Video Case Studies on Social Media For Fun And Profit

As of 2022, there are 4.59 billion people on social media.¹⁹ 

So chances are – your customers are there too. Making it a powerful tool for marketing and sales.

SproutSocial discovered that an astonishing 91% of social media users visit a brand’s website after following them on social media.²⁰ 

But people don’t just use it for entertainment: 75% of social browsers use social media to research products.²²

And using video case studies for social media is especially effective. 

For two reasons. 

1. All of your claims require proof and video testimonials have that proof baked-in. Because you’re not the one making the claim, it’s easier to believe.
2. Video testimonials look and fit in with the kind of organic content you see on social media, i.e. people talking to cameras with no special effects or animations. This makes it easier to bypass the sales shield of your prospects and get your message across.

Five Ways To Repurpose Your Customer Stories For Social Media

1. Use One Idea to make Social Clips That Resonate

Try creating what we call “social clips” from your video testimonials.

These are mini videos designed for maximum impact on social media. 

This usually means very short-form content, between 15 seconds and a minute, packed with the juiciest quotes and squished into a format that grabs your prospects’ attention and never lets go. 

You can use a formula, like PAS, APRIL, or DOS from our previous articles.

But one note – we recommend that each of these social cuts be based on one idea. 

The single most emotional element of your prospects’ problem.

Social clips don’t have much time to convince a prospect to click, so you might be tempted to cram in all the awesome features or benefits your product can provide.

But if you instead pick one idea:

• A fight with an established concept
• The single biggest benefit of your product
• Or a new way to approach an old problem

Then you’ll be able to use what little time you have to make a big impact by hyper-focusing on prospects’ established view of the world and challenging it. 

You can use multiple interviews here, as long as they all support that one idea. 

If you’re making an ad you should make sure that wherever they land after this video is congruent with that one idea. A compelling social cut around quadrupling ROAS that lands the viewer on a page that doesn’t mention ROAS at all is going to up your bounce rate. 

If you’re making content, ensure you focus on engagement over conversions.

2. Full Testimonial Story

You can also host and promote your customer success stories in full on your YouTube channel. 

When interviewed properly, you can often end up with customer success stories that play out as a compelling drama.

And when those interviews are edited with the story in mind, you have compelling and insightful video content that people will watch just to “find out what happened.”

Of course, this relies on your customer giving a good interview, being honest, and being vulnerable about their ‘before’ state prior to working with you. 

But proper interview techniques can help customers to open up, dig into their experience, and relay their experience in ways that are relatable to your prospects. 

So your interview process is vital. 

But if you get it right, video case studies can be valuable social media content on their own. 

You should also use title cards during the video to increase engagement and add context where necessary. 

3. Content based on your discoveries

Once you begin regularly collecting customer success stories on video, you’ll also end up collecting a wealth of industry insight. 

This material can be repurposed into short or long-form content to host and promote on your channels. 

The beauty of this approach is that it puts your customers on a pedestal, positioning them as thought leaders sharing their insights. 

And a collection of these insights packaged into content doesn’t just show off the intelligent and hard-working people you serve…

…it also positions you as a company with industry-leading customers. 

How To Do It:

What sort of questions should you be asking your customers to get this insight into their ‘before’ and ‘after’ state that makes for a compelling story?

Here are a few we like:

• What problems are you regularly having to solve on a weekly/monthly basis? What keeps coming up?
• What do you wish you understood better in your industry or topics you wished you knew more about?
• What’s the scariest thing for you as a title/role? What’s the thing that worries you most?
• What was something that almost kept you from purchasing? Was that concern justified?
• How has your life improved from [product]?
• Was there anything surprising about the way [product] solved your problem?

There are lots of other ways to approach this, and perhaps the most important question to keep asking your interviewee when they give an answer is simply…

“Why?”

Don’t settle for superficial answers, get to the core of your prospect’s motivations.

Editor’s Note: If you don’t already have a large audience following your brand’s social platforms, spending a little money to get in front of the right prospects is a smart move. The next two points are how to do just that. You can also go back to article 3, The APRIL Formula for more details. For now, here are a few things to think about.

4. Remarketing:

You can use video on social media to retarget your prospects to great effect. 

YouTube in particular offers retargeting campaigns that are amazingly affordable, even for small companies. It’s a cheap and effective way to build your online presence, reaching prospects often to keep you top of mind when it comes to their problem and your solution. 

However, you will need at least 1000 people in your adsense retargeting list before you can begin.

But by combining your retargeting efforts on social media with the objection handling approach to video case stories we described in article 2, Crank Up Your Web Conversions, you’ll have a retargeting campaign that bypasses your prospect’s sales shield and delivers trustworthy messaging to soothe and handle their objections.

5. Using targeted APRIL/AIDA ads:

Social media is the perfect tool to use targeted APRIL ads. 

If you’ve recorded your stories using the right interview model, you’ll have a wealth of attention-grabbing clips and quotes that will fit the APRIL formula. And of course, you can structure your ad with different formulas also. 

For instance, AIDA is another model that works well for repurposing video testimonials. 

You might know this model from its customer journey applications.

But it originated in the world of direct-response copywriting and has been one of the single most applicable formulas for marketing ads ever since:

• Attention
• Interest
• Desire
• Action

Here’s the breakdown:

• Grab your prospect’s attention with your headline and quote in the thumbnail caption. This could be a surprising outcome from using your product, a persuasive depiction of the difficulty of solving the problem before your product, or even an out-of-context quote that pulls the viewer in
  
• Build interest in your solution with clips that hint at the solution without revealing the mechanism. This is especially powerful when this portion includes surprising information that goes against accepted standards in the industry. Think of this as the intellectual stimulation in the ad, you’re using the psychology of the information gap to stimulate interest
  
• Work up your viewer’s desire with a portion of the video dedicated to stimulating their emotions. This should speak to either their pain points or ideal outcomes. Look for portions of your interview where your customer is talking about what it was like after your product solved their problems. There’s often a wealth of compelling clips here that can persuasively show the outcomes your prospects can expect when they use your product 
  
• Finally, end with a Call To Action. Ideally, the Call To Action completes or includes the phrase “I want to…” + “CTA”. Where the CTA is the outcome depicted in the video

As in, “I want to quadruple my ROAS” or “Quadruple my ROAS.” 

See the stats page for each platform at the end of this section to tailor your approach for the best ROI. 

How To Work Up Your Headlines

As always, your headlines are the most important quality of all of these efforts. If you’re not working with a professional copywriter, who may spend 80% of their time just on headlines – don’t settle for the first one you come up with.

Give your headlines the attention they deserve.

Because it’s the first obstacle between you and your prospect’s attention. If you don’t capture it with your headline, your ad can’t do its job.

As a quick solution, we recommend generating between 25-30 headlines for each ad, then narrowing those down to 5.

How do you pick the best one from those 5? 

You should have a strong feeling that one is significantly more compelling than the others, if not – generate another 30 headlines and repeat the process until you have a winner.

This is also a good time to examine what you’ve learned from your customers in your success stories.

Ideally, a single person has been conducting and processing them. That person can generate a list of the most common pains, outcomes, and dreamstates of your customers. 

Even linking them back to your Success Story Silo from article one, making research easy.

The overlap you find between your customers will give you priceless data on which to base your headline efforts. 

Remember when writing your headlines to do so from the point of view of your prospects, not yourself.

This is part of what makes headlines so hard, they’re as much art as they are science. 

How To Optimize Your Videos For Social Media

You’ll get the best results if you optimize a video specifically for that social channel.

How do you do that? Three ways:

• Keep it short and to one point
• Optimize the formatting with a headline
• Add closed captioning for increased engagement

Length: It differs from site to site, but for LinkedIn, the company itself recommends keeping video length under 30 seconds, and we’ve tested up to 90 seconds with varying degrees of success. 

The most successful we’ve seen is when the video is just under 60 seconds, and the content addresses only one major point. 

Videos on YouTube can be longer if they provide real value (i.e. thought leadership, peer stories, etc) and aren’t just pure marketing.

Formatting: According to one study by Buffer, in some cases square videos resulted in 30-35% higher video views and an 80-100% increase in engagement. 

We almost always do square videos on LinkedIn with a large captivating text headline to grab their attention. We strongly recommend creating a few variations to A/B test headline options as well. 

CC/Subtitles: Since video ads autoplay without sound, having closed captioning is essential to engage scrolling viewers and pull them in to watch further. 

Plus, most mobile viewers aren’t in a place they can hear the sound, so being able to read along is important.

Comprehensive Collection Of The Social Media Stats Of 2022

We’ve collected all the latest stats of the largest social media platforms in 2022, this is up-to-the-minute data that can help you make a call on the best place to spend your resources or offer up new ideas for campaigns. 

Here’s a rundown of the specifics of each channel and where these strategies best fit. 

Conclusion: 

Phew. This one was pretty heavy with stats. 

But the takeaway here is that when it comes to social media, there are so many ways you can repurpose your existing customer success stories into new assets for your campaigns. 

Social clips, full-length stories, remarketing campaigns for cheap with YouTube… the list goes on. 

These assets are like the marketing gift that keeps on giving. 

Especially when you take what we showed here and combine it with our previous 3 articles. There are a ton of ways you can use your customer interviews for lower production spend and higher returns.

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But we’re not done yet. In our next article, Supercharged Email Marketing, we’ll cover how you can use your video case studies to:

• Increase your open rates
• Make your emails more memorable
• Boost your CTR
• And even close more proposals.