Everything you need to know about personalized video

Summary

Personalized video represents the convergence of two closely related trends, both of which are extremely important: digitization and personalization. With the emergence of a consumer status characterized by the ease of use of new communication tools and the greater ability to participate in conversation with the brand, companies are forced to adopt innovative tools to intercept needs, desires, and urgencies. The development of advanced systems for managing and interpreting data enables extraordinarily effective one-to-one communication, of which personalized videos represent the most complete form. Thanks to personalized video, organizations of any type and size can create truly valuable relationships and improve their business results.

Personalized video was born at a moment of convergence between two trends, both of which are destined to dramatically transform the relationship between brands and consumers and require organizations to rethink their organizational and business philosophy: from the adoption of a bidirectional approach to communication with their audiences to the shift towards fully customer-centric modes of interaction.

The first of these trends is technological, and it produces deep and irreversible cultural, social, and economic consequences: it is digitalization, which will have an irresistible development in the design of advanced systems for the collection, modeling, and analysis of data.

The second trend concerns the complex of practices, psychological motivations, and values that we now identify with the phenomenon of personalization.

It is by implementing personalization throughout the journey that brands can build richer and more relevant experiences for their customers.

Digitalization enables a new brand experience

Beyond its revolutionary scope in the strictly technological sphere, digitization enables a new experiential dimension where the virtual is gradually integrated with the physical, to some extent freed from the limits of time and geography.

As a result of the mass diffusion of digital resources, consumers are beginning to seek the same freedom and flexibility in their purchasing habits that they have experienced in other contexts (for example, on social platforms).

Today, customers expect that the increase in the number and types of touchpoints (including online, increasingly) will result in their needs being satisfied, including needs that are linked to self representation.

On the company side, if the volume of available information coming from a variety of sources, in different formats (video, web series, surveys, social sharing, mobile apps, social) increases exponentially (consider that 90% of the data available today was created only in the last two years), digital tools can succeed in providing a meaningful reading of that same data, collecting it, selecting it, and interpreting it according to precise objectives, in order to develop products that are able to gain the trust – and hopefully the loyalty – of consumers.

Personalization: from data to insight

With the mass adoption of new technologies, the media environment is opening up to personalization, and this is not a cautious advance but a progressive, unstoppable colonization. Consumers are gradually becoming aware of their enhanced status with respect to the brand.

Not only are they demanding to be heard, they also want to be known, really known. It is no longer acceptable to be confused in a vague demographic segment. Today’s customers are much more than their personal details or their spending capacity, and to reach them and convince them to stay, other insights must be extracted from their data: personal tastes, desires, idiosyncrasies, consumption habits, preferred touchpoints, etc..

Personalization is the result of an epochal shift: from the typical broadcasting of “old media” in a one-to-many mode and from top to bottom, i.e. from the brand to the consumer to the new paradigm of co-creation and participation.

This paradigm inverts the sense and multiplies the directions: from an audience of spectators, whose only response, binary, is to listen or not to listen and to buy or not to buy, to a community of people who can make themselves heard as never before (and can actually be heard), confident that their distinctive voice will resonate within the dialog with the brand.

To be able to read such a complex reality and translate it into creative formats that are able to create connections between brands and consumers today, companies need tools with specific qualities, which must:

• Be developed with the most advanced web technology.
• Allow personalization and interactivity
• Be fully bi-directional, multi-channel, measurable.
• Be able to extract value from huge volumes of data.

The most advantageous solution? Personalized videos!

Among the most advantageous solutions with these features, which are necessary to allow the transition from broadcasting to participatory and personalized communication, we have personalized videos.

This is an increasingly popular choice among companies and agencies that can take advantage of such a flexible and effective format, along the entire customer journey.

With personalized video, information becomes so useful and meaningful that it accelerates the evolution of business processes.

Personalized videos: a concrete help to companies

Statistics show that 90% of consumers are more likely to buy from a brand that knows them and is able to recognize their unique characteristics. Ideally, this is a brand that is able to provide relevant offers and advice accordingly.

Personalization fuels communication that delivers the right content to the right person, at the right time.

So, if consumers are increasingly open to personalized interactions, the most powerful communication medium in this regard is certainly video, which can create a level of fascination and emotional involvement like never before.

Incorporating personalized video as part of a communication strategy can help improve the customer experience by investing in the entire brand messaging system. There are many benefits of this approach:

• increased conversion rates,
• lasting relationships with customers,
• better understanding of the target audience,
• greater brand loyalty,
• higher ROI from marketing activities,
• more agile and efficient sales cycle.

At this point, let’s pause for a moment to describe the current situation of video content, which is understood in all its formats as a fundamental asset of content marketing.

Present and future of a format with great potential

Video, in its various forms and durations, is confirmed as one of the most used resources within the content strategy of brands and institutions.

According to the 2021 edition of the Wyzowl survey, for 93% of marketers, videos are a fundamental part of their strategy. They are a powerful tool:

• that is being used increasingly with each passing year (the number of companies using video as a marketing tool has increased 41% since 2016);
• That increases a customer’s understanding of products and services (94% of people surveyed have watched an explainer video to learn more about a product or service).

The unprecedented events of 2020 profoundly affected video supply and demand, so much so that:

• 91% of marketers believe that video has become even more important to brand communication;
• 68% of consumers say the pandemic has affected the amount of video content consumed online, and the vast majority (96%) say the amount has increased;
• 86% of video marketers say video has increased traffic to their website;
• 94% of video marketers say that video has helped increase users’ understanding of their product or service.

Video also continues to have exceptional reach: people enjoy this content online for an average of 18 hours per week (an increase of 2 hours per week from 12 months ago and an increase of more than 7 hours per week over three years) and are twice as likely to share it as any other type of content, including social media posts, blog posts and articles, and product pages.

Personalized videos: what they are, why use them, who should use them

Now, let’s return to the topic of this post: everything you need to know about personalized videos.

They are extremely agile and powerful formats where digitization and personalization converge.

A video is personalized when it relates directly to the recipient during storytelling, and when it contains information and details that are relevant and of interest to the particular user for whom it is intended. Personalization is made possible by digitization, access to data, and statistics that relate to customer profiles.

What needs do they address?

Personalized videos are successful because they meet many requirements: profiling for one, also, they incorporate interactive elements, and they can be easily distributed across multiple channels. Personalized videos also allow you to:

• Involve recipients by questioning them directly thanks to precise and punctual references;
• Acquire recipients’ data in order to complete their profile, dynamically adapt the proposed service (assistance, information request, donation method) launch surveys, or measure the effectiveness of the marketing initiatives;
• Modify the narrative path in real time, according to the different choices and interactions with different users;
• Distribute content in a multichannel approach (social media, messaging, email, app notifications, chatbot;
• Motivate and push users to action, thanks to interactive calls-to-action that are easily and immediately actionable.

And who benefits most from personalized video?

Within an organization, there are many different professions that benefit from the ability of personalized video to create more authentic relationships with stakeholders: from marketers constantly searching for new approaches and technologies to personalize content; to HR professionals committed to updating each employee’s experience in the sense of greater proximity and participation; to sales, where we have moved from an exploration phase (the digital-enabled personalization associated with traditional transactions) – to one of investment – where new tools are no longer alternatives but enrich and enhance negotiations on a regular basis.

Personalized one-to-one video: Babelee technology at work

Personalized video can refer to a group, such as a company or an industry: this is the case when a company name, a logo, or specific text is included to achieve certain communication goals. In its most evolved form, it is designed to directly address the individual.

These are one-to-one videos, which have an even greater level of personalization and can be used for completely personal customer communications.

This is where the role of the Babelee video automation platform becomes absolutely critical: when it comes to creating highly personalized videos and, impactful, carefully personalized content.

Thanks to a simplified editing process in terms of narration and the use of metadata, Babelee technology makes it possible for video to be covered in specific formats, depending on the touchpoint with which the user comes into contact during the customer journey.

Once created, personalized videos can be stored in a video library for future delivery. From existing content, they are then edited to include new information or metadata about the recipient. These features make one-to-one personalized videos usable for multiple purposes and can be easily inserted into emails and landing pages.

Leveraging video automation and sophisticated analytics processes, Babelee’s digital platform allows users to select information from corporate databases, cross-reference data and statistics in the corporate database related to individual users, define content types, initiate the automatic creation of dynamic videos, and better plan a video’s distribution.