Planning Your First Project

This guide will help you plan your first testimonial video project with Vocal Video, from concept to sharing finished video assets with your audience.

Who do you want to collect videos from?

Step one of getting great video testimonials: Think about  who you want videos from, and what kind of videos you'd like. It can be helpful to work backwards from upcoming marketing initiatives that would benefit from authentic testimonial videos.

For testing Vocal Video out, the best subjects can be you and your colleagues. Create a test collector, send it to yourself, and experience the full collection and editing experience.

Here are a few of the most common subjects for Vocal Video testimonial videos.

Customers

• Customer testimonials
• Product reviews
• Case studies

Employees

• Employee testimonials
• Executive commentary
• Sales training

Experts

• Industry leader insights
• Influencers

Where to share the videos you collect

You’ll also want to consider  where you will promote your testimonial videos, and where they  will live once you’ve published them. Here are some of the top places Vocal Video customers share their videos to improve marketing conversion with video.

Our ad-free hosting and embedding is available to all customers. All videos can also be downloaded from your account in HD - this is the best way to share on social media as they will autoplay in the feed.

• Website
• Blog
• Social media: Facebook, Instagram, X, LinkedIn, and more
• Customer newsletter
• Sales outreach
• Sales training
• Customer community
• Slack/internal community
• Live and virtual events
• Youtube

Get started collecting video testimonials

There are  so many possibilities for getting great new video testimonials, that it can actually be overwhelming. If you’re having trouble deciding, our advice is to start with a small, friendly group of customers for your first project. Here’s a checklist to get you started.

Get our 11 top tips for higher response rates in video testimonial campaigns and email copy you can use here.

• Make a list of subjects you’d like to reach out to
• Make a plan for who will email them. (Response rate is always best when this is someone the subject knows.)
• Include appropriate incentives to boost response rates
• Set up your brand colors for Video Collector and Video Drafts.
• Customize your video Collector. Step-by-step instructions here. Or ask Vera, your AI assistant, to write it for you: describe who you're asking and what you want to hear, and she'll draft the questions and settings for you to review.
• Pick your video template. Each response becomes a draft video built from it, ready for you to review and publish. Choose it under Video template in the collector's settings; see Video Templates: the Complete Guide.
• You can distribute your collector by email from your Vocal Video account or by sharing the link yourself by email, text, on your website or social media accounts. More info here

Editing your video testimonial, sharing it, and SEO tips

Fresh content on your site and blog provides an important SEO boost, and each published Vocal Video testimonial also comes with its own landing page that includes the video and transcript that is optimized to be searchable all by itself - make sure to edit metadata associated with the video ie this highlight reel. Here are a few ways you can take advantage of long-tail keywords in your testimonial video transcripts to improve SEO for your site. (You can find all the details on the Vocal Video Editor here.)

Your drafts are shaped by your video template. With an AI-directed template, each draft is cut from the strongest moments of that one response, so you start from a finished video rather than raw footage. To combine several responses into a highlight reel, ask Vera or build it yourself in the editor; see How to Create Videos Featuring Multiple People (Montages and Highlight Reels).

Blog (or your newest blog series)

Make any desired edits to your full-length video, and publish it.  Grab the embed code from your published video page in your account to insert the video at the top of a blog post, and copy and paste the provided transcript. With some light copy-editing you’re done. You can see an example of one our series here.

Website

Embed videos on your homepage, customer stories page, or any page you think would benefit from some authentic social proof.

Social media (organic and paid)

Create short clips of your testimonial videos for highly engaging content to share on social media. Our provided video templates do the cutting for you: YouTube Shorts, Square Feed Cut for LinkedIn and other feeds, and portrait cuts like Rapid Fire for Instagram and TikTok (see Video Templates: the Complete Guide). Or ask Vera to pull the strongest 30 seconds from a response. Be sure to download the file, and upload it to the social platform so that it will automatically play in the feed. We’ve seen best results from starting the video on the subject’s face.

Newsletter

Feature a link to your latest video alongside your Video Collector to offer your readers a chance to leave you a testimonial.

Customer community

Testimonial videos from customers, execs at your company, and industry leaders are all great videos to share w/your customer community, regardless of platform.

Slack/internal community

Your company, particularly teams that don’t have a customer-facing position, are often starved for information about how customers benefit from your product or service. Make sure to share testimonial videos with these teams as well.

Need a hand planning your first project, or ideas for putting the videos you create to work? Contact our support team at support@vocalvideo.com and we'll help you get started.