Video testimonials are a powerful marketing tool to show how much genuine customers love your brand. As opposed to written testimonials, which are overused, easy to gloss over, and hard for customers to verify as true, video testimonials are authentic and engaging — they show a real person talking in detail about your products and brand.
As a result, video testimonials tend to have much higher conversion rates than written testimonials - with the vast majority of marketing teams reporting over 10% campaign improvements by adding this type of social proof.
The problem with video testimonials is figuring out how to produce them quickly and affordably. Most marketers assume producing video testimonials has to involve: hiring a professional videographer or film crew, taking days out of their schedule to be on location, and hiring professional video editors to turn raw footage into usable material. This old-fashioned video production process is expensive and time-consuming. If this is your only way of producing video testimonials, you won’t produce many (or any).
We built Vocal Video because we experienced all these issues first-hand. We wanted any marketing team, large or small, to quickly and affordably produce high-quality video testimonials, and with none of the logistical hassle of in-person video shoots.
By using our platform, your satisfied customers can record testimonial videos asynchronously in just a few minutes (no aligning schedules, no traveling on site, no film crew). Vocal Video’s process sends back an automatically edited video that’s ready to use right away.
Read our founding story to find out more about why we built Vocal Video.
In this article, we’ll show you:
Do you want to collect and record testimonial videos in an easy and cost-effective way? Sign up here for a free Vocal Video account.
How to Use Vocal Video to Record Your Own High-Quality Video Testimonials
Vocal Video’s accessible pricing and easy-to-use platform make it possible for businesses large and small to create high-quality video testimonials, and other video content, at scale, and whenever they need it for video marketing campaigns.
Our easy four-step process for creating video testimonials is as follows:
1. Set Up a Video Collector
To start collecting testimonial videos using Vocal Video, the first step is to build a “Video Collector”. This interface will guide your customers through a step-by-step process to record their testimonials.
The elements you add include:
- A welcome message or video.
- Your logo, branding, and colors.
- Three to five questions to ask your customers.
- An optional incentive for recording a video testimonial.
- A message thanking respondents for recording a client testimonial video.
Learn more about building a Video Collector and collecting video testimonials from your customers.
To make the process of building a collector even faster and simpler, we offer 45+ Video Collector Templates:
Each of Vocal Video’s collector templates give you:
- A suggested three-step email sequence to ask for, collect, and follow-up on testimonial videos from happy customers.
- Three suggested, but customizable, questions for each template.
- A default welcome message that you can adapt to your needs.
- A suggested thank-you message.
You just select the template that most closely matches your needs, make the changes you want to whichever template you choose, add your brand colors and logo, and include an optional incentive for customers who record a testimonial video. (Vocal Video has a monthly cash prize draw, or you can add your own gift, discount, or other incentive, such as an Amazon gift card.)
Finally, you send out an automatically-generated link for the Video Collector you have just built to enable the customer to record their testimonial remotely. The whole process takes less than 15 minutes and is designed for anyone to use, even if you have no video production experience.
Read our in-depth article for more inspiration on how to design the best video testimonial questions.
2. Vocal Video Guides Your Happy Customers Through the Recording Process
Each customer that wants to record a testimonial video simply clicks on the link you send them to be taken to your Vocal Video landing page, which is fully branded for your organization using your own logos and brand colors.
Your customers don’t need any special equipment, they don’t have to download any software or sign up for our services to record a video for you. They can also record the video whenever they have time, and choose their own remote recording location.
We’ve made the recording process as simple and friction-free as possible as a way of increasing response rates and getting you more testimonials.
The customer follows simple instructions to record responses to each question. Vocal Video gives your testimonial respondents time to think about how they want to answer each question you have set and they only need to press record when they are ready.
If something goes wrong with their answer, or they don’t like how they look or sound on the video, they can re-record an answer before moving on to the next question.
As soon as they’ve recorded answers to all the questions and are happy with the resulting video, they click “submit” to send their testimonial to you. You then receive an alert that you have a new testimonial video waiting to be viewed.
Find out more about the process of collecting video testimonials using our platform.
3. Use Vocal Video to Create Polished Video Testimonials
By the time you receive the video testimonial in your inbox, Vocal Video has applied its pre-editing process and what you get is a ready-to-go video. At this stage, the video already includes the following elements without you having to do any manual editing:
- Your branding, logo, and colors.
- Interstitial text slides and overlays (including names, titles, and questions).
- Animated transitions between elements (video responses and slides).
- Default background music.
- Automatic captions.
- An automatically generated transcript.
If you’d like to make your own edits for a slightly better final product in addition to our automatic edits, we’ve designed the Vocal Video platform so that you can edit your videos without using third-party editing software.
To do this, we give you a complete video editing suite built right into the platform. When we designed our video editing tools, we focused on making them so easy to use that anybody can master them in just a few minutes. It’s based on intuitive drag-and-drop tools that allow you to make the following edits:
- Trim responses to cut out pauses and unrelated information.
- Rearrange the order of responses and slides.
- Change colors and logos.
- Add a different music track (choose from our royalty-free library or add your own).
- Adjust the music volume to different levels throughout the video.
- Edit the captions and transcript.
- Splice several testimonial videos together to create a highlight reel.
Read more about how the Vocal Video editor works.
4. Share Your Video Testimonials Online
Testimonial videos your happy customers record on your behalf come with automatically generated embed codes and share links. You can use these to embed your best testimonials on landing pages, within emails to your subscribers, and across social media channels, as well as via messaging apps and workplace platforms.
The quick sharing feature in Vocal Video also makes it easy to share any video in your library to a range of social media channels (see the image below).
Vocal Video also integrates with Zapier, so you can automatically share video testimonials via your favorite apps.
Six Customer Testimonial Video Examples
Below, we list six high-quality examples of testimonial videos created by real customers using our platform, Vocal Video. Notice how each video comes with:
- Text slides for names, titles, and questions
- Background music
- Full company branding and colors
- Captions
- Animated transitions between each video response.
Product Video Testimonials
1. Majka
Majka — a nutrition company focused on supplements and food products for pregnancy, breastfeeding, and motherhood — collected a testimonial from Allyson, a recent mother, about her experience of postpartum hair loss and how Majka’s product had helped her.
This testimonial video is especially compelling for its target audience of new mothers because it shows a relatable person experiencing exactly the same problem as the potential customer and talking about what can be a sensitive topic in an open and honest way.
Customer Video Testimonials
2. Sleeptest.com
Sleeptest.com — a home sleep test company — includes several patient video testimonials on a dedicated landing page, with users describing how the process of ordering and using their home sleep test worked for them.
Similar to the product testimonial we showed above, this video testimonial (and all the others on their reviews page) provide social proof from a range of different people who are having trouble sleeping and need to find out why.
It helps prospective customers to hear about other customers’ journeys and to see the effect the product had on them. These videos relieve doubt in a way that’s similar to word-of-mouth referrals.
3. Recruit Rockstars
Recruit Rockstars — a recruitment company focused on hiring employees for venture capital and private equity-backed companies — has a whole web page dedicated to video testimonials to prove how satisfied its clients are with the services they provide.
4. RyTech
RyTech — a digital marketing agency — uses testimonial videos to share its customers’ positive experiences of implementing SEO, web design, and other digital marketing services.
Employee Video Testimonials
5. Recovery Center of America
Recovery Center of America — a modern rehab facility — uses employee testimonial videos on its homepage and jobs pages for all of its different locations.
Expert Video Testimonials
6. Product-Led Alliance
Product-Led Alliance — an online community of product professionals — collected an expert testimonial video from a speaker featured at a festival it was holding. This testimonial, featured along with its transcript, served to attract sign-ups for the festival and to lend additional authority to the event by highlighting the speaker’s subject expertise.
Video Testimonial FAQs
What Is a Video Testimonial?
When one of your happy customers provides you with a testimonial video, you get a video of them speaking about their positive experience with your brand. A video testimonial is similar to a case study, success story, or customer story, but instead of a traditional customer review, your customer actually appears on screen talking about your product or service.
Video marketing, especially video testimonials, is more compelling than traditional written reviews. Potential customers view video testimonials as more authentic and valuable as social proof of your brand’s quality. Because prospective customers see your current customers on screen, they are more likely to make an emotional connection with them and with your brand.
Read more about the impact of testimonial videos on digital marketing.
What Are the Benefits of Testimonial Videos?
Video testimonials build trust for your brand — and they are proven to increase referrals and conversions.
A Vocal Video survey of 456 marketing professionals found that 72% of marketers yield a return on investment (ROI) between 50% and 500% from video testimonials, and over half see an increase in conversions of 25%+ compared to campaigns without testimonial videos.
Video testimonials are particularly easy to share online, especially when they are used in social media campaigns. This leads to even more impressive conversion rates, as shown in the chart below.
When it comes to using video testimonials in paid social media advertising, video testimonial conversion rates get even more interesting. Unlike the scattershot approach of more traditional advertising channels, like television, paid social advertising is hyper-targeted to a group of people who are much more likely to buy what you are selling, even before they watch the great customer testimonial video in your ad.
Video ads, featuring your customers, employees, or industry experts, are able to stop someone mid-scroll much more effectively than static image ads.
The effect of video testimonials isn’t limited to their use in social media, though. Including a video in your email marketing campaigns has been found to boost email open rates by 96% and click-through rates by 65%.
What Makes a Great Testimonial Video?
The first and most important aspect of a customer testimonial video is identifying happy customers to provide them for you. These people are your brand advocates: The more genuine and engaging the featured customers are, the more likely they are to build trust and make an emotional connection with viewers and subsequently convert them into new customers.
You can find these customers in a few different ways:
- When collecting net promoter scores. Anyone who gives you a nine or 10-star rating is a great candidate for a testimonial video.
- When customers first sign a contract or buy your product. Customer enthusiasm is at its peak when they’ve just signed up, so it’s a great time to capture their passion on video.
- When you get positive feedback on social media or in online reviews. Anyone who spontaneously provides a good review is a great bet for a video testimonial.
Once you’ve found your advocates, the next step is to design great questions to ask them, which will elicit valuable responses in their video testimonials.
Here are some ideas about what customer responses should include:
- A focus on specific product/service features.
- How the brand solved a pain point or improved their life or business.
- Anecdotes and personal details, which build trust and emotional connection.
- A short and dynamic answer to each question.
- A relatable and enthusiastic demeanor.
Read more about what to say in a testimonial video.
Video Testimonial Software Alternatives
Here are a few alternative products if you want to shop around before starting a subscription.
VideoAsk
VideoAsk specializes in “video conversations”. This means that the platform is optimized to facilitate asynchronous chat between a business and its customers. The platform is set up so that you can quickly send videos to your customers and your customers can easily send a video back as a reply. You can use video, text, or audio to reply to each other.
This is useful for gathering comprehensive customer feedback but is not specifically designed to collect video testimonials. You also need to edit video outside the VideoAsk platform in third-party software, and it’s only possible to add basic graphics such as a logo, whereas Vocal Video provides a full range of quality video editing tools within its own platform.
VideoAsk also offers well-presented video welcome messages for respondents and conditional logic that allows you to send pre-recorded questions to customers based on their previous responses.
VideoPeel
VideoPeel automates video capture via a link that allows users to click, record, and submit — similarly to Vocal Video.
VideoPeel has a different recording structure than Vocal Video. All questions are presented on a single screen and customers are expected to answer all the queries in one go. Vocal Video, on the other hand, allows respondents to respond to questions one by one. This simplifies the process for respondents and increases the likelihood of better video responses.
All collected videos are stored in one repository for easy management. VideoPeel's editing tools are very basic and allow you to add logos, simple text overlays, stars, or disclaimers.
There are no additional features for trimming clips, adding music, or inserting additional scenes, as with Vocal Video’s platform.
Boast.io
Boast.io is a general testimonial collector; video is just one type of testimonial it collects.
The other types of online reviews you can collect are written feedback and star ratings, which are automatically sent straight to your website.
Videos are linked directly to reviews, so once submitted they can’t be edited. And while showing unedited footage on an e-commerce site can be useful to build social proof, Boast’s platform isn't designed to help you create branded, professionally-styled video testimonials.
Vocal Video: Video Testimonials Everyone Can Collect and Record — Regardless of Budget
By using Vocal Video for high-quality testimonial videos, business owners can attract new customers without allocating a huge portion of their budget to video production and editing.
You get a straightforward and repeatable system for requesting, recording, collecting, and sharing testimonial videos whenever your marketing strategy requires them.
If you’d like to get a quick start on recording and collecting affordable, high-quality video testimonials from your customers, sign up for a free trial of Vocal Video.