Last updated on August 11th, 2015 at 04:27 pm
Personalizing your B2B marketing is one of the easiest ways to cut through the noise in today’s busy marketplace. Why? Because our identities are hard-wired into our psyches (the fancy name is interpellation), and we immediately recognize ourselves when someone says our name. That’s why marketers try to personalize their content for us. They know it’ll catch our attention more easily.
Add a little interpellation, or personalization to a B2B marketing video, and it has the potential to make an even deeper impact on your audience. You’ll generate higher-quality leads and build your B2B customer base.
Here are 3 ways to create better personalized videos for your B2B marketing:
1. Listen carefully to your audience
Start by mining your customer relationship management (CRM) system and uncover details about your prospects and customers. Make sure your sales and marketing teams keep the records updated with the latest information about your customers. This helps you develop a clear picture of what your audience wants and needs with respect to your products and services.
Additional ways to listen:
- Send out surveys and questionnaires to existing customers and prospects to find out more about them. Ask what motivates them in their business, what their pain points are in their careers, and what solutions they prefer.
- Comb through your website analytics to see what pages visitors view, how long they stay on the pages, what they look at on each individual page, and more. Free tools like Google Analytics or paid ones such as Clicky and KISSMetrics can help you discover the numbers you need.
- Social listening tools such as SocialMention will help you uncover even more information about what the topics your prospects and customers are interested in. Use them to dig in to the online breadcrumbs they leave as well, such as words and phrases they use often, and their geographic location.
2. Narrow your target as much as possible
All of the information you gathered from your website visitors, leads, and prospects puts you in a better position to target your video marketing efforts at a specific segment. Create messages that appeal to these smaller groups and increase your leads and conversions. Experiment, analyze, tweak if necessary.
Use the information you gathered from your CRM, social media accounts, analytics, and more to develop clearly-defined buyer segments. For example, create segments by geography, industries, company sizes, revenues, etc.
3. Choose the right video delivery method
Now that you’ve gathered the information and created your audience segments, it’s time to think about your video delivery method. Where are you going to post the videos so they’re seen by your audience? On your website? Business blog? YouTube? Vimeo?
Many B2B marketers think video only belongs on YouTube or their own business website, and they’re not entirely wrong. They are, however, missing one place where B2B audiences live: email.
The video-embedded email
Email allows B2B marketers the best opportunity to personalize content for their list, as they can tailor the emails to a much finer level than on other platforms. Check out some of these email marketing numbers when videos were included:
- A study by Forrester and Vidyard found that click-through rates on emails with videos in them increased by 200-300 percent. Email engagement levels increased 10 times, and gave companies like BT Global Services and AT&T a 10-times improvement in their ROI.
- Oracle Eloqua found that using videos in email content regularly reduces email opt-outs by as much as 75 percent.
- Emails should combine a video with a compelling CTA since 75 percent of viewers won’t watch all the way to the end.
Why email works
The video-embedded email helps increase your reach, engagement, and brand awareness with your audience. Recipients like emails with videos because they’re time-savers, giving them information about your product or service in less time. They’re also great at explaining complex subjects or products.
Marketers have noticed higher click-through rates on any CTA in these emails because viewers are more active and engaged by the videos.
Traditional video delivery methods still work
That’s not to say that other video marketing platforms don’t work either. Just take a look at this YouTube video study the Content Marketing Institute did, where they found that 61 of the Top 100 Best Global Brands (as decided by Interbrand) upload videos to YouTube and then embed them on their business website.
Other B2B firms are creating video communities by inviting their audience to subscribe to their channel, which lets them notify subscribers about new videos they publish – for example, Volvo Trucks, Intel, and Cisco.
Video marketing takeaway
Personalization is a tactic that many marketing organizations make, regardless of channel or type of content. B2B marketers must commit to it at a deeper level if they want to truly reap the benefits of personalized marketing.
With video marketing, you’ll entertain your B2B audience in a way that’ll make your marketing messages seem like a delight instead of a time drain.
Flickr photo via user Andy Atzert
