Mariana Ruiz
September 20, 2023
7 min read

Four powerful ways to use personalised video in your marketing

Imagine hearing your name called out in a crowded room; your attention is immediately seized, right? This personalised approach can be just as powerful when applied to your marketing strategies.

In a world awash with generic content, personalisation stands out like a beacon, immediately capturing attention. Tailored messages have gone from being a luxury to a necessity in our competitive digital landscape. Personalised videos amplify this principle to a new level, providing immersive and engaging experiences that are tuned to each individual, meeting the modern expectation for relevant, impactful communication.

Personalisation – designing or producing something to meet someone’s individual requirements – is not a new thing. From Amazon’s product recommendations to finding a soft drink with your name on it, leading brands worldwide have recognised the value of personalising the way they interact with their customers.

Multinational professional services network, KPMG, reports on six pillars of customer experience excellence each year. Their eleven years of research have shown that every outstanding customer relationship has a universal set of qualities. These qualities form the six pillars of: Personalisation, Integrity, Expectations, Time and Effort, Resolution, and Empathy.

Why personalisation should be embedded in your marketing strategy

For the last couple of years, personalisation was identified as the number one driver of customer experience excellence, with the largest impact on both customer loyalty and customer advocacy. At its core, personalisation is about using individualised attention to drive emotional connection.

In marketing, personalisation looks like interacting with your audience and customers in a way that feels personal and human. On a more practical level, it is the implementation of a strategy by which companies deliver individualised content to recipients through data collection, analysis, and the use of automation technology.

There are many benefits to including personalisation in your marketing strategy:

  • According to Montate-Econsultancy research 94% of marketers regard personalisation of web experience as critical for the success of their business.
  • An Epsilon study found that 80% of customers indicated their intent to purchase from brands embodying personalisation
  • 81% of people want brands to get to know them and understand when to approach them
  • The use of personalized video in emails can lead to a 500% lift in conversions

The truth is simple and clear: the key to building long lasting customer relationships is to get to know them, and then show that you know them through your marketing efforts. How? By including personalised content in your marketing strategy.

Including personalisation in your marketing strategy

Remember when seeing your name in an email subject line seemed like a revolutionary advancement in digital marketing? Today, personalisation requires a far more robust and strategic approach, and requires more creativity in order to stay competitive in the marketplace.

There are many ways to include personalisation in your marketing strategy. One of these ways is through personalised video content.

What is personalised video content?

With the right information – simple variables like name or life stage – you can create a personalised video experience for each member of your target audience, ensuring your content stays relevant to them.

This new technology combines data with a multimedia experience that addresses the viewer by name, and includes content relevant to them. Thousands upon thousands of videos, for example, can be made, each unique to a different customer.

How personalised video works for your marketing strategy

Personalised video adds the extra competitive dimension of storytelling, emotional connection and the ability to communicate more, while keeping the messaging simple. It is more than just using someone’s name in an email – it is a living breathing story that can represent so much more than just the information it conveys.

Above is a breakdown of different ways to use personalised video across your customer’s journey with your brand, from first becoming aware of your brand to after they have made the decision to work with you.

How personalised video works

At the most basic level, personalised video requires information about the viewer collected prior to them watching the video. For instance, their name, age and date of birth might personalise a video wishing them a ‘Happy Birthday’. The video might include their name, the age that they’re turning and be sure to mail it to them on their actual birthday. But how this information is arranged and told is where the impact of personalised content can be seen.

Personalised video allows you to tell a captivating story

To make a message cut through the noise, you need to capture attention. Effective storytelling does this. Storytelling has been used for hundreds of years as a medium to convey important messages, cautionary tales and brilliant adventures. When audiences are captured by story, they are ready to listen. It should be the same when brands communicate a message to their customers or clients. You need to invite them into a story that compels them to listen. Stories don‘t have to start with ‘once upon a time’ and they don’t even need to be narrative.

How you can use personalised video 

Here are some examples of how you can use personalised video to create individualised attention and drive emotional connection.

Use personalised video to send personalised statements to your customers

By using personalised video in your statements, you can:

  • Communicate unique statement information to each member
  • Engagement tool – help them be aware of their super
  • Simplify statement information and provide context for member to understand their circumstances
  • Drive individualised actions based on these circumstances
  • Use segmentation of messaging to align with member segments
  • Encourage actions with clickable CTA (call to action) buttons

This superannuation member-based campaign animated video was sent out in 2020, so the tone for this Mercy Super video was empathetic and understanding. Not only does the video include details specific to the customer, it is also crafted in an engaging and empathetic way that communicates more than just the information. Their focus was on those working from home, on families within those contexts, and on the fact that their customers are facing new challenges unlike any other year. 2020 was not a year for massive investment returns. So the bigger picture that Mercy Super brought in here was ‘we hope you’re managing okay, and in spite of everything, remember that your superannuation is a long term investment’.

Use personalised video to welcome new members or onboard your customers

By using personalised video in your welcoming/onboarding process, you can:

  • Drive an emotional connection with your brand by making customers feel welcome with individualised attention
  • Manage expectations for new customers to drive loyalty and reduce churn
  • Save your customer’s time by providing only the information relevant to them
  • Avoid any confusion about services and products available

This video was created to welcome new members with personalised videos and explain what the next steps were, as well as what they needed to do to access the application. There were multiple steps involved, depending on what products they signed up for. For example, all the extras that their members could choose from. The purpose of the personalised video was to cut through the complexity and not only make the first steps clear, but also simply explain what’s included in their plan. Intentional messaging with a focus on personalisation will always engage your audience more than a wordy product description.

Use personalised video to share renewals, offers or new plans

By using personalised video to share information on renewals, offers or plans, you can:

  • Drive take up of offers and renewals by highlighting a specific value delivered, or a value that relates to the customer’s unique circumstances
  • Save customers time, provide understanding and drive loyalty by segmenting and personalising video
  • Provide information specific to customers products or membership if there are multiple tiers or different offerings
  • Making decision making simpler
  • Drive loyalty

This personalised video was part of a campaign that went out to high school students who were about to graduate and were considering their university options. For this project, we engaged real University of Canberra (UC) students to be our heroes in this video – for that authentic, relatability aspect. UC wanted the talent to come across as relatable friends of the potential students. The narrative of this video was all about UC conveying that they see the potential of the viewer, that they have supported people just like them, and that going to UC will help them on their way to achieving their dreams.

Use personalised video to engage your audience through gamification and interactivity

By including gamification and interactivity in your personalised video you can:

  • Engage the user to generate a unique piece of content per viewer
  • Encourage your audience to actively participate beyond the standard level of interaction with brand experiences
  • Create a more immersive experience for your audience
  • Inject fun and playfulness into a product or brand to build connection and loyalty with your customers

This is a user generated video for new members that we created for Melbourne Storm, a Melbourne based professional rugby league club.

When members renew their membership they are sent this video to encourage them to feel part of the team. This is an example of a real time user generated video. This means that the user can share this link with their friends and family, thereby increasing engagement and allowing them to join in the fun. This gave their members an incentive to share the video and allowed the club an opportunity to grow their membership numbers.

What is the future of personalisation in content marketing?

That’s a great question. Your customer has new expectations – they want individual personalisation, constant contact, rewards for their loyalty and multiple ways to communicate with your brand – from social media to website chat functions.

The way we see it, however you want to communicate with your customers or audience, there’s a way to deepen the connection with personalised video content. Whether it’s an extension of the examples we’ve written about in this article, or it’s an idea you have you’d like to discuss further, we are open and ready to test the limits of personalised video with you and your business.

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