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Personalized Video Marketing: The Next Revolution in Content Marketing

“Personalized Video Content Can Be The Marketing Breakthrough Brands Need”

Above all, that’s the title of a Forbes report from earlier this year. And it isn’t surprising at all.

Videos now top the list of all Marketing content, be it internal comms, ABM, or e-commerce listings. Marketers are scrambling to account for personalized videos in their strategies, marketing budgets, and team structures. This savvy idea of engaging clients with exclusive, targeted content personalized to them is certainly attractive.

Now, thanks to one-click video creation and distribution, it’s simpler to tailor content to your customers, get their attention, and create a lasting relationship with them.

The mad rush for personalization

Why is personalization suddenly the latest hype in marketing concepts, though? Intuitively, it feels right to personalize all your content for your prospects and customers but let’s understand the reasoning behind the trend. How? With good old numbers.

  1. 200 milion+ people now use ad blockers, including 16% of the US population.
  2. 78% of CMOs think custom content is the future of marketing.
  3. 81% of marketers perceive increases in customer engagement as the main benefit of real-time marketing.
  4. 75% say “dynamic, personalized content” across channels is very important.
  5. 46% of marketers cited lack of time as the biggest hurdle to content marketing personalization.
  6. 81% of people want brands to get to know them and understand when to approach them.
  7. More than 78% of customers will only pursue offers if they’re customized to previous engagements with the brand.
  8. 93% of companies see greater conversion rates with website personalization.

So ads perform more poorly than ever, customer engagement is on the up and up, and people want brands to speak to them alone. Add to this that videos are the most engaging content asset and you have your answer.

Pro Tip: for video advertisements, you can use an online video maker to make the process easier and more cost-efficient.

 

What is a personalized video?

A personalized video is any video content that’s customized and relevant to each one of your audience groups, be it prospects, customers, or influencers. Given that, there are as many ways of personalizing videos as there are brands, marketers, and audiences.

A holiday greeting with your customer’s name on it, a series of picture slides when your client last visited your offices, or a video of your colleagues chanting your top client’s name are all good examples of personalization in videos. The more nuanced use cases of personalized videos, though, come up in Account-Based Marketing (ABM) where a series of videos customized to your website visitors or e-mail subscribers show up when they first interact with your brand.

How to create personalized videos?

Entertainment is not the only goal of videos.

They can be a rescue boat for your stagnating relationships with some customers and increase sales, too.

Personalized videos contain the recipient’s personal information such as name, gender, age, city, and such. Each video generated has details and messaging, aimed at talking to the recipient one-on-one.

Imagine you had to send out a Christmas video to your audience, and each video had a different name in it. That would be personalization for sure, but to achieve this for thousands of customers, you would need a hundred people and months of planning. Not very scalable, is it?

Automation to the rescue

There are several tools to help you create individualized videos from your structured data and applications. Rocketium is one. With automation, you can create thousands of videos in an unbelievably short period of time. You can use an existing video as a template and or make a brand new one in minutes that you will then use to individualize to your users.

“The number of businesses using video in email jumped from 36% to 46%.”

Next, you need to link data from your marketing automation platform to both bring in unique details about your users and also track performance. With API monitoring to quickly check functionality, this isn’t too difficult.

Delivery of such videos depends on the channel you think will work best for your customers. Let’s go with e-mails for now. A thumbnail of the video (this is what you see before playing a video on YouTube) linking to a unique page that has the personalized video is good to embed in e-mails. Add a nice message on top of it, choose a subject line that’s bound to get opens, and watch the views go up. Tip: an exciting subject line plays a major role in email open rates.

PRO TIP: Don’t direct traffic from your e-mails to YouTube or another hosting service. Host it on your website and use an affordable web hosting service or web hosting provider. Get a player that goes deep into engagement analytics, and slice+dice data to see what works for who. As with all content, analytics is the wood behind the arrow. Using a reliable VDS hosting provider will help your videos load quickly and smoothly, providing a seamless viewing experience for the audience.

SEE MORE: Ultimate Guide To Instagram Analytics: Everything You Need To Know

What data can be used for video personalization?

Salesforce’s Fourth Annual State Of Marketing Report shows 52% of consumers, as well as 65% of business buyers, will switch brands if they don’t receive personalized communication from vendors. Cookies, IP addresses, platforms, and other information and metrics about consumers can help you get pretty creative and accurate with personalization. Here’s a cool cheatsheet for doing just that.

SEE MORE: How To Tell A Story On Social Media That People Will Share

Source 

Who should try video personalization?

A lot depends on what your brand is, how prepped you are for videos and personalization, and if you have the tools you need to connect data with creativity. Having said that, here are a few areas that can truly benefit from personalized videos. So much that you’ll wonder how you never tried it yet:

  • Personalized Invitations: People (think about yourself) are more likely to respond to a personalized invitation over a generic one. Event managers, pre-digital and largely offline, made expensive invitation videos, burned them onto tape, and sent them to speakers or premium sponsors, personalizing them with anecdotes and history to ensure participation. Think of videos as the digital counterpart to those tapes, only better and at scale.

    You can now personally invite each one of your customers or leads to an event (rake up those ticket sales), to a landing page (get them to sign up), or to a demo booth (wow them into a conversation). You can even thank them with a personalized video.

Most noteworthy e-mail is the most preferred channel for personalized video, but try others, too. The best video-making tools enable easy integration and distribution of your personalized videos.

Here is an excellent example of a personalized e-mail video for Derek inviting him to an insightful conference.

  • Connecting through social media: You can also boost your social media campaigns with the magic of personalization. It can be a very effective way to raise awareness, increase engagement, and strengthen your relationship with your audiences. Similarly, charities can make personalized videos to thank their donors, engage people in fundraisers, and build a strong and engaging community of supporters.

SEE MORE: 30+ Professionals Share The Best Hacks On Growing Your Social Media Brand

Here’s a beautiful example from Breast Cancer Now. They used personalized videos on social media to show their gratitude to donors for a successful campaign. The organization targeted people who used #wearitpink or mentioned the brand. Also, they employed their personal data like name, Twitter profile pics, and photos from the fundraising event to truly execute a wow campaign. Have a look at their video:

Almost 50% of people retweeted and almost 80% of people liked these personalized videos. The videos reached around 77,000 users on social media. That’s phenomenal for a non-profit!

  • Personalized brand story: Personalized brand stories are one of the best ways to draw your audiences’ attention to your campaigns, products, and new updates. It’s a great way to show gratitude to your users for being a part of your journey and convert them into loyal customers.


For example, the video campaign “Your Year with Nike+” is a great example of using user data beautifully to personalize content. Nike created around 100,000 personalized animated videos, drawing users’ data from their fitness app — data that included weather, movement activity, and location — to tell individual stories of fitness goals achieved by the users of the apps in the previous year, inspiring users to continue engagement with the app. Here’s how they motivated Carlo to do more in 2015.

Benefits of personalized videos

Adding personalized videos to your marketing plan can give you the best results in the acquisition phase of your marketing plan. A potential customer provides his information through website activities, filling out forms, being active on social media, etc. Here are some perks of including these valuable data in creating a personalized video for your audience:

  • Personalized videos can help you drive your sales. It reaches the customers at a personal level. Seeing their name, email, address, and other personal details get your customer’s attention efficiently. Using personalized videos for inactive users in your marketing campaigns can increase the open rate by 5x than a standard, regular email.
  • Personalized videos engage twice as many people. People who received personalized videos spent 62% more time on the campaign landing page.
  • A study found that personalized video increases click-through rate by around 10x over standard emails.
  • A study by Email Monks says that personalized video results in 280% higher returns than standard, traditional emails.
  • Since the customer gets curated and tailored content according to his needs and preferences, personalized video can also be a great medium to increase conversions.
  • Using personalized videos in an integrated marketing plan can give you an opportunity to connect with the audience and acquire leads and new customers.
  • Personalized videos have 35% higher retention rate over conventional videos.
  • 75% of prospects at kate stage converted into a closed deal after receiving a personalized video.
  • Personalized videos have around 16x higher click-to-open rate and around 4.5x increase in unique click-throughs.

Conclusion

Marketers can see an exponential increase in acquisition and conversion through personalized video marketing. Furthermore, it can help you achieve elevated brand awareness, acquire new customers, and build a long-lasting relationship with your customers. While this video content type is like a swiss knife, marketers often find it challenging to wield it.

According to Rapt Media, 83% of marketers say that creating personalized content is their biggest challenge. Translating that to videos, the #1 hurdle in the path to personalized videos is the absence of a tool that churns out videos at scale without breaking the bank or compromising on quality. 

Krishna Bora

Krishna Bora

Krishna is a Content Marketer at Rocketium, a video creation tool for marketers. She is an expert in Social Media content and loves experimenting with GIFs and memes. Her favorite part of the job is to create outstanding videos with Rocketium.

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