Testimonial videos are one of the key ingredients used in a Video Powered Business. Using testimonial videos in your marketing strategy help to boost your credibility in the eyes of your customers because they are hearing about how great your product or service is from someone OTHER THAN YOU. We spend so much time talking about ourselves that at some point it just becomes useless noise, but when a happy customer talks about their experiences with you it can really help to push a hesitant prospect over the edge and drive them to make a purchase.
There are many ways to make a successful testimonial video, but here are 3 key elements that you must include in the video.
1 – Introduction
The reason that testimonials can be so powerful within your marketing strategy is because of something called “Social Proof”, which is the idea that people need to see other people doing something to feel comfortable doing it themselves… it’s basically a form of peer pressure. To make this effective, your prospect has to be able to see themselves in the shoes of whoever is giving the testimonial so that they can feel connected to the person on screen. For example, if you are selling a product catered to new mothers, a new mom is going to feel more comfortable buying someone who introduces themselves as a mom as opposed to someone who introduces themselves as a financial advisor.
Additionally, including the length of time they’ve been in their position (either professionally like in the example below or personally like the example of a new mother who might say something such as “I recently became a new mother”). Including their city / location isn’t necessary, but it may help to add more credibility to your brand if your prospects can see that you have served customers in many different locations.
There are certainly many different ways someone could introduce themselves on camera, but their introduction could flow something like “Hello, my name is John Doe and I’ve been a professional private chef based in Denver, Colorado for the past 15 years.”
2 – Painful past experience
Businesses exist to solve some kind of problem or serve a need. Sometimes these problems can be simple, like “my hair got long, I need someone to cut it” and sometimes they can be complex like “I have products that need to get from Point A to Point B, I need someone to transport them for me”. In both cases, your prospective customer has some kind of a pain point that they want addressed and your business likely exists to help alleviate some of your customers pains. The bigger the pain that you can alleviate, the more valuable your offering is.
Before your current customer can share how great your product is, they should share the bad experience (pain) they were experiencing before finding your product. This will help to remind the viewer, your prospect, about their own experiences. In fact, there is a good chance that your prospect is experiencing that pain RIGHT NOW, otherwise it isn’t likely that they’d be searching for your services.
This part of your testimonial might sound like “Before finding Chef Box, I had to rely on plain plastic bins to transport my chef’s tools and equipment. These boxes were horrible, the handles kept breaking, everything was disorganized, and my back was hurting from how many heavy boxes I had to carry in to each house I cooked at.”
3 – Resolution
After exposing the pain that your customer and prospect have experienced in past experiences, you want to paint your offering as the “guide” that helps them experience peace, prosperity, success, happiness, comfort, etc. As they say in Building a Story Brand, “Always position your customer as the hero and your brand as the guide. Always. If you don’t, you will die.” You are not their hero and here to save them, your job is to equip them to save themselves.
In the case of testimonials, we can’t exactly put words in our customers’ mouths, but it would be best if they said something like “Once I started using the Chef Box my work became so much more enjoyable and I was able to focus on my love of cooking instead of worrying about if I had the right utensils and how they were organized. As a result, I sped up my prep time and now my dinners take HALF the time to prepare. With the extra time that I have, I’ve been able to perfect some new recipes I was developing and my clients LOVE them!”
Conclusion
As you can see, the actual message within the testimonial can be very simple but still be effective. You can certainly include more elements in the testimonial, and your client can choose to go more in-depth than the example, but the basic structure will likely stay somewhat the same. As you watch other testimonials, try and pinpoint these three elements and see what else the marketer has chosen to include.
If you have any questions about this article or want to explore creating your own testimonial videos, feel free to reach out to us at info@chromaticdc.com!
