The Essential Guide to Video Testimonials

• Video testimonials work better than text-based testimonials or online reviews.
• A relaxed, casual atmosphere is ideal for getting an interviewee to provide a high-quality testimonial message.
• Video testimonials can be distributed in a variety of ways and through many types of media.

Video marketing is becoming one of the most dominant tactics for companies as they battle for new customers and repeat business. But it’s not because the medium is advancing rapidly from a technological standpoint. In other words, even though new video equipment, applications and software are constantly hitting the market, the basic format of the videos being produced for companies hasn’t changed much at all.

One of these tried-and-true components of effective video marketing is the customer testimonial. After all, these testimonials are rated as the most effective content marketing tool, and customer input typically increases conversion rates by 74 percent.

Why Testimonials Work

Of course, the concept of customer testimonials has been around the decades. But until fairly recently, these were primarily promoted using text in print ads and/or with still photographs in brochures or similar marketing materials. With video testimonials, viewers can better identify with the person who is on-camera espousing the benefits of a company or its products and services.

As a result, video testimonials foster a stronger level of trust between the viewer and the company. If they can identify with the individual giving the testimonial, they’re more likely to make a connection with the brand. On a more practical level, viewers can learn how a company (or its products) solved a real-world problem for one of its customers; and if they have similar troubles, they’re much more likely to solicit the company’s help.

Searching for Testimonial Candidates

Given the fact that customer testimonials are so valuable and effective, how should your company go about procuring them?

Soliciting testimonials is a bit of an art. To be sure, you don’t want to ask customers to do this right after they’ve begun partnering with your company, and not just anyone will have the on-camera presence that you’re looking for.

A good rule of thumb is to wait a few months before asking a new customer to provide a testimonial. You can also see which customers have proactively reached out to thank your company for their assistance and then reply with a “soft” suggestion about appearing on video. If your company has sales reps, they likely have a good grasp of which customers are the most satisfied, photogenic and eager to sing your company’s praises.

Preparing For a Video Testimonial

After identifying who might be appropriate for video testimonials, reach out to them by email and follow up by phone if they express any interest. Explain to them that you’d love to sit down with them and simply talk about their business and how your company has helped them achieve its goals. Note that the conversation would be recorded on video, and emphasize that the entire chat will be casual and informal. (If possible, arrange for the interview to take place in their office or some other place in which they will feel comfortable.)

Once you find a willing participant, start preparing them for the testimonial itself. Explain the entire process of what will happen on the day of the interview from the production setup to the flow of the conversation. If the person wants to know what will be discussed, you can provide a few sample questions ahead of time; but be sure to stress not to prepare scripted answers. Also, give them advice on what apparel to wear on the day of the interview: solid dark and neutral colors while avoiding red, stripes, or wild patterns.

Relaxed Interviewee = Strong Testimonial

On the day of the shoot, do everything you can to put the interviewee at ease while the video production crew is setting up lighting, audio, and cameras. When the recording begins, start by asking a few general questions about their business; such as when they first started, what they do and why they’re special. This will allow the interviewee to speak about topics they’re familiar with and become more relaxed on camera.

Then you can gradually start asking more relevant questions that relate to your company and how it has helped them improve their business. Examples of these more probing questions may include:

• • 1. What issue prompted you to contact our company in the first place?
  • 2. What benefits have you noticed since you have partnered with our company (or used its products or services)?
  • 3. What do you love the most about working with our company?
  • 4. What do you think about our customer service representatives (and/or salespeople)?
  • 5. How has your life been simplified (and/or your revenues increased) since your relationship with our company began?
  • 6. Why would you recommend our company/product/service to others?

It’s not uncommon for these interview sessions to last a few hours. If you think an answer needs to be repeated for clarity reasons, don’t hesitate to ask. Be sure to get some footage of the person working in their environment to use for cover video—also known as “b-roll”—during editing. Once the interview is over, be sure to send them a heartfelt thank-you note for their time and comments.

Video Testimonial Editing Tips

After you view the raw footage, try to pick out several “soundbites” which are the most compelling and portray your company in the best possible light. If an answer sounds better when stumbles or superfluous phrases are edited out, use b-roll to connect the desired phrases.

Standalone video testimonials should be limited to be 45 and 60 seconds in duration. If the interviewee or the material is exceptionally entertaining or interesting, you can extend the video length to two minutes. Anything longer than that runs the risk of viewers losing interest in the video.

Distributing Your Video Testimonial

Once the testimonial video is edited and finished, what should you do with it? Here are a few ideas:

• • • Post it on the home page of your website
    • Create a “case study” of your site where you can feature it (and others like it)
    • Create an email marketing campaign around it
    • Post on your company’s social media platforms
    • Upload it to your company’s YouTube channel
    • Share it with all of your sales personnel and internal marketing teams
    • Share it with industry publications and/or local business columnists or publications
    • Let it play on a screen or computer in your lobby, store, or window
    • Let it play on a screen at a trade show or convention

Last but not least: be sure to send a copy directly to the interviewee. They’ll probably share it with their network as well!

Of course, it’s better to hire a professional video production company to shoot and edit your video testimonial. After all, viewers will associate the quality of the finished product with that of your company and its offerings.

For most companies, referrals are the best way to build a customer base. Think of a video testimonial as a large-scale “referral” of your company by a happy customer to whoever watches the video. Chances are, your video testimonials will become an integral part of your overall marketing strategy.

To learn how you can harness the power of Video Testimonials please contact Gerald at Tybach Production Services. A testimonial is, without a doubt, the most cost-effective and efficient way to boost your business!

Posted by Ashley Brook at https://crewscontrol.com/ on August 16, 2018

SNAPCHAT - a powerful marketing tool!

Snapchat is a popular mobile app that lets users take quick pictures or videos and share them with their friends. After a little bit, these posts disappear forever. Even though just about everybody has heard about Snapchat at this point, many businesses have ignored it. That’s a huge mistake. Snapchat is gaining popularity quickly, especially among younger demographics. While many teenagers are using Facebook less than ever, Snapchat has become the most popular mobile app among them. Additional studies also predict that Snapchat is poised to become more popular with older demographics as well.

It’s clear that Snapchat is important for businesses looking to connect with a growing audience, and it’s getting more important every single month. To help you get started, here are eight pro tips for using Snapchat as a business:

1. Highlight a Single Product or Service

Taco Bell is one company that’s really good at doing this. They highlight new menu items or existing favorites by taking multiple pictures of them, telling a quick story about why they’re great. They use emojis and humor, catering to the younger audience that they target. Incredibly, Taco Bell maintains an open rate of 80% of all of their snaps. If that was indicative of an email or of another direct marketing campaign, it would be an unbelievable open rate. On Snapchat, it’s simply par for the course.

2. Give a Peek Behind the Curtain

Customers respond well when they get a chance to look behind the scenes of brands that they care about and people they follow. With its fun, quick nature, Snapchat is the perfect delivery mechanism. It’s personable and immersive, and will resonate much better than a Facebook video or Instagram picture would. You could post quick pictures showing interesting behind the scenes processes, or single questions and answers with company leaders. The key is being fun and authentic.

pulling back the curtain great way to use power of snapchat. Pulling back the curtain a bit is a great way to develop stronger relationships with your audience.

3. Keep Your Stories Short

Snapchat stories are like an interactive slideshow. You can post multiple pictures or videos in a row to create a narrative that’s fun and different. It could be a variety of glimpses into a normal workday at your company, or even just a series of different uses for your brand-new product. It’s important to keep in mind that you don’t want to post too many pictures or videos in a single day, though. If they’re too long or you post too many, views will drop off and you’re going to turn the audience off.

4. Send Valuable Promotions

One of the downsides to offering exclusive promotions via social media is that they’re public forever. Customers may find your old tweets or Facebook posts and become upset if they’re no longer eligible or valid. Snapchat is an ideal way to get creative with these social media promotions because of its temporary nature. Snaps are only available for a short period of time. Direct snaps are available for up to 30 days if unopened, and snaps posted to your story are only available for 24 hours. You can offer lucrative, exciting promotions without having to worry about having it honor it for a long period of time. Best of all, you’re teaching your customers exactly how important it is to pay attention to you, since your best deals don’t last very long.

5. Create Branded Filter

Filters are graphics that can be automatically added over pictures or videos that Snapchat users take themselves. To reduce costs and target strongly, you can create a geofilter so that the filters are only available in specific locations. For example, if you’re having a company event, you can create a custom filter so that users there can send out their own branded snaps. You could also place a permanent geofilter near any retail locations or office buildings so that users and employees can access your filters whenever they’re in your store or near your office.

6. Hand the Keys Over to Somebody Else

Account takeovers are extremely popular on Snapchat. You simply give control of the Snapchat to an employee, a customer, or a key influencer, and let them take control for a day or several hours. A clothing company known as Wet Seal did this with a local fashion influencer by giving her control over their Snapchat during the holiday season. In the end, they were able to drive over 9,000 new connections and over 250,000 views in total.

7. Offer Sneak Peeks

Car manufacturer Honda was able to build up a stir for their new NSX vehicle by sending a select group of followers an exclusive preview of it. You simply had to be one of the first 100 followers of their special account. Taco Bell has also experimented with sending users pictures of new or limited edition products. It’s a great way to generate buzz for a launch and make a very personal connection with your most dedicated users.

8. Always Stay Authentic

Snapchat is much more personal than other social media platforms. You’re sending messages specifically to your users and when they open them, they’re not seeing anything but your content. That means you need to keep Snapchat authentic and light. Simply show your own personality and try not to script snaps too much. Have fun with it and stay spontaneous. The brands that have the most success on Snapchat are the ones who are able to keep it light and friendly.

Snapchat is a great vehicle to make small, day-to-day connections, but it’s still important to create long-form videos. You’ll need in-depth production demonstrations, how-to videos, advertisements, and much more. For your next corporate video project, make sure to reach out to us here at Tybach Production Services. We’ll help you find the perfect solution for any video you need to make. 

This blog originally posted on Crews Control website

Vimeo Launches Vimeo Business: What You Need to Know

Original posting by Crews Control - December 5, 2016

Earlier this year the online video platform Vimeo launched Vimeo Business, a brand-new subscription plan focused providing small and medium-sized businesses the tools they need to host their video content, distribute it, and analyze the results.

Below, we’ll take a look at exactly what this means to your business, including what they’re offering and how it can be useful. To get started, we’ll need to discuss exactly what Vimeo’s platform is about, and why it’s different from somebody like YouTube.

The Basics of Vimeo

Vimeo is much smaller than YouTube but it still has a massive audience. On average, they have about 170 million monthly viewers. However, there are some key differences that make Vimeo a better choice for many businesses:

Lack of pre-roll marketing. Unlike YouTube, Vimeo doesn’t have any pre-roll ads. You don’t have to worry about a user navigating to your video and leaving simply because they’re annoyed by having to watch an ad.

Focus on quality. The Vimeo community is full of aspiring filmmakers, and the community is extremely supportive. Commenters are rarely Internet trolls – they’re usually interested individuals who want to give you proper advice and feedback.

Additional privacy restrictions. With Vimeo, you can control exactly who has the ability to view your content. You can even password protect specific videos if you want to provide early access or control access very tightly.

The introduction of Vimeo Business takes these existing strengths and provides even more powerful tools for business users. We’ll continue by taking a look at exactly what’s being added for Vimeo Business users.

Vimeo Business offers an active online community

Vimeo’s active professional community can be a terrific resource.

New Features for Vimeo Business

Vimeo Business is built specifically to make it easier for organizations to use video to reach out to their customers and engage with them. Here are some of the most valuable new features Vimeo Business provides:

Lead management. Your Vimeo videos will now have the ability to add clickable buttons and forms right within the video player. This can be as simple as a single trackable CTA or an advanced email form.

Ability to customize. You will be able to completely customize the video player by adding your logo or color scheme to it, or creating a personalized outro.

Tracking. One of the most valuable new features of Vimeo Business is the amount of analytics it provides. You’ll have instant access to views that show where your traffic comes where and when viewers tend to drop off. You can even integrate it fully into your existing Google Analytics dashboard.

Storage space. You’ll be able to directly and securely upload your videos to Vimeo and store them with a wide variety of options, with up to a maximum of 5 TB of storage space. You can even integrate with other web hosting services such as Google Drive, Dropbox, and OneDrive.

There are a number of additional perks to being a member of Vimeo Business, too, such as unlimited bandwidth and direct access to sell content online. It also includes up to 10 team members, third-party support, and even free lessons and educational materials. Vimeo business is sold on an annual basis, and cost $599 each year.

Potential Downsides of Vimeo

Despite the great perks and advantages of using Vimeo Business, there are some considerations you need to consider. Vimeo has a much more supportive and active community, but it’s still much smaller than YouTube’s. If you’re looking for a great deal of organic traffic from the platform without having to do a lot of the marketing yourself, Vimeo may not be an ideal fit.

Another downside is that Vimeo video content simply doesn’t perform as well in Google searches than YouTube does. Considering that Google has a massive slice of overall organic web search traffic, it’s worth keeping this in mind. Unfortunately, since Google owns YouTube and will naturally steer users towards its own content, this is unlikely to change in the future. The bottom line is that if you want to use Vimeo, you need to have a strong plan to direct users to your content yourself.

Of course, you need to weigh the benefits of Vimeo Business carefully against these cons. No matter what level of YouTube account that you have, for example, you’re not going to be able to add your colors and logo to the embedded video player. It comes down to knowing your audience, goals, and video content strategies.

Making the Most of Vimeo Business

If you’re decided that Vimeo Business makes sense for you, it’s important that you make the most out of your membership. Here are some ways you can do just that:

Use high-res video quality. YouTube videos have notoriously spotty quality, making it impractical to use especially high-quality video footage. Vimeo is completely different. They purposefully limit video upload limits and don’t restrict videos to specific quality levels. The end result is that videos can look much better on Vimeo than they do on other online video platforms.

Take advantage of the CTAs. The clickable call to action button is one of the most powerful options in Vimeo Business. If you’re not creating and customizing targeted CTAs for every single video, you’re missing out on a lot of conversions.

Remember it’s not one or the other. Don’t forget that you don’t need to select Vimeo or YouTube exclusively – you can use both. You can use Vimeo for videos where resolution quality matters or when it’s important that the video player is branded. You can see use YouTube to host SEO-friendly content or quick helper videos.

clickable CTAs are an important part of Vimeo business

Clickable CTAs are an important perk offered to Vimeo Business users.

Now that you know all about Vimeo Business and how it can help you out, you just need great video content to post there. Make sure to keep Tybach Production Services in mind for your next corporate video shoot. 

We’ll help you find the perfect solution for your video project and at less cost than you would have imagined possible.

All you have to do is contact us for a free quote!

What 2016’s video marketing trends tell us (in a tiny, tiny nutshell)

 

Originally posted on December 27, 2016December 28, 2016 by Crew Connection

Videos are more accessible than ever—both to make and to watch. Good thing, too, because they’ve been found to increase engagement on every front from sales to click-through rates on emails and websites. And the sheer quantity of content is hard to fathom. In any given 30-day span, more video is uploaded online than what all three major U.S. T.V. networks combined have created in 30 years.

It all points to one thing: Video is taking over the world. The unmatched effectiveness and saturation of video on the web means it’s more important and harder than ever to rise above the noise.

What 2016’s video marketing trends tell us (in a tiny, tiny nutshell)

1. Mobile video consumption is increasing rapidly—to the tune of about 100 percent every year.
2. People are watching more videos on more devices and are apt to watch multiple videos on more than one device at the same time.
3. YouTube has over a billion users. That’s about a third of all of the people on the Internet.
4. Livestreaming and 360 video are both on the rise. Video isn’t heavily-edited commercials starring handsome actors anymore.
5. The Washington Post predicts video content will make up more than 80 percent of web content in the next several years.

Does that last one seem hard to believe? Then take a lesson from Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, who said in 2007, “There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance.”

Every time someone says, “That could NEVER happen,” the universe conspires to make absolutely sure it does. So what do these video marketing trends mean for you and the eyeballs you’re trying to reach?

Early in their career, a young band called Dispatch got a piece of advice from one of their favorite musicians. “Make them listen,” he said. Spotify and Pandora bring a world of music to consumers’ earbuds. They can skip a song or discover a band in one click. The only way to make someone listen in these conditions is to make your sound so compelling they choose to bend their ear.

If you want to be ready for 2017, hire video service providers who understand your vision and can produce creative, high-quality content that makes people watch, click, and act.