Landing page testimonials are effective for a reason.
Unlike sales pitches, testimonials are unbiased, making it easier for your business to establish credibility and increase trust in your landing page offer.
In fact, studies show that credible testimonials increase buying intent by more than 92%.
Now, it's important to understand that your landing page visitors have different learning styles, and this influences how they prefer to consume information. All of that being said, one content type stands head and shoulders above the rest—video.
Research by Vidyard reveals the most popular types of videos that marketers use:
Furthermore, here's where marketers are using these different video types in different stages of their funnels:
In addition to the obvious places one might implement a customer video, landing pages are in fact a huge opportunity—precisely because not all marketers are currently using them in that area. And it's a huge opportunity to improve your conversions.
Here's why: Video landing page testimonials can increase conversions by 80%.
According to Forbes Insights, 75% of senior executives watch work-related videos on business-related websites every week. In each visit, 42% of them expect to watch a customer testimonial.
Let's dive deeper into what makes up compelling testimonial landing page videos. We'll also look at how different brands are using video testimonials on their landing pages to give you ideas on how to get started.
Before we get into that, let's take a look at exactly why video testimonials perform better than text-based testimonials.
Landing Page Testimonials With Video Add A Human & Emotional Touch
Testimonial videos use the face of your customers as well as relatable dialogue and music to influence the behavior of your business' prospective buyers. These elements spark emotions and create a shared experience that makes your business memorable, approachable and, most importantly, trustworthy.
In fact, your prospects will retain an average of 65% of what they watch three days later as compared to retaining 10% of what they only hear.
Text-based testimonials, on the other hand, rely on specific word choice, punctuation, and visual elements such as emojis to elicit an emotional response. A reader will have to interact with several testimonials before taking action.
Furthermore, text based testimonials are also much easier to fake. Or at a minimum, many B2B prospects know that text based testimonials are actually written by the marketing team of the seller's company.
Yes, the featured customer may have signed off on them, but all too often, it's the marketing department that is writing these testimonials. Today's savvy B2B buyers know this which means written testimonials simply don't pack the punch they may have in years past.
Still, you might think a two-minute video might not seem like enough time to give your business a human touch. Forrester research, however, reveals that a minute-long video is worth 1.8 million words.
For prospects, it's much more than just what your customer is audibly saying. It's the whole package that increases the trust and social proof—the smile on their face, their expression as they sing your praises, artful cutaway shots, and more. All of these factors come together to create a video that delivers real impact in a sales and marketing situation.
Video Testimonials Build Trust
Prospects are naturally skeptical—for good reason. As B2B buyers, we've all been in a situation where a vendor over promised and under delivered.
Your prospects are numb to advertising, don't trust sales reps, and doubt your marketing claims—except when you let customers speak for you.
And that's why 91% of B2B buyers rely on word of mouth marketing to make buying decisions.
They are looking for authentic content that tells the real story—something that only your customers can do through video testimonials.
What's more, video testimonials showcase your customer's face and their personality—crucial elements that help in building trust with prospects.
Biologically, our brains are hardwired to recognize faces. A team of neuroscientists from UCLA and Caltech conducted a study measuring the electrical activity in our brains when we see a human face.
Epilepsy patients, while undergoing surgery, were shown pictures of Jennifer Aniston's face. The implanted electrodes recorded an increase in brain cell electrical activity. When they saw other images that didn't include a face, electrical activity in their brains remained constant.
The bottom line is, as humans, we have specialized neural circuits in our brains (the fusiform gyrus) whose work it is to recognize faces.
When your prospects see your customer's face in a video testimonial, it holds their attention, allowing you to start building trust with them in a way that animated videos or product demos alone simply can't do.
Video Testimonials Are Persuasive
Stories influence us at psychological and neurological levels. The classic "before and after" story arc is at the core of customer storytelling and what makes video testimonials effective marketing content.
In a study conducted by Dr. Uri Hasson and his team at Princeton University, they recorded the brain activity of a speaker telling the story of their life and that of a listener, listening to the story.
Their brain activity showed similar patterns across different parts of their brains (also known as neural coupling).
Essentially, storytelling improves neural coupling. It helps the listener understands what the speaker is saying and makes it easier for them to believe them.
Video testimonials focus on telling a specific story about a customer as opposed to telling a story about a group. From a psychological perspective, this approach makes your prospects pay more attention and respond to the emotions the story evokes.
It becomes even more powerful when the prospective buyer is served a video testimonial they can relate with, a "persona match" so to speak. When you're able to share a customer story from a similar company or industry, with a similar problem, the persuasiveness factor is amplified even further.
This is why we always recommend clients get started by making a list of all their key buyer personas. Then creating a strategy to make sure they cover all of those key personas with at least one video testimonial that "maps" to them. These are perfect to use in a sales in marketing situation with a prospect that is an ideal match—in a similar industry, company size, or situation.
Video Testimonials Create Affinity With Prospects & Your Brand
What comes to your mind when you think about Tesla? What about Apple or Google?
Brand association is a powerful thing, and a video testimonial gives you the ability to change, alter, or improve the brand associations that your prospects have about your business.
When you share real-life stories of how your product is transforming the lives of your customers, prospects can make an emotional association.
As they picture themselves using your product, they view you as the solution they need because they understand the value you're bringing to the table. This increases their likelihood of converting on your landing page.
Now you understand the benefits of video testimonials and how they're important for your landing page testimonials. Next, let's explore what makes a compelling video testimonial video. There are four primary elements that make it stand out.
4 Elements Of Compelling Video Testimonials
There's more to video testimonials than reaching out to a customer with a couple of questions and asking them to record a video narrating their experience with your product.
These four elements will help you create a compelling video testimonial:
1. Focus on a specific buyer persona
After seeing a ton of ads and marketing messages that fail to resonate with their needs, customers are looking for products with clear and tangible value. How do you get into their heads and understand what is important to them?
By looking at your buyer personas to identify the needs, goals, values, challenges, and pain points of each customer segment.
Doing this will help you identify the message you want to pass across in each testimonial. Besides, you'll reach out to the right customers and ask relevant questions, prompting a relevant and compelling story with details that resonate with each customer segment.
Take a look at this video from the buyer persona viewpoint:
The video speaks to a specific customer segment: Heads of sales. As the video comes to a close, Emmanuelle says:
"The biggest benefit it delivers to me is the ability to actually coach reps on something very specific that is not just 'how is this deal going?' it's more strategic, it's long term and that makes sure that they're not going to be successful this month but they're set up for next month and the next quarter"
Emmanuelle Skala, VP of Sales at Influitive
By targeting the heads of sales, InsightSquared is pushing their target customers towards making a decision.
Make your video testimonial count by calling out that specific customer segment. You'll be sending out a clear and concise message that helps them make decisions faster.
Watch More Testimonial Videos With Focused Personas
2. Be real
Prospects get turned off by fake and rehearsed videos. When you make your customers stick to a script, you lose credibility instead of showcasing their honest stories.
And your prospects can tell when you present a scripted video testimonial. Once they do, they won't trust what you or your customers say.
It doesn't mean that compelling testimonial videos don't have a rough script. Scripts help your customer know what needs to be said, without telling them how to say it.
Unscripted video testimonials make your prospects relate to your customers, hence increasing their chances of converting on your landing page. You want to go into the video with a clear interview outline and a great set of interview questions you plan to ask the client—but you should never force your client to say a specific thing or script them.
The power of a testimonial is in the fact that it is organic and human—don't take away from that with overly staged videos that feel too stiff or overproduced.
3. Focus on transformation
People love movies with characters who experience transformation. Similarly, they love businesses that deliver a similar transformative experience with their products.
Transformation highlights the customer's life before and after they started using your product. When you focus on transformation, it becomes impossible for your prospects to resist taking action because they see their lives after using your product.
With transformation, you're looking to answer one or all of the following questions:
- Which desires did the product help fulfill for your customer?
- What goals did your customer achieve once they started using your product?
- What fears and frustrations did your product get rid of?
The goal is always to get B2B prospects to see themselves in the story of the customer you are showcasing. If you can get prospects to identify with the featured customer and resonate with their success story, you're well on your way to reducing friction in the sales cycle and accelerating the overall sales process! This is one of the most valuable aspects of customer testimonial videos for B2B sales and marketing teams.
4. Keep it short (Two minutes or under)
When you land on a page with a video, whether it's on social media or on a website, what do you do first?
My guess is that you check its length to decide whether you'll watch it on not. The same thing applies to your video testimonials.
So, how long should video testimonials be?
According to Wistia—who gathers a multitude of data of viewer behaviour as part of the video hosting software—the ideal length of a video testimonial is 2-2.5 minutes.
That being said, Google—who, thanks to YouTube, gathers even more data—recommends below two minutes in their internal marketing style guides and presentations.
The bottom line is, if you give your prospects anything much longer than 2:00, you risk losing them and having a portion of your message never get there, lowering engagement hurting your conversion rates.
As the saying goes, "brevity is the soul of wit"—and this holds doubly true for B2B video testimonials. Short videos are an indication that your message is concise and clear, so it won't take long for prospects to understand what you are saying.
Generally speaking, here's a proven formula for organizing your video testimonials:
- Start with the most important details first (a quick introduction that grabs the prospect's attention)
- Provide essential information (a short story that covers the product and transformation)
- Call to action (asking them to sign up for a trial or book a demo)
If they don't receive your message in the shortest time possible, even the longest video won't keep them engaged. Now that you've nailed down the four elements every compelling video testimonial needs, it's time to look at testimonial page examples you'll want to copy.
Build Your Landing Pages With Testimonial Videos
Especially for B2B software marketers, the goals of customer testimonials are to build the trust needed to increase initial conversions, get conversations off to a warm start, and then ultimately accelerate sales and reduce friction in the sales cycle.
Social proof and validation from real, existing customers plays a key role when your prospect is deciding whether or not to sign up or click away from your homepage or landing page.
When it comes to landing page testimonials, video testimonials are an incredible tool to help you hit your conversion goals. Effective video testimonials are a result of focused energy and investment and will require significant planning. They don't happen by accident.
Are you ready to improve engagement, conversions, and drive more revenue by highlighting your existing customers on your landing pages?
