Personalized sales videos: the key to improve your business

Summary

Sales processes always start by listening to and getting to know the customer: this is the basis for effective tailor-made communication, even for B2B marketing. Thanks to digital transformation, this can be applied to large numbers with unprecedented efficiency and effectiveness. The starting point is the collection of data: from these digital traces, salespeople can reconstruct the personality, behavior and desires of the individuals with whom they interact.

The end point is to design the right communications for each of these people. There is nothing more effective than personalized sales videos, which combine the great communicative power of video with the boost of personalization.

In this post, let’s see what they are, how they work, and why they bring huge benefits for your business.

Introduction

We’ve dedicated an entire series of posts on our blog to the topic of sales videos, a crucial tool, especially for B2B marketing.

We started from the basics and definitions: sales videos are communications built to facilitate the sales process. They are typically sent by the individual salesperson (or the sales team) to a potential customer with whom they aim to build a relationship or to an actual customer with the goal of achieving better retention, or to proceed to up-selling or cross-selling operations. We analyzed the effectiveness of sales videos and provided you with some tips and best practices for calibrating them to the best of your ability.

Collecting data on your audience, establishing a dialogue that creates loyalty, calibrating your strategies over time, are just some of the fundamental aspects of an effective marketing strategy.

There is one key word that has come up often, in the path traced by these articles: personalization.

Well, now we’re ready to dive totally into this topic. In the next sections, we’ll directly address the topic of personalized sales video. We’ll start by talking about data, the basic requirement without which there can be no personalization. Then we’ll look at some numbers that demonstrate the power of personalized marketing. In conclusion, we’ll explain how personalized sales videos are built and how they actually work.

The importance of data…it’s not just a question of quantity

How many times have you heard it said that Big Data is the “oil of the digital age,” the “real asset of every company of the present”…well, these are true, unquestionable statements: but too often they are flaunted and repeated as simple slogans.

We want to go further and we want to strongly emphasize this: when we talk about data, it’s not only the quantity that counts, but above all the quality and the “depth.” And we can’t confine ourselves only to the numbers and cold information: the ultimate goal is always people, both in B2C and B2B. To put it another way: data is a means, not the end.

In marketing, therefore, Big Data must be the compass by which to orient ourselves. It represents the digital traces that allow us to know the recipients of our messages and campaigns in greater depth. And, as a result, it allows us to package our strategies in an increasingly tailored, more effective, winning way. Let’s look at these very telling statistics:

• For 64% of marketing leaders, data-driven strategies are vital to today’s business (invespcro.com).
• For two-thirds of marketers, decisions made based on data are far more effective than those made based on intuition (thinkwithgoogle.com).
• And 76% of marketers base their decisions on data analytics processes (gartner.com).

No further commentary on this is needed. But, at this point, it’s critical to ask a question: how many types of data exist? Many. But it may be useful to start with these macro-categories:

• Demographic Data: everything related to age, gender, marital status, employment, and income.
• Psychographic Data: behaviors, beliefs, values, interests, and lifestyles of people that can be inferred from their online data.
• Geographic Data: here we are in the area of geolocation. This is a fundamental theme, especially for some types of business and for proximity marketing.
• Behavioral Data: data based on users’ web surfing behaviors, extracted from “cookies.”
• Contextual Data: a large field that concerns the context around a user or a customer; from news, to sentiment, to market fluctuations, to geopolitics.
• First Party Data: the data that a company collects directly from its users and customers, through CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and CCM systems for example.

When it comes to personalized sales videos, you need to pay close attention to the latter category. As we have already written, sales videos are typically forms of communication that help us carry on a direct relationship with customers, one that is aimed at sales, but also at loyalty. So, it’s a matter of being able to communicate with one recipient at a time, in a tailored, one-to-one, but also automated way.

In short, thanks to first party data that has been properly collected and organized in CRM systems and integrated with all other types of data, the transition from data-driven to true personalization takes place. We will continue on this point in the next section.

The power of personalization and video, in numbers

A one-size-fits-all message will never have the strength and effectiveness of a one-to-one dialog. The best salespeople have always known this. They know that every sales process is always the result of a preliminary phase of listening, of getting to know each other and of mutual trust.

Unlike in the past, however, the companies of the digital era have an enormous challenge in front of them: that of carrying on many communications simultaneously, with a large number of different recipients, and most of which are at a great distance away. The question, then, is this: how do we avoid losing “proximity” in this kind of ecosystem?

The answer comes from personalized CCM (Customer Communication Management) systems, within which personalized sales video occupies the primary role.

Now, let’s take a look at some statistics. We’ll start with two surveys on the video tool; one focused on the customer side, the other on the marketer side:

• When it comes to getting information about a product or service, 69% of customers say they prefer a short video. Only 18% prefer a text-based article, and just 2% prefer a phone call (wyzowl.com).
• 78% of marketers said video directly helped increase sales (wyzowl.com).

And now let’s move on to personalization:

• Through personalization, you can reduce acquisition costs by up to 50%, increase average revenue by 5 to 15%, and improve the efficiency of marketing expenses by 10 to 30% (adweek.com).
• 79% of companies that have met and exceeded revenue goals have a documented personalized marketing strategy (netcorecloud.com).
• A recent study by Gartner found that digital companies that use personalization systems increase their profits by an average of 15% more than others (gartner.com).

Finally, let’s tighten the circle on these significant findings about this important tool:

• Personalized videos grab the attention of viewers 35% more than standard videos (hubspot.com).
• People who watch a personalized video are 40% more likely to purchase a product and service than those who receive a generic video campaign (webeo.com)
• There was an 8-fold improvement in click-through rate for campaigns that used personalized video (qoboweb.com).

We think there’s no need for further commentary: these numbers speak for themselves and they all point in exactly the same direction! In conclusion, in the last section, let’s see how personalized sales videos are built and how they work.

Personalized sales videos – What they are and how they work

We have seen, with personalization, the target of video marketing campaigns becomes the individual with his unique and unrepeatable characteristics, behaviors, and desires. These characteristics, behaviors, and desires are reconstructed from data, and this data is stored and organized in CRM and CCM systems.

This is where the creation of personalized sales videos starts, and specialized platforms like Babelee make this possible.

Every single recipient receives a different communication, in an automated way. There are many distribution channels: from email to social media, from company websites to dedicated apps. The perspective, in short, is omnichannel. And of course it is optimized for all types of devices to a maximum degree.

Not only are Babelee’s personalized sales videos designed based on the recipient’s characteristics and “history,” they adapt to the navigation choices of each individual user in real time. Babelee videos are also interactive.

And thanks to interactivity, the communication process leading up to the sale becomes bi-directional, transforming itself into a fruitful opportunity for exchange, a real dialog between company and customer. The perspective is therefore win-win, with enormous advantages on both sides. This is the data-telling revolution, applied to B2B marketing!

Babelee

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