Getting Customer Reviews

Posted on July 19, 2016 by Donna Price, Marketing Strategist & Business Consultant

How To Get Audio/Video/Photo Customer Reviews For Your Small Business

Customer reviews can be so helpful to a company. Video and photo gives you an added advantage of add authenticity to the review as well as search engine ranking power.

An often overlooked method of collecting online customer reviews is through videos and photos. With so much emphasis on written reviews, no one bothers thinking about video and image reviews yet they have a more powerful influencing effect than text due to their visual and audio benefits. A majority of people take in information better and actually enjoy doing so when it is present in picture or video format. Cell phones give you an easy way to collect both video and photo’s for your reviews.

As with anything there is a right way and a wrong way to collect video and image reviews. Let’s start with how NOT to do it. Do not try recording videos or shooting photos of your customers on an ordinary business day at your shop. There will be no excitement necessary to portray all the right mix of emotional energy to make the review enjoyable and convincing.

The right way to do it is to capitalize on an event that is taking place at your business or being sponsored by your business. Events include:
* Parties
* Concerts
* Product Launches
* Store Openings
* Holiday Celebrations such as Halloween, Christmas, Independence Day
* Community Events
* Fundraisings
* Sporting Events
* Family Fun Days
* TV Coverage of your business such for a show.

These are all opportune moments to take video footage and photos when your clients are exhibiting positive emotions – they are excited, attentive, entertained, astonished, cheerful, engaged and relaxed. If asked a question about your business, they will be able to naturally and enthusiastically give a positive customer testimonial. You can easily set up an area for shooting the short 30-60 second reviews. Have someone else record the videos so that customers don’t feel uncomfortable. But when you are at a special event, you have your fans there! These are the people you WANT to give you reviews.

With their permission, you can post these videos and photos on
* Your website
* Your facebook page
* Your YouTube channel
* Your review site and business directory profiles

Videos do not have to be lengthy – in fact the shorter they are the better. A 60 second video clip is just the right length. While you may think you need expensive equipment to make this happen, a simple point and shoot digital camera or a good quality mobile phone camera will do the trick. You want your videos to look amateurish because that makes them look more credible. Super professional videos just look fake and hard to believe so it’s best to keep it simple and believable.

Start adding video reviews to your website.

With some cool plugins you can have a carousel of video testimonials.

You can also ask people to add reviews on social media sites.