How do you grab attention for your brand? This is increasingly tough with the continual content overload that bombards your customers every day. With limited time and ever shorter attention spans, if they don’t feel compelled to click on your video content straight away, they’ll be off to your competitor.
The answer isn’t necessarily more content, but smarter content. That’s where personalized video comes in as an effective strategy to cut through. It’s commonplace to use personalization in email marketing, and now it’s readily available for video marketing campaigns.
With impressive results, including a 500% lift in email conversions with personalised video, I hope I’ve got your attention to read on to discover how your brand could benefit from personalization.
“A personalized video just for me?”
The target audience is at the heart of any successful video marketing campaign both in terms of insight and creative. Personalization pushes this further, positioning the viewer centre-stage in the story. Rather than creating content, which speaks at your audience, with personalization it’s all about the recipient of the video. It’s unique content “just for them”.
Once you’ve grabbed their attention, the path is opened towards developing relationships. The content that you are sharing has greater resonance, will be more memorable and works to move your prospect further up the sales funnel to a conversion.
The evidence for personalized videos
The stats on personalized video are compelling. Personalization can cut through your customers’ inboxes, and help with conversions in open rates, click-through, on-page conversions, and time with your brand.
Video platform, Vidyard, compared a generic video campaign, without personalization in the text or video thumbnail, to a personalized campaign. Videos with personalization were shown to improve click-through rates by an average of 4.5 times and the average click-to-open ratio by 16 times. With impressive results like this, it’s certainly worth thinking about using personalization.
What can you personalize?
Video personalization is similar to email marketing in terms of what you can individualise; names, company details and logos, company websites as well as pain points or behaviours. The data will fit into the video content seamlessly as though it were designed specifically for the recipient.
As with any campaign, it’s important to maximise the effectiveness of your data so think about what information you have that would work well to make a connection with your viewers. Watch that the personalized content doesn’t feel intrusive; it should feel natural, helpful and friendly.
You’ve probably received at least one Facebook personalized review of the year or a video celebrating your friendships, which illustrate how you can fit your available data into content targeted for your audience that they would want to share.
How can my brand use personalized video?
There are lots of ways to use personalized content whether your brand is B2B or B2C; as a thank-you, an event invitation or follow-up, to show their journey with your brand, to promote a new product or service, or key into business sector hot topics or pain points.
For instance, if you send a personalized video via email to prospects about a new service, explaining why you’ve adapted it to meet their needs, it’s going to be a much easier conversation when your sales team follows up with a call. It’s more likely that your prospect will remember your email and the effort you’ve taken to create content that’s meaningful to them.
Here are few examples of successful personalized video campaigns.
Inspiring brand content
“Your Year with Nike+” remains a really good example of using data effectively to personalize content. The brand created 100,000 animated personalized videos, drawing on fitness app data including weather, movement activity and location to create content that shows what their audience achieved the previous year in order to inspire them to “outdo you” in the new year. It’s spot on message and incites a call to action to achieve more with the brand.
A personalized invitation
Of course, we’re more likely to respond to a personalized invitation and coupled with the power of video, marketers have a winning formula to increase ticket sales for events. Here’s an example from Vidyard and the Marketo conference. The video uses humour to encourage the viewer to sign-up, placing them in the centre of the story alongside top names in marketing. It’s flattering to have our names up there in the top spotlight of our profession.
Personalized video can also be employed as a follow-up after a conference utilising the new data you have gathered. This is an effective way to cut through the noise post-event, when delegates are blasted with content from other exhibitors.
Connecting on social media
Personalized video can also be activated via social media campaigns. The National Lottery used video personalisation at the Rio Olympics which resulted in a huge 460% increase in Twitter engagement. Lottery players who tweeted with #IamteamGM or #IamParaOlympicsGB received a personalized thank you from an Olympic athlete.
For charities, personalized videos are an effective way to thank fund-raisers and build a community of supporters via social. Breast Cancer Now used personalized video across social media for its Wear It Pink campaign to thank fundraisers and strengthen their community. They targeted those who used the #wearitpink hashtag or @mentioned the brand, and then employed data such as name, Twitter profile pics, and fundraising photos.
Nearly 50% retweeted and almost 80% liked the personalised content, and although these are essentially just replies, the videos reached 77,000 users.
With all the benefits of personalization, it’s no surprise that it made my top 5 marketing strategy tips for 2018. Watch now to find out what else is on the list.
If you’re interested in how personalized video could help your brand, do get in touch for a chat.