Personalized video marketing is still in its infancy, but we break down the basics for making the most of this new tactic and highlight three of the most popular platforms for making personalized videos to seamlessly integrate with your content marketing and sales funnel.
As content marketing became a household name, organizations turned to personalization strategies to refine their message and speak their clients’ language for stronger, long-lasting results. It worked.
About 79% of organizations that exceeded revenue goals had a documented personalization strategy.
Over the past few years, video marketing has soared in popularity, with 87% of businesses using video as their preferred marketing tool. It’s alarmingly easy to get distracted by the glitz and glamour of video content and forget the content marketing foundations we’ve built.
You might be doing some soul-searching to infuse more personalization in your current video content marketing strategy. Or, you might be considering going even further, and you’re shopping for a personalized video management platform to support your marketing efforts.
Wherever you are in your video content strategy, hit pause for a few minutes and lean closer. Because things are about to get real personal around here.
Personalized videos: Remember your content foundations?
Video is an excellent way to add interactive elements into your existing marketing strategy. It’s the whole package — pleasing from an auditory and visual standpoint, while humanizing your brand through digital conversations.
Content should always be conversational. Video is no different. Which is why we need to remember our content marketing foundations if we want to produce high-impact, personalized videos.
1. Build a personalized video strategy around buyer personas.
With personalized videos, the conversation begins the same way you kick off any other content project…personas. (You knew it was coming.) Personas are marketing code for “knowing our audience.” Each persona is a real-life character in your marketing story.
Some brands embellish their personas with interests that don’t matter in the grand scheme of things. Does it matter if Shawna the CMO likes to play tennis on the weekends? It does if you’re selling tennis gear. Otherwise, it’s a nice-to-know versus a need-to-know.
So, what do you need to know?
- The basics – Name, title, industry, age, etc.
- The details – Goals, challenges, how you help, messaging strategy
Persona development should never fall on your shoulders. The strongest personas are built by the collective knowledge of your team.
Start with a brainstorm session with a diverse group. Include people outside the marketing department, like sales and customer success team members who are consistently on the organizational frontlines. Then, polish the points and conduct an internal and external survey to see if your internal customer view truly aligns with your customer.
2. Align personalized videos with the buyer’s journey.
Before you begin to script out your next video, first align your video content strategy with the buyer’s journey. Otherwise, you risk spending time and resources on a personalized video marketing campaign that doesn’t jive with where your buyer is at.
Everybody has their own naming convention for the buyer stages, which define where a buyer is located in the sales cycle. Technically, there are four stages but often organizations only focus on three: early, mid, and late stages of the sales funnel. Number four is the customer advocacy stage, which certainly deserves a place in your content marketing focus.
From top to bottom (of the funnel), here are some ideas for aligning video content with the buyer’s journey for a personalized, relevant experience.
- Educate – Brand explainer video, how-to
- Consider – Product or services explainer videos, customer success stories, testimonials
- Decide – Product or services comparisons, FAQs, demos
- Delight – Ongoing training and education
Personalized videos work really well in the decision stage of the buyer’s journey. The average retention rate is 35% higher than non-personalized videos.
3. Use current data to create personalized video experiences.
Ideally, in-depth customer research is performed when you are developing your personas. Yet, personas become stale when organizations don’t revisit their strategy each year, especially if the business is growing or evolving rapidly. Even if your team was diligent about creating data-driven personas, that data might be old news.
Video content is one of the most costly pieces of content you can create. To make sure your investment is worth your while, it’s crucial that your audience connects with your video from the start and takes action after it ends. Reinforcing your content foundations into your video marketing strategy heightens your effectiveness potential.
Before you dive into a video content project, gather current customer data to properly set up your strategy. A few methods for gathering feedback and information are:
- Review data mining – Software review platforms or Google, Yelp, etc.
- Social listening – Monitor relevant accounts or hashtags
- Surveys / polls – SurveyMonkey, Typeform, Google Forms, etc. — website or social media polls
- Google analytics – Demographics, geo, interests, behavior, technology, etc.
Take the pulse of your customer now. These current data collection efforts can be targeted around a content theme you’re considering for a personalized video campaign, versus being broad data points. Taking this extra research step gives you insights that will inform your video content decisions, resulting in the greater potential to captivate your audience.
Game-changing personalized video management platforms
Since you, as a marketer, are always looking for ways to boost click-throughs and conversions, personalized videos are a natural progression in your content marketing strategy. In the 2019 State of Video in Business Report, Vidyard predicts that personalized video will move from “experimental” status to “early adopter” status as more marketers turn to technology (as we often love to do).
You’re using technology for everything else, so why not personalized videos? Personalized video management platforms strike a great balance between fun and impactful. Most of these solutions have clever ways of integrating the video viewer’s personal information from submitted data via form submission or otherwise.
This might be basic information like a first name. Next level might be a company name. A step further and other relevant customer information slides right into the video content. Say what?
Yes, it’s cool and kinda creepy. Check out a few personalized video management platforms below (here is a much larger list).
Three top personalized video platforms:
1. Vidyard
Vidyard is really setting the tone for video personalization, and you’re likely familiar with their impressive video content platform already. The cool thing is that you can work with their video personalization team all the way through the process. And, you get to enjoy all of Vidyard’s hosting, integrations, and analytics features.
You can try out their lovable content, like I did with a quick form submission. All of the images sprinkled throughout this ClearVoice article are from my personalized Vidyard video. Bet you’ll remember my name now.
2. SundaySky
SundaySky allows you to create new stories by selecting scenes from a scene library, which serves as a content hub for your personalized video projects. You’re able to view changes in real-time throughout the creation process. Also valuable: The video performance monitoring and option to download reports.
3. Idomoo
Idomoo is an enterprise-grade platform that offers native personalization versus boring overlays. This solution uses dynamic elements that are rendered frame-by-frame for each video, along with composing tools and plugins that make creation and launch easy-peasy for users.
You can take Idomoo for a spin by submitting your name for a personalized video — but it’s not nearly as whimsical as Vidyard’s demo
Something’s gotta give with email marketing campaigns. Tired automated nurture programs with static content aren’t going to fly with the buyers or marketers of today. Buyers expect more, they expect video and personalized experiences.
Personalized video marketing platforms offer a technologically creative method for delivering a memorable brand experience in your landing pages, email campaigns, and account-based marketing programs.
Improve the conversation with personalized video content
Personalization has been a buzzword in content marketing for a long time, but for good reason. A personal approach to video marketing helps you improve the conversation — how you tell your brand story and how you communicate with your customer. When you pull off personalization, you see growth across the board: audience, engagement, conversions, loyalty, and revenue.
Personalized video content is another avenue worth exploring if you are committed to increasing your marketing performance. It certainly takes finesse, but you’ll see some breakthroughs if you produce innovative video content that is firmly rooted in the needs and goals of your customers.
Just remember that for all great videos you still need to have or hire experienced script writers and videographers to create them.
