Automated Video Testimonials – Get customer testimonials in a few minutes without bothering your customers
No matter how much time, money, and strategy you invest in marketing and campaigns, the best marketing and promotion is done by satisfied customers.
Start from yourself, how many times have you decided on a brand, product, or service, just because you received a recommendation for it?
That is why you should use advertising made by satisfied customers as a great marketing tool, and these are the testimonials, ie the simplest explanations of the statements of your satisfied customers who will share their experience with using your product.
Customer testimonials strengthen your brand and its relevance because it is your customers who show the trust they have and security when it comes to doing business with you and using your products.
So: relevance, security, trust - that's the image you want to gain, isn't it?
There are a few types of testimonials:
- Written testimonial
- Fully customized video testimonials (go to the client and record them)
- Use a video testimonial app
- Create automated video testimonials workflow
Depending on your resources, any of the methods above will get the job done.
Another key point in deciding how will you get the testimonials is how much work is it for your customer. Asking for testimonials can feel like you’re giving homework to your customers - which is not the ideal scenario sometimes.
That’s why you have to find the right balance between the workflow that’s the least work for your customer but gives you the most credible & trustworthy testimonial.
Asking for testimonials
Before we jump into the technicalities, let’s cover the best ways of asking for testimonials. There are several options for this and they can all be automated:
- After the customer gives you 4 or 5 stars on product review websites, you can automatically message him to fill out the form and thus offer a written testimony or record a video.
- If you have a list of your satisfied users with whom you have already had long cooperation, you can send them an email with a proposal to help you and share your experience through a written testimony or recorded video
- Contact the new customers after a certain period where they would have the opportunity to say how satisfied they are with the product again through the option of written or video testimonials
- If your product has a Web App, you can embed a link that will allow the customer to fill out a form or record a testimonial that you can later use for marketing purposes
The options are numerous - there is no one size fits all.
Video Testimonials & Their Benefits
Textual testimonial is the least work, but also it’s the one that has the least credibility. After all, anyone can create fake text testimonials. If you really want to come off trustworthy, going with the video testimonial is usually the best option, given how much marketing power video has.
However, they can be a lot of work to create. Especially if you’re creating a custom video testimonial. Sure, they are the most credible and they’ll be your sales-enablement superpower but to create one of those you need to:
- Find a time when your client is free and willing to shoot the video
- Find people from your client's team that are willing to be put in front of the camera
- Organize the shoot
- Shoot the testimonials
- Edit those testimonials
- Go through the feedback process with the client
The output is something like this.
Yeah, it looks awesome and i’m sure that it helped Slack close a lot of enterprise customers but it probably took weeks and weeks of work.
So, how do you get video testimonials if you can’t execute option 2? That leaves us with a video testimonial app or an automated video testimonial workflow.
Video Testimonial App
Video testimonial apps are a pretty good option because they handle everything and you only need to embed their video collection form link into your website.
Some of the most popular video testimonial apps are:
They are pretty similar in terms of how they work. You create the form, and you get a link to embed it on your website or wherever you want it. They are pretty simple to set up and pretty effective, but of course, there are a few downsides.
The first downside: It lacks flexibility because you can’t create workflows suited to your business (for example you may want to create testimonials for IG Story & your website from one testimonial).
The second downside: There isn’t a way to add your branding (at least at the time i’m writing this article), or any other graphical elements (like the name of the person, or the questions).
If you’re okay with these two points above, your best choice would be to go with one of these apps. If you, however, want to avoid these then an automated video testimonial workflow is the best pick.
Automated video testimonial workflow
This testimonial collecting machine combines all the best things from the methods i mentioned in the intro.
It’s simple to use, it allows users to record testimonials from their phone and it allows you to include branding (and other graphic elements) in your testimonial. Also, it gives you full flexibility to create any workflow that suits your business.
What’s also awesome is that you can leave the option to type in a testimonial, if the customer doesn’t feel like recording a video. This testimonial can later be animated and written in video format - if that’s something you’d like.
The good thing is that both of these can come from a single testimonial request form, you don’t need to create multiple forms for multiple formats.
Yes, it’s a bit of work to set this up, but once you set it up you can forget it. Usually, a workflow like this takes up to a day to set uap.
Here are the outlines of what you’ll need in order to create automated video testimonials:
- Video template
- Video automation tool
- Form creation software
- Integration tool
Video Template
The video template will be the skeleton of your testimonial. What you’ll need to do is basically create a placeholder testimonial that will contain the customer video itself along with all of the graphic elements that will go inside of the testimonial.
The video template doesn’t need to be complex, as the focus should be on the customer and their video. In terms of graphical elements, it’s often enough to add your logo, the question (if you asked one), and the name of the person speaking.
This will later be added to the video automation tool, and whenever a customer records a testimonial, it will be added to this template (alongside their name) and you’ll get a fully branded and professional-looking video testimonial.
Video Automation Tool
You will of course need a video automation tool like Plainly that will take the video template and the customer’s video and create a unique video testimonial from that. This is pretty easy to set up in Plainly.
All you have to do is upload your video template, set up the dynamic elements and you’re ready to render. Video templates are made in Adobe After Effects, which is the industry standard in video production, so it will be really easy for your team to create this.
Form Creation Software
This can really be any form creation software. Our favorite is Airtable, simply because it looks nice and it’s really powerful. It also has tons of integrations possibilities which is important if you’re to create this automated video testimonial workflow.
It can also be Google Forms, or any tool that you’re already using. The only thing that’s important is that it can actually be integrated into a workflow like this. You can check that by going to Zapier/Integromat website and searching for the tool you wish to use. If it can be integrated, it will show on the website.
Integration Tool
In the end, you need a tool that will tie everything together. That tool is an integration tool like Zapier or Integromat. These tools have the ability to link multiple tools together in one coherent automated workflow.
In our case, this tool will trigger an automated workflow whenever there is a new testimonial submitted. This basically means that there is a new response to your form.
When there is a new response, it will take the details of that response (customer name, their video) and it will insert it into the video template you made. Once the video is made, it will send the video to any destination that you like. This can be Slack, Email, and similar.
These automation tools are no code, which means that you don’t need to be a developer to create these workflows which is awesome. I’m not a developer, and i don’t know how to code but i still manage to create these automation workflows.
We actually created a step-by-step guide a similar workflow. It’s for a video creation form, which allows anybody to create videos by filling out a form. It’s similar to this workflow because it gets triggered whenever there is a new form response, which is how the automated video testimonials workflow works.
The output is a raw, recorded video from your customer that gives out credibility but it still has your branding and it looks professional.
Closing Words
Getting customer testimonials is a hard job. You need to find a tool that will make your life, and the life of your customer easier. That’s why we gave you a few options to choose from.
The majority of customers would be willing to spend some time and write a text testimonial, however, there are only a few that will be willing to do a video testimonial - that’s why you have to do everything in your power to make this easy for them.
Creating automated video testimonials is one way. Using apps is the other. Find what works for you and your customers, and stick to it.
