How to Make a Testimonial Video? Top 5 Things to Consider

Defining Video Testimonials

The definition of video testimonial has changed during the past few years. Video testimonials can now been roughly divided into two categories:

1. High-quality video production
2. Selfie video testimonials, aka video reviews

High-quality Video Testimonials

Well-planned is already half-done!

High-quality video testimonials are done by professionals. They can be a part of your in-house marketing team or a skilled freelancer.

High-quality Video Testimonial Process

1. Identify which customers you want to interview
2. Contact the chosen customers to ask if they’d like to participate
3. (If you don’t have an in-house videographer, you find a suitable freelancer from platforms like Fiverr or Upwork.)
4. Scheduling the interview
5. Prepare questions in advance
6. Shoot the thing
7. Edit and prepare social media posts, behind the scenes footage, …
8. Get the approvals from interviewees

Here’s an example of a great B2B testimonial video where Elkjop is telling about their collaboration with a workforce management software, Quinyx.

Fun fact: I was present when this video was filmed. Oh the memories.

Click the image to watch the video.

Selfie Video Testimonials

In the era of taking selfies and hosting lives on different social media platforms (TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, etc.) selfie video testimonials are becoming more and more common.

Selfie video testimonials mean that a person records themselves, for example, with their phone and uploads it either to a software or posts it on social media.

If you want to start using the easiest video testimonial tool out there, sign up for your free 14-day trial to Trustmary here.

Key Characteristics of Great Customer Testimonial Videos

• Tells a story (that provokes emotions!)
• Is relatable to the viewer
• Features one of your most known clients
• Is as authentic as possible (let them speak freely and don’t put words into their mouths!)
• Problem → Solution that fixed it → Benefits
• If possible, include a story of how something went wrong, but was then fixed

The next chapter will look into the typical hurdles that stop companies from having more video testimonials.

Typical Pain Points of Customer Testimonial Videos

Do the following pain points sound familiar to you?

• No idea which clients to ask to be the interviewee
• Budget issues
• Lack of in-house resources and expertise in making videos
• You don’t know any freelance videographers and don’t trust them to make your video anyways
• No idea where to even get started

We’ve got you covered. We’ll shortly go over five key things to consider when creating customer testimonial videos and solve these issues while we’re at it.

Top 5 Aspects in Making Testimonial Videos

Before I jump right in, you need to specify who your ideal customer is. Make an actual list of them. Here’s a helpful tool to get you started.

Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)

You can use the following grid to identify and to specify who your ICPs are. 

Once you’ve completed this list, you know your target audience. Make a customer testimonial video for each of your ICP to get the best results possible.

After all, the core idea of a testimonial video is that it increases the trust of potential customers in your business. This goal is only achievable, if the viewer can relate to the story on the video.

Let’s move on to the top five aspects to consider when making testimonials.

1.Tell a Story

We all claim to be the best in our field. We all have the best products, the best service and the best price. Boring.

We remember what we feel. According to a study by London Business School, the level of remembering the facts that we’re told is dependent mostly on whether they were embedded in a story or simply listed.

By wrapping the information in a story, the audience is 65-70 percent more likely to remember it afterwards.

Once upon a time, someone just like you was struggling and was looking for a solution. They came across a product, were skeptical at first but decided to give it a try, and ended up falling in love with it.

That’s a story that converts. 

Buying decisions are largely emotional. As much as 95% of purchase decisions are made subconsciously. 

Teaching Example of Relatable Storytelling

Take a look at this video testimonial. Click the image to watch the video on Youtube.

If you’re experiencing the same problems, this video provokes emotions in you. “Wow, I need that! That’s exactly what would ease my work so much!” or “Hmm maybe that’s not suited for the work I do as we deal with a different kind of terrain”.

However, you probably have nothing to do with forest machines, as you’re reading this text and probably work in marketing. You most likely watched a few seconds and moved on. 

Why? Because you have nothing in common with the person and their daily struggles. You don’t relate to them.

Keep this experience in mind when creating a testimonial video for your business!

Don’t just tell what, why and how. Tell it through a story and make it a story that your ideal customers can relate to and connect with.

2. Keep It Real

When it comes to testimonials, authenticity is one of the most important things to consider.

After all, what differentiates video testimonials from brand video ads is that one of them is authentic and the other fully scripted.

The whole point of a testimonial is to be trustworthy. That’s why people are looking for testimonials: they want to know the truth about the product, not the inflated statements marketers use in advertising.

Think about it: when you’re going through Google reviews of a restaurant, you’re not looking for the words of marketers — you’re looking for the brutally honest appraisals by the customers.

Even though testimonials are not the same as random reviews, they essentially serve the same purpose: to tell the prospective customers how the customer, a real person, honestly feels about the product.

To succeed in this, the testimonial not only has to be real, but it has to FEEL real as well.

Tips to Make Your Video Testimonials Authentic

1. Focus on making the interview questions open-ended
2. Make the interviewee feel comfortable during the interview
3. Don’t make the end result too polished. That easily makes it look fake. Real people are not picture perfect. Real thoughts are not scripted. Real places don’t always have sunset.
4. Show that the interviewee is speaking freely! Even better if you include a few “uhmms”.
5. Include the natural pauses the interviewee has while speaking.

Example of Business to Business Video Testimonial

This is a nice example of a customer testimonial video that is authentic, to the point and has people in marketing as its target audience. Experiences of Trustmary – Pindora

3. Keep it Short

If the age of social media has taught us anything, it’s that people have a short attention span.

Tweets have a maximum of 280 characters. TikTok and Instagram are all about short videos.

And research shows that people want short videos (less than 2 minutes).

Keep your testimonial short meaning that the optimal length is 1:30-2:00. Only include what is absolutely necessary for the story. If the story is really compelling, you can make the customer testimonial video a bit longer.

The Shorter, The Better

You know the basic principles of written stories: Cut out all the nonessential and leave only the most important things. Only keep the stuff that your particular target audience is concerned about. Everything else is a distraction and gets your viewer bored.

You’re not trying to tell the customer everything about the product or service. You don’t need to tell them everything about the customer’s background. You don’t need to tell at length how exactly their life is better after the use of the product.

Just tell enough about the background to connect to the viewer; describe only the key features of the product; and quickly summarize how it changed their life.

Pro tip: You can include some facts about the background situation also in the written copy posted next to the actual testimonial video.

Example of Keeping the Video Short

A perfect example of this from TANA:

They posted this video on Youtube TANA Landfill compactors – Designed for Extremely Demanding Terrains

And the description tells all the relatable information, such as the model of the machine, best traits, amount of waste handled per day. This gives the viewers some relatable background information AND is at the same time SEO optimized written content. 

4. Make It Easy and Appealing to Participate

You’re right — this is not exactly about the content of the testimonial.

Having the greatest interview questions and a brilliant camera ready for action are not very useful if you can’t actually get someone in front of that camera.

When you contact the customers you’d like to interview, focus on making sure they understand that you value your relationship so much that you’d like to showcase it to the world. 

Highlight that participating has its benefits, as you’ve planned an online ad campaign that will naturally showcase their business as well. It might bring them leads indirectly if different viewers get interested in them.

Provide them with examples of how you imagine the final result to look like.

Plan the Production of the Customer Testimonial Video so that:

• It takes as little time from the interviewee as possible
• The situation is relaxed and there aren’t many people behind the camera in the same room when the interview is filmed
• The interviewee has the chance to approve the finished product before it’s published

Example Customer Testimonial Video

Here’s an example of a video that was filmed in under two hours and there wasn’t a script the interviewee had to follow. Instead, she was asked open-ended questions and she wasn’t asked to prepare for the interview in any way.

You can watch the full video on Youtube.

5. Invest in Quality

It’s 2024 and nobody watches crappy 480p videos with bland colors and the wind blowing straight into the microphone.

Heck, even TikTok videos are great quality nowadays, and they’re mostly filmed with a phone.

I’m not talking about feature film quality — that would actually make your customer testimonial video way too polished.

One thing to keep in mind is that the quality of the audio is more important than you think. It’s interesting that according to the Journal of the Audio Engineering Society, having poor audio quality will lead to people perceiving the overall quality of the video much lower as well.

In other words, having bad audio quality will lead to fewer leads as people stop watching because they think the video isn’t worth their time.

Prospective Customers Need Emotional Connection

Brands often forget that they need to speak the same language with their prospects. People are using google to find the product or service they need, and you need to create video content that:

If you still haven’t decided on the best way to go about starting the process of creating customer testimonial videos, keep on reading to find a more affordable and faster way to get dozens!

Pro Tip: Let Your Customers Submit Video Reviews

What would be more authentic than seeing a video that’s not overly branded, but rather filmed at a spur of the moment?

Well, nothing.

Step-by-Step on How to Get Selfie Customer Testimonial Videos

1. Create a video testimonial form
2. Send it to all customers manually

The key is to enable your customers to record the video as hassle-free as possible. In order to make that happen, you need to have a tried-and-tested interface and recording system in place. Dedicated testimonial software tools provide just that.

Trustmary is the best testimonial tool that enables you just that.

In addition to being the most cost-efficient and hassle-free way to collect testimonial videos, it can also be integrated natively with your CRM (HubSpot and Pipedrive)

Pro Tip 2: Hire a Pro to Get Customer Testimonial Video

Consider hiring a neutral third party to produce your video testimonials. It’ll make the interview situation more comfortable to the interviewee.

Hiring a freelance videographer to do the video has its pros and cons.

Pros of Hiring a Pro:

• Professional outcome (post production, camera angles, …)
• No need to own equipment
• Pay per project

Cons of Outsourcing Video Testimonial Production

• Costs can rise high (equipment rentals, travel costs, possible location costs)
• Project management needed
• Finding a reliable partner can be tricky
• Often no access to raw footage

Be careful who you hire, as hiring the wrong person might cost you the relationship you have with your customers.

You’re still the one who needs to get the customer to agree to appear, and you need to figure out what point exactly are you trying to say with the video — the videographer will execute your idea but most likely not create the idea for you.

Indeed, using a pro is quite time-consuming and resource-intensive. It can get expensive. Starting from the thousands and going up to tens of thousands (travel, location rent, all the hours filming and editing and processing). 

All that being said, I’d still recommend hiring an outsider to interview to get the authentic interview footage you’re looking for.

Having representatives from your company in the same room will for sure affect their answers and the interviewees won’t speak as openly as they otherwise would.

I’ve seen this multiple times happen in action: If there is no company representative present, the interview setting becomes more intimate and real.

Start Collecting Video Reviews

Start collecting customer feedback from your customers so you know who your satisfied customers are.

After you’ve got positive feedback, ask the happy people the give online reviews.

The final step is to ask them to record video about their experience.

Trustmary is the best testimonial tool because it’s easy to set up and you can get the first responses within just a few minutes after sending a video testimonial request to your customers.

Having trouble getting video reviews?

Try collecting audio testimonials instead! Same principle, but customers don’t need to show their faces.

Further Reading

In case you’re looking for some more resources on video testimonials and how to get the most out of them, have a look at the following articles:

• 7+ Tips for Using Customer Testimonial Videos in Marketing
• How to Get Testimonials From Customers (With 7 Examples)

FAQ on Video Testimonials