Testimonials are first hand stories about the value of your product or service. These stories, written or recorded by your customers, clients, or employees, are a priceless form of social proof that shows potential connections the benefits they could see for themselves.
Here, we’ve gathered the testimonial statistics you need to know, based on data from over 450 marketing professionals on:
Despite these proven benefits, we know that businesses face challenges when they want to share testimonials with their audience.
That’s why we’ll also show you how to collect powerful testimonials with Vocal Video, our affordable, user-friendly tool that every business can use to gather stories from the people who know exactly what they have to offer.
Find out more about Vocal Video when you sign up for free today — or read on to find out more about the proven power of testimonials in video marketing.
4 Key Testimonial Statistics for Marketers
The data we refer to throughout this post comes from Vocal Video’s survey of over 450 marketing professionals.
Whether they spoke about the power of testimonials or the challenges they faced in collecting them, the answers we received were reflected across SMBs, enterprise businesses, and B2B and B2C sectors alike.
We think the results make two things crystal clear:
- Testimonials have benefits for everyone.
- The importance of testimonials is only increasing.
Let’s dive into the details.
1. Testimonials Have an ROI of up to 500%
In our survey results, we found the majority of businesses see a fantastic return on the time and resources they invest in producing testimonials. Specifically…
72% of marketers realize an ROI of 50–500% from testimonial videos, including significant conversion improvements.
And when we looked at larger businesses, these figures rose, with 78% of large and enterprise businesses seeing an ROI of 100% or more.
Here, it’s important to bear in mind the businesses we surveyed often produced testimonials “the old-fashioned way,” with professional recording equipment and a production team (for example, 44% of large organizations sent a videographer to their customer’s location). This leads to far higher costs than producing a testimonial with Vocal Video, and the return on investment was still clear to see.
Testimonials have such a high ROI because they’re one of the best types of content to build trust with prospective customers. Testimonials can make your marketing…
- More authentic, by showing real people talking about their customer experience.
- More detailed, by explaining the pain points your company addresses and the positive experiences people have had.
- More memorable, by connecting with potential customers on a more relatable level than star ratings alone.
So, when they use testimonials alongside their other marketing tools, it’s no wonder businesses consistently see a return on the testimonials they create.
2. Testimonials Boost Conversion Rates for 88% of Marketing Teams
When your goal is to increase conversions, video testimonials are the way to go…
88% of marketing teams see 10+% lift compared to campaigns without testimonial videos, and nearly half see a 25%+ lift.
The most encouraging thing about these statistics is their consistency across different sizes and types of businesses. For example:
95% of medium companies reported at least a 10% lift, and 64% of small businesses saw their conversions rise by 25% or more.
What’s more, testimonial marketing doesn’t just move people down the sales funnel — it connects with more potential customers, too.
Testimonials can increase conversions and get more leads for your business by…
- Increasing the number of clicks your site gets when you appear in search engine results.
- Keeping potential customers on your sales pages for longer.
- Building the number of internal and external links on your website.
- Lowering the number of people who bounce away from your site.
Read more about the SEO benefits of testimonials for your business.
According to our research…
Nearly half of marketers reported significant improvements in conversions (over 25%) by using more social proof in their social media campaigns.
Some businesses, particularly in B2B, find it challenging to connect with their potential audience through content marketing on social media. If you’re struggling to stand out on social media, sharing testimonials, personal recommendations, customer reviews, endorsements, and success stories makes your offering relatable and grabs attention in a notoriously noisy space.
We found 54% of marketing pros are already using video testimonials for social media advertising and they’re seeing this strategy compound the ROI on the high-quality content they’re producing.
Whether you choose to share testimonials on LinkedIn, Instagram, in short form video, or on Facebook, it’s hard to beat the connection you can make when you center your marketing on your valued customers.
4. Demand for Testimonials Is Increasing
Year on year, more businesses want to make more testimonials to use in more parts of their marketing strategy. In fact…
The number of marketing organizations planning to create more than 15 testimonial videos has doubled.
You can draw some interesting conclusions from these results:
- Testimonials aren’t a “one-and-done” resource for businesses. Instead, it’s about building a library of social proof to show how many people have struggled with the challenges you address, how your business can help, and what sets you apart from your competitors.
- Once businesses start to build a library of customer feedback, their appetite for it increases. Notice that the businesses that have previously made 10 testimonials or more want to follow up with even more in the upcoming business year.
We think it’s clear that positive testimonials are one of the most powerful marketing tools businesses can add to their arsenal. They’re versatile, effective, and consistently get results.
So, when you know how many satisfied customers you have, what’s stopping you from using their stories in your marketing materials?
Why Don’t Businesses Produce More Testimonials?
As well as uncovering the benefits, our testimonial statistics shed some light on the most common dilemmas business owners face when they set out to collect positive reviews.
Testimonials Can Be Time-Consuming to Produce
Here, the statistics speak for themselves…
- 78% of companies need at least 4 weeks to make a testimonial video.
- 54% of marketers spend over 2 months creating a testimonial video.
- 12% of respondents (including 33% of enterprise organizations) said the process took 6 months from start to finish.
This time crunch problem is particularly acute for SMBs, but no business is immune.
89% of large organizations and 75% of enterprise organizations said they would produce at least 50% more testimonial videos if they had more time.
In fact, of all the factors holding people back from producing more testimonials, time was the single biggest obstacle they faced.
Testimonials Can Be Expensive to Film and Edit
We’re familiar with the budgeting constraints businesses can face when they set out to produce testimonials. Before we started Vocal Video, we once spent $25,000 on a single video.
We’re not alone, either…
- 54% of marketers pay more than $15,000 for a single testimonial video through outside agencies.
- 11% of companies pay over $50,000 for a testimonial video.
- Only 16% of large and enterprise companies claimed to be able to create a testimonial video for less than $1,000.
Again, cost is a problem that’s particularly acute for smaller businesses, who are more likely to find the expense dulls the ROI they see on their testimonials.
And of the larger businesses that responded to our survey, 67% agreed they’d produce 50% more testimonial videos if they were less expensive.
Testimonials Can Require a Large Production Team
From videographers, to boom operators, to editors in post-production, making a testimonial can involve a sprawling team. Larger businesses can also find people from across departments want to get involved, which can make the process even more complicated to manage.
- 32% of businesses use a 4–6 person team to make testimonials.
- 16% of businesses have over 12 people involved.
- 31% of SMBs don’t collect any testimonial videos stating it’s just “too hard.”
When we created Vocal Video, we wanted to give marketers and entrepreneurs (like us) an easy way to create and share customer and client testimonials.
We knew we could overcome all the challenges of time, expense, and scheduling, and come up with an easy-to-use, end-to-end tool to help every business use testimonials from their happy customers to attract new ones.
With Vocal Video, you can scale up testimonial production efficiently and affordably and see a massive return on the time and resources you invest. For example…
- Revenue software company Clari made 40 testimonial videos in just 6 months.
- Non-profit FVAP went from 0–46 videos without recruiting a marketing team.
- CEG worldwide found themselves among the 30% of businesses that record testimonials at events, and they’re now picking up 20 new testimonials every time.
Now, you can start gathering online reviews with a powerful tool that makes it easy to record, edit, and publish great testimonials like these…
See the results for yourself and sign up for your free-forever Vocal Video account.
Experience the Power of Testimonials with Vocal Video
Now, we’ll take you through the Vocal Video process step-by-step and show you how easy it can be to collect customer testimonials, case studies, and other forms of user-generated content to enhance your marketing strategy.
Set Up a Testimonial Collector
Every Vocal Video testimonial starts with a video collector, which guides your respondents through your interview questions and records their answers remotely.
You can set your video collector up with your brand colors for instant recognition, the interface is user-friendly, and collectors look great on any device.
Plus, in comparison to traditional testimonial collection, one person can set up a video collector in just a couple of minutes.
Every Vocal Video pricing plan includes over 45 customizable video collector templates to kick off your project and simplify the process.
Our classic testimonial template is Customer Testimonial Videos. This template includes three questions and pre-written welcome and thank you messages, which explain the process and thank the respondents for their time.
The questions are…
- Could you describe a time that [your organization] helped you?
- How would you describe [your organization] in three words?
- Why is [your organization] different from similar products or services?
B2C companies can also get the ball rolling with the questions in these templates…
If you’re looking for a way to attract B2B buyers, these templates are a fantastic place to get started…
And we also include industry-specific templates for Real Estate, Healthcare, Event Promotion, and more.
Get Responses Fast
When you record testimonial videos the old-fashioned way, you can send them to the editor and wait weeks for them to be turned around. If you’ve just launched a new product or you want to use employee testimonials in recruitment, this is simply too long to wait.
With Vocal Video, you simply share a link to your video collector by email, text, through your website, or on social media. Your happy customers can open the link and start sharing their stories, wherever and whenever they have time.
Read more about how to ask for testimonials.
Since the knowledge crowdsourcing community Pulse started using Vocal Video, they’ve started publishing video testimonials in less than two working days.
“It’s super easy! We send it out, and within 24 to 48 hours, we actually get out videos of super high quality. And, at the same time, they also feel very authentic.”
You can see more about how Pulse is using Vocal Video to bring the voices of their users to their marketing strategy and investor presentations in their case study video.
Edit Responses without the Pros
When you use Vocal Video, you won’t need any prior experience to create high-quality, branded videos to share online. Our unique automatic editing process removes the need for a lengthy post-production process, dramatically reducing the number of people who need to come on board and slashing the costs of using video content in marketing.
Once your customer finishes recording their testimonial, we’ll stitch together their responses to each question and add the professional-quality design elements that help your video stand out.
These automatic edits include:
- An opening slide with your logo and brand colors.
- Cards showing the questions your respondent answered.
- Dynamic transitions between scenes.
- An overlay with attribution information.
- AI-generated subtitles for accessibility.
- Music from our library of royalty-free tracks.
With our intuitive drag-and-drop editing tools, you can trim your video or tweak elements of the design before it goes live.
Then, whenever you publish a testimonial with Vocal Video, you’ll be able to…
- Embed the video seamlessly on your website by copying + pasting the code we generate for you.
- Post the video on Facebook, LinkedIn, and X (Twitter) with as little as one click.
- Download the video to use on YouTube, Reels, or a digital screen at your location.
- Share the link to the public Vocal Video page where your video is hosted.
All you have to do is decide where you want to share the testimonial first.
Scale Up Production
As we saw in the survey results, once businesses start reaping the benefits of video testimonials in marketing, they usually want to make even more.
When you use Vocal Video to collect testimonials, it’s easy to make testimonial collection an ongoing part of your marketing process — without increasing the effort you put in.
The video collectors you customize can collect unlimited responses, and Vocal Video customers on a Pro or Enterprise plan can publish unlimited videos, too. This makes it easier than ever to…
Optimizely collected testimonials from their employees for International Women’s Day and shared them on LinkedIn. Their video collector included open questions about the benefits of working for Optimizely, as well as invitations to share the wisdom they’d picked up along the way.
With a testimonial marketing campaign like this, based on sharing encouragement and having your voice heard, it’s incredibly easy to invite others to get involved by sharing the link to your video collector in the caption.
Good to know: Employee testimonials like these ones can also be an invaluable part of your recruitment marketing strategy, helping to attract top candidates to the open roles at your company.
Read more about using employee-generated content in recruitment.
Create an Online Gallery of Customer Stories (and Invite More Customers to Add Their Voices)
Prepared4X shares video demonstrations of their fire starter tool on the product pages of their website. Here, it’s the sheer number of positive reviews that’s convincing, along with the undeniable video evidence that the product works.
Here, video testimonials influence buying decisions in the same way as word of mouth or peer recommendations — but much faster, and without the need to strike up the conversation in person.
To collect video testimonials like this, try including the link to your video collector in the follow-up emails you send after a customer makes a purchase.
Good to know: Vocal Video gallery embeds are dynamic. Whenever you add a new video to the gallery in your dashboard, the gallery on your website will automatically update, so there’s no need to remove the embed code and input a new version every time your testimonial collection grows.
Show (and Collect) Video Testimonials at Events
The American Lighting Association uses testimonials at its events, and takes the opportunity to gather more attendee stories to advertise their upcoming conferences.
These videos were collected with Vocal Video’s unique Kiosk Mode, where the video collector runs on a single device and collects testimonials one after another. We love the way these videos capture the electric atmosphere and the community feel of a live event.
Good to know: A testimonial carousel gallery like this is also an effective addition to a home page or any of your company’s landing pages. Placed after the headline statistics and a compelling description of your offering, the voices of real customers bring it all together and help to seal the deal at the end of the decision-making process.
Testimonial Statistics Speak for Themselves, Now See the Benefits with Vocal Video
When you create testimonial videos to use as part of your marketing strategy, you’re more likely to convert new customers, more likely to engage them on social media, and you could see up to a 500% return on investment.
Testimonials connect with your audience on a deeper level, inform purchasing decisions, and build an impression of your brand that consumers trust. Whatever industry you’re in, you can collect powerful testimonials quickly and affordably with Vocal Video. It’s the only tool you need to ask for, record, edit, and share testimonials online.
Sign up for free now and find out more about what testimonials can do for your business.