The most effective marketing doesn’t come from the mind of business owners, or trained copywriters, or conversion experts, or smart publicists. 

It comes… from your customers. 

There’s nothing quite so compelling and persuasive to potential buyers as seeing people just like them sing praises about your company and its products or services — on video. It’s the next best thing to word of mouth, a.k.a. the most powerful form of advertising there is. 

That’s why video testimonials are one of the greatest assets any business can have. 

If you want to boost your industry cred, increase conversions, and attract as many dream-fit customers to your brand — but you aren’t investing heavily in video testimonials… it’s time to change that.

In this week’s article, I’m going to show you 5 secret strategies for creating an abundance of authentic, attention-grabbing, and most importantly — high-converting video testimonials.

You will learn:

  • Why you can’t rely on unsolicited testimonials alone, and how to implement a simple testimonial-gathering process in your business
  • How to create video testimonials that are structured and eloquent but still free-flowing… without straight-up telling your customers what to say (yikes)
  • The #1 tip for making the facts and figures in your testimonials incredibly memorable. Hint: it’s the oldest form of communication known to humans
  • How to generate sizzling hot demand for your offer… without putting a single word of hype in your testimonials

And more.

Let’s get to it!

Description: brown-haired woman, awestruck, is holding open a book with a video Play button on the cover. She is surrounded by speech bubbles with ellipses in them.

 

1. Be proactive about gathering testimonials

To bolster their social proof and credibility, smart brands don’t rely on unsolicited video testimonials alone.

(That’s like relying 100% on rain to water your garden — understandable, but not consistent or effective!)

Don’t get me wrong, unsolicited testimonials are great when they do come in. Nothing beats the sheer enthusiasm and passion of glowing customer feedback that is given unprompted…

But if you ever see a company, any company, with a stunningly large collection of video testimonials, know this: they built it up over time, painstakingly and proactively!

That’s what you want to do as well.

Be methodical and deliberate about engaging your existing and past customers and getting testimonials from them. Here’s a simple process you can use:

  • During the offboarding process — after you’ve successfully delivered your product or service — do an exit survey and ask the customer about their results and experience.
  • Reach out to the customers who had the best experience / most dramatic results and set up a video call. Or simply ask them to record a short video testimonial for your brand. Most of them will be thrilled to do it!
  • Follow up until the testimonial is completed and you can add it to your marketing library.

You can get more sophisticated if you want, but the truth is, even simply asking for testimonials consistently will get you more of them! Make it a part of your communication with customers, and you will see results.

 

2. Don’t sweat the production values

It’s a well-established fact that higher production values can increase customers’ trust in your brand. It’s not an ironclad rule, but the correlation is strong enough to always err on the side of quality and polish when making any kind of video content.

Except video testimonials, that is.

Counterintuitively, it doesn’t matter if your testimonials have sky-high production values or not. It doesn’t hurt customer trust in any substantial way — and it might even help your videos appear more authentic!

What does that mean for you? If your video testimonials are on the rougher side in terms of picture / audio quality, you can still leverage them to grow your business. 

So don’t worry if you can’t dispatch a videographer to your customer’s home to film them professionally, or fly them out into a fancy studio. You don’t have to — in fact, it might be better not to.

Don’t let concerns about production values hold you back from using video testimonials. If you pack yours with a powerful enough message, your customers won’t even notice the quality!

Case in point:

We have plenty of unpolished ones featured on The Draw Shop website — see for yourself!

Why did we decide to publish them despite the low production values? It’s simple — because those video testimonials are simply too compelling not to share.

And we were right! I highly recommend that you embrace the same message-driven approach with your brand.

 

3. Give your customers a loose script

I know what you’re thinking.

“Summer, you aren’t suggesting that I tell my customers what to say in their testimonials… are you?”

Nope! That would be illegal, and also spectacularly ineffective — your customers can spot phony video testimonials from a light year away. So you’re not going to do that.

That said, letting customers go off without any direction on your part is just as bad, because it won’t produce a testimonial that’s as high-converting as it could be. People who aren’t trained in copywriting or public speaking are not the best at compelling video presentations. Shocking, I know.

So what’s the solution, then? Here’s what I recommend…

Before recording a video testimonial, give your customers a list of questions and prompts to respond to. This will structure and focus their thoughts, helping the testimonial flow better in a logical, persuasive way.

Feel free to swipe this list of questions:

  • “Can you describe your life before working with [Brand] / using [Product]? What challenges were you struggling with? What were you looking to achieve but couldn’t?”
  • “What made you choose our brand / product over other options? Did your expectations match up with your actual experience? Did we exceed them?”
  • “How did working with [Brand] / using [Product] help you solve your #1 problem? Which benefits or features come to mind first?”
  • “How has this experience impacted your life? What do you have now that you didn’t have before? What can you do now thanks to [Brand] / [Product] that you weren’t able to before?”

Use these prompts, and you’ll be able to get a compelling video testimonial out of anyone!

 

4. Treat your video testimonials like a story

I want you to look at that list of questions and prompts I have just shared in Secret #3.

What do you notice?

That’s right: if you read them in a sequence, they follow a very simple storytelling structure!

There’s a struggling beginning, a happy ending, and a little arc / journey in between, a.k.a. all the building blocks of a very simple narrative.

Which brings me to a trick question…

Why bother making a simple video testimonial into a story? Why not just ask the customer to infodump describe the results and leave it at that?

That’s a great point. There are two good reasons for it:

  1. Context is everything. Impressive results hit harder when compared to your customers’ starting situation, instead of being examined in isolation. Viewers of your video testimonials will appreciate the transformation much more if they know the full journey.
  2. Stories are “sticky.” Presenting facts and figures in a story makes them much easier to remember than sharing everything as is. Story is a great framing device that will help your viewers retain more information from a testimonial for longer.

Bottom line is: if you want potential customers to take action after watching your video testimonials, don’t just give them cold, hard data — connect with them emotionally through storytelling!

 

5. Keep the spotlight firmly on your customers

Even though video testimonials are a marketing vehicle for your products or services… 

…they shouldn’t be about them, you know?

From beginning to end, you want the sole focus of each testimonial to be on the customer. They’re the heroes, and it’s their journeys you’re highlighting.

I know it’s tempting to plug your brand and your offer in video testimonials — why else go through all the trouble? — but you’ll get far better results if you resist the urge and keep them as customer-focused as possible.

(At most, you can cap off each video with a call to action at the end to contact you, or click a link, or sign up for a free trial, or whatever the next conversion step is in your funnel.)

You may be feeling like you’re missing a golden opportunity to hype your company and its offerings, but you actually aren’t. If you present a compelling customer journey with dramatic positive results, your viewers will put two and two together. They will know all that success became possible because of your brand. Your products and services.

And at that point, the hype will take care of itself.

 

Want more resources on using testimonials to grow your brand?

I got you. Check out these articles from The Draw Shop blog:

  1. The Anatomy of a Perfect Customer Testimonial
  2. How to Use Customer-Led Storytelling to Grow Your Business

And if you’d like our help attracting ideal customers to your brand, we would love to put together an irresistible Elevator Pitch for you — a single memorable statement scientifically designed to grab your prospects’ attention in 30 seconds or less (yes, really).

All you need is to hop on a 30-minute consultation with one of our expert copywriters here at The Draw Shop. They will help you define the problem you solve, how you solve it, and the life-changing results your customers will see from working with you.

Then we’ll transform your input into a unique Elevator Pitch for your brand — a powerful 30-second statement scientifically designed to stand out, delight, persuade… and convert.

And we’ll top it off with a one-page, one-of-a-king infographic that makes your pitch into an engaging visual story! That’s going to be a valuable marketing asset in its own right — you can use it to…

  • Share it with your team
  • Feature it on your website
  • Use it in your email signature
  • Put it on the back of your business card
  • Spread it on social media

And more!

Interested?

Visit this page to book your appointment, and create your Elevator Pitch + infographic!