5 Tips You Can Use to Create Powerful Customer Testimonial Commercials for Your Brand

Creating great video testimonials that will attract the interest, and trust, in your brand from your target audience is a practice that every business owner needs to understand. If you want to produce powerful customer testimonial commercials that you can use to build audience trust in your brand, there are a few important concepts to understand and consider ahead of time. As simple as it may seem, there’s a lot more to filming powerful customer testimonial commercials for your brand than just a point-and-shoot camera and a customer willing to share their story!

If questions like: “how long should my testimonial video commercial be?” and “what information should I include? And “should I write a script or just wing it?” are a burning sensation in your mind, we’ve got some tips you can use to create powerful customer testimonial commercials and that will answer those burning questions in the process!

1. Know the Difference Between Expert & Paid

Expert testimonials are more important than ever before, but when we say expert, a lot of business owners read “scripted” or “paid promotion.” Expert customer testimonial commercials are not paid promotions. They certainly can be, but for the purposes of this post, we’re talking about actual customer testimonials that are not the result of the customer having been paid to provide their review or testimonial of the product, service, or brand.

When consumers are on the verge of converting, they’re looking for real world reviews from past customers, like themselves, that have benefitted form your business. The best testimonials are authentic, genuine, and unrehearsed. Which means you need to know the difference between an expert crafted testimonial, and a paid testimonial – they’re not the same!

You can certainly pay a product company, like Beverly Boy Productions, to assist you with the filming and overall creation of the testimonial or commercial, but you don’t want to pay your customer for their review of your brand. This will come across as spammy, and if your prospects find out you paid for a review and tried to make it appear that it was real, you’ll lost their trust with a quickness!

2. Show Your Customers the Value of Sharing their Story

If you’re having trouble figuring out how to get customers to share their reviews of your business or brand, start by showing them how much it will help other customers or prospects in the future.  Being open about the power of customer testimonial commercials, and how other prospective customers will use the review to help them decide whether or not to support your brand is an incredibly important step to generating consistent customer testimonials.

Let them know that the testimonial will only be 1-2 minutes at most, and should only require 5-10 minutes of their time as they answer questions about your brand and their experience. Make it very clear that you’ll do the heavy lifting when it comes to creating customer testimonial commercials for your brand and that they should not feel offput or otherwise like they have to help you out.

3. Provide Customers with a List of Questions to Guide their Response

While you don’t necessarily have to answer each question in full, and you may not want to have the questions answered in a specific order, providing customers with a list of the questions or topics you would like them to cover when creating a customer testimonial commercial video will help you to form the general storyline that you wish to create about your brand. For instance:

• Have your customer answer questions that include responses to what other competition they may have worked with or considered working with before your brand.
• Ask customers to provide key details about the struggle or problem they had and the steps they embarked on in trying to solve the problem before finding your brand.
• Ask customers to provide actual facts, figures, or tangible evidence to support their claims about your brand.
• Ask customers to speak visually, so that you can easily create b-roll footage to support their storyline.

Having your customer answer key questions, and provide important data ahead of time, will ensure that you can capture the customer’s journey in a way that is most consistent with the story you want to tell your target audience.

4. Consider How You Will Film Your Video

You have two options when filming your customer testimonial commercials. You can either have your customer answer questions on camera, from the comfort of their home, office or some other location where you are not present, or you can ask to be present so that you can film the customer as they discuss your brand. Some customers will find it less invasive to film on their own time with their phone or an HD camera while others might be open to you or your hired film crew coming to them to film. 

Remember the importance of making this easy on the customer – follow their lead and film in whatever manner they are most comfortable with. Regardless of how you film, make sure that the customer is answering questions or speaking from their own words not from a script. It’s okay to prompt with questions, as mentioned above, but avoid a pre-written, and rehearsed script that can make the testimonial come across as less than authentic.

5. Edit to Keep it Short & Focused

When editing customer testimonial commercials, it’s important to keep them short and focused. Most testimonials are under 3 minutes, and many are in the 60 second range. If you find that you’re struggling to get your video edited down to about 2-3 minutes at most, you might need to rethink the storyline. When consumers are looking for customer testimonial commercials to review as they decide on a brand to purchase from, they are likely to watch several and they don’t want to spend hours doing so – keeping the content short, and focused, is key.

Want more assistance on how to create powerful customer testimonial commercials? Give Beverly Boy Productions a call!