Every modern marketer knows: getting reviews from happy customers isn’t always easy. The truth is, people are busy. And unless they’re incentivized, it can be difficult to secure customer testimonials about your product or service without a formalized plan. That’s why, when you do receive a positive review it’s important to maximize its impact, and using video is one of the best ways to do so. 

Whether you’re in the B2B space or marketing to a consumer audience, customer testimonials are one of the most effective ways to capture the attention of prospective buyers. In fact, 79% of consumers say they have watched a video testimonial to learn more about a company before making a purchase. With so many potential buyers seeking out videos before purchasing, making videos that speak directly to their pain points, and how your product or service can solve them, can generate a significant impact on increasing your conversion rates.

We’re going to walk you through some of the best practices for making customer testimonial videos. From getting testimonials from customers to building a quick and efficient workflow for customer testimonial video production using templates, we’ll help you generate more conversions and more revenue.

Customer Testimonial Video Best Practices

A well-structured customer testimonial video strategy begins with – well, generating reviews!

We’ve already talked about how difficult it can be to convince those delighted customers to share their thoughts with future buyers. So let’s take a look at several tactics to increase your success rate.

Review Management Systems

The easiest and quickest way to build up a library of reviews is with a review management service. There are plenty of services out there that will reach out to your customers to elicit feedback for your business. For time-strapped teams, this may be a great option. However, the fees can be steep for small budgets. Reputation management services like Birdeye, Grade.us, or Podium are just a few examples of how you can automate review generation.

Email automation and follow-ups

If you already have a marketing automation platform, you can start this today. Take a list of your customers, design a basic email asking for a review, and hit send. This is the best approach for B2C companies that may not have a sales team interacting directly with consumers. But it’s also an effective strategy for B2B marketers looking to scale outreach more efficiently. Emails can be personalized and segmented to target your most satisfied customers using parameters like health score or product engagement. You can even set up the email program to trigger when the customer purchases, or completes an action that is associated with seeing the value in your product.

If you don’t have a platform to do this for you, make it part of your sales or service team’s weekly workflow. Have them set a reminder to send an email for a few days, a week, or a month after the purchase. Having a standardized post-purchase cadence can help you hone in on the perfect time to send your request.

Incentives are another effective approach to gathering customer testimonials. While your customers may love your product and company, sometimes they need an extra little nudge to spend their time sharing their experience. Common incentives are gift cards, discounts, or even company swag.

Or you can keep it simple

Here at Wibbitz, we leverage automation but we’ve found that often our best tactic is simply asking our customers to participate. If you have a great product, have a rapport with your customers, and want to generate more reviews – try asking. You might be surprised at how successful you can be. We’ve been able to build up a consistent library of reviews and testimonials we can use for our videos. More on those below.

Customer testimonial video templates

Don’t let your hard work go to waste. As we discussed earlier, you’ll want to maximize each review you receive. Once you have a solid plan for generating reviews it’s time to turn them into videos.

We’re big on planning here at Wibbitz. Doing a bit of work upfront goes a long way in maintaining efficiency and maximizing our creative output. So having a customer testimonial video template – or two – can help you produce videos quickly.

Here’s one of our most recent customer testimonial videos we did for our customer MOXXOR:

Each scene and layout is part of a video template we created for our customer testimonials. Each time we get a new review, we start by using the customer testimonial video template and edit the content. From a new project to a finished product, it takes only a few minutes of time. This way we have a consistent flow of new customer testimonial videos to post and drive conversions.

Choose a quote that speaks to your brand values

First, we want to say it’s important to be honest. Don’t change what your customer said or wrote. But don’t be afraid to edit either. Include the most impactful statement that speaks to your unique value proposition. Attention spans are short (and getting shorter), so it’s vital to convey important information succinctly to better inform your prospects of the benefits of your product or service.

“Saving time” and “ease-of-use” are some of our core product values at Wibbitz (we don’t know many professionals who couldn’t use a few more hours a day to get more done!) In this testimonial video for our customer City of Mesa, AZ, we chose a quote that spoke to this core tenet:

In just a few sentences, we were able to prove the value of our platform with the powerful and persuasive words of a current customer.

Use visuals that establish authenticity

If you’re in the B2B space, reach out to your customer to see if they have a headshot you can use in your video. This is a great way for the customer to get a little professional exposure and to help them build awareness for their business or personal brand. It also helps to establish credibility and trust in your business by sharing the person behind the testimonial.

For B2C it may be trickier to share visuals of the actual reviewers, but you can leverage user-generated content that features your product (with the customer’s consent of course). Seeing your product being used by real customers is an excellent way to establish authenticity. Some customers will also include photos or videos when leaving reviews on product pages that can be used as visual assets for videos with a little fine tuning.

And use stock footage to tie it all together

Are your future customers in a specific industry? Are your targets in one or two similar niches? Round out your final video with stock footage that reflects their reality. Choose supporting imagery that speaks to their specific pain points, and helps them see themselves in the customer story.

We use the Wibbitz Media Library for all of our stock footage. For this video, we wanted to illustrate how the remote team at Pepsia uses Wibbitz for alignment:

Make sure it’s ready to share on social media

It’s great to post these testimonials on your website. But you’re missing out on maximum exposure if you aren’t sharing them on social. Traditionally, resizing and reformatting videos for all of the different formats can be tedious. Cropping to vertical for Instagram stories and reels, and fitting everything inside the 1:1 square for your feed takes time.

Wibbitz does this in just a few clicks. Check out this video to see how easy it is to reformat and resize with Wibbitz.

Have fun and experiment

 “Know thyself. Know the customer. Innovate.”

Beth Comstock

Most importantly, strive to create videos that truly speak to the specific experiences, pain points, and drivers of your target audience. If you know your product solves specific problems no other competitor can show that.

Try out different topics, styles, music, and layouts to see what works best for your brand. And if something isn’t working, don’t be afraid to experiment. Customer testimonial videos are the perfect opportunity to flex your creativity while building rapport with prospects.

Find the best video testimonial tools

So now that you understand the power of customer video testimonials, it’s time to consider what are the right video testimonial tools to start establishing your workflow. We already discussed review management systems and marketing automation platforms for email to gather reviews, but you should also consider what tools you’ll use to record the video, find media assets, and edit the video. We use the Wibbitz Studio to edit our customer testimonial videos because it’s fast, easy, and has all the media assets we need right inside the editor. By creating several different customer testimonial video templates we’ve made video production more efficient and saved hours of time in the process. Finding the best video testimonial tools for you and your team is a key step in building a scalable customer video testimonial strategy.

Now go turn your latest glowing review into a video that drives more conversions.

Wibbitz Pro Tip: How to Create a Customer Testimonial Video