Video Personalization: How to Create Videos that Speak To Your Audience
Whether you are creating videos for potential leads or existing business customers, people want to feel special, seen, and heard. As leads move through the sales funnel, your ability to create videos specific to those users can be a game changer for your business.
That's where video personalization comes into play. It can serve videos that convey one message to many or one personalized message for each viewer.
What is Video Personalization?
Video personalization refers to the process of tailoring video content to suit the specific preferences, characteristics, and behaviors of individual viewers. With an ever-increasing array of content competing for consumers' attention, generic and mass-produced videos often fail to make a lasting impact.
By leveraging a wealth of data, including demographics and past interactions, marketers and video professionals can craft videos that feel tailor-made for each individual viewer. Gone are the days of one-size-fits-all content; the era of hyper-targeted and personalized video experiences is here, and it holds the key to unlocking a new level of engagement, conversion, and brand loyalty.
In fact, a survey showed that 80% of people are more likely to make a purchasing decision when businesses offer them a personalized experience.
As marketers and video professionals strive to navigate the intricacies of an increasingly digital world, mastering the art of video personalization becomes paramount. In this article, let’s examine how personalized videos can help your business, what you need to know when creating personalized videos, and how to create personalized videos for your business easily.
How Video Personalization Can Help Your Business
In creating personalized videos, your customers get content that resonates with them, but what does this mean for your business?
- Drives Brand Awareness
We are currently in an era where individuals are bombarded by marketing messages daily on different platforms, making it more difficult for businesses to stand out and get their message heard from the crowd of competitors fighting for the users' attention. When users see a personalized video that is tailored to their interests, they are more likely to pay attention to the content and remember the brand.
This is because personalized videos feel more relevant and engaging than generic videos. As a result, viewers are more likely to remember the brand and its message, which can lead to increased brand awareness. - Improves Brand Loyalty
Research shows that about 52% of customers would switch from products that don’t personalize their communication. When you establish a personal connection with your customers, they feel understood and appreciated and are more likely to develop a sense of loyalty toward your brand, leading to continued business and positive word-of-mouth referrals.
Personalized videos can help create a strong emotional connection between your business and your customers. - Improved Conversion Rates
By delivering personalized discounts and product or service recommendations, businesses can increase the likelihood of converting viewers into customers by 202%. This is because personalized videos can effectively address specific pain points and showcase how the offering meets the viewer's needs, resulting in higher conversion rates. - Reduces Churn
Personalized videos are a way of turning present customers into lifetime customers. As your customer's needs change over time, you can track customer engagement, identifying potential churners early on. This gives you an opportunity to intervene and use that data to create personalized videos and retain customers that might have otherwise churned.
So if you are looking for a way to keep your customers happy and engaged for a long time, personalized video is a powerful tool that you should consider using.
Best Practices to Ace Video Personalization
Now, let’s talk about some tried-and-true strategies for video personalization that’ll help you harness its full potential and create marketing content that helps you establish an emotional connection with your audience.
Mentioning the lead/customer’s name
Including the lead's or customer's name in a video can make the video feel more personal and engaging. According to Dale Carnegie, “A person’s name is to him or her the sweetest and most important sound in any language.”. The customer will more likely need to pay attention to messages in the video since they are addressed directly to them.
This would make the customer feel more valued and appreciated, and it could also help increase the chances of taking action. This immediately gives you an advantage over your competitors because most businesses don’t bother with this basic first step to personalizing their videos.
Overlaying business logo
As you create personalized videos, it is essential also to include your brand/business logo prominently in the video itself. Your brand logo is a powerful symbol, evoking emotions in the viewer. An incorporated brand logo gives the video a more professional look and makes it clear that the content in the video belongs to your brand.
Any time the viewer shares or embeds the video on other websites/social media platforms, your brand grows. As you continue to put your video out there with your business logo, people are more likely to remember your business because they see it frequently. Also, it is the simplest way of preventing unauthorized distribution or plagiarism of your video content.
Watermarking to protect video rights
There are always cases of actors stealing people’s content and passing it off as their own, more often than not with malicious intent. One way of protecting your videos from being stolen is by watermarking them. A watermark can make it difficult for people to copy or share the video without permission.
For example, you could watermark your videos with your business logo or copyright notice. This would help to prevent people from illegally sharing the videos, and it would also help to protect your company's intellectual property.
Customizing videos for your user’s platform
When delivering content to your users, you will have to keep in mind that your users will engage with your videos using different devices and on different social media platforms.
So you will need to customize your video's aspect ratio and dimensions to fit specific devices (cropping a regular 16:9 video to portrait mode to better cater to mobile audiences, for example) and also reduce video length for certain social media platforms (reducing a 10mins video to 3mins to post on Instagram, for example).
This ensures that your videos not only display correctly without any awkward cropping or black bars but are also appropriate in terms of length for each platform. This improves the user experience and makes the content more visually appealing.
Custom video thumbnail
From data taken from 3,745 videos posted by 38 top brands across 4 industries on YouTube, it was discovered that videos with visually appealing thumbnails get more views. Using a custom video thumbnail can help to attract attention and encourage people to watch the video. The thumbnail should include relevant images and text about the video, giving people a better idea of what the video is about.
Personalized videos are essential when dealing with customers at various sales funnel stages if you intend to attract new customers and keep existing ones. Having said this, how do you then create these videos? Do you roll your camera to create a video for each customer every time?
You need a more efficient solution, and that is where a tool like ImageKit comes into play, providing a more efficient approach to creating personalized videos at scale, saving you valuable time and resources.
How to create personalized videos with ImageKit
ImageKit is a cloud-based modern media stack—a Digital Asset Management platform, video optimization, and transformation service—all in one. It allows you to programmatically transform your videos in real-time, using URL-based parameters, and then use a global CDN – AWS CloudFront, out of the box – to deliver them to your users the closest to where they are.
This means you can create personalized videos at scale without having to render new videos in your editing suite for every customer.
Steps to personalize videos using ImageKit:
With ImageKit, creating personalized videos is simplified down to three easy, straightforward steps.
Upload your videos ➡️ Apply transformations ️➡️ Deliver personalized videos. It’s that easy. Let’s take a look at these steps in detail.
Step 1: Upload your video
You can use any of these methods to upload your videos to ImageKit
- ImageKit’s Media Library: Within ImageKit’s dashboard, navigate to the 'Media Library' section ➡️ Click on “New” ➡️Choose either “File Upload” or “Folder Upload”. You can then proceed to upload a video or folder of videos from your computer
You can also upload files by dragging and dropping them anywhere on the screen.
- External Cloud storage integration: ImageKit makes it easy to integrate with existing infrastructure like Amazon S3, Azure, Google Storage, or Nginx servers in a few minutes. You can do that from the ImageKit dashboard.
From the Dashboard, navigate to the 'External Storage' section ➡️ Click on “Add new” ➡️Choose the type of origin you want to integrate with ImageKit.
- Using the Video Upload API: Finally, you can upload your videos to the Media Library via the API from your application. ImageKit provides SDKs that enable secure video uploads from both the Server (NodeJS, Python, PHP, Go, etc.) as well as the Client (React, Angular, Vue.js, vanilla JS, and more).
Step 2: Apply video transformations and personalizations in real-time:
After successfully uploading your video file to ImageKit using any of the methods described above, you can now proceed to transform your videos using ImageKit’s URL-based API.
The ability to crop your personalized videos before delivering them to your users in real-time has several advantages for you and your customers. You can crop videos to cater to users on different devices, whether mobile, tablet, or desktop, and create pixel-perfect dimensions for different social media platforms.
For example, videos in vertical 4:5 or 9:16 for Instagram/Facebook reels or square 1:1 for feed content). This will improve the user experience because videos will look better and load faster on your customer's devices, irrespective of screen size.
ImageKit provides a simple way of achieving this in real time without using any editing software by just using the uploaded file URL.
First, get the video’s URL from your ImageKit dashboard. As shown below.
Then, use ImageKit’s Transformations API. To crop a video file in ImageKit, pass the width and height as parameters (as w and h) in the URL.
For example, to crop a video to an aspect ratio of 9:16 vertical view for users on mobile devices, you would use the following URL:
https://ik.imagekit.io/hhmnlrce0/thor_short.mp4%20(Original).mp4?tr=ar-9-16,h-800
Trim video length
ImageKit offers you a powerful and efficient way to trim video content for various marketing campaigns, social media platforms, or client projects.
You can trim a video using the so, eo, and du options to specify a start offset, end offset, or duration.
This is particularly useful in some of the following areas, to mention a few:
- Social media: You can create video stories of different lengths based on the platform or stick to a custom video length according to your brand presets. For example, You can create Instagram videos that are only 60 seconds long, while TikTok videos can be up to 10 minutes long.
- Video ads: Video ads are often shown on different platforms, each with its own length restrictions. For example, Google Display Network ads can be up to 30 seconds long, while Facebook ads can be up to 15 seconds long. By trimming your video ads to the appropriate length, you can ensure that they are always the perfect length for the platform and that they are more likely to be watched by users.
Video trimming is quite easy to do with the ImageKit URL-based transformation API. For example, if you have a 3-minute long trailer and want to cut it down to a 15-second Facebook ad (after trimming out the first 5 seconds of studio logos), you can do so with the so and du parameters in your URL.
Usage - so-<value>,du-<value>
The URL will become:
https://ik.imagekit.io/hhmnlrce0/thor_short.mp4%20(Original).mp4?tr=so-5,du=15
The video trimming functionality will ensure that your videos are always the perfect length for your users and that they are more likely to be watched and engaged with.
Overlay logo, text, or image
In ImageKit, you can add images of your business logo, the text of your customer's names, subtitles, and even other videos over a base video using layers. A layer is a special kind of transformation that allows you to modify the overlay itself and express its position in relation to the parent video.
A layer starts with l-<type> and ends with l-end. All the positional and transformation parameters of that layer are between l-<type> and l-end and only apply to that layer and not the parent base asset.
type can be either an image, text, video, or subtitles.
For example, you can add a customer's name or whatever text you want to a personalized video (“Good Day James"); all you will need to do is specify it in the URL API.
ImageKit also lets you specify where the text or any other form of overlay will be located. You can learn more about how to add text or brand logo overlays from the ImageKit documentation. It’s worth noting that you can also transform these layers themselves, and you can learn more about advanced overlay strategies here.
Step 3: Delivering the personalized video
Automatic file format conversion
You want to ensure your customers get your video in the format that’ll be best for their device/platform – after all, anything else would defeat the point of a personalized video. But how do you do this? You can’t be sure what device every single one of your users has, after all. ImageKit takes this problem off your hands with its automatic format conversion.
This ImageKit feature considers various factors such as device capabilities, browser support for specific video formats, and your customer's preferences. You’ll never have to worry about creating and storing multiple versions of a video, in different formats. Upload a video, personalize it as needed, and ImageKit will dynamically ensure the best format is delivered to your user.
You can enable this feature for your personalized video by simply turning on “Use best format for video delivery” option when you head to “Settings” ➡️ “Video” ➡️ “Video optimization”
Using ImageKit, you’ll never have to worry about the tradeoff between visual fidelity and file size. Upload a video, personalize it as needed, and ImageKit can automatically optimize them to provide the most balanced video quality every time, with no further editing or infrastructure needed on your part.
To enable this from your Imagekit dashboard, Select settings from the left main menu ➡️ Inside Videos ➡️ under optimization ➡️ toggle "optimize video quality" control.
You can choose a quality level between 1 and 100 for your videos. 1 results in the lowest perceptual quality and smallest file size. 100 results in the highest perceptual quality and biggest file size, but keep in mind that the default setting of 50 will suit most use cases. Going too high only increases file size, it won’t improve your quality beyond the source.
Adaptive bitrate streaming
With ImageKit’s URL-based API, you can easily add Adaptive Bitrate Streaming to your personalized videos, ensuring an optimum viewing experience for your customers.
Adaptive Bitrate (ABR) is a dynamic video streaming technique that optimizes the viewing experience by adjusting video quality based on the viewer's internet connection or bandwidth. It involves encoding a video into multiple versions at different bitrates and resolutions.
During playback, the video player continuously monitors the user's network conditions and collaborates with the server to seamlessly switch between these versions. This ensures smooth and uninterrupted playback.
For example, you can generate an HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) manifest and four adaptive variants of your video at different resolutions, i.e., 240p, 360p, 480p, and 720p, that will be available to your customers by simply modifying the original URL like this:
And if you prefer to use Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over the HTTP (MPEG-DASH) protocol, the URL will be:
https://ik.imagekit.io/hhmnlrce0/thor_short.mp4%20(Original).mp4/ik-master.mpd?tr=sr-240_360_480_720
That’s it! All you have to do now is embed any of these URLs in any HTML5-compatible video player, and you’ll have an adaptive streaming-ready video for your videos in real-time.
You can check out some other live demos for adaptive bitrate streaming here.
ImageKit - Your Ideal Tool for Video Personalization
Let's explore some of the key features that make ImageKit an indispensable companion in the journey of captivating your viewers and achieving marketing success:
- Global CDN network: ImageKit.io offers a global CDN (Amazon CloudFront). This means that your personalized videos are not only optimized for size, and you get to transform them as per your requirements, but you also have a superfast delivery network with ImageKit.io that helps deliver personalized videos to your customers in milliseconds.
- Video webhooks: ImageKit uses webhooks to notify your application wherever a video is processed or updated. This can be used to trigger other actions, such as sending a notification to a customer when a personalized video has been delivered or updating a database record. With ImageKit, you can easily create a Webhook from your dashboard and start using it in your application. See the video webhook events that imageKit supports here.
- Video security: Protecting personalized video content is of utmost importance. ImageKit supports secure video uploads from both client and server, restricts unsigned transform requests, and lets you set videos to private (access control). Implementing these security features will stop the unauthorized use of your video URLs. ImageKit also allows you to set access and permission levels for each user on your assets based on your organization's needs.
- Media collection and sharing: ImageKit's Digital Asset Management solution allows you to organize, manage, and share your assets in files and folders. Using media collections, you can create virtual groupings of assets regardless of their folder structure, this makes it easy for you to tag, organize, and manage your personalized video assets. It provides a user-friendly interface, ensuring smooth collaboration among team members.
- Performance monitoring: Monitoring the performance of personalized videos is vital to optimizing user engagement. ImageKit provides detailed analytics and performance metrics for videos and pages you choose to monitor, allowing businesses to track video views, engagement, and other relevant data. These insights enable data-driven decision-making and continuous improvement of video personalization strategies. As soon as you complete your setup and start delivering videos using ImageKit.io, you are able to track the performance of your videos for both desktop and mobile devices using the Performance Center.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the power of video personalization cannot be overstated when creating videos that genuinely connect with your audience and drive conversions. By tailoring content to individual viewers, businesses can achieve a lot of benefits, ranging from; increased engagement, enhanced customer experience, improved brand loyalty, higher conversion rates, and a lot more.
However, video personalization can be difficult to accomplish; aside from being time-consuming, it is also resource-intensive, from buying equipment to paying for software, which often costs an arm and a leg. So to harness the full potential of video personalization, you need a tool that is not only easy to use but also cost-effective.
That's where ImageKit shines as an exceptional solution; it offers a low-code, cloud-based solution that requires no software, downloads, or infrastructure on your part.
With ImageKit's forever-free trial, you get an impressive 20 GB of free storage to explore all the platform's benefits. Don't miss this opportunity to elevate your video marketing strategy with personalized and high-performing videos.
Sign up for an ImageKit account today and unlock the potential to create videos that resonate with your audience and drive conversions like never before.