The irresistible rise of video content in the ever-evolving landscape of digital communication is unstoppable. This is borne out by statistics over the past few years from leading trade journals and industry experts, and 2020, the dreaded year of the pandemic, is no exception.
Personalized video is making its way to the forefront, carving out a prominent role in the most successful marketing strategies. It can be seamlessly integrated into lead management projects and contribute substantially to the success of lead nurturing efforts. Personalized video, automatically inserted into marketing automation solutions and workflows, is probably the most flexible and powerful tool through which to build the customer experience that today’s consumer – elusive, demanding, disenchanted – expects.
The personalization breakthrough in digital marketing
Personalization has for some time now been The Breakthrough, the fundamental turning point (forbes.com). We can intuitively agree with this statement, just think of our daily experience as consumers. Companies that show they know us and remember us often manage to gain our attention and sometimes even our loyalty, from the trusted baker who sets aside our favorite pastry, to the big digital clothing store that celebrates our birthday by giving us a gift certificate.
In general, in digital marketing, personalization has taken on a precise meaning: it indicates the set of practices and technological resources used to collect, select, and catalogue the personal data of customers, which are then used to build targeted messages in line with their particular behaviors, needs, and preferences. It’s a trend that is likely to intensify in the near future as advances in data analytics and customer relationship management allow for increasingly sophisticated targeting of consumer experiences across multiple channels and at different stages of the customer journey.
The success of personalization: Let’s look at the data
The success of personalization is supported by significant data. Here are a few points, taken from statista.com:
- In 2019, “personalization” is named marketing word of the year by the Association of National Advertisers (ANA).
- Also in 2019, more than 763 million users worldwide were using ad blockers: plug-ins to block desktop, browser, and mobile ads. This figure looks set to grow again (albeit more slowly), so much so that over the next few years, nearly a quarter of paid ad blockers will likely never reach the audience they are made for. New ways of communicating are needed to overcome the barriers that people are forced to build in an attempt to contain the information overload to which they are subjected.
- While the share of marketing budgets devoted to personalization may vary, a recent survey showed that 33% of marketers in the United States and the United Kingdom (UK) spent more than half of their online budgets on personalization initiatives.
If we take the marketer’s perspective, personalization is both a key to understanding the reality of contemporary consumption and a conceptual framework within which to develop tactics and action plans.
- According to a recent survey, the share of business professionals using personalization in the U.S. ranges from 78% to 96%, depending on the industry. As of 2020, email is the most widely used digital marketing automation channel among all marketing automation solutions for personalized communication. No surprise here: messages delivered via email are highly customizable, easily usable, and non-invasive. The format itself allows you to address (potential) customers by name, customizing the subject line and body of the email to fit the target audience. Other lead nurturing techniques that are widely used, especially by e-commerce giants, include product suggestions, which are formulated based on search history and previous purchases.
Statista also reports that in 2020, the main benefits of personalized marketing for marketers were the ability to deliver a better customer experience and the higher conversion and engagement rates achieved.
Finally, consumers seem to prefer personalized experiences to large amounts of content, which is often perceived as excessive. No longer just a competitive advantage, but also something customers increasingly value.
- In 2019, 90% of consumers found brand messages that weren’t personally relevant, annoying.
- In contrast, a survey the following year highlighted that 65% of users purchased, at least occasionally, based on personalized shopping suggestions.
Video marketing in 2021: The state of the art
The pandemic has certainly affected both the ways in which video content is enjoyed and the choice of this content by companies. For example, the consumption of webinars has increased, which were preferred by 62% of marketers in 2020 (in 2019 the percentage was 46%) and live streaming: Linkedin live, Instagram live, TikTok, and Twitch for younger audiences. Gen Z and Millennials are increasingly at the center of brands’ communication strategies.
According to Wyzowl’s The State of Video Marketing 2021, 40% of marketers confirmed the strategic value of video, an indispensable tool to keep the relationship with consumers alive during the health crisis. The amount of video content consumed online also grew, viewed by 68% of respondents. Of those, about 96% chose to watch an explainer video to learn more about the features of a particular product or service or to find solutions to solve a problem.
Explainer videos can be very effective at conveying useful information quickly, in a flow that progresses erratically through successive conversions to the actual purchase. They tend to be more engaging than other content, and in fact about 69% of users say they prefer them to reading an article, an infographic, or searching for information on the company website. The number of users watching videos from a mobile or tablet device is also growing steadily (source: Backlinko).
This quick overview, which shows just a few of the main trends currently underway, is intended to serve as a sort of litmus test for marketers of small and large companies. While there is a need to use video, especially personalized video, industry professionals are called upon to continually recalibrate their video marketing strategies in terms of both format and channels to be used.
All of these statistics basically highlight the enormous opportunities that video marketing can still offer to help achieve a number of business objectives: To effectively communicate the quality of a product or service, promote a brand identity, and initiate and consolidate a conversation with a lead or customer.
Too long, too complicated, too expensive: the solution is Doxee
Yet despite the decidedly promising picture described so far, there are still uncertainties, doubts, and concerns among marketers (source: biteable.com):
- 66% of marketers don’t make videos because they think it takes too much time
- 41% of marketers don’t make videos because they think it’s too complicated
- 37% of marketers don’t make videos because they think it’s too expensive
For all these reasons, the creation and distribution of automated personalized video continues to remain unexplored for many companies, governments, or agencies, in both B2B or B2C contexts. The ability to leverage technologies that enable the creation of dynamic, personalized content is, however, already accessible to all organizations, not just enterprise-sized ones.
Thanks to its investment in innovation and its solid know-how built over time, Doxee offers the most suitable alternative, depending on the specific needs. It can deploy its specialists to support the development of the entire process without requiring any commitment from the customer. Doxee Pvideo® enables the fast and extremely simple creation of automated and personalized videos without the need for external support, but simply by accessing the Doxee platform.
Doxee: Marketing automation solutions for every need
Doxee confirms its leadership in lead management: its Doxee interactive experience products fit for marketing automation solutions, designed for every possible touchpoint, for every moment of relationship with the lead, create the best possible experience, allowing customers to accrue direct benefits in terms of return on investment. Every interaction during the life of a service or a good brings with it emotional, behavioral, and cognitive impact.
Every interaction must be investigated and become a moment that amplifies the positive, personalized, and individual experience of each user. Only in this way will it be possible to nurture loyalty and extend the duration of relationships, reducing acquisition and retention costs and ensuring an economic basis for structuring growth.
The customer journey according to Doxee: Exploiting every relationship opportunity
A strategic approach and appropriate tools are needed to design, manage, and monitor all possible moments of contact that the customer has with the company along the entire journey. The tools available with the interactive experience line allow companies to:
- Capture the interest of the user,
- Exploit their data to create new services,
- Extend existing traditional channels into the digital space.
For Doxee, customer involvement is the determining factor of competitiveness. To create the conditions for this, in the fluid and crowded context in which companies operate today, any marketing automation solution and lead management initiative must incorporate strategies that are strongly characterized by increasing personalization and interactivity. Doxee is the bearer of a new type of communication that is more accurate, more immediate. In addition to videos, micro-websites, which are also personalized, make it possible to reach the user and provide him with what he needs: content in a concise form, standardized information that is therefore easier to understand, and simple messages that are never trivialized.
Possible areas of application for Doxee personalized videos
Every business scenario, every moment of communication with customers, every type of interaction through digital platforms or generated for transactional purposes becomes a possible ground for implementing those contact strategies that have personalized videos at their center. For example, in the retail sector, which is increasingly digitized, if a positive experience is created tailored to the individual user right from the start, the new customer will be more predisposed to listen, receive and evaluate subsequent proposals specifically tailored to his needs in the early welcome and onboarding phases.
Through fluent and personalized storytelling built from the knowledge of the actual position of the user, the video is able to speak with sensitivity, calling the recipient by name. In this way, even in the case of delicate situations such as insolvency or late payment, the eventual process of credit recovery can take place in an easier and less costly way.
In fact, the interactive functions of Doxee Pvideo® make it possible to collect the sum to be collected (e.g. a tax) because they integrate direct links to digital payments, which can then be made with just a few clicks.
Another area of application includes internal corporate communication: transmitting regulatory content, providing priority indexes for consultation, facilitating the procedures that employees must follow to manage complex agendas significantly improves the employee experience.
Personalized video as a response to a need for relevance
As never before, today’s consumers are involved in the digital transformation process: they are connected, attentive, demanding. Most of them casually use all digital channels and are progressively getting used to a seamless, multi-channel shopping experience. They are looking for a two-way relationship with the brand.
Doxee interactive experience, of which personalized video is a key solution, enables the management of all moments of contact, from extracting the value hidden in customer data to creating highly interactive communications. ix products create and manage countless individual conversations for businesses, automatically. High conversion rates are the most visible consequence of the success of this strategy, which is based on listening, on a new balance of the brand-customer relationship in which the customer counts more than the brand.
Here, then, is what really seems to matter: relevance. Receiving valuable content because it “corresponds to us” is part of the personalized online experience, and in order to live it, many users are willing to share with companies not only email addresses, phone numbers, and personal details, but also other information that concerns them, such as their desires, concerns, and urgencies. This flow of data shows no signs of slowing down and companies will find increasingly innovative applications thanks to machine learning and artificial intelligence. For marketing, this is an enormous and valuable resource to be managed with intelligence and respect.
On the one hand, the decline of less evolved digital communication is confirmed, the one that is still expressed with “push” modalities, the one of negligible proposals because they are not relevant and because they interrupt the user’s day without asking for permission. On the other hand, the opportunities to participate in the conversation with brands are multiplying and differentiating. Customers want exclusive, authentic, and involving relationships. Personalized videos fully respond to this need, a need that is revolutionary to some extent: to be seen and spoken to longer in a generic third person plural but according to one’s own, singular point of view.