Video testimonials are a gold prize for an effective social-proof marketing strategy.
Video testimonials is an excellent way to share success stories from your happy customers and demonstrate your value to potential new clients. Learning how to record video testimonials might seem daunting, but don’t worry: We’re here to help!
Read over our handy step-by-step guide. We share our best practices to record video testimonials so you can leverage what your happy clients say about you.
Why Do You Need Video Testimonials?
Video testimonials are recordings of your satisfied customers endorsing your business. They offer social proof: validating your product by showing that real people use it and consider it valuable.
They combine the emotional appeal of video with the power of social influence and ensure effective marketing of your business. In a study surveying people watching customer testimonials, over 70% said positive video testimonials significantly increased their trust in a business.
Potential clients are more likely to remember information they’ve seen in a video than what they’ve read. Plus, videos are more likely to be spread on social media, meaning your testimonial will have greater reach.
How to Get Video Testimonials
So how do you go about getting video testimonials? To put it simply, ask! Of course, getting your clients to give you positive video testimonials is a lot easier if you already have a great personal relationship with them. This is why it’s always essential to maintain a human onboarding experience for new and existing clients.
Make sure to ask them personally and explain how much their testimonial means to you. You can also offer them something in return. Giving a discount on their subscription to your service or even a simple backlink to their website to boost their domain authority to rank better on Google are two great rewards that may well help you get a video testimonial.
What Makes A Good Video Testimonial?
Engaging structure. Your client’s testimonial should explain their experience by following a structured narrative.
Make your video short and to the point. Aim for a video length of between 60 and 90 seconds.
Happy clients. Film the video somewhere your client is comfortable, ensure they’re confident with what they’re saying, and practice before recording.
Keep things conversational. Effective video testimonials create an emotional connection: your client should speak from experience and from the heart so that their testimonial sounds authentic. You don’t want to have them reading off a script.
Bonus: include a unique twist. To optimize audience engagement, think about adding in multiple camera angles, different locations, or footage of them using your product.
Best Structure For Effective Video Testimonials
Create a storyboard to estimate the timing of each part of the narrative and ensure the content remains relevant. Your client should:
- Introduce themselves and their company. This highlights your client’s credibility and allows viewers to relate to them, creating social proof.
- Identify their pain point. The client must explain what their problem was. This is a powerful tool to hook the targeted audience who are looking for the same thing.
- Detail their struggle to find the right product and how other businesses let them down. The audience can relate to this, so it creates an emotional connection for them.
- Explain the solution: finding your business. Convince viewers of how your product stood out from competitors, resolved their issues, and met their original needs.
- End with a call-to-action (CTA) to convert the audience into new clients.
8 Best Practices To Prepare For Video Testimonials
Our best practices to prepare for video testimonials apply whether you record them remotely or on-premises. Having seen remote become the norm, we’ve developed our software to ensure your video testimonials remain high-quality wherever they’re recorded.
What’s more, Riverside gives the producer full control over the remote video testimonial shoot without recording you, making it a lot easier for you to check that your best practices are in place.
Follow these 8 best practices for better video testimonials:
1. Choose high-quality recording equipment
- Camera & tripod: these days, most external webcams and smartphone cameras record high-definition videos. Use a tripod to ensure stable video.
- Sound: if possible, choosing a high-quality microphone will make all the difference to the sound when you record video testimonials.
2. Record with the right software
Make sure your recording software has all the features you need and is simple to use, making it easier for you and your client to record video testimonials. For example, if you're recording remotely you'll want software like Riverside.
Riverside is for top-notch remote interview recordings. You can create videos with up to 8 participants no matter if they're at home, in the office, or anywhere else. For every participant, you receive a separate audio and video track for more editing in post-production.
Even though you’re recording on an online platform, the end recordings are studio-quality. Riverside records everything directly on your participants’ devices instead of relying on internet connection. This means you’ll get high-end video with up to 4K resolution and uncompressed crisp audio at up to 48kHz. We offer many other benefits, including automated transcriptions, producer controls, and a text-based editor for a streamlined workflow.
Find out more about us here, or start recording video testimonials from anywhere!
3. Make sure you’ve got a backup
Check WiFi connection, storage, and battery: three things that can cause your video to cut out. Riverside automatically creates two files, a local and an online recording, to ensure you don’t lose any recordings even if you have connection issues.
4. Consider your location's background, lighting, and setup
- Lighting: arranging to record in the middle of the day will ensure your client has a good amount of natural light.
- Background: a quiet, uncluttered room is best to ensure nothing in the video distracts from your client talking.
- Landscape format: mount your camera horizontally to record your video testimonials in landscape format and make sure you can see your client’s face. This way, you’ll have enough content to crop the video if you’re sharing on platforms that require portrait format.
5. Prepare your client
The most important thing when recording your video testimonial is that your client sounds positive and authentic. Work with your client to build and practice the testimonial narrative structure detailed above. Before starting the recording, answer any questions they may have, reassure them they can take as long as they need (you can edit out any bloopers), and thank them again for their time.
6. Focus on the value you provide
Don't focus on the features you're offering, rather focus on what value this will give your clients. How are you solving clients' problems? How are you making their lives better or easier? This is a much stronger selling point that will actually get clients to see they can benefit and gain from using your service or product.
7. Keep it short but captivating
While people are willing to watch a video that's a few minutes long, according to vidyard only around 25% will watch a video to the end if it's more than 20 minutes long. This is why you should keep video testimonials short and simple at around 2 minutes or preferably shorter. It's also a good idea to try hook your audience at the beginning of your video, so you give them a reason to continue watching.
8. Use branding effectively
You want viewers to remember your brand and according to Facebook, revealing your brand in the first few seconds of your video might help them do so.
How to Record a Video Testimonial with Riverside: Step-by-Step Guide
Our step-by-step guide will allow you to record high-quality video testimonials even if you’re producing them remotely:
Step 1: Sign up for Riverside. Create an account, you can even start with a free plan.
Step 2: Create your studio. Give it a name and make sure it’s set up to record audio and video. You can also invite your client as a guest here, and Riverside will send a link to their email.
Step 3: Adjust studio settings. Select your preferred recording resolution, audio sample rate, and how you want your backup file recorded. You can also add a waiting room for an extra security feature and sign in to Dropbox to save your files after recording.
Step 4: Invite your client. The studio settings page gives you another chance to invite your client to join the recording. Make sure “guest” is selected, then invite them by emailing a calendar invite or copying the link into your conversation.
Step 5: Go to the recording studio. Type your name in, indicate whether you’re wearing headphones or not, and select “Join as a producer”. On the right, you can make sure your mic and camera are turned off so that only your client is recorded.
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Step 6: Join studio. Let your client into the studio and check they’re ready to start.
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Step 7: Start recording. As your client gives their testimonial, you have full control over the recording session using Riverside’s side panel, even though you’re not being recorded. You can also chat with them via the right-hand tab.
Step 8: Hang up and end recording. Select “View all recordings” on the side panel and your recording will begin saving automatically. Make sure neither you or your client closes the browser window until Riverside says it’s saved the recording. You’ll be redirected to the recordings dashboard where you can name and download the files ready for post-production.
How To Leverage Your Video Testimonial
Once your recording is edited and both you and your client are happy with the result, it’s time to share your video testimonial across different platforms for maximum engagement.
- Feature the video testimonial across your website. Capture and convert different website visitors throughout their journey by promoting the testimonial on your homepage, on a dedicated customer testimonials page, your sales page, and landing pages. Plus, having video on your site is proven to increase traffic and boost sales.
- Write a case study or blog post about the testimonial (or both!). Featuring the testimonial as part of a longer article will answer all the questions your audience may have after watching the video. Plus, the content will provide additional SEO opportunities to attract visitors to your website.
- Share your testimonials on social media. Over 90% of brands have reported getting new customers thanks to sharing videos on social media.
- Use online ads. To expand the impact of your video testimonial beyond your followers, run an ad campaign on your preferred social network. Don’t forget to link the social media post to a landing page to convert your targeted audience into leads.
- Send your video testimonial via email to convert newsletter subscribers into customers. Make your subject line engaging, the email content personalized, and the testimonial relevant to the target recipients.
Optimize Your Video Testimonials With Riverside.fm
Video testimonials are an important demonstration of your product’s social proof and are a proven way to attract new customers and boost revenue.
Following the best practices and step-by-step guide in this article will allow you to optimize your video testimonials and create high-quality, professional-looking recordings even if you can’t be there in person.
Using remote recording software like Riverside makes the experience even easier, so all you have to concentrate on is your happy clients sharing their positive stories.
FAQs on How to Make Video Testimonials
How long should a testimonial video be?
As we mentioned in our article, people tend to have a short attention span. This is why creating short but effective video testimonials is much better. Your length should also correlate with the platform you’re posting on. We wouldn’t recommend creating videos that are longer than 2 minutes. Preferably videos under a minute are best, especially for social media.
How can you record video testimonials?
Recording video testimonials is pretty simple. You can use Riverside and follow the steps above. To summarize, this is how you can record a video testimonial:
- Find and invite customers to interview who are enthusiastic about your brand
- Set up equipment and send customers a brief so they can prepare.
- Record your customers in person or remotely. You can also ask them to record themselves.
- Edit and polish your recordings.
- Publish and share them on your platform of choice.
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