They say talk is cheap. But when it comes to marketing your business, it’s priceless. Think about it: Who is a more credible advocate for your business, you or a satisfied customer? People rely on others for proof that you’re the real deal. So who better than your satisfied clients to talk you up? That’s why their video testimonials should be an integral part of your marketing mix.
However a customer video testimonial won’t help you unless you have ways for people to watch it. In this blog I am going to share the 8 best ways to not only to help you get more leads, but to help you close more sales using video testimonials.
But before you can start, you first need to upload your video testimonial(s) to a video hosting platform. There are many free and paid options but for most businesses you can do everything you need with YouTube and Vimeo.
YouTube is the #2 search engine in the world so it is a great way to get your business found when someone is looking for your product or service online. In fact, a client of ours got a lead a couple of weeks after uploading his video testimonials to his YouTube channel. If you have a FREE Gmail account, you are just one click away from having a YouTube channel.
As much as YouTube is great for search engine optimization, it isn’t great for embedding videos on your website. YouTube will show related videos at the end of your video and the last thing you want to be doing is promoting your competitor’s videos on your website. So I also recommend you upload your video testimonials to Vimeo. Vimeo is also a free video hosting platform and you have much more control over how the video looks when it’s embedded on your website. Don’t use the default setting. The overlays can be distracting. In the example below, you will see how much cleaner it looks with all of the overlays turned off.
Where do I share my testimonial videos?
Company Website
Thanks to the internet, smartphones, and social media, the way your prospects buy has changed. Over 67% of the buying decision now happens online. That means that they have basically made their decision well before they every decide to call you. You no longer can wait until they call you to convince them to hire you. The decision is already made.
People buy from people they know, like and trust. They have to believe that you are the right one to solve their problem or provide the solution they desire. That is where your video testimonials can help you.
And the first place people are going to visit is your website. Most visitors will stay less than 60 seconds, but 80% will stay longer to watch a video. This is why you want to have the video on your home page, more specifically as high on the page as possible to ensure that a visitor finds it. And by just adding video to the page, you will get an SEO boost and more traffic to the page because Google gives preference to video.
Prospects will not only visit your website, they are also going to Google to look for online reviews. Most people don’t know this but Google now allows you to add video to your Google My Business Page. The videos can be no longer than 60 seconds so be sure you have a version of your video testimonials that meet this requirement. You also have the ability to create Google posts so be sure to create a post about your video testimonials and provide a link to the testimonials page on your website.
Social Media Advertising
If you are looking to get more leads with digital ads, video ads typically perform better than photo based ads and who better to promote you and your business than your happy customers. Use all or part of your customer video testimonial as a video ad on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. Who better to convert cold traffic into warm leads?
When advertising online it as always a good idea to send cold traffic to landing page or sales page. This is also an excellent place to share additional video testimonials to continue building trust with a prospect and convince them to take action.
Email Marketing Campaigns
If you communicate with cold or warm traffic through email, video can be extremely helpful in getting people to actually open and read your emails. By mentioning video in the subject line and adding a video to an email, you not only increase the open rate by 19%, but you also increase the click-through-rate by almost 65%!
Since it isn’t possible to include a video directly in your email because of the file size, there are some other ways to include a customer video testimonial that work better than others. Of course, you can simply paste the URL for the video in your email. If you do decide to go this way, add the link as a text hyperlink . For example, you could write, “Click here to see what one of our customers had to say about working with us.”
To increase your chances that someone will watch the video, a better alternative is to include an image from the video and add a hyperlink to the photo. But be sure to add a play button on top of the image so people know it is a video.
An animated GIF works the best
And if you really want to get someone’s attention, using a GIF is the best option. It does take a little extra effort on your part but it is well worth it. A free and easy way to create a GIF from your customer video testimonial is using GIPHY. All you need to do is upload your video and select the section you want to use to create your GIF.
Depending on the type of business you have, there is a good chance that a prospect is also going to check you or the business owner out on LinkedIn. It is just another data point they can use to decide if they trust you.
Most people don’t even know you can add video to your LinkedIn profile. There are two areas where you can add your customer video testimonials, the Featured and Experience sections. As much as LinkedIn supports native video in posts and articles, you can only add links to videos hosted on YouTube and Vimeo.
Besides adding the video testimonial to your profile, we recommend you share the video testimonials natively in LinkedIn posts.
Social Media
Video is the most engaging content on social media so sharing a video testimonial in a post on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter is a great way to help your connections better understand what you do for your clients.
Rather than sharing a link to the video, we recommend you upload the video directly to your post. This way, when it shows up in someone’s newsfeed, the video is actually playing.
When we create a customer video testimonial for a client, we use less than 10% of the footage we capture. We offer our clients the opportunity to download all the video footage from the shoot. This way they can take other pieces from their interview and turn them into shorter video clips to share as additional social media posts. Many of the social media platforms have multiple ways to share beyond the newsfeed with reels and stories so don’t forget to share there as well. And how can we talk about social media and not mention TikTok. It really depends on the type of business and how engaging you make your testimonial videos but this could be another platform to consider.
Text Messaging
Some people are concerned about clicking on a link in an email. A way to address this is by texting the video testimonial. Text messages have a 99% open rate. This is the highest open rate of all, so if you have a prospect and you want to be sure they see your video testimonial, sharing it as a text message is the best way to do that. You can share the link to your video hosted on Vimeo or YouTube, but a better way to go is to save a copy of your video testimonials on your phone and text it directly from your phone.
Email Signature
As much as this is the last way, it is one of the easiest to do and gets your customer video testimonials in front of prospects, clients, vendors, strategic partners and friends. The most overlooked opportunity to share your video testimonials is in your email signature. Just add something like, “Watch Customer Video Testimonial” and add a hyperlink to the testimonials page on your website.
Conclusion
Most businesses only share their customer video testimonials on their website but they can be used at every point in the sales process. Hopefully now you can see there are so many other ways you can share them to build trust. If you are speaking with a prospect and they think your price is too high or they need to think about it, that is the perfect time for you to share a customer video testimonial with them. Clients have told me, they share their video testimonial and the client buys.
I hope you found this information helpful. If you have any questions you can always email me at david@remotevideotestimonials.com or call us at (914) 677-2588.