For almost two years after March of 2020, the majority of live video production ground to a halt due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Three years later, live production is thankfully once again possible, but not without a new set of challenges. For marketers wishing to capture on-site customer testimonial videos, there are several potential roadblocks that can make production feel like more trouble than it’s worth.
In this article, we’ll cover a few options for creating alternative styles of customer videos in a post-pandemic world.
Why customer videos?
Research has shown that social proof is one of the most important deciding factors for whether a prospect will ultimately become a customer during their evaluation stage. Having real, credible customers speak to their success with your business is critical. But how do you go about making customer videos when your customers don’t work at the dang office anymore?
The In-Person Dilemma
Even in today’s post-COVID world, many businesses across industries have allowed significant parts of their workforce to work from home indefinitely. This makes filming with customers a tricky proposition. Do you ask your customer to have employees come into their office for a day of filming? What if those employees now live and work all around the country and the world?
The fact is that for many of your customers, wrangling employees at a physical location for your marketing video is just too big of an ask. So what should you do if filming in-person isn’t an option?
Visualized Case Studies
At Free Radical, we’ve developed a creative solution to this problem, which we like to call the “Visualized Case Study”. This style of customer video typically begins life as a script that’s adapted from one of your existing customer case studies.
We pull out the best highlights to write a compelling narrative that’s structured for video, and bring the story to life with motion graphics animation. This means that your customer story is told in an engaging, concise format without the need to ever set foot in your customer’s workplace.
Will people miss seeing b-roll of fingers typing on keyboards, folks filling up coffee mugs at the office espresso machine, and employees awkwardly walking down the hallway towards their cubicle? Maybe. But we doubt it.
If filming in person isn’t an easy option, why not create something that feels innovative and fresh? A visualized case study is also an excellent opportunity to infuse your own brand into a customer video.
Virtual Recording
If you can’t film at your customer’s workplace (or your own), but you really want people to see those real-life pretty faces, there’s another option. Since the start of COVID, we’ve worked with our clients to record videos virtually, via webcam. If that sounds like a recipe for a boring video, you’re only half-right. Because we don’t just slap together Zoom recording footage and call it day.
Instead, we take our traditional creative approach of developing a concept, writing a script, and pulling together all of the captured footage with branded motion graphics. It’s a great hybrid workaround for those videos that require an extra touch of credibility that’s achieved by seeing real people on screen.
Bio: Jason has over a decade of experience working with marketers in the B2B tech space to bring products and brands to life with powerful storytelling and engaging visuals. He is a Meta Certified Marketing Science Professional and Creative Strategy Professional, and has a Hubspot Digital Advertising Certification.