“In all these studies, word of mouth has more of an impact than traditional forms of advertising. Having a word-of-mouth marketing strategy is becoming essential for marketers.” Debra Aho Williamson, senior analyst at eMarketer.

As the type and frequency of media bombards your target audience with more information than ever, word-of-mouth remains the most effective form of communications. According to the recent Nielsen study referenced above, 78% of consumers surveyed worldwide find that consumer opinions are the most effective form of media.* Clearly, word-of-mouth recommendation is the best there is, and an absolutely crucial marketing tactic for small and medium-sized enterprises with limited money to spend on communications.

Online video lends credibility

One way to accomplish an effective word-of-mouth strategy you can be comfortable with is to invite and videotape your best customers speaking on your behalf and then embed these video’s on your website. There’s nothing wrong with asking and more often than not, you’ll find that people are agreeable. Online video lends credibility to this type of communication because it is something that people can see and hear for themselves, and it is captured in an environment that you manage and can be a part of. I just completed this kind of project myself (see the video testimonials here) and was thrilled with the results…in fact I don’t think we could have created content of our own that is nearly as powerful.

So how do you get customers on camera? First, we’d recommend that you keep the testimonials brief, around 1 to 2 minutes (of finished, edited content) per person. Share this with your customer in advance when you ask them to participate -- it goes a long way to alleviate concerns about how much of their time it may take or how much they might have to prepare. In most cases, our taping sessions were done in about 30 minutes. To get started, develop a series of 6 or 8 questions to ask the participant and give it to them ahead of time so they can consider their responses. In order to produce nice detailed comments, the questions should be relevant to their company and/or the experience they’ve had with your products or services. Vague responses will potentially come across as weak and less plausible.

Keep the taping informal and short

Keep the taping informal and although it may be tempting, don’t use a teleprompter! The former approach is more conducive to producing open and sincere comments that are authentic and believable. Once the content is captured, you can then edit the video to include the most succinct and compelling comments.

We created a similar program for ExactTarget and they captured their testimonials at a customer event they were hosting, to take advantage of everyone being in one place at the same time. You could also go on-location at a client office with a single camera and crew, or host an appreciation luncheon at a centrally located hotel and invite several participants to join you there. Other industry events could pose another opportunity to capture multiple testimonials at one time to save expense.

Keep the taping informal and short

Once you have created the media, you can re-use the assets to increase the ROI and cost effectiveness on your project by creating smaller standalone segments for multiple areas of your web site. For example, I identified specific comments that related to products and used these as standalone testimonials on various product pages. With some platforms, like AccelaCast, you can embed a video testimonial program in multiple channels or locations with just a snippet of code, so it is very easy to extend the scope of the project beyond the original goal.

Want to learn more about Video Testimonials? Contact us and we'd be happy to share our experiences.

* Nielsen Global Study: Word-of-mouth the most powerful selling tool