, driving interest in specific use cases.
According to HubSpot, 96% of marketers say videos help increase customer understanding of their product or service, and 40% believe this is the most significant benefit of creating video content.
Provides marketing content for multiple platforms
Video testimonials are versatile and can be shared across social media, emails, and websites.
This multiplies your reach and allows potential customers to engage with your brand across various touchpoints. They can also be repurposed into short clips to be shared on social media, turned into blog posts, and more.
Examples of great customer video testimonials
Wondering how to make impactful customer testimonial videos? Let’s look at some fantastic examples for inspiration.
Codeacademy
This video is short and sweet, but offers many valuable lessons.
The first lesson is about highlighting benefits. You’ll see that the customer describes the benefits of Codeacademy quite well. He mentions how he and his co-founder learned to code and build a website using Codeacademy within 1-3 months.
The second lesson here is that the video cleverly incorporates social proof by featuring Coffivity, a website built by the customer in the video. The fact that Coffivity was featured in numerous news articles lends credibility and demonstrates the potential for success for users using Codecademy.
Another reason customers like doing testimonials because it gives them an external channel outside of their own marketing channels for promoting their brand to new audiences.
Felder Group
This video does a great job of showcasing the product. Viewers get a glimpse into what it would be like to experience the product or to have the product in their spaces.
Also, the customer in the video does a good job highlighting the machines' benefits. He mentions how something he spent 3 days doing only took 10 minutes with the machine. He also says the machine is compact and fits well in his home space. These are all clear benefits that are important to the company's target audience.
The customer's modesty is also a great detail that humanizes the experience. When he says, “At the moment, I’m building a chair. Not very successfully, but I’m building it,” the viewer is getting a dose of honesty, humility, and some comic relief.
Primal Trust
Here's a customer video testimonial that's very long, over 40 minutes, but very purposeful in hits length.
This video traverses the entire customer journey, from initial struggles to final transformation, giving viewers a deep look into how the Primal Trust course can help them.
Interview-style customer testimonials work well because you, as the interviewer, can steer the flow of the conversation and ask follow up questions in order to get very specific and uncover use cases that and benefits that might not be as obvious on the surface.
How to create customer testimonial videos
Creating customer video testimonials doesn’t require a big budget or a professional studio setup.
With a platform like Riverside, which enables high-quality remote video recordings, capturing authentic customer stories is easier and more affordable than ever.
Here’s how to create compelling testimonials with a video testimonial recording tool like Riverside.
Sync with your customer ahead of time
Once you’ve found a customer who wants to participate and you have agreed on the format, take steps before the interview to ensure the proper outcome.
Schedule a preliminary call or video chat to discuss the testimonial process. Tell the customer the purpose of the testimonial and what key message you’d like to convey. Do you want the video to highlight a specific product feature, emphasize positive outcomes, build relatability, or a mix of all?
Also, give them a general outline of questions you plan to ask. This way, your customers can reflect on their experience and formulate thoughtful responses.
Some common testimonial questions include:
- What problem were you trying to solve before you found [your product/service]?
- What features or benefits have you found the most valuable?
- What results have you experienced?
- How was your overall experience using [product/service]?
- Have you used any other similar product/service? How did they compare to ours?
Send equipment to them (optional)
If you want your videos to look more professional, consider sending recording equipment to your customer. You can send the equipment yourself or let a dedicated third-party company do so.
This step is optional because your customer can still record using their laptop, webcam, or phone and get excellent results with Riverside.
Record a high-quality testimonial remotely
Recording customer testimonials remotely doesn’t mean compromising quality if you use the right platform. Riverside is designed to deliver professional-grade recordings without needing your customers to handle any technical setup.
Use Producer Mode for seamless control
With Riverside’s Producer Mode, you can take complete control of the recording session, making it easier for your customers to share their stories without worrying about the technicalities. Here’s how it helps:
- Adjust Audio and Video Settings: As the producer, you can manage audio levels and optimize video settings in real time.
- Control Extra Elements: Load sound effects, play videos, and manage other multimedia features using Riverside's Media Board without interrupting your customer’s focus on the interview.
If you want to use a script while recording, you can also share the script and a teleprompter with your guest to ensure the conversation runs as smoothly as possible.
Record crystal-clear video and audio
Riverside offers local recording in 4K video and 48 kHz audio, ensuring every testimonial is high-quality and stable, even if there are fluctuations in internet connection. Here’s why this is key:
- High-definition output: 4K video and high-fidelity audio mean your testimonials will look and sound sharp, helping create a professional impression.
- Stable recording quality: Since recording happens locally on both ends, any internet lag or dropouts won’t affect the final quality, keeping the audio and video smooth and consistent.
Get separate audio and video tracks
Each participant’s audio and video are recorded on separate tracks, which gives you greater flexibility during post-production. Riverside can record in 4K video and 48 kHz audio. The recording is done locally, so any fluctuations in the internet connection won’t affect the recording quality.
With separate tracks, you can adjust each person’s audio or video individually, making it easier to edit out background noise or adjust volume. This setup is ideal if you’re repurposing content, as you can cut different segments or adjust for specific platforms.
For a more detailed guide, check out this resource on how to record video testimonials with Riverside.
Edit and polish your video
Riverside has plenty of tools to edit your video so it is ready to upload to YouTube or your website:
- Text-based editing: Trim the video by removing text in the transcript to delete the corresponding portion of the video automatically.
- Timeline editing: Timeline editor with tools including trimming and splitting.
- Add supporting visuals and audio: Add supporting visuals, such as product demonstration or b-roll footage of your customer using your product to enhance the testimonial’s impact.
- Audio enhancement: The AI-powered audio editor lets you automatically remove background noise, normalize audio levels, and remove long silences and pauses.
- AI caption and transcription: Add captions in over 100 languages to your videos.
- Text and image overlays: Add text and image overlays to the video.
- Branding: Add a custom logo and graphics to suit your brand.
- Change aspect ratio: Change the aspect ratio to suit the platform you’re uploading to.
Get approval and publish
Once the video is complete, send it to the customer for approval. After they give the go-ahead, thank the customer and consider offering them a small token of appreciation. This could be a small gift basket, gift card, exclusive access to your products, or discounts.
Then, work with your marketing team to create a promotional strategy for sharing the video on your website, social media channels, email newsletters, and other relevant platforms.
You can even use Riverside to create clips for all of your favorite social media channels instantly.
FAQs about customer testimonial videos
How long should a customer testimonial video be?
You can have both long and short customer testimonial videos. Shorter ones should be 2-3 minutes in length. This is the ideal time for capturing attention online, where people have shorter attention spans.
Longer-form testimonial videos, like interviews, can take 30 minutes or longer. These longer videos are to connect even more deeply with the customer, the product, and the story – building trust and credibility in the process.
How do you ask for a video testimonial from a client?
To ask for a video testimonial from a client, follow the below steps:
- Choose the right time: Reach out when a client is most likely to express satisfaction or achieve a positive outcome using your product or service. This ensures their experience is fresh and their enthusiasm is high.
- Personalize your request: Don’t just send a generic email. Make your email sound personal and customized.
- Make it easy: Provide clear instructions so the customer knows exactly what to do.
- Offer assistance and make it easy: Guide the customer on recording the video. Provide them with equipment and software recommendations if needed. Riverside is an excellent option for facilitating remote customer tutorial recordings.
Why are video testimonials better?
Video testimonials are more engaging than text. They clearly show the customer's emotions and authentic gratitude and appreciation for the product. Plus, a video is also more memorable than text. Lastly, they humanize your brand, forging a stronger connection with potential customers.
