When you make a video of yourself or one of your employees talking about how great your products and services are, that's called selling.

But when you make a video featuring an existing, satisfied customer talking about the exact same information... that's called a video testimonial, and it is absolutely one of the most powerful modern marketing techniques that you have available to you.

 

What Are Video Testimonials? An Overview

For proof of that, take a look at the following example of a compelling video testimonial.

You're still learning about what the service is and what it does (in this case, that service is Uscreen), but in a much more relatable way than a standard piece of marketing collateral.

If you were a curious prospect who was still on the fence about making a purchase, you're now closer to that sale than ever—all thanks to an average, everyday person who had such a great experience that you can't help but want that for yourself.

But the convincing nature of video testimonials is just one of the many reasons why they should have a permanent home on all of your landing pages.

 

Why you Should Use Video Testimonials

The 5 reasons you should use video testimonials on landing pages are:

  1. They nurture leads.
  2. They address the pain points of your leads.
  3. They help generate leads.
  4. They boost conversion rates.
  5. They stand the test of time.

 

Video Testimonials Nurture Leads

According to one recent study, as many as 80% of your leads that are currently unqualified will go on to buy something—either from you or from a competitor—within the next two years. Because lead nurturing is geared towards making these currently unqualified leads purchase with you, video testimonials are an incredibly powerful weapon when used properly!

Let's take the unique, specific and personalized content you need within the different stages of a sales funnel:

Once you raise awareness, you need to get someone to commit to change by having them review their options. Then you want them to commit to a solution, justify it, and make their final decision.

Thanks to their malleability, you can create unique video testimonials for ALL of these stages to target your audience with greater precision by:

  • Getting different satisfied customers to speak about their experience within the context of these unique stages.
  • Having them talk about their pain points and the genuine value you were able to bring to the table.
  • Letting them discuss other options they were thinking about before they settled on your product.
  • Letting them go into detail about the unique problems they faced and how you helped them solve them.

At that point, edit all of those stories into unique videos targeting different stages of the funnel to help naturally - and effectively - get more leads from one end to the other.

 

Address the Pain Points of Your Leads

Maybe the most immediate reason why you should leverage video testimonials on your landing pages has to do with just how emotional they can be when created properly.

Consumers have already reached the point where they put more stock in recommendations from real people like friends and family members rather than professional reviews. Video testimonials enable you to have full control of the narrative playing out in front of your leads!

Rather than reading a testimonial, one of your prospects can hear the inflection in someone's voice when they talk about what a positive experience they had. They can see the genuineness in someone's eyes when they talk about how their life was improved by their relationship with your brand.

It's an additional layer of emotion that you DON'T get from traditional print content and when applied properly, it can help transform someone from curious prospect to enthusiastic customer in the blink of an eye.

 

Video Testimonials Generate Leads

Your video testimonials may live on your landing pages—but that's not where their reach ends. Because of the potential these testimonials have as a lead generation tool, you may want to think about your landing pages as less of a traditional "sales" tool and more of an over-the-top service just waiting to be taken advantage of.

Let’s take social networking.

Visual content on social media is 40 times more likely to get shared than other types of content. Not only that, but posts with videos attract as many as three times the inbound links as ones that just contain plain text.

So when someone finds your landing page and views your video, they're much more likely to share it with their Twitter and Facebook friends than they would another type of content. That post is going to garner more attention on social media than something like a blog post ever would, thus bringing a larger volume of brand-new leads directly to your virtual doorstep.

 

Video Testimonials Boost Conversion Rates

Video testimonials are also proven to have a strong and immediate impact on what is, for many marketers, the most important metric of all: conversion rates.

According to one recent study, about 90% of people say that positive online reviews influence their buying decisions—and what is a video testimonial if not a positive online review? Likewise, shoppers who view a video are 1.81 times more likely to purchase a product than someone who went in cold.

Video testimonials essentially allow you to leverage both of these ideas at the exact same time. You're serving someone up an online review—which they're already actively searching for—and you're doing it in a format that is every bit as convincing as it is compelling.

 

Video Testimonials Stand the Test of Time

Finally, one of the most powerful reasons to leverage video testimonials on your landing pages has to do with the fact that they're the best type of sales content—the kind that has no set expiration date.

Video testimonials are as evergreen as your products and services—meaning that so long as what you're selling on that landing page doesn't change, your video testimonial will be just as effective five years from now as it is today.

A great story transcends time and is the very reason why people still cherish movies like “Star Wars” and “Alien” over 40 years later. Thanks to the wonders of video on demand, people can stumble onto your landing page’s video testimonials and end up having a significant connection independent of when it happened.

For most people, that alone is worth the investment in leveraging video testimonials on those landing pages.

Looking for more ways to improve conversion rates on your landing page? Check out our 20-Point Landing Page Audit today.

 

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About our guest author

Amir Shahzeidi is the digital marketing manager at Uscreen, a video monetization platform that allows creators to launch OTT platforms, and monetize their video content online.

 

 

Originally published July 29, 2019, updated July 29, 2019
Tags: lead nurturing campaign Website CRO video