Marketing and advertising have been around since forever, which started off as an inward looking discipline with a focus on the product but gradually and surely it has moved towards an outward looking perspective - one that attempts to understand the markets and the consumers instead of endlessly hankering on about the product.
The field of marketing has humble beginnings. In simpler times when the markets weren’t saturated, most marketing efforts were sales oriented. Marketing, though still second fiddle to the product, primarily focussed on distribution and branding.
“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half”
- John Wanamaker
Not that Marketing is not sales and distribution oriented now, but the focus of marketing functions in the saturated markets today is to generate demand by means of educating the customer about the product. The modern marketing efforts are as important as the product and are involved at a strategic level in the organization. Their job of researching and determining the current and potential needs of the customers directly influences how the product is made, how it is sold and for what price points.
The rise of the internet gave a new dimension to marketing and advertising. Billboards went from being on the side of highways to plastered across web pages. With advertising and marketing being all about attention, while earlier there was no way to measure the attention caught by a particular ad campaign, the internet changed the game. Now, every marketing action can be quantified, right from how many people view an advertisement to how many people engage with it.
But the ultimate pursuit of all marketing innovations over the years has been to find and engage the audience that is most receptive to the message of the advertising/marketing campaign, aka Targeted advertising.
Targeted advertising has been around the block for ages, almost for as long as advertising itself. Products would be advertised on channels most appropriate for them, for example a real-estate advertisement would be found on a billboard beside the highway, expensive watches and wealth management plans could be wound in magazines such as the WSJ, and lifestyle products would be found in publications such as Vogue. The idea is to aim the advertisements at a certain demographic, which would enable advertisers to extract the most response out of the consumer segment targeted.
A modern targeted advertising campaign mechanism consists of broadly the following three parts:
The objective of a buyer persona is to target marketing resources on an audience which is likely to have a strong preference towards a product and will be receptive to the message instead of people whose preferences do not align with the product. If done right, the building of the ideal buyer persona ensures that the message is well received, and minimizes wasted resources.
Some channels of distribution to consider are:
SEM on Google and Bing usually drive results via search patterns of consumers and ad prominence. Google Adwords reaches a staggering 80% of global internet users.
SMM on the other hand consists of a lot of genre specific channels for the purpose of advertising and marketing. Facebook works for almost all kinds of general consumers, Twitter is great for new businesses looking to create an early buzz and reach out to adopters, LinkedIn is the best in the game for B2B, other professionals and targeted customers, and Quora is great for educating the audience about your product and what particular pain points does it solve.
A Johns Hopkins study reveals that an average person checks emails or switches tabs online a staggering 37 times per hour while at work. Indeed, people are increasingly proficient at using technology, and this has also given rise to a need of instant gratification. Marketing is equal parts technology and psychology, and this rising need for instant gratification has led a change in the way leading brands market to consumers as well.
While carefully crafted marketing campaigns that follow strict deadlines and schedules and take several weeks to plan do create value in the long run, they lack the crucial element of virality. Real time marketing aims to make use of consumer demographic and psychographic data such as age, sex, gender, purchase history and social values to create instant, spontaneous and impulsive short term value tailormade to the buyer preferences and personalities.
Since RTM is all about relevant messaging and usually executed over social channels by listening and responding to the buyer's needs, the traction and virality thus generated is often a good gauge of the prevailing brand sentiment in the market. The key to RTM is to always be listening and knowing where the conversation happens, and here’s why you should consider using RTM as a marketing strategy:
To run a successful marketing campaign, the most important commodity you absolutely need to get on top of is attention to the prospect, and the margin of error is pretty slim. And what better way is there to catch and keep peoples’ attention than visual marketing!
“A picture is not just worth a thousand words, it’s also worth a thousand impressions!”
At an elementary level, visual marketing refers to the art of using creative visual content such as images, gifs, graphics, videos etc to create attention and boost engagement. A big part of marketing is understand how people work, and visual marketing is particularly effective in creating brand awareness because people are a primarily visual species - 50% of our brain is devoted to visual signal processing, and people can subconsciously relate to and retain a visual piece of content for more than 3 days if they are exposed to it for around 130 milliseconds.
We can probably show more statistics that prove how visual content will catch attention before anything else, and how it will help your brand stay in the heads of the prospects longer than other forms of content. But the bottom line is that a well-thought out Visual content marketing strategy is an extremely vital aspect of your overall marketing strategy, and people are much more likely to make a decision based on what they actually see.
Now that we’ve covered why you should be prioritising visual marketing in the overall scheme of your marketing strategy, the question then essentially boils down to just what all strategies you can use to get your brand to make waves, connect with your audience and establish your brand as the go-to authority in your domain.
There are a ton of ways you can implement your visual content strategy to make your content more appealing, shareable, understandable and persuasive, and here are just a few of them that we personally use at Nexweave, and recommend you do it too!
An image is not only the most basic of visual content marketing tools across channels, it is also particularly effective. Images and graphics are a great way to break the monotony and catch a prospect’s attention when they’re shuffling through content.
It is a proven fact that content across social media channels works way better with images and graphics than just plain text, and not only does it get more engagement, but also better opens, shares and click-through rates.
You can either use stock images and graphics, or create your own, but it is important to make sure the message is consistent with your brand’s story, values, products and messaging, although we’re slightly biased against using stock images. Stock images do have their advantages - they are generally well recognized, creating content out of a stock image is inexpensive and campaigns can be budget friendly. On the flip side, creating your own image and graphic content resources is a time consuming and a costly affair but it gives a unique brand identity and is an entirely unique asset - one that’ll help you stand out from the rest. So it’s really a decision on what the priorities and expected outcomes of your visual content marketing campaign are! In either case, it is important to remain consistent throughout your image content marketing strategy, so that prospects can warm up to your messaging and it gets embedded in their psyche.
Infographics are a great way to visually represent information to your prospects about a certain topic, especially if there is a lot of complex data and statistics that you want to put across, in a compelling and easy to understand manner.
Infographics also do very well across channels on social media, and numbers say that contextually relevant infographics are shared as much as 3 times more than other forms of content.
Storytelling is the most important aspect of a good visual content marketing strategy, and an effective infographic should strive to share a large amount of information with the audience, without taking up too much of their time and all the while maintaining curiosity. In this respect, the design and layout of the infographic therefore becomes essential to maintain a coherent brand story.
GenZ and millennials are over 40% of all people on the internet, and since they’re digital natives, it is probably a wise choice to optimize for their engagement on priority for your product. And what better way to accomplish that other than Gifs!
Incorporating gifs in your content marketing strategy will not only help your brand keep up with the trends and connect to the millennial audience better, it is also a powerful way to share and communicate the message and emotions around your brand.
You can either create your own gifs or use a stock gif (there’s plenty to go around). Just make sure that the usage is relevant and consistent with the message of your content - overdoing it may come across as immature and prove to be counterintuitive to the branding efforts. If done right, gifs are an extremely powerful visual asset which can make your prospects warm up to your brand and bring in a ton of engagement and ultimately, conversions.
Across industries, no form of visual content will probably make more waves than video. Every marketer ever seems to suggest that video is the future, and for good reason. Perhaps the most powerful form of all visual content, videos have the power to enormously increase your brand clout and improve brand recall.
Starting off with video is the hardest step in the process, but if you can go the extra mile to deliver tailored experiences to your audiences in the form of well-thought and educative video content that the buyer can relate to, you will definitely experience massive engagement boost, and ultimately, revenue.
Humans are visual learners, so while the concept of visual marketing isn’t exactly new, what is new is the way those visuals are communicated to prospects and buyers. Visuals are processed 60,000 times faster than text. This directly translates to a lot of eyeballs on your content, and if it is engaging enough, you will stand out from the competition and your audience will remember you.
Video has become the undisputed champion of visual content. Increasingly more distribution channels are promoting the use of video, simply because it is more difficult for the audience to skip through a video endlessly, hence they hang around longer.
Social media is at a turning point where it is transforming into digital publication, and while static content like images, infographics, gifs and other forms of static content will keep getting proportionate attention, video really steals the show amidst no signs of stopping.
Video and marketing go together like burger and fries; like pancakes and maple syrup; like Jack and coke.
Sure you can have your burger without the fries, the pancakes without the maple syrup, or the Jack without coke - but they just won’t feel like how they do together!
Ever since the advent of TV, video has become a staple feature in people’s lives across the world, and it is probably one form of media people are most accustomed to - more so than print or other forms of static visual media.
Starting with videos can be a daunting task for marketers today, but it's mostly a psychological barrier at this point. Sure, in the bygone era, a desirable standard of quality wasn’t exactly achievable without high-end and expensive equipment, but now most phone cameras do very well if you fix it to a tripod.
When making a video, it is important to stay consistent with the message, and lead with a well-defined storyline. A good marketing video uses these principles to evoke emotions in the audience, especially curiosity. Ending with cliffhangers is the go to strategy to evoke curiosity, it keeps the audience hungry for more, and they look forward to more of your content. Another aspect to keep in mind, when making a marketing video, is to mind the duration of your video. It entirely depends on the niche you’re in and the distribution platform you choose, but as a thumb rule shorter videos to the tune of 120 seconds generally work well across use-cases and industries. Make sure your video content is equally optimized for mobiles, and don’t forget the subtitiles - most people watch the video on mute at any given point in time. Subtitles are the best way to get the message across, without interfering with the user’s content experience. Keep an eye out for subtleties in each platform - what works on YouTube may not work on Facebook, and what works on LinkedIn may not work on Instagram.
Fun fact: Human attention span is continuously shrinking, to the point it’s widely considered to be less than a goldfish today. That’s why it becomes even more important to not only deliver effective messages in a very short duration of time, but also strike a relationship with the audience through audio-visual storytelling, which is simply not possible over text.
Here are a few facts about Video and why it should be the pivotal part of your visual content marketing strategy:
These are not just a bunch of random numbers and facts - they are proof of how video is changing the visual marketing game as we know it. Video used to be another asset in the arsenal of a visual marketer - but now it is THE asset any Visual marketer needs to have. The audience is constantly ex[osed to video all the time, so they will subconsciously consume it (unlike text and images), and with good story telling not only can you attract their attention, but you can also keep it. Videos, especially interactive and personalized videos are the ultimate means to deliver your message quickly and effectively. Iit has the potential to drive a ton of engagement for your brand in a short time, while also having an enormous impact on brand recall.
If you’ve managed to read this so far, by now you definitely would’ve realized just how important video marketing is for brands. You cannot just get by with images, written content and infographics alone. For people who are habitual to videos and whose psyche has been inundated with video content since their earliest memory, it’s impossible to keep them hooked with plain old visual marketing content. And the best part about video marketing is - it works across marketing strategies! Whether you want to boost your organic rankings, use the paid channels to generate awareness and drive traffic, or just plain old emails - video marketing is your one-stop shop for all your content marketing goals and needs!
Video Marketing in SEO:
Search Engine Optimization refers to the practice of increasing the traffic on your website or a webpage, by means of “organic” methods.
Inherently, the practice of SEO is as much psychological as it is technological in nature. SEO is all about how people behave online - what content they wish to consume, how do they look for what they want to consume, how do they phrase their searches and what motivates them to do so. It doesn't take much to get lost in all the noise of the Internet, but when you can successfully answer these questions at scale, you can then successfully connect to the audience that is best suited to use your product/service.
Usually, when people look something up on a search engine, they show up with intent and are in the “buy” mode. An estimated 71% of people, when looking something up on the internet through a search engine, are in the decision-making phase of their buyer journey. 64% of these users have already made their mind up, and all they need is that last mile push to get them over the line and buy from you.
Therefore, it is absolutely crucial for your business to rank high in organic search, and this is where video will help you stand head and shoulders above the rest of your competition.
Search engines like Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo are increasingly prioritizing websites and webpages with video content, so having videos on your website is a shot in the arm from a pure SEO ranking perspective. Besides, videos also tremendously help with the issue of Internet real-estate - the presence of videos on your snippet will make your listing bigger and it stands out from the rest of the results on the page. This is where you receive the ultimate commodity the customer can give you in content marketing - attention! And once all these people click on the link and flock to your website, do more of the same and have a ton of videos ready to educate them about your offering and have them spend as much time as they can on your website!
Video Marketing in Paid Ads:
The best distribution channels out there don’t charge users for their money, so running paid ads in an effort to have your content seen by a wide audience is probably the only way to play on their platform and get a decent return on your investment. And if you play your cards right, you can realistically have a very small advertising budget yield pretty big payoffs.
Some of the most popular social distribution channels are increasingly leaning towards video content on their platform - native or otherwise. Videos have consistently proven to be exponentially more effective than text or image based content - with videos generating 1200% more shares and 55% increased traffic for websites with embedded videos.
When you run paid ads on social media, your video content can introduce your brand and awe audiences of all demographics and psychographics such as age, sex, locations, interests, values and beliefs, standard of living among endless other things.
Video Marketing in emails and blogs
Blogs and email are very different channels of communication, yet they’re very similar. Both of these functions are absolutely essential to any business, and while blogs work as a channel to broadcast your message to a wide audience, emails are more about establishing a direct line of communication between you and the audience.
The objective behind both of these content distribution strategies remains the same - providing your audience with ungated, informational and educative content that makes them realize why they need your product or service, how it would help them be the best at what they do, and what would happen if they miss out.
And what better way than a nice video to have them engage with your offering and commit time to your content!
A sociologist would describe interactivity as a derivative of the noun interaction, which refers to a to-and-fro of information between two separate entities.
In the context of videos, traditional videos, also known as linear videos are the ones which all of us are exposed to on a daily basis. Besides the usual limited options such play/pause, forward, next etc, there’s not really much you can do with it except consume the content in a linear fashion - it’s a one-way street.
With interactive videos, things are different. They change the narrative, as they open up another direction of communication with the audience by giving them the power to interact with the video itself, and tailor their content experience as and how they want it to be. With interaction levels similar to that of web content, there are several functionalities you can build in your interactive videos to make your content experience stand out from the rest, such as:
There’s several reasons why you need interactivity in your video content marketing strategy. The prime reason is that they use interaction thoughtfully, which not only helps you get your message across, but it also helps your audience receive it, ponder upon it and give you their feedback which ensures the highest level of service on your part, and immense satisfaction on the part of your audience.
Marketing isn’t just about shouting about your product into the abyss, only to get back an echo. Marketing is a way of communicating with people about your brand, and people only communicate with others when it is either entertaining or enjoyable for them. This is THE factor that affects brand recall, and using interactive videos in your content marketing strategy can take it to another level and make your brand memorable.
Further, interactive videos give story-telling a whole new dimension, where your audience is essentially a part of the very story they’re consuming. They’re in charge of how they want the story to unfold and consequently feel part of your brand, which is probably the biggest compliment your product or service can get.
Personalization, as the word suggests, is the practice of customizing and tailoring a product or a service for a particular individual, or a group of people. The advent of big data has enabled us to look at things in a whole new light, and insights previously hidden are out there in the open for marketers to process and act upon. Personalization is how you make sense of that data and use it effectively to make life easier for both yourself, and your customer.
Marketing is all about forming connections with your audience, and making them realize how you stand out from the crowd when it comes to solving their pain point. Personalized videos are the second best thing to actually being there in person with your prospects and conveying your message to them. It’s a direct line of messaging, and the sheer exclusivity and personal touch around a personalized image or a video can often drive a prospect to move down your funnel.
With personalized videos a part of your stack, you are bound to see exponential increase in the acquisition and conversion phases of your marketing funnel.
Personalized videos are customized down to each member of the audience, and you can achieve this by either the demography, the psychography or a combination of both. We live in a world where every one of us, even the marketers, are bombarded by marketing messages from left,right and centre. With the constant noise all around us, it is extremely difficult to stand out from the competition and get noticed by the audience who you want to be in front of, much less them engaging with you and connecting with your message to strike a relationship.
However, when people start getting treated like an individual with a social identity instead of just another customer, the dynamics of the relationship change. They feel more valued and acknowledged, and in turn more receptive to the message you want to convey to them.
For businesses, catching the attention of the audience, keeping them hooked to the content and building relationships is a means to the end - revenue. Personalized video can help you drive 5 times more revenue, and personalized videos engage twice as many people as a normal linear video. Moreover, people spend 62% more time on a landing page with a personalized video, as opposed to the old fashioned landing pages.
Besides conversion, personalized videos are also incredibly potent in other stages of the funnel. For starters, outreaches with a personalized video gets clicked-through more than 10 times in comparison to the normal outreaches. Personalized videos have also proven to improve retention rates by over 35% as compared to conventional videos.
Now that we know how incredibly powerful both interactive and personalized videos can be for your content marketing efforts, we asked ourselves - what if we could take the power of interactivity and the effect it has on weaving a story around your brand and getting your audience to connect to it, and marry it to the impact created by personalized videos and the resulting feeling of value and acknowledgement in your audience.
And voila, we came up with Nexweave - a simple to use tool which you can use to hyper-personalize interactive videos, at scale!
With a host of templates to choose from (you can even create one from scratch if you’re just not feeling the templates), Nexweave allows you to 1:1 personalize videos for millions of recipients, uniquely crafted for every single one of them. You can also use the dynamic storyboards to customise your messaging based on the intent of the marketing campaign.
And the best part? - The Nexweave experience can be delivered through any platform as long as they support video files and links (duh, who doesn’t!)
Nexweave also comes with powerful analytics to help you understand your audience better, and help you tweak your approach accordingly
Marketing has changed, and today you cannot reach out to your customers by talking about yourself. You have to make the messaging about them. If you can present a value proposition - how you can solve their pain points and add value to their lives, they will buy from you.
But this is easier said than done. Content marketing should aim to educate the audience about your products and services, and how the audience can reap benefits out of it. At the same time, it also has to be entertaining and inspiring, so as to keep the human touch in the communication and keep their interest piqued.
Your brand can take it a step further, with the use of interactive personalized videos in your strategy. Open a direct line of communication with your audience, and empower them to take charge of their own story line and how they relate with the product/service offered. For various stages of the buyer journey and their place in the funnel, check out some ways you can make use of interactive personalized videos to keep you audience hooked and happy:
For the absolute top of the funnel, and for buyers who are not yet acquainted with their pain-points, your brand, or both - interactive personalized videos are a powerful way to introduce them to a problem they didn’t know they had, and consequently, a solution that exists for the problem that is causing friction in their business. The focus here is to keep it subtle and educate the buyer as much as you can about how your product can make their life better.
The best way to do this is in person - have a direct conversation, face to face, with your prospect. Since that isn’t possible at scale for obvious reasons, the second best way to do that is Nexweave - with an interactive personalized video!
Another top of the funnel use case for videos as a part of content marketing, a product or service marketing video aims to promote/highlight the key features of your product or service, and how it sets you apart from the rest of your competitors in your space. This is slightly lower down the funnel than the awareness phase, but still in the top region of the marketing funnel.
Still lower down the funnel is the stage of a customer journey where they are intrigued by your product/service and want to take it for a spin. This is probably the most delicate part of the marketing funnel and the buyer journey alike. Demo videos take a deep dive into the product/service and their functionalities, and how the prospect could seriously benefit from using your product or service. Since in this stage, the purchasing decisions are complicated, the decision time-frames are longer and the ticket size is high for B2B especially, personalization and acknowledgement of the customer is the difference between an average product demo and a great product demo.
Again, the best way to achieve these outcomes is to show them how it works in person. The second best? Use an interactive and personalized video to catch their attention and show them what they stand to lose without your product or service.
Back to the top range of the funnel for a bit, explainer videos are generally used to simplify a product or service use-case, and tell your audience how exactly your product or the service can take care of it. Generic explainer videos today have the same storyline - introduce a character, describe his problem same as that of your audience, and how your offerings make the characters’ life easy. While this is a good overview, what’s missing is the connection with the audience. Since these generic explainer videos have become the norm, this will surely not excite your audience anymore.
However, instead of using a character like them, if you use them to describe a problem they have, and solve it for them (or better yet, let them choose how they want to solve it themselves - interactivity remember?), that is where the magic happens. And what better way to do that than use an interactive personalized video to make it happen?
Social proof is probably the most powerful form of advertisement there is. Nothing has more impact than an existing customer explaining how your product or service solved their pain-point, and helped them achieve the desired business outcome.
If you can put your best advocates in front of your prospects, telling them how your product or service worked wonders for them, there is an exponentially greater chance that your prospects will make the purchase. Again, the best way to deliver this experience, apart from in-person, is to use an interactive personalized video where your prospect can feel the message you want to send across, and relate to it.
Reviews are the gospel truth about your product, and if the reviews are good you’d definitely want to use it to your advantage. Just like customer testimonials, reviews as social proof go a long way in establishing confidence in the minds of your audiences’ psyche about your brand authenticity and usefulness.
To get prospects to make your prospects cross over the line in case they hesitate just before making the purchasing decision, try providing them with social proof of your product or service through a personalized interactive video. Let them interact with the video, and check out the review of their choice. If they have the space to explore, they will definitely buy.
Most products or services have a handful of questions that your audience is very likely to have at some point in the buyer journey. It is ingenious to send them a personalized video with all the questions they might have in their journey, and let them interact with your video to get answers to as many of them as they want. Easy peasy.
A successful execution of a video marketing campaign is contingent on the strategy, which in turn is a function of what you want to accomplish with your videos. Ideally, you should have interactive personalized video content for every stage of your funnel in a manner which is consistent with the buyer psyche and journey. To get started with your video content marketing journey, there’s a bunch of questions you need the answers to:
What is the goal of your video marketing campaign? Is it to educate your audience about a particular use-case that a lot of people face, but may not be explicitly aware of? Or is it to position your product as the perfect solution to an already existing and well-defined problem. The objective of your video marketing campaign may also be further down the funnel, such as, allowing the audience to experience the full force of your product by taking a product or service demo, or helping a customer make up his mind to make the purchase by means of reviews/testimonials. Even further down the funnel, your video marketing campaign may be set up to minimize customer churn and improve retention. Point is, you can use interactive personalized video in any stage of the buyer journey. It’s up to you to identify where exactly you want to do it, and how do you want to go about it.
Once you have a set agenda for your video marketing campaign with clearly outlined marketing outcomes, the next step in the process is to figure how you want to engage them.
Deciding on how you want the video content to shape up can be the toughest, albeit fun part of the process. Usually, a rough framework to play by has the following features - a central character around whom the story revolves; a pain point that the character repeatedly faces, just like your customers; the journey of how you want the character aka the customer to take in order to get rid of the pain points and finally, the solution - your product or service to the rescue.
Using interactive personalized videos in the process just makes the exercise that much more fun and engaging, because the audience doesn’t have to deal with a generic character anymore. They can be themselves, interacting with the video and choosing their storylines, and solving the problem all on their own. They are their own Batman, and your product - the ever reliable Robin!
This is the first step in formulating an effective marketing strategy - deciding on what your buyer persona really is. You can use various demographic and psychographic parameters like age, location, sex, living standard, beliefs, interests etc. to define what your ideal audience looks like, who are most likely to buy from you.
This is the stage of the marketing campaign where you analyze the psyche of your audience, and explore more on why does your audience buy? What makes them tick, and what do they look for when consuming marketing content? If done right, this exercise goes a long way in establishing the psychometric [parameters for your video-marketing campaigns.
Once you have enough knowledge about who your customers are and what makes them tick, the next step in the process is to determine what content (in our case, videos) do you want them to consume, and what part of the marketing funnel would they belong upon doing so.
There is one thing that is even more important than content creation - content distribution.
How you distribute your video content will make or break a video content marketing strategy. This question is consistent with all the other three before it - once you have a buyer persona and what drives them, the next question you need to answer is where they hang out and shape up your video content accordingly. What works on Facebook may not work on Instagram, and what works on Twitter may not work on LinkedIn.
As with everything else in life, the timing of your video content marketing strategy is crucial. For your distribution to be effective, it is important that you explore and find out more about your distribution channel, and what works best. People may not use LinkedIn on weekends, and very few of them may use Instagram while hard at work. It is important to understand the subtle nuances.
It is easy for marketers to get carried away with viral videos which get a ton of views, but just views are no good if they cannot translate to results. It is important to be data-driven in this endeavour, and optimize for results/revenue.
It is then important to identify and track a bunch of key-performance indicators to give you an actual sense of how your marketing efforts are turning out to be:
The very top of the funnel metric, the goalpost for which is broad and relatively easy to measure. The idea is to quantify how well your content is doing in terms of first impressions, and the number of views your video content gets is a good measure of how you can perceive the rest of the campaign to be.
Another important top of the funnel metric, play rate is usually defined as the number of times your video content is played relative to the number of times your video content appears in the feed of your audience. This will give you a good idea if your creatives are good enough to have people stop through their browsing and take notice of your content.
Once your audience starts to consume the video content you tailored for them, the next obvious question is how many of them completely view the video in order to receive the message that you wanted to send out. Video completion rate is a good starting measure of engagement, and if your audience likes your video enough to sit through it.
When your audience starts to consume the content you have for them, it is important to lead with a call-to-action in order to persuade them to take action. If the audience has made it this far, it is important that you nurture them and make use of the purchase intent that exists. How many people click-through your interactive video to move down your funnel is an important metric you should keep track of in your video content marketing strategy.
Once the audience makes the decision to purchase and convert, the goal is to then keep them hooked to your product or service and to make sure they keep using them. You also have to keep them interested in your brand for future and build trust.
Now that we’ve explored how powerful videos are across the marketing funnel and the customer journey, let us take a look at some ways you can take your game to the next level by using interactive personalized videos instead of the linear ones to blast through your targets.
Interactive personalized videos work like a charm in this case, because of their ability to not just carry multiple storylines, but also because the audience is an active participant in the flow of the content story, and they feel attached to the product or service you want to talk about.
Interactive personalized videos will give you the edge over others because instead of just handing them a CTA at the end of the content piece you made, the buyer now takes active part in making their way through the content towards the call-to-action, which is customized exclusively for them. Landing pages with mere linear videos convert 85% more than generic landing pages. Imagine the impact when a customer consumes your content to land on a page with a personalized interactive video! Watch them demo requests blowing up!
Whether you use direct emails, product reviews, testimonials or comparative case studies in a bid to help them make up their mind on what needs to be done, an immersive experience where they can be a part of the narrative, exclusively personalized for them, will help the audience visualize their association with their brand and help you seal the deal!
Now that we have discussed all there is about video marketing, and how using interactive personalized videos in your strategy will give you the edge, let us do a deep-dive into industry specific use cases and how you can deliver the Nexweave experience to your audience across stages of the marketing funnel and buyer journeys to maximize ROI.
The e-commerce industry is probably primed to lose out the most without a well-thought video content strategy. And e-commerce is also big on personalization - it is important to send across your product or service message to the right audience at exactly the right time, and what better way than interactive personalized videos to eliminate the friction in the minds of the audience and improve their shopping experience.
Interactive personalized videos are an incredibly potent way to deliver tailored content to your audience in an attempt to persuade them to take action and make a purchase. For a sneaker-head, you can provide them with a tailored list of sneakers they’d be interested in, and for someone who’s into home-decor, send across the best products you’d recommend and watch them make the purchase.
Random and frequent notifications are annoying, truth be told nobody is exactly fond of them. But with Nexweave, you can make these notifications entertaining and engage with your audience, as opposed to the boring news-flash that seems to be the trademark way of delivering notifications.
Recommender systems are incredibly powerful that act based on the available behavioural customer data in an attempt to upsell or cross-sell to them. It is therefore important to customize the messaging in a manner that comes across as exclusive to the customer, and interactive personalized videos are the best foot forward in this regard.
We get that as marketers, there is an urge to keep customers on the platform to keep the engagement going, but the exit pop-up is something that is becoming increasingly common when people depart the platform, and it is not a pleasant experience on the part of the user. Point is, there is a polite way to manage exit intent and have them come back soon after they’ve left - through interactive personalized videos! When you have enough data on the customer references, send tailored and customized offers across their way to have them come back to the happy place in your platform and keep the purchase cycle going.
It is a well known fact that most people add the stuff they want to a cart, only to not proceed with the transaction and leave it there. The interest eventually fizzles out, and the purchase is not made. It is important to hit the nail on the head while you can, and if you spot an item in a customers cart for longer than it should be, it is probably a wise idea to remind them of why they fell in love with the product in the first place. And what better way to do that than an interactive personalized video, especially for them!
Videos are absolutely vital in the marketing of the travel/tourism/hospitality industry, especially when it is more about the experience, feeling and the emotion around the offerings than the offering itself! And video is the best way to do this, since it is the most powerful channel that can be used at scale to create that emotional connection with the audience.
Consumer is king, and here are just a few ways the travel, tourism and hospitality industry can make use of interactive and personalized videos to create the perfect buyer experience they can.
Most customers, when looking for an offering in this space already have a faint idea of what they want out of the next experience. It is important to analyze their behaviour and come up with a custom-plan just for them, all as part of the experience on offer, to create immense customer satisfaction.
Once you know what your customers generally prefer, you can take a deep dive into how they can make the most out of their experience, and expose them to the possibilities available, which may of course interest them.
For a person planning to go to the hills, have them know all about the mountains and the things they could do and the memories they could make. Again, interactive personalized videos are probably the best way to communicate abstracts such as these.
You can even go a step further and deliver them an entire custom experience as per their demographic and psychographic traits, coupled with their past behaviour and buying patterns, This will ensure that the experience is in sync with their preferences and exponentially enhance the satisfaction levels. Brownie points for personalizing the messaging itself, to deliver a personalized experience to your customers.
Interactive personalized videos can perhaps be used in every avenue of your sales, marketing and customer success efforts. Starting from the very top of the funnel from the awareness phase of the buyer journey, down to after the decision phase and after the purchase is complete, there are plenty of ways to maximize ROI and streamline marketing efforts with Nexweave.
It is important for your audience to consume your content and come to a sense of realization about the severity of their pain-points, and what they stand to lose if it is not addressed on time. Weaving a story around your customers is crucial here, so that not only they are introduced to the problems they have, but also can figure out a way to solve them.
When you use an interactive and personalized video to build awareness and trust with your audience, you give them the power to identify the problem, relate to it and analyze how they want to solve it, all the while satisfied that they’re acknowledged on an individual level as a person.
Every person is different, and all of them have different behavioral patterns based on the demography and psychography. Yes you do have the insights about how your audience behaves and what makes them tick, but it is equally important to put these insights in action and communicate with them to address their specific needs and concerns.
With interactive personalized videos, you can send across your message in a direct-line, and the consumer will be satisfied receiving it because it is tailored exactly for them.
Email campaigns are notorious for their low open rate, but did you know that the mere mention of ‘video’ in the subject line has been proven to boost the open rate by 13%!
Emails are still probably the most effective way to organically reach out to people at scale, but if your emails are notoriously boring like most of them are out there, laws of probability may not favor your email marketing campaign.
You can change the dynamics by incorporating interactive personalized videos in the mix. People love custom content, and it’s time you make use of it, at scale. Oh and also, did we tell you Nexweave only charges for the opens? That way, you ensure that you are actually paying only when someone is consuming your content!
Landing pages with embedded videos convert 80% more people than generic landing pages.
If the numbers are so high for generic linear videos, imagine what you could accomplish when a customer lands up on your landing page, and comes across a video made just for them! Guaranteed conversion, if you ask us!
Nexweave Video Scripts
01 – Did you know humans can process visuals 60000 times faster than text; If you want a lot of eyeballs on your content, video is the undisputed champion; But if you think merely getting those eyeballs is enough, you’re in for a surprise; Human attention spans are less than a goldfish; Just kidding, that’s not true – but fact is, our attention span is a mere 8 seconds now!; Not only do you need attention on your video content, you need to make sure people actually consume it; What hacks do you use to stand out from the crowd? Let us know in the comments below!
02 – Attention marketers! We live in a world where every one of us, even the marketers, are constantly bombarded from marketing messages from all directions. With so much noise all around your audience, how do you plan to stand out from the crowd? How do you make sure that your audience connects with your messaging? The answer is simple – Personalization. Change the dynamics of your relationship with the audience. Start acknowledging them as individuals with social identities. Establish a direct-line of communication. Build relationships and trust. Watch marketing outcomes increase exponentially. Personalize at scale, today!
03 - A person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language. No person ever wants to feel like just another face in the crowd, yet most of our online experiences would point to a completely opposite situation. The average Joe is exposed to roughly 1700 ads each month, and 84% of all emails received are spam! Certainly, there is a lot of noise, and customers often get annoyed and end up ignoring all advertisements. Then, the most important part of any marketing effort today has to be contextualization and personalization! If you can acknowledge and focus on the individual needs of your audience, they will feel truly heard! There are no two ways about this – if you want your sales to skyrocket, personalization is the way to go!
04 – Traditional marketing approaches are a one-way street, which all of us are exposed to on a daily basis. But that approach is fast dying, because modern customers expect increasing responsiveness from the companies they do business with. So then the question is - how do you react to what your audience wants and break through the noise? How do you educate them, give them advice, and offer real value? The answer is simple – Interactive content! Typically 2-12 times more effective than traditional marketing, interactive marketing is dramatically more effective because it adjusts to and responds to your audience in real-time. How do you foster a relationship with your audience? Let us know in the comments below!
05 – Communication means exchanging information, which implies there must be two parties who participate. Marketing isn’t just about shouting about your product into the abyss, only to get back an echo. Marketing is a way of communicating with people about your brand, and people only communicate with others when it is either entertaining or enjoyable for them. This is THE factor that affects brand recall, and using interactive videos in your content marketing strategy can take it to another level and make your brand memorable. Your audience is counting on you, foster a relationship with them! Speak to them as individuals, and listen to what they have to say. Do this at scale – and watch your business grow!
06 - Marketing has changed, and today you cannot reach out to your customers by talking endlessly about yourself. You have to make the messaging about them. If you can present a value proposition - how you can solve their pain points and add value to their lives, they will buy from you. But this is easier said than done. Content marketing should aim to educate the audience about your products and services, and how the audience can reap benefits out of it. At the same time, it also has to be entertaining and inspiring, so as to keep the human touch in the communication and keep their interest piqued. Your brand can take it a step further, with the use of interactive personalized videos in your strategy. Open a direct line of communication with your audience, and empower them to take charge of their own story line and how they relate with the product/service offered!
07 - For the absolute top of the funnel, and for buyers who are not yet acquainted with their pain-points, your brand, or both - interactive personalized videos are a powerful way to introduce them to a problem they didn’t know they had, and consequently, a solution that exists for the problem that is causing friction in their business. The focus here is to keep it subtle and educate the buyer as much as you can about how your product can make their life better. The best way to do this is in person - have a direct conversation, face to face, with your prospect. Since that isn’t possible at scale for obvious reasons, the second best way to do that is Nexweave - with an interactive personalized video!
08 - The stage of a customer journey where they are intrigued by your product/service and want to take it for a spin, is probably the most delicate part of the marketing funnel and the buyer journey alike. Demo videos take a deep dive into the product/service and their functionalities, and how the prospect could seriously benefit from using your product or service. Since in this stage, the purchasing decisions are complicated, the decision time-frames are longer and the ticket size is high for B2B especially, personalization and acknowledgement of the customer is the difference between an average product demo and a great product demo. The best way to achieve these outcomes is to show them how it works in person. The second best? Use an interactive and personalized video to catch their attention and show them what they stand to lose without your product or service.
09 - Explainer videos are generally used to simplify a product or service use-case, and tell your audience how exactly your product or the service can take care of it. Generic explainer videos today have the same storyline - introduce a character, describe his problem same as that of your audience, and how your offerings make the characters’ life easy. While this is a good overview, what’s missing is the connection with the audience. Since these generic explainer videos have become the norm, this will surely not excite your audience anymore. However, instead of using a character like them, if you use THEM to describe a problem THEY have, and solve it for them (or better yet, let them choose how they want to solve it themselves - interactivity remember?), that is where the magic happens. And what better way to do that than use an interactive personalized video to make it happen?
10 - In the beginning of the buyer journey, your audience may not even realize they have a pain-point in the first place. The objective here is to define a use-case and make the audience realize they might have a problem on their hands, and what they stand to lose if they don’t work around it. This part of the buyer journey is where story-telling and engagement matters the most, so it is important to keep your audience interested and receptive to the message you’re trying to put across to them. Interactive personalized videos work like a charm in this case, because of their ability to not just carry multiple storylines, but also because the audience is an active participant in the flow of the content story, and they feel attached to the product or service you want to talk about!
11 - The buyer journey does not come to an end with them making the purchase. Once they’ve splashed the cash, it is important for your brand to help them navigate the initial period of getting familiar with the product or service. Once that happens and the customer is comfortable with the offering, you need to make sure that they are actually using it because people sometimes end up buying but not using, which is a leading contributor to churn (trust us, it happens a lot!). And once they’ve consistently started using the product or the service, you need to ensure they get the full value out of the offering. If you use interactive personalized videos to this extent, you can minimize churning customers, which is as good as, if not better, than adding new ones!
12 - E-commerce is big on interaction and personalization! It is important to send across your product or service message to the right audience at exactly the right time, and what better way than interactive personalized videos to eliminate the friction in the minds of the audience and improve their shopping experiences!
13 - Videos are absolutely vital in the travel, tourism and hospitality industry. For the audience, it is more about the experience, feeling and the emotion around the offerings than the offering itself! And video is the best way to do this, since it is the most powerful channel that can be used at scale to create that emotional connection with the audience. Consumer is king, and there are a ton of ways the travel, tourism and hospitality industry can make use of interactive and personalized videos to create the perfect buyer experience they can.
14 - Interactive personalized videos can perhaps be used in every avenue of your sales, marketing and customer success efforts. Starting from the very top of the funnel from the awareness phase of the buyer journey, down to after the decision phase and after the purchase is complete, there are plenty of ways to maximize ROI and streamline marketing efforts with Nexweave.
15 - Deciding on how you want the video content to shape up can be the toughest, albeit fun part of the process. Usually, a rough framework to play by has the following features - a central character around whom the story revolves; a pain point that the character repeatedly faces, just like your customers; the journey of how you want the character aka the customer to take in order to get rid of the pain points and finally, the solution - your product or service to the rescue.
Using interactive personalized videos in the process just makes the exercise that much more fun and engaging, because the audience doesn’t have to deal with a generic character anymore. They can be themselves, interacting with the video and choosing their storylines, and solving the problem all on their own. They are their own Batman, and your product - the ever reliable Robin!
