“Viral Circle”: How to produce B2B video testimonials 100% remotely
SUMMARY:
Satisfied customers are the best recommendation, and one video says more than a thousand words. We offer an approach that requires minimal effort on your part and benefits both you and your customers.
For many B2B companies, case studies are the most obvious solution for referral marketing. But there is an efficient approach that generates even more trust: Read this article to find out how you can create a win-win situation for yourself and your enthusiastic customers with 100% remotely produced video testimonials and achieve maximum persuasiveness with just a few sentences. Ready to activate untapped potential? Then read the article below or contact us directly.
About Leadvolution
About Leadvolution: with over 160 advertising setups for fast-growing startups, exciting medium-sized companies, and over 35 global market leaders, Leadvolution is one of the most experienced social media B2B marketing consultancies in Europe. Within 4-8 weeks, we build a globally scalable social media lead generation system for very specific and complex B2B target groups, generating up to 500 leads per month.
The problem: Recommendations are the very best leads – but difficult to scale
Nothing is more powerful in marketing and sales than an active recommendation from a satisfied or even enthusiastic customer. This is often recorded in a case study. However, the path to getting there is usually complicated: it means a lot of work for the customer (and for you), and the approval of many stakeholders is required before it can be released. This means that case study projects often drag on forever, fail, or are not even started in the first place. We have thought about how you can make better use of the positive statements of enthusiastic customers with less work and in a win-win situation with advantages for you and your customers.
The solution: 100% remotely produced video testimonials
The testimonial process should require minimal effort on the part of your customers. We produce a one-minute video from material that only takes your customer about 90 minutes to provide. Here’s how it works:
- We send your customer a hardware box with a camera and high-quality microphone and give them a brief briefing to ensure the best possible result.
- In a remote interview, we coach your customer through a prepared set of questions.
- We produce an authentic short video from this raw material that encourages your target audience to follow in the footsteps of your satisfied customer.
- The approval process is much simpler than for a case study, as only a few sentences need to be checked. This usually takes just a few days, and the approval rate is significantly higher than for complex case studies.
- Translation into other languages is quick and easy.
And the best thing about it is that everyone involved enjoys it – precisely because it is such an efficient and entertaining format.
With the right reach, this creates a “viral circle.”
We help you deliver your videos digitally to tens of thousands of decision-makers in your target group worldwide. You will be surprised at how accurately you can reach your target group – and how large it actually is. You can find more details about our B2B reach process in the article about our “Content Booster” process.
This immense, predictable reach creates a scalable process known as the “Viral Circle”:
- Your enthusiastic customers authentically demonstrate the added value of your solutions on camera and communicate the results they have achieved.
- Your target groups learn about these results via digital channels – and if they have a similar challenge, they will understand after the third video at the latest that they should take a closer look at your solution.
- This way, you generate more satisfied customers who are in turn available for videos – the “Viral Circle” is created.
- As a side effect, you get an extremely convincing, authentic, and lasting positive branding and awareness effect.
Important before you start: Use ReThink180™ to develop a structure that maximizes your persuasiveness.
Only those who ask the right questions get the most useful answers. If your customer just tells you anything, it is unlikely that you will get the best results. That is why you should first get an overview of the customer’s problems and how they can be solved and with what results. From this, you develop a fixed list of questions and prepare the answer structure, including results for the customer.
Sound complicated? Not with our ReThink180™ methodology: it uses customer-centric questions to create texts and visuals that quickly make it clear to the user that they should request more information. This has been proven to achieve click and conversion rates that are 50 to 200 percent higher than previous campaigns.
The “viral circle” is just one example of what you can achieve with the results of a ReThink180 audit. The lines of argumentation also provide you with the basis for ongoing “always on” communication with your target groups and form the foundation for “video content in 1 day” – i.e., producing raw material in just one day of shooting that you can use on social media for up to six months.
Why customers like to participate in the “Viral Circle”
It is usually very difficult to convince customers to participate in case studies. Reasons: a lot of work, tedious approval processes, and the responsible manager on the customer side has little personal benefit. With the Viral Circle, you create a win-win situation: there is hardly any effort involved, the approval process is much simpler, and best of all, there is a personal benefit for your contact person at the customer.
This video will make them known as a successful manager within their industry, which is extremely beneficial for their career. Once your customers understand this, you will have gained a valuable supporter for the project on the customer side, and the probability of success will increase many times over.
If you still don’t get the go-ahead from your customer, no problem. We are also happy to interview your employees for anonymous cases.
How to start your viral circle
Enthusiastic customers in front of the camera are your biggest advocates – use this effect now to generate more leads and sales. We will implement a “viral circle” project for you from start to finish. The total effort for you and your team will be less than two man-days. Here’s how it works:
- Focus on a product or service for which you can imagine testimonials.
- In a concept phase, we work with you to develop questions and lines of argumentation as a basis for customer statements (and other exciting approaches such as “always on” communication, webinars, white papers, etc.).
- We create a video template that can be used for all videos.
- Potential customers are selected and a repeatable production and reach process is defined.
Try out our approach with a pilot project that will deliver measurable results after just four to six weeks.
Do you find these approaches exciting and want to generate sustainable awareness, positive branding, and genuine customer inquiries at the same time?
Simply request a free consultation with an expert:
How B2B marketers achieve 4x higher awareness with ReThink180 than with traditional approaches
SUMMARY:
With the ReThink180 approach, you can achieve 4x higher awareness and generate leads at the same time.
How sustainable are traditional B2B awareness campaigns really? The effects are rarely measurable – yet a lot of money is spent on them. “We didn’t generate any leads with the campaign, but we did generate a high level of awareness,” is often the response. Read this article to find out how you can generate 4x higher awareness and high-quality leads in just 3 months with the right combination of targeting, ReThink180 messaging, blog marketing, and testimonials. Ready to activate untapped potential? Then read the article below or contact us directly.
About Leadvolution
About Leadvolution: with over 160 advertising setups for fast-growing startups, exciting medium-sized companies, and over 35 global market leaders, Leadvolution is one of the most experienced social media B2B marketing consultancies in Europe. Within 4-8 weeks, we build a globally scalable social media lead generation system for very specific and complex B2B target groups, generating up to 500 leads per month.
The problem with B2B awareness campaigns: The effects on sales and branding are usually not measurable.
“We need to get our name out there and generate awareness before we can think about leads” or “We want to inform customers about our new product” – these are typical briefings for awareness campaigns. But what do campaigns focused purely on awareness really achieve?
This is often impossible to measure – in the case of digital channels, it is at least possible to track how many people your advertising material was delivered to and how many clicked on it.
But whether the right target audience was actually reached, how many of them even noticed your advertising, and whether the advertising had a positive, neutral, or perhaps even negative effect and how lasting this was – all of this is usually completely unclear.
In addition, click rates are often low, at less than 0.5%. Even if the stated goal was “We just wanted to raise awareness,” no one is really happy with such results.
What we remember and what we pass on: 4x higher ad recall with ReThink180
Reality check: Suppose you see a really well-designed ad online for five seconds with a claim such as “We take innovation to the next level” – would you be able to recall the content the next day? Or would you even tell someone else about it? Most likely not.
You can achieve lasting awareness in the B2B sector by referring directly to your target group’s problems in your messages and highlighting specific opportunities. Recipients can understand your perspective intuitively and without having to think about it. So if you communicate strictly from the recipient’s perspective rather than your company’s, your messages will automatically receive more attention.
The more concrete the product communication, the easier it is for anyone interested to remember it – and the easier you make it for them to pass it on. “Imagine, they have more than 1,000 service employees in Germany alone” is much more tangible and convinces third parties much more effectively than “They have a dense service network.”
Real awareness always arises when content has a direct, intuitively comprehensible relevance. Positive B2B branding stems from a collection of individual concrete facts that customers can remember and pass on.
A brand lift study on LinkedIn shows the benefits that B2B companies can derive from precise messaging created using the ReThink180 methodology: In this study, we achieved 4x higher ad recall for a global B2B market leader than the average of all European brand lift studies on this platform. The focus on added value and quantifiable results was therefore significantly more effective than the usual classic creative branding approach.
This also helps in the further process of lead generation performance. Users who have been “warmed up” by ReThink180 awareness campaigns often show a 1.5 to 10 times higher click and conversion rate than “cold” users.
Achieve sustainable awareness and leads in four efficient steps simultaneously
Are you seeking pragmatic solutions with measurable results for sustainable B2B awareness, including lead generation? These four steps will help you lay the perfect foundation:
Step 1: Convince social media users in a maximum of 30 seconds with compelling B2B messaging
Using the ReThink180 methodology developed by Leadvolution, we first determine the customer perspective in great detail before each pilot project. This forms the basis for content that generates positive branding and immediate inquiries.
For each persona, we systematically generate lines of argument that enable interested parties to understand in 15 to 30 seconds why the product is relevant to them personally. In this short period of time, they come to the conclusion that they should request more information – and at the same time remember the product/brand very well or even pass it on to others.
In lead ad campaigns, we usually see a 50-200% better performance than the LinkedIn benchmark. The figures prove that leads and lasting awareness are possible with just one communication approach.
Would you like to know more about targeted messaging approaches for your product? Arrange a free consultation with one of our experts here.
Step 2: Build precise target group funnels with “on-platform” retargeting
LinkedIn already offers very precise target group criteria. For sustainable awareness, “on-platform” retargeting is also a must-have infrastructure: it allows users who have interacted with ads, videos, or forms, etc., to be grouped into target groups that can be specifically reached or excluded.
This makes it possible to create wonderful funnels with a wide reach even with “normal” budgets – but also lookalike approaches to generate new target groups. The latter can be an exciting opportunity for B2B marketers who have difficulty reaching their target group with the existing selection criteria, minimizing scatter loss when scaling.
Schritt 3: Mit Expet Articles gleichzeitig Awareness schaffen & Leads in höherer Qualität generieren
Unlike a general awareness text, you can use crystal-clear lines of argument based on your messaging to create expert articles that are highly relevant to your target group (similar to the format you are reading now), generate direct product interest, and, as a side effect, deliver genuine and sustainable brand building. The reason: the customer can now associate the added value of the product with your company name. “Expert Articles” are therefore an effective way to ensure that your target groups perceive you as a solution provider for their challenges at every stage of their customer journey.
This not only increases the number of leads generated, but also the quality of the leads. Because if the customer already understands the added value they can achieve with a product, your sales team can enter the sales process directly (unlike when downloading a general white paper, for example).
Interim conclusion: Expert articles are the format that allows you to generate awareness and leads at the same time. No other content format makes it easier for the target group to obtain information quickly and efficiently. Compared to what B2B companies can convey with them, the effort required to create them is minimal.
Would you like to know more about specific content approaches for your product? Arrange a free expert consultation with us here.
Illustration: Expert article personalized for different employees
Step 4: Build trust in your niche target group with testimonials
Personal recommendations are the best source of hot leads. Scaling these testimonials through digital distribution, e.g., in the form of LinkedIn posts promoted with paid advertising, can be a decisive game changer for B2B companies.
However, few B2B companies can claim to have efficient testimonial processes in place and to have scaled up the number of their advocates – and thus also the number of new hot leads – accordingly. Take a pragmatic approach and quickly distribute coordinated statements from enthusiastic customers who highlight quantifiable results to tens of thousands of decision-makers in your specific target group. Read here to find out how you can continuously build trust in your product and your company.
CONCLUSION: B2B companies should constantly present themselves as solution providers on social media. If your target groups read testimonial statements repeatedly over a period of weeks and can also deepen their understanding of the added value of your solution through expert articles, what else do B2B companies need to do to convince them?