Six Tips for Crafting A Great Customer Story Video
What is one of the best marketing tools that keeps on giving days, months, and even years after you’ve completed it? A well-crafted customer story video.
Just about every tech company we talk to mentions the need for increased social proof via testimonials, written case studies, and video customer stories. Yet this initiative tends to be pushed off quarter after quarter.
Why? Because it’s hard to manage and harder to execute without dedicated resources in-house to keep it on track. Identifying the customer, securing a ‘yes,’ producing the story, getting PR approvals — these things add up to dozens of hours of work for a video that only lasts 2-3 minutes. And that’s not all. What about identifying the story you want to tell? The voices that speak to it best? Or, more importantly, ensuring your video isn’t cheesy or low-budget?
Crafting a beautiful story requires more than just logistics coordination and hiring a video crew. As specialists in producing cinematic customer stories, we’ve learned a thing or two about what makes a compelling customer story. Here are six tips to help your customer stories stand out and give you that solid return on investment that will make all the time and budget worth your marketing efforts.
1 Make it human
We start by doing a video interview with 2-3 people at the company we are profiling to identify our lead voice, our secondary voices, and figure out what makes them each unique. We ask questions like: What pain points do you have? What are your goals in the coming months? Why do you like coming to work every day? Then we dig into the background with the product or service we are profiling and why they love it. Doing this gives a full picture of who they are as people and helps develop a rapport before you move onto the storytelling and filming logistics part of the process (pro tip: we like to record these calls and share them with the sales team!).
2 Develop a story
Once you know the voices, now you can figure out the angle of the story. We suggest aligning this with specific brand pillars and/or personas that are important to your company. Here’s an example of this. For the XERO customer story we produced for Envoy in 2019, we crafted a story that targeted a key Envoy persona (the office coordinator) while highlighting a major brand pillar (delivering a beautiful first impression). We let the story shine through with these two angles in mind.
3 Don’t mess with scripting
We’ve all seen it. Those videos that are clearly scripted...and cringeworthy. We’re here to tell you — no scripting! Let your customers’ authentic voices shine through by asking compelling questions and hiring a fantastic editor. You do not need to feed any lines to your customer or put words in their mouth (keep in mind, they are not actors). It can be tempting for the marketing team to want to tightly control the narrative, but if you focus on crafting great, open-ended questions, you’ll get goldstar soundbites that are natural and relatable.
4 Let your product be secondary
For these films, your customer is telling their story. This means your product will be featured within the context of their day-to-day work life and you can’t necessarily control the exact features or benefits the customer will focus on. That’s okay! Let the customer guide the narrative around how your product supports their story and gather b-roll (alternative / supporting footage) that fits into this.
5 Bring in the best equipment and crew
One of the highest praises we’ve received is that our work, “looks like cinema - not like video.” That’s because we use cinematic-grade cameras and our crew is composed of film professionals. Our differentiator is that we bring cinematic expertise to tech films, and we encourage you to do the same by renting top-of-the-line gear and hiring a crew with experience being on a film set. Viewers love seeing beautiful, crisp images on the screen, and if you bring this to your customer story videos, we guarantee you’ll get longer watch times and more engagement.
6 Create short social media snippets
Get more for your time and effort by repurposing the longer video you produce into shortened clips for social media. We like to deliver a version with and without audio (and subtitles) so they can be used across different channels and for different purposes. Plus, it’s an easy way to get a high-quality asset for advertising, particularly on platforms like Facebook or Instagram, which tend to favor video content.
See an example of it all coming together
One of our favorite customers we produced was the Envoy & Xero story. The main voice Kyle de Golia came across so well on camera and we had a blast capturing his story and how he relied on Envoy every day in his role at Xero.
Envoy & Xero Customer Story
Envoy & Xero Customer Short
Hopefully, this gives you a bit of insight into what sets great customer stories apart from the typical talking-heads marketing video we all have come to loathe. To see more examples of the customer stories we've had the honor of putting together for companies like Envoy, GitPrime/Pluralsight, and more, visit our Marketing Films page.
Interested in chatting with the Olivine team about producing a customer story for your company? Start a conversation with expert filmmakers.
