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Wednesday, 30 June 2010
In my last article, I wrote about the effectiveness of customer testimonials on your website. In that article testimonials were limited to text displayed on one or more web pages.
A video is also a great medium for testimonials.
Today videos can be created with a video camera, digital camera -- even a cell phone. Or it can be professionally made. However, there’s a lot to be said for amateur videos. They look more genuine than professional videos. Save the professional productions for staff bios and commercials. Amateur videos have the raw honesty of Reality TV and can be very persuasive.
Once you have recorded your video, you have two main options on where to publish them. You can upload the videos to your website or you can upload them to YouTube. If you upload videos to your own website, you’ll need a video player. Several are available for free -- one that I’ve used is FlowPlayer. For FlowPlayer, you’ll need to create or convert your video to an acceptable format. Alternately, you can upload videos to YouTube. YouTube converts everything to Flash. It automatically creates the HTML code that you can embed in your webpage with only a limited understanding of HTML. If you want to allow other YouTube visitors to embed your video in their web page, just leave the embed code visible on YouTube give permission to use it. Letting others embed your videos on their own web pages or blogs helps spread the word about your products or services.
If you host your own videos, you’ll be using your own diskspace and bandwidth. If you host them at YouTube, even though visitors are viewing your web page, the video is pulled from the YouTube website -- using YouTube’s disk space and bandwidth -- and placed within your web page. To the visitor, it looks like it’s coming from your website.
YouTube is visited by zillions of people. (You can look up the stats.) When someone types in “how to exterminate ants” or “unclogging a drain” into YouTube or Google, your video may the one the visitor views. Be sure to add descriptive text so that the keywords that someone may enter are also found in your description. On YouTube, visitors also share videos with friends. That’s more free word-of-mouth marketing for you.
I’ve seen websites with videos of happy clients, speaking in their own words about how pleased they are with the product or service they received. Keep in mind that anytime you film another human being, you should get a model release. There are many examples of model releases on the web, such as as this one -- http://www.getfreelegalforms.com/talent-and-model-video-and-film-release/ -- or you can consult with your attorney for advice. A good example of customer testimonial videos can be found at this pest exterminator’s website -- http://pestplus.net/index.php?page=pestimonials, where happy clients can’t say enough about how pleased they are with their exterminator.
Other video testimonials show a product in use without featuring any humans. These are “How To” tutorials. When searching Google for advice on how to unclog a drain, I came across several videos on YouTube showing a Zip-It plastic strip inserted into a drain, and pulling out unsightly gobs of hair and muck. These videos were uploaded by customers themselves. Search YouTube for your own products or services. If you find any videos, embed them into your website. Of course, you should ask for permission first.
You don’t have to limit yourself to YouTube. Services like Traffic Geyser -- http://www.trafficgeyser.com -- will help promote your videos across the Internet.
It’s so much more powerful and persuasive when someone else (besides you) extols the virtues of your business’ products or services. Good video testimonials provide content that your visitors want to learn about. Good video testimonials are also good social networking content that visitors will share with others.
Mark Beck is Vice President and Partner of The Boulevard Group, a full service internet services company specializing in web design, web development and internet marketing. The Boulevard Group serves a broad customer base and provides services that include dynamic content management systems, database-driven ecommerce catalogs and shopping carts, and traditional brochure-style web sites. Mark formerly provided content to the Duct Tape Marketing blog where he covered topics relating to web design and internet marketing. He may be contacted at
Mark@theblvdgroup.com or by calling 908-876-3707.
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Technology 
