On Monday, April 16, 2018 over 30,000 runners congregated in the town of Hopkinton, Massachusetts for the start of the 122nd running of the Boston Marathon. The Boston Marathon is the most famous road race in the world, and running Boston for most of these runners will be the pinnacle of their running lives. Even the unseasonably cold and damp weather couldn't stop these runners from forging memories that will last a lifetime. However, this year thanks to the marketing team at Adidas every runner received a unique view of their race experience: A personalized video chronicling their race experience. Read this article to learn more about how Adidas made this happen.
The results were outstanding! Adidas reported 57 percent of video recipients viewed their personalized video, 25 percent shared their videos on Facebook, and the campaign drove over 80,000 visitors to the Adidas website.
While the creation of individualized content through data collection, analysis, and automated delivery of custom content isn't a new concept, highly personalized content has been proven to improve the customer experience, drive revenue, increase brand loyalty and provide a consistent message across multiple marketing channels. However, what the Adidas campaign highlights are out of all forms of personalized content, personalized video content has the capability to be the most influential and active form of one-to-one marketing.
The human brain is hardwired to be receptive to and process visual stimuli. Research shows video viewers remember 95 percent of a message they watched and only 10 percent of the same message they've read, making video the most potent marketing medium because it is easier to process and retain than text. Videos are also shared at a rate 1,200 percent more than images and text combined. When you take the inherent power of video and connect it with a custom element, you have marketing content that is impactful, impressive, and makes your audience feel like VIPs.
Before considering personalized video or any form of one-to-one marketing, it is essential you begin with the development of a personalized marketing strategy. In the creation of a personalized marketing strategy, there are four things to take into consideration:
Objectives – The first step in the development of a personalized marketing strategy is to determine what are you trying to achieve with your personalization efforts. Are you trying to tap into new markets? Build stronger brand awareness? Increase revenue from your current customers? Many of these questions may have already been addressed in your overall marketing strategy, but, when looking to add a personalized element to your marketing mix, you need to revisit these objectives in light of which could be enhanced with a personalized component.
Capabilities Audit – Before undertaking any form of personalized marketing, you also need to do an audit of your current technical and resource capabilities. If you don't have a marketing automation solution in place you need to begin researching the available solutions based on your objectives, budget, and system capabilities. If you already have a marketing automation solution in place, what are its personalization capabilities?
Data Capture and Analysis – For any automation and personalization solution to be effective data is required as the fuel for these efforts. That process begins with making sure all your points of contact with your audiences are optimized for data capture. This may require as little as a couple of lines of code to be added to your website or landing pages. Once these are in place you can begin to capture and analyze the information for things like clicks, time on site, abandoned shopping carts, purchase history, and much more.
Action – Once you've had a chance to analyze the data and overlay the information against your marketing objectives, then you can begin working on executions that can effectively leverage personalization functionality. For something like email, personalization may be as simple as a personalized greeting or messaging based off of past consumer behavior. However, with video, while the information gleaned from the data may help you identify personalization opportunities, incorporating that information might require additional steps to be leveraged with a video specific execution.
It should be noted that you don’t need an Adidas-sized budget to incorporate personalized marketing and personalized video into your marketing strategy.
Personalization of video does not always mean imbedding your audience within a video. There are several ways that video can be personalized.
Web – This form doesn't customize the video but customizes what videos are served on a web page based on the visitor's persona and viewing history.
Burned-In – Burned in video personalization utilizes advanced production techniques that place tags in specific frames within the video. Personalized elements will be injected dynamically by software that pulls metadata from data sources such as a CRM or a marketing automation solution. The result is unique generated video assets where the custom elements are a part of the video itself.
Overlay – This type of video personalization is the placement of personalized elements within a specific video asset or assets dynamically, in real-time, based on a contact's information and metadata, web viewing behavior, and desired call-to-action.
Interactive – Interactive video marketing takes video from a linear, passive medium and turns it into an active, multimedia experience. It allows the viewer to determine the direction of the video by choosing which action to do next. The path that each viewer follows is based on their decisions and is unique to their interests.
Each of these approaches have their advantages and challenges. All require quality data to drive the personalization, back-end technology to deliver and produce the personalized video assets, and an experienced video production team to make sure the video content is reflective of the quality of your brand.
Here at Oswego Creative, we have developed video content for a wide variety of personalized video executions. We have also produced fully interactive video content in our work with the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW). The IBEW was looking for a unique way to recruit recent college and high school graduates to their apprentice program. Check it out to see how we created a unique solution to meet their needs.
Interactive video like this allows the very person you are targeting to tailor the message for you. They are creating their own personalized video experience, making them that much more likely to stay engaged and make a purchase decision. When viewers feel they are in control of their journey 64 percent are more likely to spend more time watching that video compared to a traditional video. Moreover, they are more likely to make a purchasing decision.
As customer expectation and video marketing technology continually evolve, the shift toward and use of personalized video will become more critical for brands. Customers already expect tailored marketing communication that provides a better user experience and is consistent across channels. If your video strategy isn’t leveraging personalized video that is uniquely engaging to the individual, they won’t feel like you know them as a person and a customer. Implementing personalized video as part of a personalized marketing strategy can be the greatest asset your business has to offer.
By Bill Johnson