Inside Marketing: An interview with Francesco Compiani, Babelee Product Manager

One of the few companies in Italy to offer this service, Babelee is a technology platform for creating data-driven video, which helps organizations achieve their marketing and communication goals in a personalized, measurable, and sustainable way.

Francesco Compiani, Product Manager at Babelee, will explore these topics in an interview with Roberta D’Antonio. Read or watch the interview for tips on using data-driven video, the features a platform needs to be effective, and learn about all the benefits.

The Inside Marketing interview

How can data-driven video benefit companies, and specifically, what are the main areas where this content can be applied to support business growth?

Francesco: We have been seeing today’s trends for a few years now. On the one hand, the double-digit growth of online video content consumption and Audiweb, comScore, etc., and on the other, the need for companies to build, generate, and orchestrate communications that are really personalized and interest-based on the behavior of their customers.

Personalized video basically fits into this context and makes it possible to produce videos that have precisely the characteristic of being based on customer data or at least on data. And this makes it possible to generate communications that have the power and effectiveness of the video format as well as the characteristic of having precisely personalized content within the video that is based on the data present, within a CRM or marketing automation system, for example.

This makes it possible to make all the touch points of the customer journey more effective, from Lead Nurturing, to Onboarding, to Upselling, to Contract Renewal, and integration with Customer Cares. And therefore, it makes it possible to transform and enhance the touch points of a Customer Journey that are typically managed with digital or traditional communications into really effective communications that can create stable and lasting relationships with their customers.

What features should a good data-driven video creation platform have, and what advantages does the Babelee data-driven video platform offer?

Francesco: Our platform, Babelee, basically has two features from the point of view of product functionality. The first feature is that it is able to precisely build and generate videos based on the personalization data of each individual customer that the video reaches. This is possible because the platform has hundreds and hundreds of Templates that can be customized, both in the assets and communication layers and also with the integrations with databases, which then allow the generation of the personalized video, or by uploading some of the footage or externally made videos.

For example, consider a web agency or a communications agency that creates a video for a commercial that will run on television or perhaps online. Here, that same video can be imported into the platform and easily personalized with integrations with CRMs or marketing automation systems. On the other hand, another main feature of Babelee is that it enables the generation of videos that aren’t just personalized, but also have elements of interactivity.

This allows us to be very effective in terms of funnel conversion, where we place the personalized video. To answer your question Roberta, the feature that today’s platform must have, basically is ease of use. This is for two reasons, because if we refer to a market, I’m thinking of the agency market that already produces videos off the platform, for example.

As I said before, maybe it generates a commercial or creates its own advertising or for a client in the platform, the creative, the videomaker, or the video scientist can easily use that content in a very streamlined way and combine it with the personalization elements and data. In the same way, a  freelancer has to be able to use it in a very easy way, so it has to be accessible to people who don’t have special skills. So in this case, the ease of use and the intuitiveness of the interface is a very important asset from our point of view.

In which industries have you found the greatest demand for this content?

Francesco: Today, we have more than 400 operational use cases to our credit today, in different contexts, different industries that have decided to use video instead of traditional communications, so instead of a DEM in the digital world, but even instead of a classic letter or a classic transactional PDF. The insurance world, for example, uses personalized video to replace classic insurance policy renewal letters. Because video allows you to be much more caring in an explanation in the offer, it allows you to renew with one click, it allows you to call the agency just by clicking a button within the video, so there is really an enhancement of that specific touchpoint. 

The areas really are very diverse. Babelee operates and serves brands and communication agencies, because communication agencies are the main market for Babelee. Because Babelee becomes a value for the communications agency that can bring clearly innovative technology into its portfolio products and services, we are the most diverse, in the sense that we operate in the world of utilities, in the world of insurance, and also in banking. 

We have interesting use cases in banking. The nonprofit is a sector that is deriving a lot of value from converting the classic paper DM to personalized video on different parts of the database or at any rate of more evolved donor-conscious customers. Fashion and therefore high-end retail, sees personalized video as an element of communication to strengthen the relationship with the brand and its customers. Personalization, in addition to the emotional video content, plays a key role. Another Babelee feature is also very important: it is very easy to integrate with the application map of the customer and therefore the brand.  

This is a value for the brand itself, but it is also a value for the agencies, because they can connect with simple connectors, basically the platform to a CRM system, to a marketing automation system, to an email campaign system, and this is very important because at that point, the video personalizes becomes part of the very application map of the company’s software and application ecosystem. This clearly facilitates the management of touchpoints along the customer journey and in the case of agencies, which are the main market for Babelee, it also greatly facilitates the levels of integration with the customer, which become really trivial.

Babelee

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