Which Aspects of Testimonial Videos Do B2B Audiences Most Respond To?
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Statistics show that testimonial videos are one of the most effective and highest converting forms of marketing. Despite the effectiveness, there's bit of cynicism about testimonials as well.
Some marketers and consumers are quick to say that testimonials are "cherry-picked" to make the business look its best rather than to provide a proper snapshot of a company's services. However, this mostly applies to bad practices around some written testimonials. Great video testimonials are able to show prospects a real story and alleviate concerns over "cherry-picking".
In the world of B2B, where logic and details are king, it's important to make sure your testimonials focus on concrete points for your audience. Every good B2B testimonial should have four key elements—real world statistics, an exciting narrative, concrete details, and relevant context. Let's explore how these can be applied to your testimonials.
1. Real World Statistics in Testimonial Videos
If you were to present an investment opportunity to the leadership team of a company, they would ask you for some concrete numbers on how you can help the company.
The same theory applies to B2B testimonial videos. Your testimonials should include solid numbers describing how your product or service helped the company in question. This can be difficult if the testifying customer is unable to access those types of statistics.
If you're able to dig up those numbers, it's well worth it. There's a drastic difference between:
- "I enjoyed x company's services" and
- "Working with x company raised our revenue 20%."
Presenting these these statistics visually within the video increases the value of the communication as well.
This is part of the reason why it's a good idea to build a solid relationship with your clients before requesting a testimonial. There will likely be some level of effort needed on their part to provide you with the real world data you want to inform your content. This is an easier ask to make if they're very happy with your services over an extended period. If it helps, you can also throw in some type of incentive.
Additional Tips on Using Real World Statistics
B2B marketing materials, by nature, are going to be more technical than their B2C counterparts. It can be difficult to avoid overly dry written materials in this case. Adding too many statistics repeatedly can actually make your testimonial difficult to read or come off as inauthentic.
Using video makes it a lot easier to add visual elements like charts or footage from your clients to complement the statistics, making them easier to understand.
2. An Exciting Narrative in Testimonial Videos
This may sound like a bit of an odd thing to place after statistics. How do you combine cold, hard facts with the notion of "telling a story"?
A narrative in a testimonial should be about creating a persuasive argument through a compelling story. By the end of a testimonial, your prospective client should know why it makes sense to go with your business above anyone else.
Additional Tips on Creating An Exciting Narrative
All you have to do is go to a movie and you can see the power of film with narrative. In a B2B context, it's far easier to lay out a comprehensive argument for your business when you're able to edit together a video, versus a raw interview or written statement. Along with this, you can also put supplementary material into your video to support the narrative, versus having to link to an outside page in text.
3. Concrete Details in Testimonial Videos
This is especially important in the B2B segment, where chances are your clients are probably entertaining multiple options at the same time. Your testimonial videos may literally be up against another company's to sway their decision. As a result, your testimonial should have a series of points that build off of each other, creating a potent case for your business.
In the world of B2C, people are a bit more willing to ponder hypotheticals, but it pays a lot more to get down to brass tacks with a B2B video testimonial. Generally, the best format to go with is:
- Present the problem faced by the customer.
- Establish how your solution helped the customer solve the challenge.
- State the final results.
Don't be afraid to give details throughout and especially in the final result. The more information you can provide, the more useful your testimonials will be to prospects.
There is one situation where hypothetical situations may be okay—talking about projections. For example, if your client can state their financial growth in the first year (or similar time period) of using your services and then project their expected additional savings in the next year, this can be an effective addition to the testimonial.
Additional Tips on Using Concrete Details
Similar to statistics, when you are explaining what your business did for a client in a testimonial, the visual format of video makes it easier to keep your content from being overly clinical or dull. Be sure to utilize visual elements to help tell the story.
4. Relevant Context in Testimonial Videos
Any B2B client understands they service specific market segments. Therefore it's important for testifying customers to give an explanation of their company. The customer can simply give a brief explanation of their:
- name and role at the company
- company's service or product
- company's market segment
These small details are essential to provide context for your audience. For example, prospects will be more likely to relate to the video if they're also in the same market segment and role. This goes a long way to making your videos more persuasive.
A secondary area to consider in your testimonial videos is to provide additional context to the statistics. Percentages are great but many people will want to know the actual starting and ending numbers. Why?
Doubling revenue from $100,000 to $200,000 is a lot different than doubling from $10 million to $20 million. Referencing the original numbers will help your target prospects make a more educated decision.
Additional Tips on Providing Relevant Context
The visual element helps a lot here for adding context. Go to YouTube for a while and look at the thumbnails. You should be able to instantly tell what a video is about. With a list of customer testimonial videos, the logos and colors you use can instantly make it clear to viewers what testimonials are most relevant to them.
Your Turn to Utilize These Elements
We've established four main components every testimonial needs to have to do its job effectively.
A video testimonial, especially in the B2B world, can be a difficult balancing act to manage. Push the benefits too hard and it may come off as insincere. Provide an insufficient amount of technical details, and the testimonial isn't useful. This is why it's important to have ideas like prepared questions, story outlines, and other factors. Then the video will provide a stimulating visual and useful content for closing your prospects.
Take a look at these top-notch testimonial video examples of how to utilize these elements.
When you're ready to create top-notch testimonial videos, you'll need a partner who understand the B2B mindset and have video expertise.
Testimonial Hero can give you a leg up on the competition with:
- Local crews near you who can capture testimonials with zero travel fees.
- A frictionless production experience for you—we'll take care of all logistics and create the perfect edit in-house.
- Comprehensive strategy planning for capturing and editing the story.
Dan shares on:
Brokers no longer need to spend hours each week tagging conversations manually and adding notes after each call—ZRA does all that for them.
During customer calls, brokers, salespeople, and customer success agents can easily see AI-generated notes from previous interactions and continue the conversation, whether it involves offering the customer more information about a particular token or solving a simple troubleshooting issue like two-factor authentication.
Using ZRA has streamlined customer processes, from sales to customer service calls to onboarding. “When we go through a customer onboarding process, we need a lot of information from the customer to remain compliant,” Dan explains. “With Zoom Revenue Accelerator, our onboarding team can easily see what’s been collected and what’s missing.”
After each call, ZRA will automatically create a summary and generate a list of the next steps to complete the onboarding. “Our onboarding team can now save time. When engaging with a customer, they can focus and prioritize that customer conversation.”
With automatic, AI-enabled insights into customer calls, Caleb & Brown now uses the intelligence gathered from conversations to guide business decisions. “When we want to start a new customer acquisition campaign or explore a new business line, we have insights into what matters most to our customers,” Dan says. “We can adjust our acquisition strategy and the key messages we use in our comms to match what we see.”
ZRA makes data sharing between teams easier, so brokers can share customer feedback with product and engineering teams—something they couldn’t do easily before. “In the past, it was quite clunky to pull a clip or audio file to share with other teams. Now, they can easily search through transcripts and provide those snippets as text snippets. It’s been a huge improvement to our workflow,” Dan says.
The enhanced collaboration—furthered by the adoption of Zoom Chat and Zoom Meetings—has also improved security. Teams can communicate faster and use ZRA to share data and call recordings to identify bad actors and confirm client identities quickly.
"Our teams can look at the data and make sure the voice and conversation style matches previous conversations. The auto-generated transcript that ZRA provides makes it much easier to search previous conversations." — Dan Johnson, Head of product, Caleb & Brown
In addition to tightening security, ZRA has made it easier for Caleb & Brown to track potential compliance issues and conduct quality assurance.
Along with ZRA, Caleb & Brown adopted Zoom Phone.
As a distributed company with global teams, it was important to ensure that distance didn’t impact customer experience. According to Dan, their previous provider “had significant latency issues and delays in the conversation. It made conversations quite disjointed and felt very unnatural.”
Switching to Zoom Phone solved those issues, and with the seamless integration of ZRA, they’ve gained data analysis capabilities they didn’t have before.
Since they’ve started working with Zoom Phone and ZRA, Caleb & Brown has gathered valuable data from every single customer call. “Previously, only a fraction of those calls were analyzed and reviewed. Now it’s 100%, and our team doesn’t have to do anything—the software does it for us. It’s quite magical,” Dan says.
This analysis has led to significant time savings and given the team a deeper understanding of their customers.
“Understanding those conversations and what topics matter most to our customers at scale has been absolutely phenomenal. We can’t put an exact number on it, but days, months, years of work have been saved.” —Dan Johnson, Head of product, Caleb & Brown
Caleb & Brown have gotten so much value from Zoom Phone and ZRA that they’ve expanded their Zoom ecosystem.
One such integration involves Salesforce. ZRA integrates directly with Salesforce, which means agents no longer have to spend time searching for the information they need. When a customer calls, their profile pops on the screen, allowing agents and brokers to swiftly navigate through that customer's data for additional context for a particular request. “If a customer wants to update their address, for example, the agent can click see and change that information directly in Salesforce. The useability is phenomenal,” Dan says.
Another addition is Zoom Contact Center, which provides a better way for the global support team to service customers. Rather than having support team members to have unique phone numbers, they leverage intelligent routing to streamline call volume through a single phone number. This capability makes reporting much clearer, as it's easier for leadership to understand the types of conversations being had and who is having those conversations.
With so many solutions to offer, Zoom enables Caleb & Brown to improve productivity, know their customers better, and get deeper deal insights to drive more revenue.
“One of the biggest benefits of working with Zoom is their complete product line. Having one provider that you can go to for many solutions makes things quite easy.” —Dan Johnson, Head of product, Caleb & Brown
