Right now the term ‘personalization’ is all the hype, its what marketers are talking about. It’s all about delivering the right content to the right person at the right time. Sounds easy right? Well, the term is a little confusing and as us video marketers start to make our video experiences more interactive, personalization will play a central role. This short article is mean’t to explain personalized video as it relates to video marketing.
There are two main types of Personalization when it comes to video marketing:
1. The personalization of content that appears on a web experience based on web viewer behavior profile.
Let’s call this the CMS centric approach. The technology here enables the CMS to serve the most relevant content to the web viewer by dynamically loading content like text or a video on a web page. A good example of this a retail brand website that sells mens and women’s shoes. When a customer or potential customer visits their website and starts clicking around on content (including video), the CMS along with personalization software will track that viewer and dynamically load videos and other relevant content for that viewer based on a history of content consumed. In this case if the web viewer identified them self as woman, they would see content relevant to women’s shoe wear or fashion. From a tech standpoint, an online video platform was integrated to talk to their content management system (CMS) and personalization software to dynamically serve video.
2. The second type of Personalization is to personalize the copy or production of content.
In this case, rather than serve relevant content, you are modifying existing content (through production methods) to include information or metadata related to the web viewer. A great example of this is an online greeting card, like the famous dancing elf holiday card, where you can input your names and head shots of your best friends and it renders a video that places the faces of your friends on the dancing elfs in the video. That is personalization on the content creation level and there are a number of solutions that integrate with video.
Here are some questions to ask yourself before you implement personalized video at your organization:
1. What’s your content personalization strategy? Are you looking to produce personalized content (through production methods) on the spot or are you looking to personalize the customer journey and experience?
2. Although your team may be asking for this functionality it may be in fact very narrow and solves a specific goal, but does not scale well across your organization’s other video use cases.
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