Video Marketing: How to Humanize Your Brand with Personalized Videos

People love watching videos, be it for entertainment, learning about a product, or in general consuming information.  96% of people prefer watching a short video to learn more about a product or service as compared to reading text-based content. 

Videos are so powerful that they influenced 80% of people to download or buy a piece of software after watching an online video about it. This makes them one of the high-performing content types, most widely used by marketers. 

This means people watch explainer videos, testimonials, product demos, and even promotional videos to learn more about a brand. Your marketing needs to cut through the noise and stand out from competitors. A great way to do so is by humanizing your marketing with personalized video marketing. 

After all, 82% of customers expect human interactions from brands. They want brands to recognize them as individuals and provide relevant offers and recommendations. If you need more proof about the payoff of personalizing consumer interactions, the same study reveals that users are happy to pay a premium price on products and services that make them feel valued by using personalization. Another benefit of personalized marketing is improved loyalty.  

Regardless of the fact that you are in the B2C or B2B industry, you need to add personalized videos to your digital marketing arsenal. That ranges from B2B SaaS, enterprise software, agencies to an eCommerce business. 

Let’s start with understanding what is a personalized video before going into the details of how it can humanize your marketing campaigns and your brand. 

What Is Video Personalization in Marketing? 

Video personalization involves customizing the video content to each of your audience groups, ranging from customers, and prospects to influencers. There are multiple elements in the video that can be customized, including the viewer’s name, designation, and company name. 

This is an important part of a broader customer targeting strategy that is intended to gel and connect with people efficiently and consistently. A video campaign that’s bespoke will hit home with individuals and niche audiences, whereas a generic or overly broad equivalent simply cannot stand toe to toe in the same way.

Companies use data from their CRM software, in-house data sources such as customer feedback forms, and analytics accounts to market a video to a particular customer group. 

It can be as simple as creating a seasonal greeting video with the customers’ names. Or listing at the beginning of the video, “This video was created specifically for {client’s name}.” When you personalize the introduction, the remaining video feels personal, too. 

Personalized video marketing allows you to reach out to several people with the same video while giving them a feeling that it was created exclusively for them.  

Facebook’s “Year in Review” is a well-known example of personalized video marketing. The video highlights recaps from the user’s profile including photos, number of friends made, and important events.  

Your customers are looking for something beyond the run-of-the-mill and personalized videos can help you ace your marketing game. In short, personalized videos help you stand out. 

Advantages of Using Personalized Videos in Your Marketing Campaign

Over 93% of internet users complain that they do not receive relevant marketing and communication. The same percentage of people find irrelevant messaging annoying. 

On the other hand, brands that used personalized videos noted an 8X improvement in their click-through rates compared to standard outbound email campaigns. 

The plausible reason why personalized videos give excellent results in a digital marketing strategy is that they combine two popular concepts “personalized marketing” and overall “video marketing strategy.” 

While videos are the most popular form of content consumption, using personalized elements taps into the viewer’s desire to be acknowledged. And doing so through video intrigues them. 

Adding to that, many people will watch the entire video to see when the personalization pops up again. This is a great reason why personalized videos increase engagement, conversion, and click-through rates. 

Types of Personalized Videos for Your Business 

The truth is that your audience gets cold pitches daily, be it through calls, email blasts, or retargeted ads. 

Personalized video marketing uses customer data relevant to each individual or segment of your target audience. The viewer feels that you created the video specifically for them, thereby building a stronger relationship. The result is a shorter and more efficient sales cycle with better brand affinity and loyalty. 

A major benefit of personalized videos is that it can be used as a content repurposing strategy to boost traffic and engagement with minimal effort. 

Here are some personalized video marketing ideas to power your B2B marketing, garner the viewer’s attention, and lead to conversions. 

#1. Event Invites  

Taking inspiration from the event invite sent by Marketo for their Marketing Nation Summit. 

Marketo’s personalized video for their event Marketing Nation Summit. 

They saw a 36% increase in open rates by using personalized video marketing to invite attendees. 

You can use video personalization not just for an event but also for webinars, tutorials, and product launches. You can use this type of content to tell your brand story in an engaging way, to get more event signups. 

#2. Promotion Videos  

Promotional videos are an integral part of your B2B marketing strategy. They talk directly to the customer or prospect, explaining why that brand stands out. Typically, businesses use them to show a prospect how their services can help. 

The B2B video marketing strategy, when personalized, enables you to engage with your audience over an effective platform such as email, allows you to educate your prospects through product demos, adds social proof to your product or service in the form of customer testimonials and provides webinars to speed up the buyer’s decision-making process.

As a majority of us prefer to watch videos to learn the working of a product, it is an excellent reason to use personalized videos for brand promotions. 

#3.  Holiday Greetings  

Holidays are a perfect occasion to build a strong relationship with your audience. You can use a personalized business holiday greeting to show them your appreciation for staying loyal to your business. 

That being said, along with reaching out to your customers in the holiday season, other special days such as birthdays and anniversaries are excellent opportunities to use personalized videos with the help of a birthday video maker to get customers to make a purchase. Keep the message personal and short. 

Even small details such as personalizing the viewer’s name in a seasonal greeting video can promote brand loyalty. 

#4. Case Study Videos 

Traditionally, case studies have been long and boring. When you convert a case study into a video, you can win over the prospective customer’s attention. 

The testimonial case study videos could be a compilation of user benefits, sharing a success story, and getting into the specifics of how your product or service has a positive impact on the user’s bottom line. 

Case study videos are a form of product marketing content for sales enablement because they are real-life examples of how a customer implemented your product or service and benefited from it. 

#5. Product Explainer Videos 

Explainer videos visualize how a problem can be resolved instantly. Instead of reading articles to understand the work, a few minutes of a product video is self-explanatory. 

For example, if your product working is complex, using personalized explainer videos to explain the product would result in higher customer engagement. The additional upside is that the same videos help in customer service.  

#6. Thank You Notes 

Once a user signs up for your product or service, why not send a series of personalized thank-you messages as a part of your B2B lead generation strategy? 

In the first thank you video, you introduce your business by mentioning the customer’s name, logo, designation, or location. Use this as an opportunity to treat the new customer as an individual.

The second follow-up video could be variable, depending on what you sell. If it is a SaaS product, this video could introduce the account manager. In the case of a financial service, the video could talk about the frequently asked questions. 

#7. Email Marketing Campaigns 

Capitalize on the fact that adding videos to your emails can boost the CTR by as much as 300%. Personalized videos in the email body can be used for upselling, cross-selling, and post-purchase email marketing campaigns. 

In your newsletter, consider including demo videos along with personalizing the user’s name and the products they purchase. Leverage the benefit of increased engagement and higher click-through rates using personalized video marketing. 

#8. Customize Your Content Marketing 

Let’s assume you have created an in-depth report, whitepaper, or checklist as a part of your content marketing strategy. Now it is time to promote your content by amplifying your efforts through a personalized experience on email and social media using a landing page. 

One low-budget social media marketing tip is to create personalized posts targeted toward a specific audience you think would download your lead magnet. That way, you can use social media to collect new leads for your business. 

#9. New Product Feature Announcement 

Suppose you’ve launched a new product feature. You can make a short video explaining the new improvement or feature and share it with your audience. Instead of sending a generic message, you can personalize the message. 

The personalization template could be: 

“Hi {Name}, 

You’ve asked us for {an awesome new feature}. Great news – we have launched it today. We are hoping it will boost the bottom line for {company}. 

Here are the features, video, screenshots, and supporting articles.”

If you are an agency, you could use personalization in your video marketing strategy to announce your rebranding or new content launch. 

Let’s take the example of Adaptify, a digital marketing agency. They could regularly send videos to their email subscribers about their new blog posts or whitepapers. 

With email still being one of the most effective digital marketing strategies, using newsletters to announce new content that would otherwise go unnoticed by the leads and clients is a great strategy to boost conversions. 

#10. Recruiting Top Talent on LinkedIn 

Most probably, your potential hires would be on LinkedIn. If you are looking to hire, LinkedIn is the best place to showcase how awesome your company is to work with. When you are inviting them for an interview, consider sending them a personalized video with the workspace, or team introduction. Think of different ways to help the potential candidates envision the place or the company environment. 

There are endless ways you can personalize your marketing campaign to add a human touch. You could start with email newsletters, video blogs, social media posts, webinars to online events. 

How Do You Make a Personalized Video? 

A video personalization tool allows you to enter the information in fields that can be customized. Based on your industry, they have templates to add the data from your CRM and personalize marketing campaigns at scale. 

InVideo is a simple video editing platform for creating online videos. The highly engaging videos help you grow your business, announce your event, create explainer videos and product demos and introduce your team members. 

Using InVideo, you can import data from your CRM to create a personalized video marketing campaign. Be it editing videos for social media, presentations, websites, or event invitations, you can choose from a library of templates

How to Humanize Your Marketing at Scale with Personalized Videos? 

Don’t get overwhelmed by thinking that personalization becomes difficult. In fact, with automation, personalized marketing is easy and cost-effective. 

Leverage the data you collect through your CRM to create marketing automation processes where your videos can be personalized. 

This data can be as simple as the customer’s name registered when they purchased your product. When you send your video addressing the viewer by their name, it affirms that the video is not generic and is specifically for them. That is personalization. 

To scale your marketing needs, the same video can be sent to multiple leads. Using variable data points such as name, gender, location, and so on, the same video can be personalized for each viewer. 

Remember to follow these 6 tips while creating a personalized video aimed to humanize your marketing campaign. 

#1. Welcome Your Leads with Personalized Videos 

Your onboarding email video must be persuasive enough to engage the viewer. The video should convey that the product helps in overcoming their challenges. 

Here’s an example of video personalization platform Hippo Video’s template for welcoming leads with personalized videos. 

Ideally, even the first email should prompt them to learn more about you, schedule a meeting, or demo by introducing your brand with a personalized video. Make sure your video ends with an actionable CTA so that you can get the viewer to take the next action. 

#2. Nurture Prospects with Personalized Follow-Ups 

Rather than sending a long plain text email describing why you are the right fit for the customer, nurture the prospect with a personalized video in continuation with the welcome email. 

You can try out different kinds of videos to figure out what strikes the right chord with the customer. 

Keep in mind that the readers are busy and might not have the patience and time to watch a long video. As an email marketing best practice convey the most important message in the first 10 seconds without beating around the bush.  

#3. Build Trust by Introducing Your Team 

When customers see real people from a brand interacting with them, they get keener to make the purchase. A human touch creates a personalized experience that can significantly improve your deal closing rate. 

It is interesting to know that using videos in outbound processes leads to a 20% increase in closed deals on getting personalized videos. Instilling trust by setting up a virtual meeting goes a long way in building personal relationships with the client.  

#4. Place Your CTA Strategically 

The most effective videos end with a clear CTA that informs the prospect of what to do next. Place the CTA prominently such that it does not go unnoticed. 

#5. Have a Strong Thumbnail 

Your thumbnail should speak for the video and allure the subscriber into hitting the “Play” button. If you have created an interesting video, but the thumbnail does not reflect that, your efforts would go in vain. Creating an attractive thumbnail for your video can increase the click-through rate by 15%. One way to create an eye-catching thumbnail without breaking the bank is by using a free YouTube thumbnail maker. 

#6. Keep an Eye on the Video’s Loading Time  

Whether your marketing team is using the video on the landing page or email, ensure that it does not affect the loading time. Slow loading time can turn off your customers and, in the worst scenario, make them switch to your competitors. Therefore, make it a point to compress the video to load within 2 seconds. 

Conclusion 

Your marketing team can send out personalized videos based on the stage of the buyer persona and journey. Additional segmentation variables age, geographic location, purchase intent, past purchases, and products or services they are interested in. 

A strong personalized video marketing strategy doesn’t mean that you reinvent the wheel. It simply means making marketing more effective by humanizing it. 

To increase your personalized video marketing engagement, monitor metrics related to the video, be it the number of views, response rate, click-through rate, and conversions.