Cranking Up Your Web Conversions

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Welcome to the second article in our 7-part series showing you how to make the most of your customer success stories, the swiss-army knife of your marketing assets. 

Today we’ll be showing you how to use them on your website to

• Increase conversions
• Disarm objection bombs
• And build trust in your prospects. 

No easy feat, for sure. Because websites are tricky. 

And homepages, especially so. 

They need to serve a broad range of demographics, with different levels of awareness, different pains, and often wildly different perspectives. 

So your messaging has to find that overlapping point in the Venn diagram of your prospects.

Then it has to not only get their attention but also act like signposting, sending prospects along the road to the outcome they want. 

So your messaging is vital here.

Unfortunately, many companies get it backward – by constructing their site from a company-centric perspective, rather than a customer-centric perspective.

But, assuming your messaging is great, backed up by customer research (and ideally written by a conversion-focused copywriter), you’re in a great position to utilize video. 

Because in 2022 MonsterInsights found that, in terms of SEO, you are 53 times more likely to hit the first page of Google if you have videos on your website.¹⁰ 

So where can you best use customer stories on your website? 

1. Homepage (Hero Video And Proof)

We suggest using customer stories on your home page.

But using video across your website without any structure in mind is counterproductive. People won’t give you multiple opportunities to give them what they want. If you miss, you may not see them again. 

Instead, use customer stories strategically. 

Hero Video:

If you have a collection of customer stories, cutting together the outcome portion (i.e. the success they saw from using your product) of the most attention-grabbing stories into a short 1-2 minute video can make a powerful hero video that lets your happy customers speak for you. 

It’s especially useful because, as we’ll get to in a moment, customer stories have a built-in element of trust.

But for now, remember that stat from our introduction article – almost 9/10 people trust online reviews as much as a personal recommendation from a friend. 

One caveat here: You’ll need to make sure this video matches the headline in your hero section.

If your headline is promising that your product cuts your prospect’s energy bills, a one-minute video of customers simply saying “you’re great” is going to be less than ideal.

But a selection of customers enthusiastically talking about their lowered energy bills will have a much greater impact. 

Build your video with the customer’s world in mind, and meet them where their mind is on the page.

Again, this is harder to do on your homepage than any other page. So if possible, A/B test your approach. 

Proof And Testimonials:

The second use of customer stories is for proof. 

You know those bars of logos you’ll see on some websites just under the hero section?

That’s a ‘proof bar.’ 

It says to the prospect, “these people trust me, so you can too.”

But you often need to use proof a few times on your home page.

How To Do It: 

So where can you use video case studies for proof?

Whenever you make a claim that is not self-evidently true. 

That is, if you make a claim about the specifics of your product that can’t be verified by your reader without work. 

If you’re selling energy cost-cutting gizmos and you make a claim about how much they can save – you’ll need proof to back it up.

Most websites will use written testimonials in these areas. These can be useful, especially if the text is short and snappy. 

But a customer success story edited into a short segment, no more than 30 seconds long, can serve as an attention-grabbing testimonial.

Remember: Don’t overdo it. Most prospects won’t need to see 3-minutes of your customers verifying each claim. Alternatively, collect answers to the objections you get with almost every prospect and use that as your hero video to subtly disarm them before they go further down your page. 

And beware overloading your page with video. Not only can video increase load times and bounce rates, video can feel like just as much ‘work’ as reading your messaging.

Instead, refine your messaging to the most vital elements of your sales argument, and use video to make that messaging undeniably persuasive. 

2. As product explainers 

A lot of companies will settle for an animated explainer on their homepage. It’s become a kind of ‘best practice’.

But as with many ‘best practices’, by the time they’ve gained that status, they’re overused and can be invisible to prospective customers. 

But using the customer voice in your product explainers can cut through that ‘best practice’ noise and grab your prospects’ attention, and soon – their trust.

And this should be applicable to most of you reading the series: product explainers are the most popular type of video for companies to produce:

The most common videos created by marketers are explainer videos [72%], presentation videos [49%], testimonial videos [48%], sales videos [42%], and video ads [42%]¹²

How To Do It: 

Just ask your customer to explain what steps they had to go through to use the product when conducting the interview. 

Alternatively, focus on how a single feature was used and how it impacted them. 

This is particularly useful when your solution is a digital one, as screen captures can be easily edited into the narrative to demonstrate ease of use. 

The major advantage here is adding a little heart to your messaging. 🥰

Real people offering genuine and positive opinions about ease of use are persuading in a way that even the most polished purely animated explainers can’t match. 

But there’s no reason why you shouldn’t include some animations in your video to engage your prospects and provide more clarity in your demonstration.

3. Wall Of Success

This is a customer-facing version of the success silo from our first article. 

The Wall of Success serves two purposes. 

1. To show a large number of video stories as a visual representation of your success at solving customers’ problems
2. To deliver highly-targeted content that matches the prospect’s desired outcome – the primary driver of their purchasing behavior

It works so well because case studies are inherently trustworthy. 

Statista surveyed marketers worldwide to ask them what they thought were the most trusted content types by their audiences. 60% said research and case studies were the most trusted by their target audiences.¹³ 

Using the Wall of Success can erase any doubts about your company’s effectiveness and relevance to your prospect’s problems. 

How To Do It:

It’s all of your customer success story videos on a single page, made searchable by a simple drop-down box at the top:

1. “I’m a (role), that wants (outcome).”

E.g: I’m a CMO that wants better ROAS

Or:

2. “I’m a (role) in (industry)”

E.g. I’m a salesperson in SaaS

Or simply:

3. “I want (outcome)”

E.g. I want better ROI on ad spend

Note: Tailor your search field to your product and market. If you’re serving multiple industries with the same product, option two might make more sense. If you have  multiple products serving multiple roles, option one might be a better fit.

When filled out, the customer is then served the videos that contain that outcome or from customers that match them. When a video is clicked, it takes them to the case study page. 

Alternatives To The Wall Of Success:

Of course, there are other ways to implement a “Wall Of Success”. Here are 3 we like. 

klientboost.com: 

Marketing agency KlientBoost has got perhaps the best customer success page in the world. They offer up a range of detailed filter types, along with unusual but interesting specifics underneath. 

All packaged in fun copy that matches their brand voice perfectly. 

gong.io:

Gong uses a similar approach to our Success Story Silo from our first article. They use a series of key identifiers to allow prospects to narrow their search to find case studies that fit them.

As we’ve mentioned, the most important variable when using success stories for persuasion is matching each story as closely as possible to the prospect you’re speaking to. Gong’s approach lets the customer do this, and they include a search bar at the top to enable them to look for more specific terms.  

metadata.io: 

Metadata makes the most of the interest generated by their customer success page by using a pop-up with one CTA and two CTVs. If people are looking at your customer stories they’re probably at a state of high interest – yet so many companies fail to make the most of that opportunity. 

Metadata has also used powerful headlines on their case studies that speak to the greatest outcome of each. We love this. 

But they miss a trick here – there’s no way for prospects to filter the results to suit their situation, which will make this page more effective at giving prospects what they want.

4. Video Case studies as Persuasive Landing Pages

If you’re using story-centric interview techniques to discover the customer’s heroic journey from problem to solution, then your case study pages can also function as landing pages. 

“95% of prospects who become clients visit our case study pages first. That’s the power they have in the sales process”

– William, Head of Growth, Vitally

You’ll need to make sure your targeting is tightly set up for this. Matching your customer success case studies to the traffic by desired outcome, industry, or role (or even all three.)

When your video is properly produced and edited to follow the classic Pain, Agitation, Solution format, you have a compelling story told by someone your prospects can trust.

Your customer success story isn’t just proof that other people trust you, it’s a compelling mini-drama that prospects can empathize with and arouses their curiosity around your solution, and proves you can do what you say.   

And once prospects know you can deliver on your promises, they’re ‘primed’ to be made an offer. 

In fact, 84% of consumers said watching a brand’s video convinced them to make a purchase or subscribe to a service. (HubSpot, 2022)¹⁴

How To Do It:

We suggest following your case study with a traditional landing page or sales page either:

• Underneath your video
• Or situated as the next page in the customer journey via a CTA under the video,
  i.e. “Discover more on how [Product Name] can help you do [X.]

You can even take your current landing page, tour page, or sales page and directly copy it under the fold, to let the case study function as a hero section. 

And because 55% of consumers watch videos before making purchases (Google, 2019)¹⁵, you’ll have made your prospects’ decision-making all the easier. 

Here’s our example, from vitally.io: 

See how Vitally leverages their most important asset: their happy customers

5. Disarm Objection Bombs with video FAQs

If you’re unprepared, the wrong objection at the wrong time can blow up your sales process.

But, depending on your interviewing techniques, you can repurpose customer success stories as powerful FAQ sections and streamlined objection handling on your website itself. 

This can be done within your webpage as an integrated part of the sales argument (our preferred method), or as a separate page for FAQs, which is perhaps better if there are a lot of ‘out there’ questions your prospects tend to ask that can’t be reasonably included in the sales argument on your web pages. 

How To Do It:

If you’re regularly collecting video testimonials, during the interview you should be asking what made your customers hesitate before purchasing. 

Once you’ve collected a half dozen or so of these, you’ll begin to get a good idea of the most common barriers to purchase.

And if your sales and marketing teams don’t know these already, then this is priceless information by itself. You can better structure your sales messaging to target these objections before they even come up.

But go one step further, don’t just ask about the hesitancies, but ask how customers feel about those concerns now that they’ve purchased. 

Then edit those objections and actual outcomes together into separate ‘objection’ videos. Next, deliver these objections and answers together into single short videos targeting a specific objection, or into longer objection-disarming assets. 

They can be used on your website, within your sales and marketing teams, and – if your solution solves a common industry problem – even in ads.  

Or, as mentioned, you can put together a separate FAQ page with all these videos linked underneath the relevant questions, but remember to add a written answer for people who prefer to read and scan the page.

The upside of all of this? Your prospects waste less time asking questions you already have the answers to during the sales process.  

And the insight you gather here can be used to accelerate your sales cycle, strengthen your messaging, and improve your product experience. 

Conclusion:

Hero videos, objection handlers, trust builders – perhaps you’re beginning to see why we keep talking about video case studies as the swiss army knife of marketing. 

There’s just so much they can do.

But what the approach boils down to in this article is simple: Make your case studies…

• More accessible
• And more visible

That’s it. 

So many companies miss out on the value they already have by creating their customer success stories, promoting them once, and then leaving them to gather dust on their site. 

Get outside of the box and think about how you can repurpose your case study content for just one more thing and you’ll be flying ahead of your competitors’ efforts.

And, more importantly, giving your prospects what they need to say “yes” to your offer. 

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Up next…

In our next article, The Formula For Unignorable Ads And 4x ROAS, we’ll be covering customer success stories in ads, where we reveal our very own formula that netted us a tidy 4X+ on our ad spend. Not bad for an asset we already had in hand. 

We’ll also show you how to:

• Use a formula for ad structure that’s better suited to the dire times we live in
• And how to use customer success stories for killer retargeting ads