The One Truth of Creating and Sharing Video Testimonials

In this recap from a Dubb Support episode, Shannon, Darius, and I spoke about the one truth of creating and sharing video testimonials. Video testimonials are game-changing tools that can help you reach your sales and marketing goals. Whether you work for a small startup or a much larger organization, you are going to want to implement the tips and strategies discussed in this post. If you would like to watch the Dubb Support episode in its entirety, go ahead and click on the play button above. Enjoy!

As sales and marketing professionals, we are always looking for ways to build stronger relationships with our audiences and generate more sales. After all, our businesses need to keep growing to survive. While it is a good idea to generate repeat business from your current customers, you and your colleagues will have no choice but to find new prospects and customers.

So what can you do? While there are plenty of ways to find new prospects and convert them into paying customers, I want to speak about one specific tool that can truly accelerate your sales and marketing work. Here, I’m talking about video testimonials. By creating and sharing video testimonials, you can bolster your relationship with current customers, build more trust with new prospects, raise your profile in your sector or industry, and generate more sales. Really, you are getting a substantial bang for your buck by investing in video testimonials.

In this post, we are going to take a deep dive into creating and sharing video testimonials. Whether you are just hearing about video testimonials for the first time or are looking to take your video testimonial work to the next level, you can get an immense amount of value from the tips and strategies discussed here.

Simply put, if we have someone advocating for our product, service, and/or company, we are on the path to generating more sales. This is true whether the individual is speaking about the pain points your product solves, the sales that they generated from your service, or how your company has simply made their life better. That means that once a new prospect hears about your company through a testimonial, he or she will trust you more. And because sales are built in trust, this means that you are already one step closer to making a sale. 

Ultimately, we’re living in a time where you can get the most out of video testimonials. Not only are they easier to collect through tools like Dubb, but you can leverage video testimonials at scale. 

Let’s get into it. 

Why Video Testimonials Are So Powerful

Before getting into the granular aspects of creating and sharing video testimonials, I want to take a brief step back. Simply put, people love videos. Whenever you visit a website, it is almost expected that you will find a video there. Of course, you need to have engaging images and text. That being said, videos are at the core of that experience. 

The statistics are striking. Over 53% of consumers want to see one or more pieces of video content from a brand that they like. This is why 87% of marketers use videos for marketing. According to Gartner, it has 12 times as many shares of video content as they do of text content. 

Why is this? Ultimately, as humans, we are wired to love video. The human brain processes images a whopping 60,000 times faster than text. Images are more compelling and more memorable. Further, they are amazing tools to tell stories. Sure, you can tell great stories through text. However, the visual nature of video gives you so many tools in your storytelling toolkit. You can tell amazing stories whether you are in your office, at a conference, or simply in your car on your way to work. 

So while people love videos, a significant challenge is figuring out what type of video content to share. The fact that you can create so many types of videos can sometimes make it difficult to choose which one. As far as video testimonials, they can be one of the best ways to build trust with new prospects. The secret sauce is that video testimonials let you leverage others’ social currency. If a new prospect sees that there are other people speaking highly of your product, service, or company, they will be much more likely to take a chance on your company. Above all else, they will trust you more—even if they haven’t yet directly spoken to you or your colleagues. 

In sum, video testimonials are a great form of video content. There are many different ways of capturing video testimonials, but no matter how you do so, rest assured that your video testimonial will provide some real value to your organization. 

A New Era of Capturing Video Testimonials

Historically, it has been difficult to collect video testimonials from your clients. In the past, your clients had to be technically savvy. They had to know how to record a decent-sized video and know how to host it somewhere (maybe on a platform like YouTube). It hasn’t been an easy process until recently.

Now, technological advances (like the technology employed by Dubb) allow you to easily collect plenty of video testimonials. Really, all it comes down to is sending a link to somebody, that person clicking on a button and speaking to the camera, and that person finishing the recording and sending the video back to you.

Historically, this has been one of the biggest obstacles to leveraging testimonials from your clients. Even if you had the most enthusiastic, rabid customer who wanted to speak highly about your company, it was difficult to actually make it happen. You would need to have a video crew go to their office. That video crew would have to collect b-roll, ensure that the lighting and audio were sufficient, and sometimes even bring in hair and makeup professionals to get the interviewees ready. 

But now, with this collection obstacle behind us, we can open ourselves up to the potential that video testimonials provide. Essentially, video testimonials have been democratized. Using a tool like Dubb, you can make it all too easy for anyone to record a stellar video testimonial and send it back to your company. From there, you can then use that video testimonial in all different places (we’ll get into this in much more detail below). 

There is another important point here. The reality of these polished testimonials is that they actually don’t work better. These videos are so contrived and produced that they sometimes lack authenticity. There is such a lack of authenticity that people sometimes don’t actually believe what is being said. They may wonder whether the person is a paid actor. They sense that a link is missing and that everything is too good to be true. In fact, sometimes it is too good to be true. 

Now, the best testimonials (in my opinion) are the ones that are captured authentically. These are the testimonials that are captured with a phone, webcam, in a Zoom call, or another type of conversational environment. Essentially, you want a video testimonial where there is no script. You don’t want any premeditation. Instead of that, you want your video testimonials to come from your speakers’ hearts. These are honest testimonials that will resonate much more than a canned testimonial that comes from an actor’s mouth. So ultimately, when people want to get video testimonials, we recommend they remember one thing. The video testimonials that work the best are the easiest ones to get. There is no paradox here. The easiest testimonials are the most effective because they are the most authentic. In the end, authenticity trumps production quality. 

Even though authentic testimonials are extremely effective, there can be some difficulties here. For example, if a key customer is delivering a glowing testimonial but the audio is bad, that testimonial isn’t going to be nearly as effective. The same is true if there are egregious distractions in the video or if there is some reason that the video is not clear or understandable. However, assuming that you can hear the person, see the person, there is decent lighting, and it looks somewhat professional, people will actually connect with it. 

In marketing, it isn’t about what we say. It isn’t about what we say about our products or services. It is about what our clients say. Specifically, we are focusing on the happy clients who have been with our organizations for an extended period of time. These are the clients that haven’t churned and that continue to pay us. By getting video testimonials and integrating them into your marketing, you will see your conversion rate significantly accelerate. Not only that, but you will have an amazingly fun time in the process. This is because you are showcasing people’s results. You are putting people on a platform. They love it, you love it, and your prospects will love it. It is a win-win-win for all of the parties that are involved. 

In fact, you can go a step forward and create a more detailed case study for your audience. If you really think about it, every case study could have been a testimonial and every testimonial could have been a case study. In this full-fledged case study, you can really show the problem being solved. You can answer all of the steps to make it easy for anyone to replicate. 

This is essential to helping you convert and you can do this in so many ways. For example, what you can do is have a first testimonial be a short video that may go on your website. The case study, on the other hand, can be a larger asset that you can share in the form of an eBook or a long-form video series. Let’s talk a little bit more about distribution now. 

Gathering Video Testimonials with Dubb

While there are plenty of ways to gather video testimonials, I want to spend a few moments speaking about how you can do so with Dubb. Dubb was designed from the ground up to be a video platform for sales and marketing professionals. Using Dubb, you can record stellar content wherever you are, make plenty of edits to those videos, and easily distribute those videos to any type of audience. 

But let’s talk about gathering video testimonials. On Dubb, it all comes down to the call to action button. Whenever you record a video on Dubb or upload a video to the Dubb platform, you automatically get a Dubb landing page for that video. If you are a paid Dubb user, you can customize that landing page in virtually any way that you want (including things like fonts, logos, and other types of branding). Even if you don’t customize your video landing pages this way, you will have the option to include several different call to action buttons below your video.

This is where it gets interesting. Dubb offers plenty of call to action buttons, including the ability to schedule a call on your calendar, communicate over Facebook messenger, and send your viewer to any type of link. That said, here, we are going to talk about the reply with video call to action. This is what you are going to want to include to gather video testimonials. What happens is that once your prospect finishes watching your video (or even stops in the middle of watching your video), they can click on the “reply with video” button. From there, your viewer can record a video of their own, whether that is a video testimonial or something else. Once they are finished, they can click on the check mark and send your video back to you. It is that easy. 

Better yet, the viewer can see this “reply with video” call to action on any device. Whether they are on their desktop, laptop, or something else, they will be able to record a video testimonial for your business. We designed this feature to be as easy as possible so that you can gather video testimonials whenever you want them. 

Using Dubb, you can even gather video testimonials automatically. One of our Dubb power users (Paige Battcher) came up with a really awesome workflow that leverages automations. She has built this effective sequence where it sends prospects a message. That message is essentially, “Hey, can you send me a video testimonial? I would greatly appreciate it.” If they don’t send a video testimonial back to Paige, the sequence sends the prospect a follow-up message. That follow-up message says something like, “Hey, I saw you didn’t get a chance to submit your testimonial yet. You can do so by clicking here.” It is a nice, polite drip sequence that reminds them to submit a video testimonial. This lets you follow up in an automatic way and in a way that doesn’t waste your viewer’s time.  

Places to Distribute Your Video Testimonials

So we talked about the creation of these types of video testimonials. Basically, what you are doing here is collecting low-fi, zero-production, and zero-cost testimonials from your most rabid customers and fans. Using a tool like Dubb, you can easily collect these types of testimonials from your clients and then distribute them in so many different ways. 

If you are on Dubb, for instance, you can add your video testimonials to a playlist. A playlist is something that you can create on Dubb whereby a video (or videos) automatically plays after an initial video. This is powerful in many different ways. As just one example, you can create a hyper-personalized video for a certain prospect and then include one (or several) video testimonials after it. Those video testimonials will automatically play once the first video is finished. 

You can also include your video testimonials in any type of prospecting or lead nurturing video. This can be a good option if you don’t want to run the risk of a prospect or viewer not watching the second video (which is a testimonial) in the playlist. When you put your video testimonials in these types of videos, your prospects will see these types of stories and be more inclined to trust you and your business. 

You may also want to consider putting your video testimonials on landing pages, advertisements, websites, and throughout your business. They can be powerful wherever the sales journey takes your prospective buyer. That is where your testimonial videos should be delivered. Even further, the more video testimonials that you have, the more stories you can share. 

You can even include a video testimonial in a blog post. The blog post can be about virtually anything, but you will want to make sure that your video testimonial connects with the blog post in some way. It can’t be awkwardly lodged in there with the hope that it will generate goodwill or trust with the audience. Like everything, it needs to add some type of value to the prospect’s life, so make sure that you are being thoughtful here. For example, what you can do is use a testimonial video in a blog post to refer to a specific feature that customers emphasize in the testimonial. It is almost like a multi-parallel approach. By doing this, you are getting as much value from the video testimonial as you can. 

They say that you need eight to 12 touch points to make a sale. If three or four of those touch points are testimonials (especially video testimonials), they are going to really move the needle throughout your sales process. It will both help provide value to your prospects and help them decide whether your product, service, or company is for them. Above all else, it is going to build trust, and trust is the key currency in any type of sales relationship. 

In sum: the answer to where to put these video testimonials is “where not to put them.” They are going to make sense throughout your entire sales process. And even better, once you have closed a particular prospect, you can then ask them to give you a video testimonial. It really is a positive, sustaining cycle that you can leverage to build more trust and get more sales. 

The One Truth

The title of this blog post is the one truth of creating and sharing video testimonials. So let’s get to it: what is the one big thing when you are making these types of videos? 

I would sum it up with this: creating and sharing video testimonials for your business will provide a significant lift. It will shorten your sales cycles and provide more revenue to your business. It has a direct effect on your bottom line. The magic ingredient here is trust and video testimonials make it much easier for any type of prospect to trust you. 

Like I mentioned above, it is extremely easy to get video testimonials with Dubb. Using Dubb’s reply with video feature, you can get video testimonials with a Dubb video landing page. Underneath your Dubb videos, you can include a reply with video call to action button, which lets your viewers record an awesome testimonial video with just one click. They don’t even need to sign up or hand over any other type of personal information. The video testimonial is recorded straight in the browser and just works. 

Think of it this way: by using a tool like Dubb, you can use video testimonials to accelerate the trajectory of your business. You can build trust, bolster your brand equity, and make more money. How great is that? 

Get Started With Creating and Sharing Video Testimonials Today

In the end, we encourage you to get your video testimonials. Find video testimonials where the speaker is authentically speaking about your product, service, or company. Once you have done that, incorporate your video testimonials into your marketing work. You can create a case studies page or a testimonials page, which can be the central hub for all of your video testimonials. If you are running ads, you can even include your video testimonials in your ad copy. In the end, have fun with the process. 

And if you are struggling to get started? Look at the last customer that had a great experience with your business or organization. Send them a quick video and say, “Hey, if you could do me the biggest favor by clicking on the button below this video and explaining how awesome it was to work with me. I would greatly appreciate it.” Then, get that video in front of that customer. By getting that first testimonial, you will be well on your way to reaping all of the benefits of video testimonials. I wish you the best of luck! 

At Dubb, we love thinking about and discussing ideas like creating and sharing video testimonials. If you have any comments or questions related to the topics discussed above, I encourage you to contact our team. You can also click here for more information about Dubb and click here for a free 14-day trial of our premium plans.