Video Personalization Can Be Truly Scaled

For centuries, written content was the dominant player in sales and marketing. If you wanted to get the word out about a product or pitch to a potential customer and meeting them in person wasn’t an option, you would have to rely on their willingness to take the time to read your message. But in the decades since, video content has been dominating the business space. Implementing a video-based sales strategy is essential if a business hopes to keep up with the competition and keep the attention of modern consumers.

The Value of Video in Sales

Over the last couple decades, video has steadily overtaken all other mediums. You need only look at some of the world’s most successful corporations for proof. In the days of Myspace, or even AOL instant messaging, social media was primarily text-based. Today, gifs and videos are the beating heart of platforms like Twitter, Instagram, and Tik Tok.

Just a few decades ago, print ads were the norm in advertising. Now, to engage their audience, companies both large and small depend on advertisements, product demos, and testimonials that can be viewed on the internet with a single mouse click. And in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, virtual sales techniques are more important than ever before, driving even more businesses to switch over entirely.

It’s hard to deny that these companies are onto something. There is a lot of compelling evidence to support the idea that video is the most effective tool in a sales team’s collection. According to research, human brains are simply hardwired to engage most effectively with movement and sound. The combination of those two stimulants grabs and holds our attention like nothing else can.

Take a Look at the Stats

Our brains don’t like video just a little bit better than other mediums; they like it a lot better. Experts maintain that human brains process visual information 60,000 times faster than written information. Obliviously, that gives a business that is using video marketing a huge advantage over a business that isn’t.

Plus, studies also suggest that a combined 95% of people are either visual or verbal learners. These two statistics alpone are evidence enough that video content has a much higher probability of reaching and sticking with customers than an email, for example.

It should be obvious by now that video has the potential to drastically improve a business’s sales numbers and level of customer engagement. Here are a few more stats that further highlight just how powerful video is as a sales or marketing component:

84% of consumers report that they have been convinced by a video advertisement to pay for a product or service.
69% of consumers say their preferred method of learning about a product or service is watching a short video. This contrasts a measly 18% who would rather read a text-based advertisement or article.
People are 100% more likely to share a video with their friends than any other type of content, including social media posts.
86% of businesses use video in their marketing strategy.
71% of B2B marketers use videos in their marketing strategy.
86% of video marketers report that implementing video has increased traffic to their websites.
41% more businesses are using video as a marketing tool in 2021 than in 2016.
78% of video marketers report that using video has directly improved their sales numbers.
83% of businesses report that customers spend more time on average viewing their websites since implementing video marketing.

Personalized Sales Videos

But what if video marketing could be improved even further? While videos allow for a greater degree of connection and engagement with a target audience than text does, they still lack the personal feel of a face-to-face conversation or a live video call.

Many potential clients are looking for a degree of personal attention from the businesses they choose to patronize. Customers want to feel like they matter to the companies with which they do business, not like they are just a faceless name on a list.

Each customer is different, each with unique needs, preferences. A sales pitch that doesn’t take customers’ differences into account, whether in video form or text form, misses a valuable opportunity to tailor the sales approach to the situation.

Filming a single sales video and posting it online or sending it out en masse is like casting a line and waiting for a bite. Personalized videos provide a way to thoughtfully target customers as individuals, which leads to a much higher rate of success.

The Problem With Scaling Personalization

But, there’s a good reason more businesses don’t create personalized video content for each and every customer. Recording a video is an exponentially more complicated, expensive, and time-consuming process than writing an email, and it’s not feasible to create them at scale.

It’s definitely worth going to the effort to personalize videos for select, high-priority clients, but trying to provide every single customer with a custom experience is simply not possible. Even though the finished video might appear simple and straightforward, there’s a lot more work going on behind the scenes than pressing record and saying the lines. Let’s walk through the process of producing a single short video:

Script writing

Before you shoot a video, you need something worth shooting. The first step of the video production process is sitting down and coming up with the idea for the content of your video, and then writing it down in the form of a script. Anything you want to communicate to the viewer needs to be clearly mapped out before you can proceed.

Storyboarding

It might sound like overkill–after all, you’re not filming the next Marvel movie–but creating at least a basic storyboard is a must if you want to avoid wasting time once you start shooting. You’ll need to plan out the video shot-by-shot, with pictures of each, so you aren’t just winging it when it comes time to hit record. The last thing you want is to spend a whole day shooting, only to discover later that your footage is confusing and disorganized, or worse, that you are missing important shots.

Preparing for the shoot

Now that your script and storyboard are finished, you’re still not ready to shoot. In order to bring your roadmap to life, you will first need to plan the execution. Any obstacles at the shooting location, such as background noise or lack of space for equipment, should be identified and solved well beforehand so that, once again, you avoid wasting shooting time.

Additionally, the actors or presenters will need to learn the script, and maybe do a trial-run or two off-camera. There are also technical factors to consider, such as lighting, acoustics, and shot composition.

Shooting the video

Finally, it’s time to shoot the video. Even a short video will take longer to record than you think, likely several hours at the least. If the finished video is planned to be more than about a minute long, you can count on at least a full day of shooting. No matter how well you prepare, you are inevitably going to run into a snag here and there that will slow you down, and you will need to record several takes of each shot to be certain you have all the footage you need.

You don’t want to enter the post-production stage and realize too late that your only take of an essential shot is unusable because of a mistake or technical issue that went unnoticed while shooting.

Editing

The last step of the process is editing all the footage you’ve gathered into a finished video. You’ll need to use high-quality editing software to do this. First, each individual clip will need to be trimmed to remove any unwanted footage at the beginning or end of the shot.

Then, the clips will need to be assembled in order and adjusted frame by frame to look smooth and seamless. It’s a painstaking process that can sometimes be as time consuming as filming itself. This is also the time to add any music, sound effects, or other audio that wasn’t picked up during the shoot.

Equipment

It’s not really a step, but it’s worth mentioning that you will also have to consider the equipment you need. Acquiring the necessary laundry list of professional video production gear won’t be cheap. Sure, you can shoot and edit the whole thing on an iPhone, but unless you really know what you’re doing, your audience will notice the lack of quality. To create a professional looking video, you need at least a camera, a light setup, and a microphone, along with all the necessary accessories.

That’s a lot of work to produce a single brief video. Let’s look at it in terms of time invested:

Script writing and storyboarding: It’s highly variable based on the situation, but most people probably need at least two hours to write and storyboard a quality video script.
Preparing for the shoot: Preparation will need to start at least one day in advance, and will probably require another two hours of work.
Shooting: Shooting even a short video could take anywhere from a few hours to a full day.
Editing: Plan for another five hours of work to assemble the final product.

That’s around 17 hours of work required to produce a single one minute-long personalized video from start to finish. Most businesses don’t have the resources to justify spending that much time on a custom sales video for every client. A company with 1,000 individual contacts would need to invest 17,000 hours to personalize a video for each of them, which is clearly impractical.

The Synthetic Scaling Solution

However, the recent advances in synthetic video technology provide a more attainable alternative. Deep Word can achieve the same personalization via their API and upcoming CRM integrations for Hubspot and Salesforce. A synthetic video can be customized and ready to use in a fraction of the time it takes to create a traditional video, truly enabling personalized content at scale. Personalized sales videos no longer have to be restricted to rare, important occasions.

Compared to the process of creating a video the traditional way, the process of creating a synthetic video with Deep Word is simple:

Select the contacts you want to create a personalized video for.
Write your script and select the areas you want to personalize for (ex. First Name, Company Name, Position Details, etc.).
(Optional) Record a short video of yourself talking, or record whoever you want to appear in the videos.
Upload your video, or select one of the video actors provided by Deep Word.
Individually personalized versions of the video, spoken by your video actor, are automatically generated and sent out to each client within the hour.

Instead of spending 17 hours per video laboring over the traditional production process, Deep Word can generate equal personalized videos in just minutes. Integration with Deep Word’s API via one’s database, CRM, or LMS requires only a few lines of code, which makes it easy for businesses to customize videos for anyone in their contacts. Personalized video content at scale looks a lot more realistic on this timeline.

Start Personalizing Videos at Scale

Video marketing dominates our cultures attention, and it’s proven to be significantly more effective than other forms of consumer engagement. Tapping into this advantage is the best way for brands to drive sales and growth. Even better, the power of a personalized experience can now be generated at scale and packaged in video format in a way that’s never been possible before.

You can see the difference that personalized sales videos make for yourself with Deep Word’s interactive demo. Just by entering some of your info in a form, you can receive a free personalized video in fifteen minutes or less that has been automatically synthesized based on the information that was submitted. Get ahead of the competition with scalable personalized video creation that will attract and impress more clients than would be possible any other way.