How to Use Personalized Video Marketing to Increase Your Engagement

The average person will watch 84 minutes of online video every day this year. Every day. With users consuming that much video, your marketing needs to stand out. That’s why personalized video marketing is key.

After all, 91% of consumers are more likely to shop with brands that recognize them as individuals and provide relevant offers and recommendations. So whether you’re running a large B2B-SaaS company that helps with business intelligence and data analysis or managing an ecommerce store that sells comfy furniture at a fair price, you’re going to want to leverage personalized video marketing to complete your digital marketing strategies.

In this guide, we’re going to share six ways to leverage personalized video marketing to help you accomplish your overall goals while providing tips on how to scale personalization and how to do personalized video marketing on a budget.

What is personalized video marketing?

Personalized video marketing is when companies use data (whether from their analytics accounts, CRM accounts, or even more in-house data-sourcing strategies, such as customer satisfaction surveys) to market a video towards a specific customer or group of customers.

There are levels of personalization. Sometimes a video will feature photos, names, and locations of specific people.

Perhaps the clearest example of personalized video marketing is the Cadbury Glow campaign. Cadbury customers were able to create a personalized video “gift” that took their personal photos from their Facebook profile:

But personalized videos don’t need to be this complicated. They can be as simple as listing, at the very beginning of the video, “This video was made specifically for [Customer Name], who wants to [complete a buying action].”

By including this personalized intro, now the rest of the video feels personal, too.

Benefits of personalized videos in your marketing strategy

87% of businesses use video as a marketing tool, so it makes sense that 90% of video marketers feel “the level of competition and noise has increased.”

But what are the benefits of personalized marketing?

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Personalized video marketing is a fantastic tool because it marries two popular strategies: personalized marketing and your overall video marketing strategy.

 

85% of the US internet audience watches videos online, yet 93% of internet users said they weren’t getting any relevant marketing communications.

Personalized marketing uses the most popular medium (video), and leverages personalization to increase engagement, conversions, click-through rates, and more.

Personalized video marketing ideas for your business

This is a great marketing tactic for all businesses, but it doesn’t work exactly that same way. B2B is a whole different world than traditional B2C marketing.

It’s because your target audience consists of professionals in their field. Plus, these professionals are likely getting cold pitched on a daily basis, whether through phone calls, email blasts, or just a steady stream of re-targeted ads.

Setting your service apart is essential. That’s why personalized video marketing in B2B isn’t just recommended, it’s essential: 72% of B2B buyers expect customization in the marketing they receive.

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Here are just some of the ways you can use personalized video marketing strategies for your business, and we’ve identified the strategies that might work better for B2B or B2C.

1. Event invites

When you’re planning your next event—whether it’s an online tutorial, webinar, or product launch—we recommend that you lean heavily on video personalization.

Here’s why: Personalized event invite emails have led to an 8x improvement on click-through rates. When Marketo used personalized video marketing to invite attendees to an event, they saw a 36% increase in open rates.

2. Explainer videos

This could work for both B2B and B2C companies, but it’s a particularly great strategy for B2Bs. An explainer video is a great way for a B2B company to talk directly to a prospect and explain or distill what makes the B2B’s service stand out. More than that, an explainer video is a tool a B2B business can use to show a prospect how their service can help.

72% of customers prefer to learn about a product through video. That’s a great reason to start explaining in personalized videos.

3. Case study videos

A case study is a way to boost your credibility. It’s a blueprint of how you achieved success for a previous client. Yet, the beauty of a case study is that no one reads them and thinks, “let’s just steal this idea,” because the execution is as important as the strategy.

What a good case study does is highlight your company’s strategic mindset, and show that you know how to measure value.

Case studies can also be long and boring. But converting your tired case study into video is a major win for your customer.

4. “Thank you” videos

Supporting customers after the purchase is key for B2B and B2C businesses. Retention makes sure your customer doesn’t jump ship and sign with one of your competitors, and satisfied, repeat customers go on to recommend your brand for some high-quality, word-of-mouth marketing.

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Let’s face it: Your competitors are likely doing what you’re doing—cold pitching, offering promotions for new customers, and other aggressive marketing tactics.

The best defense is a good offense.

In our experience, touching base with a new customer just once isn’t enough but we recommend you start with two different videos.

The first video will be a simple thank you video. This is where you can take your new customer’s information (their name, their business, what their business does, how they’ll use your service), and automatically upload it into a video template and send it.

This lets your company show appreciation while treating your new customer as an individual.

The second video can now be more instructional. Depending on what you’re selling, there could be multiple levels or tiers of services, or multiple uses for a single product. There can also be some confusion on your customer’s end on how to best use your product.

Have a series of videos that walk your new customer through how your service can benefit their business.

5. Facebook ads

Video is becoming more popular across all social media platforms, but we’re going to focus on Facebook.

Facebook ads are some company’s bread and butter. It’s easy to see why. Facebook collects a lot of data. That data is a great way to know about your existing (or potential) customers.

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Facebook itself has experimented with personalized video—end of the year montages and suggestions on memories. But we’re going to focus on video marketing that helps you convert.

How to use personalized video marketing on Facebook

When you want to focus on personalization with Facebook, simply focus on the data available to you through Facebook.

For example, you can use interests and demographics to cater your video to specific audiences. You can also use who has interacted with your page. You can target customers who have liked an ad by creating a personalized video that starts with, “We know you liked our last ad, and we’re excited to show you something new.”

General tips on using personalized video marketing on Facebook

• Use strong visuals. 85% of videos on Facebook are watched without sound. Storyboard your idea to make sure that your point can be understood (to a degree) without the sound on.
• Be aware of the running time. The rule of thumb is clear, the longer the video, the more likely the engagement will fall off before finishing it. This doesn’t necessarily mean you must create short videos, but it means it’d be strategic to put whatever is most valuable to your audience in the first quarter of the video, not the last quarter.
• Include a call to action. Every piece of advertising needs a call to action (CTA). Inviting your customer to take action is a critical part of guiding them down the sales funnel

6. Email marketing campaigns

Adding videos to your email content can boost click rates by up to 300%.

You can capitalize off that awesome click rates by adding personalized video in the body of the email.

This can also work perfectly with upselling and cross-selling. Whether you’re selling a product or a service, you can send personalized videos as part of your post-purchase email marketing campaign.

In these emails, your personalized videos (which are automated to reference the customer’s name and the products they purchased) can serve as demo videos or tutorials on other products in your catalog.

The benefits are twofold. By adding video to your email you’ll see more click through rates and by adding personalization to the videos you’ll see increased engagement.

How to scale your personalized video marketing strategy

As you grow, you might think personalization becomes more difficult. But with some built-in processes and automation, personalized marketing can actually be relatively easy (and cost-effective).

Both Amazon and Netflix are simple examples about personalization done on a large scale. Both platforms are huge, but when you log in to your account, they feel small. You see what Amazon and Netflix, from analyzing your data, thinks you want to see.

The main requirement is data. Leveraging the data you have can help create marketing automation processes where your videos are personalized.

If you think you don’t have enough data you’re overlooking some easy wins.

Even if all you have is what your customer purchased, that’s still enough data to personalize your video marketing efforts. Now you can send videos or post videos catered to customers who already have your product.

Your video won’t start now with a generic intro, it’ll start by affirming that this video is for current owners of your product. That’s personalization.

When you scale your video marketing efforts, you’ll have more data to use but the process is the same.

How about personalized video marketing on a budget?

First, yes, let’s address the elephant in the room: Video marketing can be expensive. It can be very, very expensive. If you’re talking about hiring a film crew, doing takes, getting edits done. You’re talking a minimal investment of $10,000.

For small businesses who are used to running on a tight ad budget, that may seem like a deal-breaker.

But it’s actually easier to do personalized video marketing on a small budget than the broader video marketing because you’re leveraging the information you have to create a personalized video.

Plus, it’s important to remember 66% of video marketers report getting more qualified leads thanks to video, while 88% of video marketers are happy with the ROI from using video in their social media marketing.

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By creating a personalized video, you connect to your target audience quicker and cheaper.

Here are two big tips to help.

Storyboard your idea before you film anything.

No matter if you’re filming the video yourself on your iPhone (and yes, that’s a legitimate possibility thanks to ever-advancing smartphone technology) or hiring a crew to film it for you. You want to play your video down to the smallest detail before anyone hits record.

Consider avoiding live-action.

Live-action is a little more difficult to accomplish on a budget because live-action doesn’t do well with templates or ready-made graphics. It’s easier to make video on a budget if you’re doing a screencast video or a text video over images. Live-action videos, on the other hand, require more edits (more time), better audio, and can look very amateurish if not done well.

Boost engagement with personalized video marketing

We hope this guide on using personalized video marketing in your digital marketing strategies was helpful. Personalized video marketing isn’t reinventing the wheel—it’s simply making it more effective. As we’ve seen in this post, more people are consuming content via video. This can be from Instagram Live stories or Facebook Ads or product demos. Both traditional consumers and B2B customers are starting to prefer video content to text or basic image content.

So there really isn’t (so far, at least) an argument against having a strong video marketing strategy. Personalized video marketing can be laid upon your digital marketing strategies to help increase engagement.