How personalised video can revolutionise your sales cycle

Video content is a hugely effective way to promote your company and brand. It’s easy to engage with, it’s easy to target a specific audience, and it’s easy to be shared across multiple channels. Accordingly, many businesses are starting to realize the power that video can exercise for your sales team. 

Videos are a great way to communicate who your business is, why you do what you do and why it represents value to a prospective customer. They can help you prospect for sales, break down barriers and help you seal the deal when it comes to sales. But how can you gain an extra edge on an internet which is, frankly, already full of video content? 

This is where personalized sales videos can come into play. Personalized content can be an effective way to get past some of the traditional gatekeepers; your customers like to feel special, and personalized video helps do that, even more so than personalized emails or picking up the phone and making a call directly. In fact, research from SmartHQ suggests that 72% of consumers only engage with personalized marketing.

However, you can’t simply give your salespeople a personalized sales video to work with and expect magic overnight. All the usual rules of marketing apply. It’s got to be relevant, it’s got to hook people and it’s got to be high-quality. You don’t get a pass just because of the comparative novelty of the medium. For reference, up to 66% of video advertisements were just 30 seconds long. That should give you some pause for thought before sending a 10-minute presentation! 

Importantly, not every video needs to be a hard sell. Seasonal reminders, birthdays, customer anniversaries, and more can all be ways to serve as a point of contact and keep your company at the top of mind. Additionally, they can be an effective way to promote initiatives like state of the nation addresses, company updates, and share thought leadership content to help encourage best practices in the industry.

When you’re pitching to a client, you’re not just selling a product or service — you’re also taking steps to build brand loyalty to your business. That’s why video can be so powerful; content is king, and a personalized sales video can be a great way to blend both style and substance in the process. 

One of the most common issues we hear is that it’s increasingly difficult to stand out from competitors, and personalized videos can be a highly effective way to accomplish that. Personalization is more likely to grab the prospective buyer’s attention, acting as an effective way to enhance otherwise cold outreach. It demonstrates that you’ve actively taken the time to think about what sort of issues they may be facing as a company. Additionally, with 50% of sales going to the vendor who responds first, it’s critical to ensure that your content is great out of the gate. If you’re being spotted in the inbox with unique content, you’re far more likely to land the sale than by sending a form email. 

There are three primary styles of a personalized sales video. 

• Completely customized — From top to toe, these videos are created specifically to reach out to a particular customer. They’re far and away the most resource-intensive type to create, and while they can be effective, there’s also the risk that they’ll be wasted effort if they do end up falling flat. Warby Parker had a fascinating example in response to a tweet by a customer asking for advice on choosing their preferred pair of glasses. 

• Semi-personalized — At first glance, semi-personalized videos appear to be completely customized. But a closer glance will reveal that they don’t include features like the recipient’s name or specific references to their company. They’re scripted and filmed in such a way as to avoid these elements. They’re arguably the most time-efficient way to personalize videos, but they need to be used judiciously — otherwise, viewers will wise up to the technique and begin to switch off. This is most commonly seen in TV commercials, with some extreme examples coming in these Tim and Eric-directed Old Spice commercials. 

• Bulk videos — Bulk personalized strikes something of a middle ground between the two other types. Although it requires more work than semi-personalized videos, it’s also much more time and resource-efficient than creating completely customized articles for each client. Typically, they’ll utilize existing footage — either produced by your company or stock footage and animation — which has a number of points that can be modified for personalization, such as title cards or captions. A great example includes this end of year campaign from Nike. 

Tools like Elevate enable bulk videos to be created with relative ease, even with little to no prior knowledge of video production. By folding it into an app, just about any business can create high-quality videos which can help boost sales in the process. Get in touch with the team at Elevate today to discover how personalized sales videos can benefit your business, pricing models, and much more.