Personalizing the buyer’s journey should be a top ranking goal for every marketer. Buyer’s expectations have changed dramatically and they now expect brands to understand who they are and what they care about even if they are anonymous. To market effectively a certain set of real-time personalization tools are needed. In this article I will provide information on tools and strategy needed to be successful with video personalization.
Personalization is the act of identifying a person’s relevant attributes including intent, potential, behavior, and profile to customize an online experience by presenting only the most relevant content, and calls-to-actions at the right time in the buying cycle. Whether you are a B2B or B2C marketer, video personalization is for you. And, incorporating personalized video into your marketing strategy will create more meaningful interactions with prospects both known and anonymous by serving them the right content at the right time. You can expect personalized video to help your marketing department better educate and nurture “top-of-funnel prospects” or those in the awareness state, driving them further into the sales cycle and creating lower cost/higher quality engagements. Best of all, this can all be done by leveraging existing content so you don’t need a large budget to get started.
To start personalizing video experiences you will need to understand the Who, What, and Where of your audience. The “Who” is your target audience defined by a combination of key attributes. B2B marketers should focus on company name, vertical, size, revenue, and digital body language. B2C marketers personalize content based on the buyer journey, geo-location, product interest, price sensitivity, and buying history.
It’s not likely that every audience type that interacts with your brand and website can be identified. Focus on a few key audience personas like CMOs of food and beverage companies, as an example. You should also take into consideration that the “Who” may include your target CMO but at a specific step in the buyer’s journey.
Once you know who you are targeting, you should next start mapping the video content related to the specific personas you want to personalize an experience for. If you have a large existing video library start there before creating new content which can be costly. Personalization does not have to be related to the production of the content but can also be the call-to-actions related to it, such as an in-video link, offer, or something on the page level next to the video player.
Pair your videos with case studies, blog posts, ebooks, and whitepapers. You decide what’s best for your audience. If you are using the same video for multiple personas you can develop multiple CTAs for each — that’s personalization. As another example, the CMO of a food and beverage company might see a particular CTA at the end of your video, while the CMO of a clothing brand might see something different on the same video.
Video might not always be the best form of content to engage prospects with and you should consider different experiences depending
on the audience you are marketing to. For B2B prospects, deliver content relevant to the particular vertical, organization, or location. In B2C cases offer personalized web experiences (that include video) based on product offers, location, or price sensitivity. Regardless, the goal is for your audience to receive the most relevant content. Test this by picking high profile or common target personas.
To know which content your audience is consuming leverage a marketing automation platform or recommendation engine. These types of tools automatically track a web visitor’s page and video viewing history and can help with serving website content relevant to your personas. Engaging your audience on your website works best because prospects are engaged, attentive, and interested in learning more about your organization and products/services. For most marketers a majority of their web traffic and video viewership is unknown or anonymous, but a website or video is a great first step for identifying company, industry, location, and digital body language.
Video personalization should play a key role in successful marketing strategies. To learn more about different types of video personalization read this article. Marketing automation is also a key ingredient for success; learn more about how video and marketing automation work together here.
The post How To Integrate Video Into Your Personalization Strategy appeared first on Video Marketing Strategy, Software, Pricing & Reviews.