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Five reasons personalised video is a marketer’s dream  

Does this sound familiar? Word perfect ads, sizzling socials and a promo video so full of wow you had to lay down for a week once it was in the can.

But nothing. Nada. Zilch. No swing in sales, no boom in bookings.

Annoyingly this is an all-too-common occurrence in the sales and marketing game. Customers seem to be coated in anti-advert agent. And until you find a fresh way to get under their skin, they’re going to keep passing you by and move on to someone who does…

We’re here to make sure that that someone… IS YOU!

All hail the new kid on the block – PERSONALISED VIDEO MARKETING (or PVM).

At Challenge we’re leading the charge for this relative newcomer to the marketing matrix.

We’ve embraced the technology and we’re using it to cut through the noise of generalised advertising to make our clients’ marketing and sales outreach stand out from the crowd. Because in an industry built around creating connections, the power of personalisation is irrefutable. Whether you’re looking to engage a prospect 1:1, or a multitude of people at scale, we’re keen as mustard to share the power of PVM with you!

Video still takes pole position

Broad sweep video marketing has been around for a while, and it still tops the charts in terms of advertising content across ABM, online buying and internal comms. Nearly 90% of marketers say that video has a positive effect on ROI.

But in the same way direct mail started playing the name game in the late 90s, video has had a shot in the arm too. If personalised post was Gen X and personalised emails made for millennials, then PVM is Gen Z’s baby!

A close cousin of its predecessors, PVM combines the strength of video with the engagement of personalisation: The power couple in an advertiser’s armoury.

How it works

In a nutshell, personalised videos are produced from a combination of data collected from your contact database and the information you have about your product. Simple huh?  There’s a bit more to it than that, but in essence that’s how the magic happens.

It offers a range of options and approaches applicable to solving the key communication challenges that occur across both sales and marketing. It’s real-time, interactive and cinematic, and the results are mind-blowing!

And, as I’ll get to in more detail later (and there are links to delve even deeper here) personalised videos can be used throughout your sales funnel, or flywheel, and actively get your businesses higher CTR and a reduced sales cycle to boot.

We can help you master a 1:1 desk-based approach, which is true face-to-face outbound marketing and helps you:

  • Become more than a faceless entity and build a personal relationship with your customers right from the start. 
  • Book meetings quicker, close deals faster, and on-board with ease.

And we can also help deliver 1:1 at scale, where:

  • Personalisation can be creative, repeatable and polished across your entire contact list.
  • It can be utilised throughout the entire sales and marketing process.

We’re not shooting from the hip over here!

We’re already working with several clients and have seen some fantastic results. And to take it out of the abstract and into real world scenarios, I’m going to share a little bit about the wins we’ve already had through our video personalisation work with global endpoint security providers, Tanium, and University of East Anglia (UEA).

The ‘reel’ deal with Tanium’s sales team

In an industry that prizes face-to-face contact, initial restrictions imposed by the first wave of the pandemic instantly removed a key sales channel for Tanium. Customers were no longer in offices to pick up the phone and were understandably wary of answering calls from unknown mobile numbers – a challenge that has remained with the increased adoption of remote working habits. 

Tanium needed to find a new route to connect directly and meaningfully with clients. They tasked Challenge with giving their staff an entirely new customer connection skillset – personalised video marketing. So off to Personalised Video Bootcamp we stomped, to:

  • Build on the Sales Development Reps’ (SDR) already-impressive outreach armoury
  • Reach and engage prospects and clients with a new, innovative communication channel
  • Demonstrate Tanium’s commitment to their staff, and investment in their futures
  • Get the teams together during a difficult time and give them something fun to do

We’d be lying if we said it didn’t go well…

"I would definitely recommend video outreach because it totally changed my way of prospecting and I’ve been very successful with it!"

Lorenz, Territory Tanium Sales Manager - UK&I

"It was brilliant – not only do you get training on the platform, but the Challenge sessions were very interactive, we had an actress joining to give us some really good pointers, and an awards ceremony at the end, to show the bad and the good videos we made! It was much more than a virtual lesson – which was a very pleasant surprise!"

Nora, Tanium Marketing Programs Manager

But what happened next gave us even more to feel good about! Tanium reported back to say that: 

  • Their conversion rate had shot up to 15% 
  • They’d booked meetings within five key accounts in just two weeks 
  • After 12 months of failed attempts using other methods, PVM secured them a meeting with the CIO of a very large European bank
  • The marketing department are enjoying this new and exciting channel
  • There’s now a happier, invigorated and winning SDR team at Tanium

Now for the UEA report…

With competition for university undergraduates fiercer than ever, The University of East Anglia (UEA) were looking for a way to engage with prospective students, welcome those who had already chosen UEA and offer encouragement to those who had yet to make up their minds. In effect, they needed to master personalised video, at scale.

How did we help…

Budget and time were both tight on this one so the challenge to achieve quick and cost-effective results was on.

Understanding the power of personalisation, we worked closely with UEA and their partners to drive new value from existing video resources. We took elements that had been created for a mass audience and reworked them to be ready for data-driven automated personalisation right down to the individual level.

Using our technical know-how around integration with existing technology stacks, it was a relatively simple job to combine this newly reworked video with UEA’s prospect data. This enabled us to produce literally thousands of completely personalised video assets with directly relevant content ready to be sent to both confirmed and prospective students around the globe.

And the outcome…

Internationally of the 1,181 international applicants that received a personalised video:

  • 65% opened the email, an open rate to be proud of
  • 21% viewed the video, smashing UEA’s pre-personalisation average CTR by 15%!

For the UK audience:

  • 54% opened the email
  • 24% clicked through (CTR) and watched the video

Resulting in these final, staggering stats…

An incredible 800+% ROI from 68% of student prospects who watched the video making UEA their first choice or their insurance university via UCAS.

800+% ROI

The power of personalisation

I hope these case study highlights demonstrate the power of personalisation and Challenge’s prowess around this game-changing tech. We can set you up with in-house skills and produce personalised videos that really pack a punch with your clients and prospects.

(For a more in depth understanding of how we worked with Tanium and UEA, the complete case studies are available to view here.)

Top 5 reasons to use personalised video marketing

Now let’s look at the TOP 5 reasons to make personalised video your goal for 2023

#1 It makes your customers feel special

People like to feel special. We know it’s a bit silly to get a thrill from this, but remember how it feels when you walk into an upmarket hotel lobby, restaurant or gastro pub and the receptionist greets you by name? And knows it’s your birthday? They’ve checked your booking details obviously, but nevertheless the mild narcissist in most of us loves the attention, however contrived.

#2 It massively bumps up your CTA and CTR results

We fall for the personal flattery in advertising too. It follows that seeing an advert with your name on, something personalised just for you, will make you sit up and take notice. It makes a stronger connection than a traditional ad would. In fact, a recent report from HubSpot found that personalised CTAs do up to 202% better than non-personalised. This is backed up by stats from Salesforce, that show that 81% of people want to feel a brand is trying to understand when and how to approach them.

#3 You’ll achieve higher retention and conversion rates

If you can get your customers doing some of the work for you, then that’s a good thing, right? And that includes sharing the information they’ve seen about you and your product. You’ll get a higher retention rate, and therefore conversion rate, with personalised video. The higher levels of engagement that the personalisation generates makes viewers much more likely to remember the content, watch all the way through and talk about it to others. This all adds up to your brand being more and more embedded in consumers’ psyche for longer.

#4 It works here, there and everywhere

This is one versatile animal! If you’ve got the data, there’s nowhere that personalised video can’t go. Use it in B2B, B2C and for communicating internally with colleagues, either to a mass audience, on a 1:1 basis, or team by team.

#5 It’s scalable

It’s a short cut to a long reach in a way that just wasn’t viable only a few years back. It’s now possible, relatively inexpensively, to produce 1,000s of personalised videos that talk directly to your customer database using names, images, locations, content of interest, languages etc. Soon it will be a little weird to think we ever used to rely on a one size fits all approach to driving our sales and marketing results.

#5b The BONUS reason…

It is new, creative and an innovative way to reach your prospects and customers.  It will give you stand out in an ever-competitve world.

That’s a wrap!

And there you have it! A whole bunch of evidence that points to personalised video as being the super-charged marketing tool that breaks through customers ad avoidance armour and shows them what they’re missing!

If you’re intrigued by what you’ve read here today and are ready to make it personal with your promos, drop us a line and we’ll make your video marketing dreams into a reality!

COME AND CHALLENGE US. WE’RE READY FOR YOU!

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