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Is Personalized Video a Fad?

During one of our recent meetings with an investor group the question came up whether there is the risk that “personalized video is a fad”. Is it just a novelty that will wear off quickly?

Here at BizGreet we firmly believe that there are two answers to this question, and both of them are: No, it’s here to stay. And this is why:

The first answer is that personalization will increasingly become what Mat (our CEO) refers to as “table stakes”. Your customers will increasingly expect and demand you to personalize your messages. Don’t do it and you’re already behind everyone else.

If you think about it, this isn’t an unreasonable assumption by any means. Take a look at the evolution of other mass-communications over the last years: Who really considers himself as the intended recipient of mail envelopes delivered to the “Current Resident”? That stuff goes straight into the trash bin.

If you receive email from your bank referring to you as “Dear valued customer”, don’t you wonder how valued you are if they can’t even call you by your name?

Personalized video marketing is still in its infancy, but we are at the beginning of an explosive growth of marketing messages moving into personalized video.

Secondly, personalization will become table stakes, because it happens for two reasons (The same two reasons why it has been so quickly embraced by the aforementioned mass-communication methods.) And neither of them is considered a fad:

1. A message is personalized to create a personal (emotional) connection to your customer or prospect in order to make him or her feel valued and to build goodwill for your message, request, or product. Nothing builds better goodwill than the “big cheese” of an organization taking the time out of their schedule to personally reach out to their clients or supporters. People can see through dynamic personalization with text banners, etc. rather quickly. Seeing a celebrity or the CEO of a company speak their name makes a huge difference.
2. But personalization doesn’t stop at the first name. Personalization ensures that you only deliver the subset of information to the recipient that he or she actually cares about. You know probably 25 reasons why a customer should buy your product. Chances are your customer only cares about 1 or two of them. Tailor your video to this audience of “1″, to the exact cares of your customer, and personalization will help you close the sale.

Taking all this into consideration when reaching out to customers, it seems obvious to us that in the future marketers, fundraisers, or recruiters will have to increasingly pin-point-tailor their messages to thousands of audiences of one instead of relying on a single message to reach thousands equally well.

Personalization IS table stakes already.

But no worries, we’re here to help with that.