So Much More Than Hitting Record
We had not really attempted to capture customer testimonials via video before. Part of the reason was that there’s a known issue with quality control and getting people on board. It’s not a common way that customers expect to be approached for content, at least not on a large scale. And you can always end up with a final product that is not really up to market standards. So there’s a barrier in terms of educating the people or providing the testimonial, as well as ensuring that you have a good in-house process for putting videos out at a respectable clip and making sure they are vetted, and that the copy aligns with what you’re trying to put out on marketing channels.
TeraLeap Brings the Talent, Time, and Tech
We’re an early stage company, so we were constrained team-wise, and a lot of ways, we’re still pretty lean. We haven’t scaled the team yet. So we just had trouble finding the time to track down customers and reach out to them at the key points in their journey where they’re willing to provide a testimonial and then following up on that in a way that ensures we capture the testimonial. And then also—the technical production aspect, the ability to ship out a mic, check out a video or have customers call in, in some sort of high fidelity video chat—all of that was beyond our reach due to the size of our team and the existing processes that we had in place.
Seeing (and Hearing) is Believing
Video is almost always going to be more impactful than a written testimonial or any other form of customer feedback—star ratings, anything like that. Video is where you really get a face next to the words that brings the testimonial to life, verifies that someone’s a real customer, because that’s also a concern. A lot of buyers are anticipating fake reviews these days. So when you have a person who’s willing to say, I’m on camera, here’s my face, here’s what I hear, it was my experience, that can be very, very powerful. It also rounds out existing stories that we have. So in our case, we had testimonials and case studies that didn’t have video content associated with them. But we can bring those to life by introducing a summary that will get people reading or clicking into it when they otherwise would have passed because it didn’t have an engaging video element.
Professional, Trustworthy, Dependable
The content we’ve gotten from TeraLeap has been totally professional grade, totally ready to put out without a second thought across all of our channels. And we’ve promoted it on all of our own channels. We’ve run ads against a couple of our case studies already just to get those interviews in front of potential buyers. With LinkedIn, we’ve seen traction running ads against the happy, satisfied client talking about their experience. We’ve propagated the videos across our various landing pages and touch points. In many cases, it’s a new angle on material that we’ve been relying on for so long that only augments, enhances, and improves the value prop that we’re putting in front of buyers. Initially I was worried that because of the cadence of our customer delivery schedule, and the volume of customers we’ve had, it would be a challenge for our relationship if our video needs dried up. But TeraLeap has been really patient with us on pulling it together and understanding that it can be hard to get customers on board sometimes. I was especially surprised to see the additional transcript and other written materials provided by the team. It was the sort of thing where I thought, you know, the video was a piece of our testimonial, and we’ll handle the writing on our end. But it really was a full all-in-one case study that came back to us that I could just publish as it was. And I knew that our team could rely on this to grow, because we don’t need to budget any additional labor on our end to get these things polished and out the door. They arrive in our inbox, customers are happy, we’re happy, and we can just push it out.
An Extension of Your Team
What we’ve enjoyed the most about working with Terra leap is just how trustworthy they are. I can hand off a client conversation where they’re ready to give a testimonial and completely trust that they’ll see it through, click follow ups, do the interview, send us prep materials, and edit the video in a way that is professional and ideal. They’ll respond to input and feedback. So part of that is being able to say, look, this is essentially an extension of our team, they may as well be in house. And knowing that it’s going to come back to us with the same level of quality control that we would have gotten in house, maybe even better in some cases. And when they pass back the interview materials, including written materials, their team has framed up the material, they had a consistent narrative and a vision for how the case study might be presented so we didn’t have to brainstorm about it at all. It came prepackaged. And in many cases, that can be one of the hardest parts about delivering a really good client testimonial. You want a narrative and you want an angle that makes it feel specific to a certain user class so that you can advertise around it. I was really impressed with how the written materials came back, how the transcript of the review was broken out into sections that made it clear what the customer’s journey was. So that was an unexpected bonus.
More Than Just Video
There was a lot that came through, like the recommended review copy and the recommended tweet. It’s like, oh, wow, I don’t have to think about this at all. It just falls in my lap, and I can use it, I can tweak it if I need to. I was essentially thinking the value prop here was a video, but there’s more. There’s a lot more that comes with it.
Picture Perfect, No Fuss Required
From the start, one of the chief questions for us, being a lean team, was what’s our return on investment? Is the output going to justify the cost? That is that has more than been alleviated. Because the only way that we can really scale our video production is by working with TeraLeap. In this case, we don’t have the internal resources dedicated to this, and we don’t have to worry about hiring a specific internal team in the short term. Because we can just push the button here and get a really great testimonial from customers who are ready to give them. Another concern may have been that we didn’t know what the video quality would be like, we didn’t know what the end product would look like. But it came back and we were certain we could use this. I don’t think I ever had to recommend a video edit change. Certainly not a large scale revision to any of the videos or original drafts, even. I was initially uncertain whether we could trust TeraLeap to jump into these customer conversations, because I didn’t know your people skills, if our customer is going to be passed between teams and not know what’s going on. But it’s totally seamless and it feels like, okay, here’s our team, we’re going to hand you off to TeraLeap. We don’t even have to tell them that and they get it. It’s really, really easy.
TeraLeap Does the Work So You Get the Praise
I recommend TeraLeap to any team, small or large, that’s looking to scale their video production around client testimonials. They can be trusted to take over customer conversations and guide your customers through the entire process. And what you get in return is a ready-to-publish, professional, comprehensive case study, complete with video and additional materials that you can just send right out the door. You can totally trust the TeraLeap team to deliver a high-quality video, additional high-quality materials, and to handle the customer relationship in a way that is completely consistent with your brand and your existing history with each customer.
