We've looked on a number of occasions at the importance of backing up product pages on your website with associated videos, and we've focused on product demonstrations, training and maintenance style videos. But perhaps one of the most powerful formats to look at is the case study or testimonial. If you can demonstrate how your product has saved a customer a significant amount of money, or cut his energy usage or boosted productivity, and get that customer to put across those benefits in his own words, then you have a very powerful video indeed.

Take a look at this short video produced by Control Techniques, focusing on how its drives have been key as part of an upgrade at Corus. It only runs to just over a minute long, but it gets across some very important messages - and it's key personnel at Corus who are delivering those messages, making it a powerful testimonial for CT's products.

As a technology journalist, I've written hundreds of application stories over the years. They are probably the most difficult stories to progress: you may not want your competitors knowing what projects you're working on, or there may be NDAs in place, or the customer simply may not want to publicise what they perhaps perceived as a problem. But when you do get the go ahead on good stories, they're like gold dust.

From a videographer's point of view, these are great projects to be involved in, too. There is undoubtedly a lot of effort involved in the logistics of setting them up, pulling all the key people together, and dealing with the challenges of filming on location, but the end results are always worthwhile. If you have any opportunities to produce case study videos, then I'd certainly encourage you to do so.

As an added benefit, given my own background in technical journalism and videography, while I'm filming your case study I can also be writing up the story. Two birds, one stone.

While getting a film crew out on location to produce a supporting video will undoubtedly give you the best results, there are some lower cost alternatives worth considering. This short video is a bit of a work in progress, but it gives you an idea of what you can do when you have an existing story with a few supporting photos. With the addition of some stock video (around £50 in large web format) and some stock photos (around £10 each), you can quickly, easily and  cost-effectively put a supporting video together for a given product.

So what about the costs?  For on-location filming of a case study and production of the finished HD video, I'd reckon on around £500 all in. To write the story at the same time, I'd probably look to add £200 to that. For a video built on an existing story and supplied photos, with a bit of stock footage added, I'd reckon on a finished large-web video for no more than £300, or £200-250 if no stock footage is required.