Why Use Video Testimonials?

Hello everybody, welcome to this episode of the Magnetic Marketing Podcast. Today we're going to be listening into a diamond call with Dan Kennedy as he interviews relationship marketing expert and strategist Ron Sheets. Now Ron Sheets is going to be sharing with us exactly how to structure our testimonials so that way we get the most use out of our testimonies. How do you collect them? How do you not collect them? How do you make sure that when you do collect them, they're the most worthwhile to your customers thereafter? That is what we get to learn today. Let's tune in.

I don't think there's anybody that has had a bigger impact in the field of direct response than Dan Kennedy. The legend of Dan Kennedy should be ignored at your own peril. They're not really lessons, they're kind of laws that you live by. Dan opened my eyes to what small business marketing looks like. Dan teaches strategic direct response that is timeless. His ripple effect touches people who don't even know his name.

The world as we know it was changed because Dan Kennedy became obsessed obsessed with marketing.

Welcome to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast with your host, Dan Kennedy.

Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome to your, uh, Diamond call. Um, if you are a Diamond member, you are at the right place, and, uh, we will very shortly get to our guest today, Ron Sheets, who some of you already know or know of. Ron has become one of my key go-to video guys. We do a fair amount of work together. We have a day of video coming up in Florida in the not too distant future for a client of mine, Lisa Miller, and her celebrity endorser, Chris Evert. I'm a world tennis champion and some of the GKIC video you see that involves me is Ron's work as well. But predominantly Ron is a relationship marketing expert, strategist, particularly adept at testimonial marketing. The obtaining of great testimonials, the understanding of what makes a great testimonial, and specifically getting good video testimonials and using them in marketing. He does a lot of work in healthcare practices. His newest book, ink still wet on the pages I think, but available at Amazon as we speak, is Your Patient Attraction Secret Weapon. How to Have a Referral-Driven Dental Practice and Never Advertise Again. Ron's got 3 decades of experience in video and television and private clients in 30-some-odd different industries. Ron, thank you very much for being with us today.

I appreciate the opportunity. Thank you, sir.

We'll sort of be having a dual conversation talking about testimonials and testimonial marketing, period. And so we'll be having a dual conversation about testimonials, testimonial marketing per se, as well as specifically video testimonials and the use of video. But before we get started, anything I missed about your backstory? You would like folks to know?

No, I think you've about covered it. I was coming up through school, I was kind of that video geek, pushed the video card around and so forth. But fortunately I had mentors that taught me very early on that video was just a medium. And I was brought up with a sales and marketing background and understanding that that was much, much more important than the technology itself. The technology was just the vehicle.

Well, let's talk about video then broadly for a second. It is more complicated to do than print or web without it. It is more expensive to do than audio. And so some people are tempted to skip it. Some people don't understand exactly why it's important. And of course, some people then tend to do it on the cheap and get bad results as well. But let's just talk about how somebody decides whether or not video online and/or offline ought to be an important part of their approach to marketing.

I think the greatest value for video is it doesn't replace the face-to-face selling, the face-to-face interaction with somebody, but it is the closest thing to it because people get to actually see you, hear you. If it's done properly, they get to know you. As you've taught us, it's about the know, like, and trust. That's really what people are looking for. You wrote about it extensively in the Trust-Based Marketing book. Video allows people to get to meet you. As I tell people, video allows you to multiply yourself and your efforts rather than divide yourself. You can get out to a large audience and gain connection with them quickly.

In your book, you quote some statistics about how people absorb information, retain information, and are behaviorally influenced by information, and it directly supports the idea of video. Talk a little bit about that, will you?

Yeah, and the statistics came largely a UCLA study that was done on what makes for effective communication and the different parts of communication. And it makes people think that the communication is just the words that we say, that, you know, what we tell people in that. In this study, and it's proven that 55% of the communication that happens between two people is nonverbal. It's the facial expressions, it's the body language, it's the winces, it's the eye ticks, it's the things that we pick up nonverbally that make up 55% of that communication. 38% of it is in the voice and the tonality of what we say, and only 7% of it is in the words we actually say. So video, if you're doing print, we have just the words. So it's like sending an email out to somebody. You could write that email with a certain emotion or intent behind it, but the words, the person getting it can only interpret it based on the words that you use. Whereas if we send an audio, we add another layer of that communication because now they can hear our voice. They can hear the enthusiasm the excitement in our voice and add video to it, now we've got body language and facial expressions and all of that stuff added to it. So the video makes that communication a lot more powerful.

By the way, as a result of last month's call, David Kloss sent me a— he had t-shirts made. It's got a little drawing of me on it and it says, "Enjoy my tonality." So we'll stay on video for one more second and let's talk about good versus bad, mistakes people make, how this goes awry.

For 30 years in doing this, I have heard from so many people who will get in touch with me and say, I want to make a video. The number one question I always ask is, why do you want to make a video? What's your objective for making a video? A lot of times I'll hear somebody say, I want to make a video because so-and-so is doing it and it's working for them, which is the worst reason to be making a video on your own as it is. It's not, again, it's not the video that works. It's the communication, the transference— you teach copywriting. It's what's said. I see a lot of people will pop up a video camera, just get in front of a video camera and talk extemporaneously rather than being prepared for what they're going to say, who they're talking to, making sure that they're addressing the right audience. They just do it. It's not taking the steps of understanding why do I want to do a video, who am I going to communicate to, and what am I really trying to achieve. By doing this video.

Yeah, and my own pet peeve about this is that, um, when it's watched, the viewer is watching television, and there are some obvious things about television that often are not incorporated at all in the video when someone puts their smartphone video camera leaning up against a book and gets in front of it and and whips out a direct-to-camera video. And they just don't get that the viewer at the other end has certain TV expectations. Their mind has been trained to connect or disconnect in a certain way to television programming. I just mentioned in a newsletter You've probably seen it. The most aired TV infomercial of the last quarter or last calendar year is the relatively cheaply produced Larry King interviewing the doctor and pushing pills. And the reason it works is because it's Larry King. The set is as close to a Larry King set as you can do without Larry getting sued by CNN. But that audience, boomers and seniors who would buy these health products, the minute they see Larry they have a certain expectation of what now makes television with Larry.. And if you stuck Larry King on a stool talking direct to camera, pitching his heart out, he wouldn't be nearly as effective as sitting interviewing somebody and the two of them delivering the pitch in a conversation. And I just think people don't— they just don't think through set or sets, what's the best way to present this particular information. How do I work best, the person who is going to be on camera? There are just all sorts of strategy to this that gets left behind. In some respects, it is the bane of all internet marketing. That is, it teaches people to be sloppy and hasty because they are really not spending any money. When you do direct mail, you spend real money. When you produce a show for television, you spend real money. So it becomes a more thoughtful process.

Yeah. When we've shot videos in your office, I mean, people don't— they'll go back and look at them now, and they should. We spend the time as to how are you positioned, where are you positioned, what's in the background. The video that you mentioned that we're doing, next month with Lisa Miller, we spent time designing the set, what's going to be on the set, what's on the shelves that are in the background, what message are we conveying to people. When I shoot a video of myself, I have in the background, I have several national awards and so forth, but I had to make sure that the awards are in the background. I'm not pointing them out, but they're there. They're seen. And we're utilizing all aspects of the video because they may not be looking at us while we're talking, but they're checking out. It's like walking into your office for the first time. You're looking around. You mentioned before people want to go through the trash. They're taking it all in. You're absolutely right. People don't think far enough through what they are communicating in a video beyond just the words they're saying.

Let me raise one other question. Then we're going to shift gears to testimonials. And we'll get all the way back to video testimony. Um, but so the last question I'll ask as a surrogate for listeners on this call is, what about length?

That's— I just, I just shot a video last week and that question came up again, and my position on is how long How much time do you need to communicate what you want to communicate effectively? Can it be done in 2 minutes? Can it be done in 30 minutes? Some of the documentary long format videos that I do in the healthcare, I target them for 30 minutes because it's television formatted and it's branded as a TV program. And a lot of times I'll get people in the industry, they'll look at it and go, that's just way too long. They want a CliffsNotes version of it. I take it from your teachings is how long does it need to be to communicate effectively what we need to communicate to our audience? We're going to lose people if it's too long and they're probably not going to buy anyhow. I think that the longer it is, if they're vested, if we've got them vested in it, they're a much better prospect because they've spent time in it.

That's an important point people don't get. Is the development of commitment by consumption of time. And when you can figure out how to consume more and more of somebody's time, you automatically raise their commitment level to take some sort of positive action at the end rather than walk away empty-handed and feel that they have wasted their time.

I have a project I'm working on right now for a client that we shot their live presentation to a live audience as we do with yours. I mean, they're on, they're good. The presentation was 40 minutes. They do a fabulous job of communicating to the audience in that 40 minutes. Then they come back and go, "We need to cut it down to 10 minutes because that's all that people are going to watch." And trying to cram 40 minutes into 10 minutes and still have the same effect, it's impossible.

Yeah, I mean, and it's not only now impossible from the media standpoint, but if you could do it in 10 minutes, why on earth are you spending 40 minutes in manual labor to do it? I mean, it just doesn't make any sense. But so we concur. Let me— I'm keeping my eye on the clock and I'm going to shift gears. And let's talk about testimonials. There again, I think people are sloppy, hasty, not very strategic or tactical about what they set out to get. So from your standpoint, video or not video, what do you think are the most important component parts of a good testimonial?

Story and emotional involvement. I find that a lot of testimonials that people get are just universally dull and boring. The old adage is, how do you get a testimonial? You just simply ask. Well, if you ask somebody, hey, give me a testimonial. If I ask somebody, give me a testimonial about me, right off the bat without any thought, without any guidance, without any preparation, they're going to probably say, oh, I've worked with Ron for 30 years. He's a great guy. He does great work. Thanks for the ego boost, but if I'm going to use that in my marketing, in my advertising, it doesn't say a whole heck of a lot for the person who's reading it. As opposed to, you know, we had this problem. We needed to communicate to our audience what our product does. We had to demonstrate how our product worked. We tried to do it ourselves. We tried to video record it ourselves, and that didn't work. We found Ron. He was referred to us.. And he was able to come in and really show us because he's been involved in marketing advertising. You see, now I'm getting into a much more meaty testimonial that I can use to promote somebody and it hits the hot button. The 4 things that I try to get initially is what's the problem? What is the problem that this person who's given us the testimonials had? Get them to agitate that problem, what's really been a problem for them. And then what was the turning point? What was the turning point for them that they had to make a decision to do something different? And then what's the solution? The solution is whoever they are giving the testimonial to and that's where it is guided towards. So it is agitate a problem, agitate turning point solution, which is built off the model that you teach.

A friend of mine many, many years ago, Keith DeGreeve, Keith said most testimonials are of the, he was really, really, really, really adequate. Kind. They are as you described. They tend to be very general. They tend not to have meaningful specifics. They tend to be redundant. When I write copy, I'll often have a client deliver 20 testimonials and none of them accomplish anything different. They are all of that. He's a good guy. He's competent. He did what he said he was going to do. Yeah, but I'm going to need 20 that make that same point.

If I were hiring a heart surgeon, I wouldn't want to base it on those.

No.

No.

So knowing what you are looking for, knowing the story behind each person you are choosing to get a testimonial from and being able to get biology, diversity, geography, diversity, age diversity, and most important, reason or motivation for buying and outcome diversity. There are— and of course you do a lot of work now with this for dentists and other healthcare professionals— there are people in the infomercial industry who are the top specialists at this, and all they do is go shoot the testimonials. I've worked with a couple of them, and, um, and again, of course, there's a lot— there's a lot— there's not a lot more at stake necessarily, but there's a lot more out of pocket at stake. So very often, to wind up with 8 minutes of testimonials in a 28-and-a-half-minute test infomercial, we will have shot testimonials for 3 days, and we will have shot 100 of them. Um, and we may or may not have gone to locations and, you know, all of that. And, uh, again, I think because there's not a big out-of-pocket wager being made, the person who's getting testimonials for their website or their shock and awe package, whether they're getting them to be used on video or not, it doesn't feel that they're making a big financial wager. So therefore, they're not really thoughtful and purposeful and strategic about all this.

Exactly. You're 100% right. If I do a 30-minute documentary for a dental practice, and it's— a majority of it is testimonial-based, it's patient testimonial-based, but to get that 30 minutes, I'll have shot 3 days, I'll shout 11 hours of actually recorded time just to get down to maybe 20 minutes worth of actual usable stuff. One person may not be very articulate, but in the conversation and interviewing them, they may say one line that is just a golden nugget that then can be edited with other people saying similar things, and it just strings together and it now gives us preponderance of proof because there are multiple people from multiple— as you put it, there are multiple genders, cultures, backgrounds, geography. It is somewhere by using enough of them, somebody who is watching is going to connect with 1, 2, 3 of those people, not necessarily all of them, but a few of them. They are going to connect with what they say.

I want to talk about merging things together. Offline, online, offline drive to online video, and the incorporation of testimonials in all of it. One of your case histories in the book, um, I think it's in the '70s, it might be page 75, 76, 77, 78, somewhere in there. It's the Affordable Dental Care Without Dental Insurance ad campaign. Really put different media together and used print in connection with video. Maybe you could kind of take us through that case history.

Absolutely. In— with that particular case, it was for a dentist, and I was talking with her. What she wanted to do is she wanted an ad. She wanted something to be able to advertise in print because she— She advertises in the small local newspapers, the little rag magazines, but they're subscriptions and they're very highly followed. So I said to her, I said, well, you know, you've got testimonials on your website, but none of them are very good. Give me a list of your patients. I'll go get them and I'll interview them. And in one of the interviews, one of the patients said something that was so powerful that connected, I felt, with the audience that we built the ad. We then built an online video, and because it was only an audio interview, it was a telephone interview with the patient, we built it into an online video because we were able to get their picture, get their permission, get them signed off. We used their name, full name, where they were from. We used what occupation they were in. So we were able to use all these multiple medias in print. We used it in audio form on the website. We built it into a video. So when somebody came, they— it didn't matter where they were at, they were getting multiple media. The other side of it was that we pulled it out and used it in text form, not only in the ad, but online at their website. And I think that's one of the mistakes, a huge mistake that people make, especially online, is that I see a lot of websites, they'll have a testimonial page. It's a location that people should go to in order to read all the testimonials.. And I know in talking with clients and in talking with patients when I interview them, they don't go to those pages. And I think the mistake that people make with their testimonials or their online reviews, whatever you want to call them, is that they don't use them strategically incorporated into their sales copy of their web page. They're not— they're just putting them, whatever testimonial they got, they're putting it onto a page randomly rather than incorporating it into presentation into the sales pitch, the sales copy. They're just again using them randomly and sticking them randomly thinking that they're going to make some impact if somebody sees them.

Well, and some of that is— some of that is because people insist on treating a website as a place to turn people loose and let them roam around. As you said, randomly, of their own free will, and look at this or not look at this, look at this or not look at this, etc., as opposed to constructing a sales presentation that you lead them through pretty much with closed walls on each side of it, and you present things to them integrated and in the order you want them to be seen in, ultimately culminating with a call to action. And so it's really a difference between a corporate website, an online brochure, and an online sales presentation. And I think you'd agree there's a place maybe for both of those things. There's a place for video in both of those things, but if you're not delivering a sales presentation with things like testimonials integrated into it and embedded in it and leading a person to a decision, then you really aren't doing direct response and you really aren't selling.

The power of the testimonial into the sales presentation— people believe what others say 1,000 times more than what we can say about us. And when that testimonial, even if it's just a sentence, that it's from a real person who's a real client, customer, patient, and their statement supports— for example, I was at Mastermind this morning and we were going over an ad that you had provided in one of the GKIC publications that was from GNC. And it was about— the headline was, "Baby Boomers Now Fear Memory Loss More Than Cancer." It was an ad that you provided. Inside of there was one line from a pilot of a certain age, and he describes it, that was built into the copy. When we hit it, when the reader hits it, everything that's been said prior to it is now solidified. It's given 100% credibility because we're not just saying it.

Somebody's actually experienced it. What do you have to say? I may be shortcutting some of our questions, but what do you have to say to the people who, my patients, customers, clients won't give me testimonials. The nature of my business, I can't get testimonials. So you have people who have a conceptual understanding of all of this but no implementation of all of this.

Because, of course, my business is different. I find that the biggest obstacle that people have in getting testimonials from their clients or their patients is them. They're asking the wrong way. They're not necessarily asking at the right times. They're not asking in the right ways. They're not using the right language to ask somebody. For instance, the word testimonial, it immediately creates an idea in somebody. If you ask them, "Would you give me a testimonial?" You're putting them on the spot. They don't know what to say. They're just going to give what I call verbal vomit. They're going to just say whatever comes to the top of their head. They're not asked and set up properly. The other side of it is if you ask them for a video testimonial, the video is going to scare them because nobody likes to see themselves on camera. They don't want to see somebody else. Again, it's how they're set up and it's how they're asked. To provide this and do this. And there's a lot of psychology involved in the asking and the language that's used. And the template scripts that I've developed and I use, I'm running at about a 78% agreement where people will not just give me a short 1 or 2 lines, they'll actually sit down on camera with me for 30, 40 minutes. So it's how the asking is done. And a lot of times it's the person doing the asking is getting in their own way because they have their own preconceived ideas as this person's not going to— they're not going to want to do it because everybody we've asked before hasn't wanted to do it, so this person— so there's again, there's a lot of that communication that's being projected. Got an example of a business where people would think it difficult and they were still obtained? Dry cleaner. A dry cleaner. Pretty much commodity-based business. I have a client who's a dry cleaner and we've actually captured probably 15, 20 testimonials from their customers as to, you know, why this dry cleaner? Why do you go to this dry cleaner? I mean, a dry cleaner is a dry cleaner is a dry cleaner. They're a commodity. Why this one? And we've gotten some very visceral responses from people as to why they're going to my client.. And being able to provide that to other people, it makes sense because they may not have thought about it. And they say, yeah, that's me. I can identify with that.

I'm going there. All right. So while they're getting in, Ron, a short and pithy answer to— and I'm in full agreement with you— of why the survey obtained testimonial ain't so hot.

What's the problem with just surveying our customers? We're putting somebody on the spot and they think we're just looking for a short, simple answer. They don't know what to say, so we're going to get that vanilla— I look at a lot of testimonials that I see that are survey-based. Hey, would you give me a testimonial? That they're nothing more than a glossy statement of approval. And that's— as you said earlier in this conversation, you see it, it's redundant over and over. And, you know, if it's bad, you can have a lot of bad and it doesn't make it good. So people have to be prepared for what it is they're going to say. You don't put words in their mouth, but they can be prepared. And what I consider the interview process is where they're actually questioned and they're able to respond. So they're not put on the spot, they're able to respond. Spontaneously. In doing so, we actually get the emotion, we get the stories, we get the body language, we get all those key elements of the communication that add authenticity and credibility to the testimonial.

Great. Thank you, sir, for being on the call.

I think we had a good one. Absolutely.

Thank you, sir, for the opportunity.

All right.

Thanks, everybody.

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