Personalized video for lead nurturing

Table of contents

Summary

Nurturing” is about “taking care of, protecting while growing” and “helping and encouraging development”. In this article, we will talk about the importance of lead nurturing video.

What is lead nurturing? 

In marketing, lead nurturing is the process of developing and strengthening relationships with your contacts at every stage of the buying process. We have already talked about how effective is online video marketing, 5 challenges of video marketing and 5 video marketing mistakes to avoid.

If, as statistics indicate, about half of a company’s contacts are not ready to make a purchase (source: Marketo), a lead nurturing strategy can help guide a potential customer from awareness to conversion through the buyer journey. 

In fact, a soft, yet strategic approach is one of the best ways to bring leads closer to a company’s products or services while maintaining a tone and style that is relevant to your positioning. 

Effective lead nurturing succeeds in cultivating relationships between the company and its prospects and, at the same time, provides useful information to contacts by sending them marketing materials that will be of interest to them. 

To succeed, companies must focus their marketing and communication efforts on listening their prospective customers, giving them the answers they need to increase brand awareness, and establishing a connection until they’re ready to make a purchase. 

By classifying leads according to their position in the buyer journey, it will be much easier to send them relevant content when they need it. 

Implementing effective lead nurturing activities, however, requires appropriate tools, such as marketing automation and new marketing strategies that enable innovative digital experiences, such as the use of personalized lead nurturing videos. 

What is Marketing Automation? 

Marketing automation refers to the use of technologies and methodologies that automate marketing activities. 

Many companies using marketing automation to fulfill repetitive tasks such as email marketing, social media posting, and advertising campaigns, with the goal of creating continuity in communications between the company and its potential customers. 

Let’s look at the data:  

• Compared to 39% of marketers in 2021, 44% now use automation for social media management (source: Ascend2 and Research Partners). 
• The number of marketers using automation for content management increased from 22% in 2021 to 29% in 2022 (source: Ascend2 and Research Partners) 
• The top three reasons for implementing marketing automation are the following: marketing and sales efforts (35%), improving customer engagement (34%), and improving customer experience (34%) (source: Ascend2 and Research Partners). 

Automating marketing processes not only increases productivity, but it can also provide a personalized customer experience. In fact, marketing automation can deliver the right content, to the right person, at the right time. 

A type of content that is carving out an increasingly important role is video, which, according to Cisco, drives 84% of web traffic. That’s why it will be increasingly important to integrate video into your lead nurturing activities. 

People who watch demonstration videos are 1.81 times more likely to complete a purchase (source: G2Crwod), and because of this, videos have become the preferred medium for companies to promote their products in recent years. 

What is Video Marketing?

Before buying a product, consumers are accustomed to watching videos: tutorial and explainer videos, video reviews, the company’s own product videos, and even video presentations, where companies introduce their team or show their work environment to create a connection with customers or potential employees. 

Let’s look at some data:  

• 86% of companies use video as a marketing tool (source: Wyzowl). 
• The average person spends 100 minutes a day watching videos online in 2022 (source: Smart Insights). 
• 94% of video marketers say video has helped users understand their product or service (source: Wyzowl). 
• More than 55% of shoppers globally say they use online video while shopping in store (source: Think with Google). 
• 76% say using videos in the lead nurturing process helped them increase sales. 

There is no doubt which format is the best to help persuade, engage, and get the word out about your company. 

Videos in Lead Nurturing

Integrating lead nurturing video processes through marketing automation also allows you to analyze if your leads are engaging with the content. 

You can include calls to action within the video that prompt recipients to learn more by downloading a piece of content, signing up for an event or newsletter. 

Analyzing the behavior of those who watched the lead nurturing video and who shared it is useful to better understand the degree of conversion and whether or not the video was successful. You’ll then be able to take this data into consideration for subsequent activities. 

For example, you can include video in an email marketing strategy to make messages more inspiring and achieve higher engagement. In fact, emails that contain videos lead to a 200-300% increase in the click-through rate (source: Forbes). 

Another use for videos could be to promote the link to certain landing pages via an email marketing campaign. According to a study by Eyeview, including a video your landing pages can increase conversions by 80%. 

In general, it’s always best to follow a couple of simple rules when you include videos in your marketing processes. The ideal video should be short enough to capture the user’s attention in just a few seconds (and before they leave the page). Related: make sure that your loading speed is fast enough to keep visitors on the page. 

We also recommend placing your video at the top of the page, i.e. “above the fold”, in order to capture the attention of those browsing your page so they will be motivated to fill out a form or follow the call to action, which may be within the video itself. 

The lead nurturing video should not distract attention away from the form or the main content of the page, and therefore should not contain too much text or take up all the space on the page. 

If customers remember your lead nurturing video, they will also remember your brand, which will have a positive effect on your brand image. This, in turn will result in an increase in consumer awareness, and an increase in leads and therefore in revenue for the company. 

It’s also important that your videos are creative enough to stand out. Given that we are bombarded with so many types of information, including videos, that compete for our attention, make sure your videos are able to really capture your viewers’ attention and create engagement. One method of doing this is to use personalized videos for each individual user. 

The benefits of personalized videos 

In personalized lead nurturing videos, you can use the recipient’s data to modifying the content, allowing you to create dynamic scenes with customized text elements and thus a unique narrative. 

Another advantage of personalized videos is that you can create an unlimited number of videos, all with the same personalization capability. In fact, you can send the video with the same layout and graphics to thousands of people, but have each recipient receive a personalized video with their own information so that each one appears to be custom built for the individual. 

In addition, adopting marketing automation technologies for lead nurturing activities allows you to distribute the video to your contacts at just the right moment in the customer journey. 

If you choose to integrate personalization with interactivity, then it will be easy to increase conversions by inserting calls to action, pop-ups, or forms directly within the video. 

Conclusion 

Numerous studies have proven the effectiveness of lead nurturing videos in conveying messages and their great power of persuasion, and today, users experience videos everywhere. As a result, they expect to find videos in companies’ marketing strategies. 

Obviously, given the endless amount of video content on the web, it is necessary to create impressive content that allows users to stand out from the crowd.

Personalized videos are the solution. They offer a high conversion rate, they succeed over other types of content in capturing the customer’s attention, and they ensure one-to-one communication by putting the recipient at the center of the narrative. Here, the ultimate goal is establishing a deeper, more like-minded relationship with potential customers. 

As a final consideration, a relationship of trust must be created between the company and its leads in order to be successful in lead nurturing. 

To ensure this, it takes a perfect synergy between marketing automation and inbound marketing activities by creating ad hoc content that reflects the needs of potential customers and, above all, using these channels and tools to address any doubts that might dissuade a customer from buying your product or service.