Developing Effective B2B Customer Video Testimonials

Customer video testimonials can help tech companies win new customers and break into new markets. According to a Wyzol report, 47% of people say testimonial videos are effective because they help visualize how a product or service actually works, while 42% of people say testimonial videos are effective because they showcase an actual person and help the viewer understand their story.

But producing a customer video testimonial isn’t as simple as putting a customer in front of a camera and asking him or her to talk about your company. The customer needs to provide a compelling reason they used your product or service in a way that resonates with potential new customers.

“The only way that I’m going to open my ears is if you connect me with a problem that you know I have and I can’t fix it,” said Neil Myers, president of Connect Marketing, which has written an e-book on the subject, Creating a Customer Case Study Video. “I look at it like a three-act play. You introduce the characters; you set up the conflict, then you resolve it.

Connect Marketing developed a B2B testimonial for Cloudinary, a company that helps business customers speed the loading and responsiveness of asset-heavy websites (videos and images).

“We first have to set up the person we’re talking to and what the company does,” Myers said. It’s like a sitcom – if you don’t connect with the characters, then you don’t like the sitcom. This is about the customer.”

Related: Best Practices To Engage Buyers With Creative Video Content

After the introduction, the video should be scripted to discuss the problem.

“Theodore Levitt (an economist and Harvard Business School professor) said people don’t go to a hardware store to buy a quarter-inch drill, they go to the hardware store to buy a quarter-inch hole. You’re talking about the quarter-inch hole. Then you discuss how they couldn’t fix it.”

Only after that — which is about halfway through the video –does the customer testimonial discuss the solution, the vendor’s product or service, Myers said. “We have the audience hooked, now they want to hear the rest of the story.”

Scripting Tips for B2B video testimonials

“We ask them to read the actual script we wrote,” Myers wrote in the e-book. “We ask them to read it as if they are “talking,’ not like they are ‘reading.’ We are looking for a version of the story that is precisely correct in case they can never get that part correct in their interview. If necessary, we will use that snippet while showing [a recorded video]. It works about half the time, but it is worth trying. Sometimes it can save an interview.”

Travis Johansen, founder and director at ProVid Films, a Minneapolis Video Production Company, prefers that customers offering testimonials speak without scripts, or just use “light scripting,” otherwise it their testimonials will seem to forced and not authentic.

To track the success (or lack thereof) of the customer video testimonial, Johansen recommended using website tools to embed videos that enable you to:

• Track your email subscribers and tag to see which videos they are watching
• Track the exact moment that viewers clicked away (or stopped watching) your videos.
• Track the any spots in the video that people watched more than once.