How to Add Personalization in Videos

Add Personalisation in videos

Personalization is one of the many approaches used in branding.

Recently, we‘ve seen a growth (and recorded success) of personalized videos for brand promotion, marketing, and sales.

In the latest Evergage trends in personalization report, 98% of marketers agreed that personalization helps advance customer relationships.

70% of these marketers also claimed that personalization has a “strong” or “extremely strong” Impact.

Videos have been used for a while now as a way to engage with people, add dynamism to content and to reach a wider audience.

People enjoy watching videos, but that doesn’t mean that they would be happy to watch any video.

The audience is becoming more preferential in what they would like to see from brands.

Specifically, they want, now more than ever, content that relates to them.

An eMarketer report showed that 93% of internet users said that they weren’t getting any relevant marketing communications, and almost as many as 90% were annoyed by irrelevant messages.

This shift in audience preference is why personalization in videos should be a necessary addition to your strategy.

Personalized videos are changing the industry of content creation in a unique way.

In the past, it used to be that brands created a message that appealed to a certain demographic of people and hoped for the best engagement.

Today, brands are trying to interact with every single person who comes in contact with their content.

The needs, views, opinions, and decision making processes of each person matter.

And rather than delivering broad messages, individual-specific messages are developed and deployed.

Some examples of personalized messages include geo-targeted offers, recommendations based on user history, and other smart ways to use data.

Such personalized messages can be integrated into the video.

This is important because video is proving to be the most effective content driver for engagement among audiences in most target groups.

Is Personalized Video Scalable?

With text content, it’s pretty easy to execute personalization in marketing.

For a basic strategy, all you need is a customer’s data (such as name, position in company or geo-location), your message framework, and software to ensure that every message reads “Hi *customer’s name*”.

Even product recommendations and sales offers can be personalized easily because they are automated.

With videos, marketers may feel stuck on personalization tactics.

How do you make a personalized video for your thousands of customers/audience members?

Personalized videos are scalable, but the technology works a bit differently.

Of course, you can’t remake the same video thousands of times to say “Hi *customer’s name*”.

However, you can create for highly specific groups containing people in the same demographics with the same pain points.

The implication is that your team will be producing more videos than the average brand marketing team.

The benefits come into play when you have a diverse library of videos that can be used to reach all the demographies in your leads list.

Add Personalization in Videos: Benefits

Interpersonal appeal to consumers

Personalized videos allow you to connect with (potential) customers in an interpersonal way.

Watching the video should leave them with the impression that you were speaking to them directly.

In fact, the customer should be left wondering, “This product/service was made just for me”.

This type of personal connection leaves an impression.

Its effect is longer lasting than the hundreds of ad videos they come across every day.

Since you will be using platforms with high ad traffic (such as YouTube or Instagram), your content needs the power to stand out.

Personalized videos are still uncommon enough that they should make viewers stop mid-scroll and pay attention.

Improve engagement

According to Planable.io, personalized videos have a 16x higher click-to-open rate and around a 4.5x increase in unique click-throughs.

They’ve been proven by marketers to drive up engagement such as click-through rates, sharing, and even conversion.

It’s important to remember that customers are tired of seeing the same old messages.

Being creative and personal is the best way, right now, is the best way to gain their attention.

People are also motivated to take action when your information is tailored to their needs.

For example, let’s assume that your company offers extermination services.

You can create generic videos promoting your services, or you can create different videos for potential clients in various industries, such as restaurants.

When I, a restaurant owner, sees your video, I’m more inclined to believe that your team is specialized in removing pests from restaurants.

I may trust you, an exterminator who works with restaurants, better than I trust a generic exterminator (even if they also work with restaurants).

The more you personalize your videos, the better you’ll stand out from the competition and win engagement.

Drive conversions

Videos deliver messages clearly and quickly because viewers can passively watch and still get the needed information.

This makes it easier to promote your call-to-actions and improve conversion.

With personalized videos, you have another advantage; you’re delivering highly-specific content to the viewer.

With personalized videos, you can achieve the following conversion goals:

  • Capture new leads
  • Build brand trust
  • Make a direct sale
  • Or collect more data for better targeting

Build better relationships with your audience

Data from Evergage shows that 98% of marketers agree that personalization helps to advance customer relationships.

Your audience and customers want to know that they’re important to you, rather than another name in your spreadsheet.

81% of people say that they want brands to get to know them and understand when to approach them.

With personalized content, you can show (potential) customers that you’ve spent some time learning about them.

This will also hint at the potential of your product or service for solving their specific needs.

Even after the customer makes a purchase, personalized videos can still be used for retention.

As a business, you don’t want to consistently spend the bulk of your budget on customer acquisition.

By retaining customers, you can always upsell them or create new offers to suit their needs.

How to make Personalized Videos

Now that we understand the benefits of personalization, the next step is learning how to make it happen.

Specifically, how to add personalization in videos.

The most important tools are your creativity and access to consumer data.

With both, your team can start testing out personalized video types and strategies.

Switch out your introductory call for a video

If your team usually starts its interaction with a new lead through a phone call, personalized videos offer a better strategy.

Most people are now wary and frankly tired, of promotional calls.

Instead of doing this, ask your agents to make one-minute videos stating the lead’s name and showing their interest in speaking to them in the future.

When you think of it, they may spend less time making those videos than they will on call and wait periods.

You can either do this using a person or through illustrations.

Like the example below.

In this example, the brand’s designer already had a video template.

All they had to do was edit a second’s clip to show the client’s name.

With this template, they may have reached thousands of clients and left a lasting impression.

If this proves too time-consuming or expensive for your team, you can make simple videos using a person.

The important thing is to show that a real-life person from your company knows the lead’s name and has taken their time to leave a personal message.

Doing this alone can make a potential customer feel some obligation to your brand before they even make a purchase.

Separate your target audience into specific groups

As you study the data collected from your customers and audiences, you will start to find details that can be used to group them into specific categories.

These details are usually known as audience demographics.

These groups are found in every business’ audience for two reasons.

First, it could be that your marketing efforts are targeted at certain demography.

If you market towards students and people in your early 20s, those will most likely make up the majority of your customers.

However, there’s the second group of people who will seek out your brand.

They may want your solutions but not for the reasons you expected.

For example, you may develop a mobile tech repair business for young people who are used to having products and services that come to them.

However, you may be receiving inquiries from aging people who need devices fixed, but aren’t mobile.

It’s important to take all contact points into account when creating a personalized video strategy.

Once you have the details in a spreadsheet, start assigning leads and customers to groups.

You can have as many groups as needed.

Remember that the whole point of this exercise is to avoid generic marketing messages.

Each group should be set up in a way that every video created (for them) is relevant to all members.

With groups in place, you can start the creative process.

Create unique video content for each group

Depending on the products and service you offer, your team can start the creative process of writing out marketing messages and their accompanying visuals.

There are several examples to draw inspiration from if you’re stuck.

Here are two of them:

This clever Marketo summit video offered a fun twist; your name right there on the tab.

Also, seeing your name right beside Ann Handley and Will Smith was obviously all the convincing their leads could have needed.

If you want to create a video like the one above, explore video personalization tools such as HippoVideo and SundaySky.

With these tools, a seemingly manual process can be automated easily.

Personalization doesn’t only occur on the marketing and sales level. It could also happen as post-sale support.

An example is what Elementor, a website builder product offers.

Their YouTube page contains dozens of short tutorials showing users how to navigate the issues they might come across while using the product.

Add Personalization in Videos

This is their way of saying, “We knew that you may have this problem. Here’s the solution we already prepared for you.”

On one hand, they’ve managed to take a lot of stress off their sales team.

On the other hand, users can feel relief at the sight of the needed solution, created by the company, when they type their issue into the search bar.

Use audience targeting tools for video ads

Both Facebook (for Facebook and Instagram) and YouTube ad platforms have very robust targeting tools.

Advertisers can use both to determine who exactly sees their video ads.

You can create micro-targets using demographics, interests, behaviors, location, languages, and so on.

This offers you better control, so you’re sure that each advert gets to the right group.

While conversion is usually the goal for targeted ads, make sure to use these ads to the most benefit.

By this, I mean to analyze the data from your analytics tab.

Which ads performed better? Where did you get the most clicks?

Where did you get the most conversion? Which demography does the highest engaging group fall under?

All these details can be helpful when tweaking both paid and organic marketing efforts for better results.

Personalization in marketing is data-driven, so always collect and analyze good data when possible.

Personalize your team too

We’ve talked about personalization from the point of the customer, but it also works from the point of the company.

Buyers no longer want to interact with nameless, faceless organizations.

They want to know who is behind a company, their level of diversity, their values, and so on.

So don’t be scared to put your team in front of the camera.

Lush cosmetics has a good strategy for this.

Their social media and YouTube pages are filled with videos of their staff at work.

You can see people mixing ingredients, hand molding products, packing it up, and so on.

They also make YouTube videos where staff members pick out some bestselling products and tell customers how those products are made.

This level of behind-the-scenes access almost makes you feel like you know exactly what is going on, even if you don’t.

Using this strategy may improve the level of trust and loyalty which your customers feel for the brand.

It also offers immediate evidence of credibility whenever a potential lead finds your brand.

Conclusion

By adding personalization to videos, you’re going a step ahead of the competition to prove value to your audience.

From market trends, we can tell that video is currently the most important type of content.

But that means everyone is currently doing video.

To gain a competitive advantage, adding personalization in your videos is a great strategy to adopt.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

23-Page YouTube ‘Secret Tips’ Rolodex  

Learn How Small Channels Earn More Money than Big Ones – With Less Stress.

Enter your email now to learn how:

Homepage Opt-in

By signing up you agree to our terms & conditions. You will receive email messages from us and you can unsubscribe any time. Privacy policy.