Most marketers know that testimonials are powerful tools to convince potential customers of the benefits of a product or service.
But what are the benefits of video testimonials compared to written testimonials, and why are they considered more effective?
Video testimonials show potential buyers real people talking about your brand. Seeing and hearing genuine customer testimonials from real people on screen makes those testimonials appear more authentic and credible than written testimonials, which are potentially easy to fake.
However, many businesses hesitate to use video in this way because the usual way of producing them involves a lot of time and expense — it isn’t affordable.
Our video testimonial platform, Vocal Video, was designed to take the time and expense out of the video testimonial recording process. It simplifies the process by guiding your happy customers to record a video on their own device which is then automatically edited. But those savings of time and money don’t come at the cost of quality. Just see for yourself in these video testimonial examples:
In this article, we’ll start by further discussing why many brands are hesitant to use video testimonials. Then, we’ll give you a rundown of five main benefits of video testimonials compared to written testimonials, and how our own customers have used Vocal Video to achieve these benefits.
5 Benefits of Using Video Testimonials
- Video testimonials are more credible than written testimonials.
- Video testimonials are more effective at building trust in your brand.
- Video testimonials are more versatile than other formats.
- Video testimonials are easily shareable and more appealing.
- Video testimonials give your brand higher conversion rates.
Finally, we’ll explain how our own platform, Vocal Video, lets you produce as many great testimonial videos as you want in a cost-effective and highly scalable way.
Experience the benefits of video testimonials for yourself by effortlessly recording and collecting them with Vocal Video. Create your free Vocal Video account now to start collecting videos in minutes.
Why Many Brands Hesitate to Invest in Video Testimonials
Many businesses don’t consider using video testimonials because the traditional way of producing them involves:
- Hiring a film crew or videographer with all the required professional video, lighting, and audio equipment.
- Identifying a convenient time for everyone involved in the shoot.
- Finding and renting a location for the shoot.
- Hiring a video editor and other post-production professionals.
All of those steps are time-consuming and costly and only allow you to create a handful of high-quality videos to use in your marketing campaigns.
Another way to record video testimonials is to have you or your customers shoot the video on an iPhone or other device. This is cheaper than hiring a video crew, but you are left with raw video footage that still needs to be turned into a polished testimonial.
The Vocal Video platform was designed to address all of these difficulties.
Our system lets you collect video testimonials from your customers at a fraction of the cost of a traditional approach. There are no in-person interviews, fancy video equipment, or on location video shoots needed. Your customers simply record the video asynchronously using their own device.
Our process guides your customers while they are recording the video so that they feel comfortable. With this process, fewer customers drop off during the video creation process and you get more testimonials. Then, when they’ve finished, the raw footage is automatically edited so you get a pro-style video testimonial without any of the editing hassle and expense.
Here’s a testimonial video example recorded using Vocal Video:
This testimonial video already includes:
- Customized branding and colors
- Interstitial text slides
- Animated transitions between responses
- Text overlays
- Background music
- Automatically-generated captions (great for accessibility and SEO)
- A call-to-action
You can use these video testimonials without changing anything, but we also give you built-in video editing tools so you can make additional edits if desired (more on this below).
5 Benefits of Video Testimonials for Your Business
1. Video Testimonials are More Credible Than Written Testimonials
As a format, a video testimonial is immediately more engaging and memorable than a text-based testimonial. Video testimonials are hard to fake; it’s obvious if somebody has been given a script to follow. If you see and hear Jane Smith from Wyoming talking about what she enjoyed about her recent purchase, you are more likely to believe her than if you simply read a quote.
When potential buyers watch a real customer providing a review of your product or service, it’s obvious that they are being genuine because their gestures, tone of voice, and enthusiasm are clear.
This perception of credibility leads to higher conversions for your brand (the ultimate goal of using testimonials; more on this later).
Case Study: How Pulse Q&A Builds Credibility with Vocal Video Testimonials
Pulse Q&A is a knowledge crowdsourcing platform for IT executives with a community of over 8000 members. As a source for cutting-edge information and knowledge that drives decision-making, it’s important for this community of CIOs and CTOs to build credibility and authority.
Ras Gill-Boulos, Chief Marketing Officer at Pulse Q&A, highlights how important video testimonials have proven to be in the community’s marketing strategy:
“Videos — and especially video testimonials — are incredibly important in building credibility with our audience. We actually do see that this is how we're going to keep improving on the marketing side things,” she says.
“Vocal Video is taking out two things for us. One, the need to go out and hire a videographer; and two, the need to find somebody to put it together and to create, basically, the commentary around it. 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,” says Gill-Boulos.
Click here to read our Pulse Marketing case study.
2. Video Testimonials Help Your Brand Build Trust with Your Target Audience
Brands are immediately considered more trustworthy when they use video testimonials because their current customers are willing to act as direct spokespeople for the business.
Viewers make an emotional connection with your testimonial provider and react similarly to them as they would to a word-of-mouth recommendation from somebody they already know and trust.
This is particularly helpful if you are an online business which relies on building trust with a customer for them to check out and pay for goods and services without ever talking to you.
Using video testimonials, including employee and leadership testimonials, gives your brand a face that people can see and relate to. The more video testimonials you create, the more trustworthy your brand will become.
Case Study: Admiral Capital Establishes Trust with Video Testimonials
Venture capital firm Admiral Capital invests in high risk startups in an intensely competitive market, where similar firms are all vying to fund the next ‘unicorn’ that will grow into a multi-million dollar business. As a new VC firm, they need to convince startup founders that they are the right source of funding and that they can guide the fledgling companies towards growth.
Testimonial videos have been crucial to establish Admiral Capital’s credibility.
Dan Holman, Managing Director at Admiral Capital, says,“We need to convince management teams and their boards to take a leap of faith and believe in certain attributes that are difficult to prove, such as trust. Video testimonials provide that push and can speak towards those attributes with a more credible voice than if you try to say them about yourself.”
Click here to read our Admiral Capital case study.
3. Video Testimonials Are Highly Versatile
You can share video testimonials across a range of social media platforms online, via email, in newsletters, and on landing pages, for example. They are simple to embed and display, and can also be hosted on platforms, like Vocal Video, so that they are publicly accessible by clicking on a link.
Additionally, video testimonials can be adapted to a wide range of use cases (that are also covered by Vocal Video’s templates).
These types of videos include:
- Customer and client testimonials: Sharing customer success stories, customer video testimonials, customer reviews of products and services, and video-based case studies.
- Employee testimonials: Improve recruiting efforts, attract quality candidates, and retain employees by celebrating their achievements.
- Expert and influencer testimonials: Raise brand awareness and establish your brand’s authority with thought leadership videos, and video content created by influencers.
- Partner and investor testimonials: Promote the work you do with partners and investors to win potential clients’ confidence and trust.
- Education testimonials: Showcase testimonials from students, alumni, and parents to communicate the positives of your school.
- Event testimonials: Create attendee and sponsor testimonials to improve registration rates and sponsorship of your events.
- Medical testimonials: Video reviews from patients to endorse treatment plans at hospitals, clinics, and more.
- Nonprofit testimonials: Record testimonials from beneficiaries, donors, and the wider community involved in non profit initiatives.
Case Study: Whistle Uses Video Testimonials for a Range of Use Cases
The global SDR agency Whistle specializes in helping B2B tech companies accelerate global expansion and revenue generation. The company initially started using Vocal Video for client testimonials to increase social proof, online via social media and its website. However, the marketing agency quickly realized that Vocal Video could be used for much more, including employee testimonials.
“At Whistle, every time we discuss a new marketing initiative, it comes up that we could probably use Vocal Video for that new project as well,” says Whistle’s Brand Manager, Kayla Evans. “I think Whistle will be using Vocal Video for many different things in the future as well.”
Click here to read our Whistle case study.
4. Video Testimonials Are Easily Shareable and More Appealing
Video testimonials are particularly easy to share online, and because they are so much more engaging than written testimonials, they are also more likely to be shared and watched. Reading is often considered a chore, so testimonial pages filled with text are usually less appealing to read and share.
Ignition is a client engagement and commerce platform for professional services. The company uses Vocal Video to shoot, edit, and share videos for sales, social media, case studies, event promotion, awards, and marketing campaigns. They have found that referrals are more effective with video than with quote testimonials.
Mollie Phipps, Global Production Manager at Ignition, says, “Testimonials offer a great way for prospective customers to hear firsthand from their peers about what they love about our product. Peer-to-peer referrals are far more effective than many other marketing strategies. Using video to share a testimonial is really authentic and much, much more engaging than just a written testimonial.”
Click here to read our Ignition case study.
5. Video Testimonials Lead to Higher Conversions
The sum of the four benefits listed above is that they lead to a fifth: increased conversion rates for your business. That means more signups, more closed sales, or more subscribers, for example.
Video testimonials boost progress toward any business’ concrete goals in digital marketing campaigns.
At Vocal Video, we’ve experienced the power and effectiveness of video testimonials over written testimonials for ourselves. We decided to put our own process to the test by using video testimonials for our own social proof, with great results.
When our marketing team added a highlight reel of video testimonials to our signup page, visitor sign ups increased by 200% compared with the written testimonials we had used before.
Additionally, when we made a comparison of YouTube and Facebook ads that use video testimonials with those that included static images and quote testimonials, video testimonials produced using Vocal Video had a 3x better performance than static images.
We also surveyed 456 marketing professionals who backed up our own findings. Across the board, marketing teams included in the survey recorded returns on investment (ROI) of between 50% and 500% from their testimonial videos. On top of this, 88% of marketing teams also saw at least a 10% increase in website signups and sales conversions from using testimonial videos, while 50% saw upwards of a 25% rise in conversions.
All of that adds up to real sales results that are hard to ignore.
How to Use Vocal Video to Harness the Power of Testimonial Videos
We deliberately designed the Vocal Video testimonial collection and recording process to be as easy as possible. Because it’s so straightforward and affordable to use, you’ll be able to ask your customers to provide you with video testimonials more often, and they’ll be more likely to agree to provide you with them.
Here’s a brief rundown of how it’s done:
1. You Put Together a ‘Video Collector’
The first step is to create a Video Collector for each new marketing campaign where you plan to use online reviews and video testimonials.
A Video Collector is an easy-to-follow interface your customers use to record their own video testimonial on your behalf: remotely, on their own device, and on their own time.
Our Video Collector builder prompts you to add the following elements for inclusion in the final video testimonial:
- A welcome note or video. Our templates come with a suggested welcome note. In our experience, a video message gets more responses.
- Your brand logo and colors. These only need to be added once to be applied to all future collectors you build.
- Three to five interview questions. Our templates each come with three suggested questions (you can also add your own questions or modify the existing ones).
- An optional incentive. You can choose any incentive you think will be attractive to your customers: a discount, a free gift, or a charitable donation, for example. Vocal Video also offers a free monthly cash prize draw all of its customers can add as an incentive.
- A thank-you note to conclude.
When you have added all these elements, Vocal Video generates an automatic link to your Video Collector that you send to your customers. Your customer simply has to click on the link to start the video testimonial recording process.
Read our articles to find out more about how to build a Video Collector to capture video anywhere at any time, and how to design video testimonial questions to get the best responses from your happy customers.
2. Customers Record a Video Testimonial Remotely
The link takes your customers to your Vocal Video landing page where they record the testimonial by following each Video Collector prompt in order. They record answers to each question you set one by one, with time between each question to think about what they want to say.
They can then watch the answer they have recorded (and redo it if they don’t like the way they look or sound on camera). This gives customers an opportunity to look their best and improves the quality of the final video.
The customer clicks to submit the video testimonial to you when they’ve finished. The entire process should take no longer than 10 minutes.
Get a Professional-Looking Video Testimonial with Minimal Editing Effort
As you saw in all the examples above, you get a fully-edited video without having to do any of the video editing yourself. It’s a huge time and money-saver, but if you prefer to add your own edits to the final product, we also give you a chance to do that without leaving the Vocal Video platform.
Vocal Video’s platform includes a comprehensive suite of video editing tools that allow you to:
- Trim the videos.
- Change the order of the recorded answers.
- Alter the volume of the music throughout the testimonial.
- Replace and edit text overlays and slides.
- Create highlight reels by editing together multiple video testimonials.
The editing tools are mostly based on a drag-and-drop principle and are designed for complete video editing novices to use with little to no instruction.
For more information on how to use Vocal Video’s editing tools, see our article: Testimonial Video Editing Made Easy
Every Vocal Video testimonial that a customer sends you can be quickly included in your video marketing efforts using automatically generated embed codes and share links. It only takes a few minutes to get started capturing customer video testimonials using our platform.
Create a free Vocal Video account to start reaping the benefits of video testimonials now.