How Personalized Videos are Changing the Way Social Media Works

The age of generic, spammy, and ultimately lazy marketing efforts is coming to an end. That’s exactly how I foresee personalized video marketing. It will change the way brands interact with customers once and for all. And marketers will have to adapt quickly. The future will be even more demanding for digital marketers around the world.

Before going into details, let’s just add a bit of context right here.

People are calling 2019 the year of video. And I agree. I see marketers & social media managers adding videos in their content like jelly to peanut butter. All the time. There’s an explosion of creativity, ideas, and content ready to be “translated” into videos to make an even more personalized digital experience.

Where can you use videos?

• Make the most out of Instagram Stories because these bite-sized 15-sec videos produced on the go that keeps viewers hooked to improve awareness
• Integrate videos on your website, via Intercom Video Bot to drive conversion for sign ups
• Upload your latest product update on your Facebook Page to spread the word
• Tell a story using LinkedIn videos to connect with professionals
• Start a video blog on YouTube to add value to your audience
• Share a tweet with your Twitter audience to ask for feedback
• You get it. There are tons & tons of opportunities for video content everywhere.

Sadly, sometimes stock videos are plain spam with no correlation to the customer and don’t have any chance to convince them to sign up or upgrade to your product.

That’s where personalized marketing comes into action.

A personalized video is any video content that’s customized and relevant to multiple segments of your customer persona or audience, including age, location, device, company, profession, etc. Given that there are many ways to personalize videos for brands, marketers should make the most of it. Here’s an example from Wideo below.

It will help you make more useful content for a specific prospect or customer. Personalized marketing is a strategy that helps you integrate all of your content from social, blog, email, website to generate better results. It involves A LOT of data related to your customers so you can craft specific experiences based on their personas and target them exactly where they are. Design Wizard is excellent software for creating amazing videos. You can create highly engaging videos that help you grow your business, announce your event or anything else in between! There is also a full library of TV ad-quality videos. This is perfect for creating and editing videos for social media, presentations, and websites.

How personalization is changing social media?

We live in a tech powered world connected to digital 24/7 wherever we go. The customer journey takes a lot more time compared to what it used to 5-10-25 years ago when one simple email could drive millions in sales. Customers are tired of receiving scam calls and they want to be recognized as individuals, not just a cell in Excel. 

Personalization is key to creating a full digital experience for your potential customers and drive more sales to your business. It will help you create prospect specific news feeds, web pages, content collections, posts, videos, stories, and campaigns delivered directly to their device.

How to implement personalized video in your social strategy?

1) Create a personalized quiz

Outgrow helps you create a viral quiz and calculator for your brand in just a few clicks. It will easily help you reach a wider audience on social, brands will get noticed and drive a lot of referral social traffic to the website.

2) Send a personalized video

Rocketium helps you create them at scale for all of your marketing needs just by filling out the name of the customer, adding materials in the video and then experience tons of leads in your inbox through the power of personalization.

3) Prepare a personalized chatbot message

Hipmunk Facebook Messenger Bot uses friendly, conversational language creating a personalized experience that mimics the way your brand speaks with customers online. The purpose of chat bots is to support and scale your brand with customers 24/7. It helps to save a lot of money and can be placed on multiple platforms such as Facebook, Slack, Telegram, SMS or your own website to improve conversions.

4) Customize your content marketing

Let’s say you created an awesome presentation, report, white paper, checklist as part of your content marketing strategy. That’s great. Now it’s time to amplify all of your efforts through personalized experience on email and social media through a landing page. You can create some personalized posts on social platforms targeted specifically to the audiences you think will download the piece so you can “collect” new leads for your brand. See how lemlist is currently doing this.

5) Announce a feature, product or new service

So you’ve listened closely over the past few months to your customers and responded to all of their requests. Now you can easily make a quick video with the new improvement or feature and then share this directly with your audience.

You can also personalize the message you’re sending them, like “Hey {{Name}}, you asked for the {{awesome feature you’ve just built}}. Awesome news – we just launched it. We hope that this will make a big difference for your {{company name}}.”

Then make sure to add other materials about the feature, including videos, screenshots, guides, articles and how to activate them (if applicable).

6) A personalized letter

Show your customers that you care and don’t stop with company announcements when it comes to customer engagement. A simple thank you letter to your users on Twitter or other social platforms will matter a very big deal. On the other side, you can target specific demographics while congratulating them with a national celebration, such as women for Mother’s Day or dog lovers for International Dogs Day.

7) Recruit top talent on LinkedIn

Trying to wow your potential hires? I believe that LinkedIn is the best place for that by showcasing how awesome your company is. When inviting them for a coffee send them a personalized video with their potential workspace, the nameplate on the desk or shirt that they will receive. Think of ways that will help your potential hires envision their place in the company and put more light on that.

What data can be used for video personalization?

The next wave of personalization will manifest itself in a way that successfully combines analytics, creativity, content and all the marketing teams into one single epicenter. There are many data points that can be used to make your video more personalized, such as

• Location (city, country, region)
• Device (iPhone, iPad, Android, Windows, Mac, Linux)
• Search keywords
• Social page (did they found your Youtube channel on Instagram or Twitter)
• Visitor frequency (first, second, fifth visit on the website)
• Date & time of the day they visit your website
• Sessions behavior (navigation clicks, pages)

Personalization marketing will also help you build stronger relationships with your customers. It shows that you care about all of them by wishing them happy birthday on Facebook, sending them a thank you note on Twitter or just adding them to your Pinterest board.

The personalization experience never ends. It can start with your social pages, then quickly move to landing pages, podcasts, video blogs, and offline events. Personalized video is important in social media, and for the best personalized video, you must have the best video editing app to enhance the video quality and personalize it in your way. It will not only help you generate more sales but help make the brand a friend of your customer.

Still not convinced? Here’s how personalization helps.

• Personalized emails produce 6x higher transaction rates, says CMO
• Curata identified that long-form blog posts generate 9x more leads than short-form blog posts
• Personalized CTAs result in a 42% higher conversion rate.
• 29% of leading marketers systematically reuse and repurpose content
• 81%+ of marketers found that increased traffic occurred with as little as 6 hours per week invested in social media marketing
• And there are many brands you can learn from starting today.

Using personalized video might be one of your best opportunities to drive new customer acquisition, improve conversion rate and make a very good first impression. It can help you promote the brand online organically and build a long-lasting relationship with your users & customers. There are many things to say on this topic so if you have any questions reach out on Twitter and I’d love to discuss them with you.

About The Author

Vlad Calus is the co-founder of Planable. Planable is the command center of social media collaboration for marketing teams, digital agencies, and freelancers to collaborate with their teammates & clients on content calendar in the most visual way. Planable is used by more than 5000 brands worldwide, including Mini, BMW, Volkswagen, SkyTeam, Wendy’s and many others.

Vlad founded two non-profits at the age of 16. He then dropped out of college and moved to another country with two 2 his friends. After that, he built Planable (Techstars London ’17) at 19 y.o and became an honoree Forbes 30 Under 30 at 22 y.o.