5 Important Best Practices to Follow with Customer Testimonials for Healthcare and Finance Brands

Customer testimonials are a natural part of any marketing campaign that consumers are drawn to. Who doesn’t want to check reviews and learn about what others have to say about a business before they embark on their own journey with the brand? While you might not immediately place healthcare and finance in the same niche, these industry opposites have certain important best practices which apply to marketing and advertising for brands within the industries. For example, customer testimonials for healthcare care and finance brands have similar best practices because both industries have similar risk portfolios.

So whether you’re the owner of a healthcare practice or you’re a finance mogul, knowing these best practices and why it’s so important to follow them, is essential, especially if you intend to produce customer testimonial videos. 

At Beverly Boy Productions, before we produce any customer testimonials for healthcare and finance brands, we follow a set of very specific rules and underlying guidelines. You might call them, key practices that we know will not only ensure our customer testimonial videos are effective, but also that they achieve the desired results without taking unnecessary risks.

1. Seek Inspiration from Others but Never Copy

Customer testimonials for healthcare and finance brands are certainly diverse, and there are many ways to find inspiration.  We like to seek out inspiration from others, particularly looking for other business owners or brands in the industry that share customer testimonials that are reflective of the real-world interactions which make up their brands. While you can very easily seek out the inspiration of another business, it is very important to take a unique approach in the production of testimonials for your brand. You don’t ever want to copy what another brand has done because it could come back to reflect poorly on your brand.

2. Be Engaging From Beginning to End

Sharing a customer testimonial is like sharing a great story – if you don’t keep the customer engaged from beginning to end, they could miss the core message.  As a best practice, when producing customer testimonials for healthcare and finance brands, we take several steps to ensure engagement including:

• Using plenty of b-roll to create a visual appeal that draws the audience.
• Incorporating music that will evoke a desired audience emotion.
• Using text overlays and animations to further influence the response of the audience.
• Incorporating clickable elements, such as phone numbers or call-to-action buttons that bring the audience to a landing page or similar location.

Keeping the audience engaged until the end of the video is going to ensure that more people are a part of the message that you’re trying to share with your testimonial.

3. Be Honest with the Review

One of the ways that we often see healthcare practices or finance brands slip up in the creation of customer testimonials is in delivering an honest review. As much as you might want to jump start the review process by leaving fake reviews or by paying for reviews, this goes against the guidelines of many sites where reviews are shared and it’s just not ethical. Following best practices with customer testimonials for healthcare and finance brands, particularly where honestly is involved, is incredibly important to the audience and to the authenticity of the brand.

4. Be Specific About the Testimonial

Customer testimonials that lack detail are less valuable overall for the audience. For example, if you have a customer testimonial video that basically states that the customer was “happy” with their engagement with a healthcare practitioner or someone from a financial services brand, what value does that really provide? It doesn’t really offer the prospective customer much insight into the brand, it certainly doesn’t provide any key details that could help the prospect to decide whether a business or brand is right for them, and it really just leaves a lot of questions.

Instead, it’s important to be specific about the review that is being shared. Talking about the individual services that were offered, the concerns the client had, and how the provider was able to help the client overcome those key concerns to achieve a solution will be much more valuable than a review or testimonial that specified that the customer was “happy.”

5. Keep it Short & Focused

Few prospects are willing to watch a long winded customer testimonial video, even if they are interested in learning more about a business or brand. Instead, we recommend always following the best practice in keeping customer testimonials for healthcare and finance brands short and focused. Most testimonials can be under 2 minutes, but occasionally it may require a bit more in-depth detail if the video is addressing a touchy subject or requires very detailed information. For instance, a testimonial that is part of a case study video interview might be a bit longer, but as a good rule the video should only be as long as absolutely necessary to share the details that are most important without taking up too much time.