Value of Testimonial Videos and how to create your own

A step-by-step guide to filming testimonial videos.

Once you’ve identified a need for a service or product, what do you do next?

Most people would probably google that product not just to find out where they may be able to buy it at the best price but also read a few reviews about it before completely making up their minds. 

Of course, those testimonials are critical in determining whether a purchase goes through. Be that a hotel to stay at, a car to buy, an insurance policy to purchase or even a burger to have for dinner. Purchasing based on consensus gives people the comfort they need to go ahead with a purchase. 

Testimonials should never be underestimated and everything should be done by the business to collect, curate and celebrate them. They are critical to a company’s success.

Written testimonials are a powerful business tool. Providing those in video, a format that most consumers prefer, and you have a much more powerful instrument that will increase your sales and customer satisfaction. 

The power of video is that it creates familiarity between the viewer and the subject. The viewer can see the eyes of the presenter, read their facial expressions and observe their body language. All of which are critical in ascertaining the authenticity of what is being presented or if the presentation isn’t genuine, viewers will find it easy to spot something fake, or fishy.

The  good thing is that producing a video now is easier than ever before. The smartphone has democratised the process by making the technology available at reasonable cost in the hands of people. Smartphones now provide the means to film, edit and distribute your films quite easily and most if not all smartphone owners have produced many videos so the process has become very familiar.

Creating videos for a business isn’t that much different. Except for ensuring that the messaging is good and tallies with the company’s voice and brand guidelines. As it is a collaborative process, it does take more time for the company’s review and approval at every stage so the producer will need to be aware of these steps and abide by them.

Ultimately though, creating video testimonials is not technically difficult. In fact, the more basic a video testimonial is, the more authentic it is regarded and the faster it will drive prospective buyers down the sales funnel.

How you might go about filming such a testimonial is relatively simple: put your customer in front of a smartphone, hit record, ask them some pertinent questions and record their responses. The questions you ask should get them to explain what the problem was that your product resolved, and how it might have changed their lives for the better. And whether they would recommend the product to their family and friends. That’s it. Now edit your video and upload it to your preferred distribution channel and start inserting it into your marketing material.

Although the video you created above might suffice, it will probably be more effective if the image is sharper, the sound is clearer and the lighting more appropriate. These technical issues can easily be resolved by providing filming lights, a microphone that is placed closer to the subject to pick up clearer audio. These are some of the things that differentiate an amateur from a professional production. I offer a complete basic video production course that addresses all of these issues by the way at VideoAcademy.me. Please visit Video Academy for more details.

Did you notice the production structure? It follows the standard film production workflow. We defined the concept, then we created a story around the product and humanised it by putting a person in front of the camera who discussed a challenge and its resolution. What remains is simply to put a clear call to action at the end of that video that will encourage people to make a purchase decision and we’re done. This CTA of course can also be subliminal rather than overt. If the story is constructed well, then that CTA will be implied in any case.

Apart from the technical and procedural requirements of professional video production for testimonials, here are some other important aspects that will elevate your video testimonial productions. The most important factor is to  ask the right questions to elicit their best responses and show their emotions too. Watch Dove’s video above again to see what I mean.

Practice will make perfect, to be sure. So take every opportunity to practice this craft. To help you get there, here are some of the questions I depend on for my testimonials productions:

1. What problem were you trying to solve with this product?
2. What was your life like before buying this product or service?
3. Did you experience any hesitations before deciding to buy this product?
4. What made you overcome those hesitations?
5. How has your life changed after you bought this product or service?
6. How would you explain our product to someone who isn’t aware of it?
7. What’s the best thing about this product?

You can create a good story from the answers provided that will highlight the problem and show how the product or service resolves it and how it has changed the lives of its users for the better. It’s a story where the product will naturally be portrayed as the hero! This is the power of storytelling. Use it every single time and you’ll win.

There is no rule that states that you should only feature a single person in your testimonial video, in fact, I find it more interesting to feature several people. I ask them the same set of questions and then invest more time in the editing and I juxtapose their answers and create a much more interesting story. If you discover that one of your interviewees has a unique perspective or journey with the product, there will be a good chance to break that out into its own story.

Let me now go over some more technical aspects that will help you in your testimonial filming. The first is how to prepare for filming:

It’s important to prepare your interview subjects and make them feel at ease. And it’s necessary to communicate to them some basic things to ensure a good shoot.

1. The first thing is to ask your subjects to avoid wearing clothes with stripe patterns.
2. If you’re shooting them against a blue or green screen, it’s important to inform them to avoid those colours and hues too.
3. Get them to wear shirts or jackets or blouses or dresses that will allow the threading of a wireless microphone close to their mouths. Those are mostly installed at the neck or clipped to the lapel of a jacket. You can also provide a boom mic that you would place above them and be out of the frame. This is a better option if you have access to one as it’s more convenient. Microphones like these are very directional and will isolate extraneous sounds and noise and keep the main audio crisp and clear.

Prepare and set your lights in the shoot location to enhance the subject. There are many resources on the web that will help you with your three-point lighting, but if those lights are not available, then you might shoot with available natural light and use a reflector to fill in the darker areas. Again, there are many resources available to help you with that. Lighting, along with good sound, are the most important elements in any shoot. So take the time to get those right and you’ll have a much better film on your hands.

Depending on the type of testimonial you’re producing, it might serve the production better to make it visually more appealing. Yes, having a head-and-shoulders shot of a person answering your questions will be authentic, but let’s face it, it might also be boring. Adding elements to your productions like filming the subject from different angles, adding some shots of them using the product, shots of their living and work environments, and even adding some explanatory graphics will move the production forward and make it more interesting.

These B-rolls – or cutaways – will give context to your video and provide convenient edit fillers too. 

Editing is the final step in this filmmaking process. And as you might have guessed it, editing is a vast subject that I cannot cover in this article. Suffice it to say that there are a myriad of software applications available to edit your film. Yes, you can edit your piece on your smartphone and quite a number of producers do just that, including myself on several occasions. 

Editing applications provides you with a timeline that represents a linear view of your story or script. They allow you to cut segments of your shoot, trim the top and tail if necessary and then insert that clip into a timeline to enable you to tell your story seamlessly.

If you need help in selecting an appropriate editing system or software for your use, let me know. I’ll help as much as I can.

It’s time now to output your edited masterpiece and upload it into your chosen platform. For these kinds of testimonials, I believe putting them into your website is important and you can capitalise on that video a lot by placing it into a specifically designed landing page on your website through which you would capture visitor emails and other important statistics.

YouTube is also a must of course. It is the 2nd highest search engine on the planet at the moment. Other than those is LinkedIn which is gaining a lot more relevant popularity over the last couple of years.

That’s it about video testimonials in a nutshell. I hope you found this content useful and relevant for your use. Is there anything here that you want me to expand on further? Please let me know. Also, shoot me an email or callout if you use this process to make your own testimonial, I’d love to know how it went for you.

Now get on with it and create your first video testimonial, and if you need help, give Mahmood a call or fill in the following form and he’ll get back to you.