“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:
Are you struggling to motivate your sales team to use LinkedIn? This is how “Social Selling as a Service” works.
SUMMARY:
How to generate appointments and revenue with LinkedIn social selling without your team having to lift a finger.
Many B2B sales managers face the same challenge: LinkedIn, a platform with enormous potential for lead generation and customer relationship building, is not being used effectively by employees for a variety of reasons. Training, tools, etc. usually do little to change this. That’s why we developed the “Social Selling as a Service” approach, which enables your employees to reap the benefits of LinkedIn without having to take action themselves. In the article below, you’ll learn how this process works and how you can benefit from it.
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: No motivation, no time, no expertise, no network, no reach
Most sales managers have recognized the potential of LinkedIn—but many fail to motivate their teams to use it successfully and systematically. The comments coming from teams are similar everywhere:
- “I don’t have time for LinkedIn, I have to sell.”
- “I’m not a content producer.”
- “I don’t have a large network and don’t want to be constantly networking.”
- “My posts don’t reach the right people.”“
- ”I don’t know anything about LinkedIn. Can we get some training?”
As a result, despite training, target agreements, and support from tools, most sales employees do not feel able to create content for LinkedIn and actively maintain relationships in addition to their actual sales activities. The result: LinkedIn’s potential remains untapped and valuable leads are lost.
How can you still leverage the potential of LinkedIn social selling for your team? We have developed the “Social Selling as a Service” approach, which enables your employees to reap the benefits of LinkedIn without having to take action themselves. This includes content creation, reach generation, qualification of all generated contact points, and scheduling appointments for the respective sales representative. The following four steps are necessary to achieve this:
Step 1: Provision of easily customizable content
In order to generate interest among your customers with content, B2B companies must adopt the customer’s perspective. To do this, you should proceed as follows:
- Identify all relevant pain points for your target group that you can solve with your product.
- Then identify the consequences of these pain points for specific job profiles that you would like to reach within your target group.
- Next, quantify the results that your target group can achieve with your product, define barriers to purchase, and gather arguments to overcome these in your communication.
- Finally, you collect references for your company.
- These points can be used to develop an argument (a “message”) that generates direct product interest and, as a side effect, also delivers genuine and lasting awareness. The reason: the customer can now link the added value of the product they have learned about with your company name.We have standardized this process for our customers with our ReThink180 methodology and achieve 50-200% better performance than the LinkedIn Agency Benchmark with the content generated in this way.
Illustration: Expert article personalized for different employees
You can use this messaging as a storyline for a wide variety of content formats—for our case, we’ve created “expert articles.” To do this, we’ve created a simple template consisting of the following elements:
- Summary of the article as an intro: If you answer the questions of why someone should read the article and what they can do afterwards right at the beginning, you will have given the reader the best possible introduction.
- Adaptable basic structure: Briefly describe the problem, then dive right into the solution and explain how your product can be used to solve it. Each article should end with a CTA (“call to action”). Include one or two more in the text to give interested readers with limited time an immediate opportunity to contact you.
- “Descriptive subheadings”: Many users initially scroll through the article to get an overview. Give them the opportunity to see what content you are specifically addressing when they skim the headlines.
- Social media visual with key message: Get to the heart of the matter to trigger a “thumbstopper effect,” meaning that decision-makers from your specific B2B target group will simply have to stop and read on.
This structure allows you to immediately generate interest and create lasting awareness because readers remember the solution to a problem that is important to them. This generates leads immediately because those who want a solution now will contact you.
In contrast to a general blog article, not only does the number of leads generated increase, but so does the quality of the leads. This is 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).
These expert articles can then be easily customized for each employee by simply replacing the face in the social media posts, translating the article into another language, or adapting it to the target industry. This means that each of your sales employees has several articles of their own, including images, available for posting on LinkedIn without having to invest any time. We would be happy to take over content production for you, even for complex/highly technical products.
Step 2: Promote the content to the specific target group using LinkedIn Thought Leader Ads
In the next step, the personalized content is targeted at the relevant audience—usually with 50-200x greater reach than an organic post:
- First, an individual target group and campaign template is created for each sales employee in LinkedIn Campaign Manager, tailored to their sales territory and industry.
- Then, the posts related to the employee’s expert articles are selected in Campaign Manager for promotion and then
- delivered via paid advertising in the LinkedIn news feed to exactly the stakeholders who are relevant in the buying process – without any active involvement from your sales team.
- Target groups can be created with a high degree of accuracy based on a wide range of criteria such as position, industry, company size, or even specific lists of target companies.Each employee is assigned an individual target group so that they appear as the sole author of the article within their cluster and are thus positioned as an expert.
Step 3: Lead harvesting (central collection of social touchpoints such as likes, profile visits, contact requests, messages, etc.)
Due to their wide reach, communication that is strongly focused on the pain points of the target group, and the description of attractive solutions and results, these posts generate not only direct inquiries but also a large amount of interaction, known as “social touchpoints.” This includes, for example:
- Likes
- Comments
- Profile visits
- Contact requests
- etc.
Together with our partner Teamfluence, we have developed an innovative solution that brings all touchpoints together in one software. The collected contacts are made available in a lead list (if you are interested, please contact us for a 30% discount code).
Illustration: Lead harvesting in Teamfluence
Step 4: Qualification of touchpoints and appointment scheduling by third parties
Leads can now be qualified either manually, with AI support, or fully automatically—not by your sales team, but by a separate team, which can also be provided by us if desired. Once a lead has been marked as positive, it is pushed to your CRM. We have also developed a standardized process with an interface and automation templates for different CRMs, which makes it very easy to transfer them to the CRM and create the corresponding contacts, companies, deals, and tasks.
The leads can now be contacted by the separate team (“I saw that you liked my colleague’s post on topic XY – what was it that interested you? Would you be interested in a quick chat with him about it?”). Direct calendar access allows you to schedule an appointment with the relevant sales representative and, of course, document it in the CRM system, including the relevant background information.
If you do not have dedicated internal resources for lead qualification, we can offer to take over the entire process of establishing contact and scheduling appointments completely externally.
The result: social selling without your employees having to take any action
With the approach described above, you can implement a social selling process without taking up any of your sales staff’s time or conceptual resources. Nevertheless, you will achieve many valuable goals:
- Visibility, reputation, and trust for your sales staff throughout your target customers’ buying center
- Additional appointments for your employees without them having to be active on LinkedIn themselves
- Higher response rate to emails from your sales staff
- Full focus on sales/closing
- Shorter sales cycles and higher closing rates
If your employees still do not want to make their profiles available for personal reasons or do not want to be on LinkedIn in general, you can also create and build ambassador profiles so that the process runs completely without your sales employees’ profiles.
Interested in a pilot for “Social Selling-as-a-Service” for your sales team? Use our contact form and find out how social selling can work for your team.
Over 160 customers, including more than 35 global market leaders in SaaS, mechanical engineering, technology, and healthcare
