There’s been an tremendous amount of interest in our new Personalized Video service, and understandably, a lot of questions. Here are answers to the most-asked questions we get from our Higher Ed clients.
1. What is Personalized Video, anyway?
Personalized Video is a new way to reach prospective students, current students and alumni on an individual basis. For the first time, it is possible to craft a truly unique video based on each person’s unique interests or history. It is a groundbreaking technique that creates data-driven videos by pulling from your existing database of student information. The result: Incredibly targeted videos that allow you to engage with prospects, students and alumni like never before.
2. How does it work?
In a nutshell, we work with you to determine what data from your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is best suited to build a compelling story for your school and target audience. Next, we create a library of video assets that address all the possible variations of the data. We build a master edit template that establishes a polished, cohesive flow for the video segments. Next, we pull data from your CRM software. Our render farm then produces an individual, unique video for each person in the database.
Each of those videos is then transcoded in the cloud to a variety of formats, suitable for playback on any device, including smart phones, tablets, desktop browsers and smart TVs. We build a branded landing page for video playback. And we supply a custom URL for each video, which is then inserted back into your CRM data. You insert the individual URLs into an eblast to your target audience.
Each campaign is unique and the specifics of your own campaign may be a little different — but in general, that is the way it works.
3. What are the benefits, versus traditional video?
Recent research shows that Personalized Video campaigns can generate anywhere from a 200% to 1,500% increase in click-through and conversion rates, versus traditional video. Of course, your mileage may vary.
Personalized Video is a paradigm shift from the “one size fits all” approach of a traditional video. It’s a data-driven approach that tailors your message to each prospect, student or alumna.
4. Does it actually work?
Absolutely. Here’s what one Higher Ed client had to say:
The feedback we received from the campaign was overwhelmingly positive. We received dozens of responses stating how much they loved the video and were very excited to attend. We also received some from accepted students that said they loved Cabrini, but will be attending somewhere else (due to cost, major), but the video reinforced what an amazing institution it is. We had about 50 recipients click the enroll link, which is great!
See the full case study.
5. Can I see an example?
Yes. Here is an actual video from the Personalized Video campaign mentioned above. This was an Accepted Students Yield campaign targeting prospective incoming freshmen. This is one of 2,400 unique videos we produced, pulling each student’s profile from the school’s CRM system.
Meet Nicole.
From the school’s CRM, we know that Nicole wants to be a Digital Communications major. She is interested in internships, study abroad and student clubs. She plans to live on campus.
6. What’s involved in producing a Personalized Video campaign?
There are four main steps in building a Personalized Video campaign. Our team works with you through each step.
- STRATEGY. Working with your team, we determine the campaign goals and establish the story architecture.
- DATA ACQUISITION. We pull pertinent data from your data source, such as a Contact Us web form or CRM service (Salesforce, Zoho, Act!, etc.)
- PRODUCTION. Our proprietary system builds out and renders a series of custom videos — one for each customer. We can produce a couple dozen unique videos, or tens of thousands. We work from video assets you already have, or we can produce them for you.
- DEPLOYMENT. We host the videos online and provide a unique link for each video, which you send out to your customers through an eblast or whatever mechanism you prefer. Social sharing links allow your customers to share their videos on Facebook, Instagram, etc.
7. Is there a way to track metrics?
Yes. We use Google Analytics to aggregate and analyze campaign traffic. Google Analytics provides data regarding number of unique videos viewed, whose videos were watched and the number of times a person’s video was watched. In addition, video play metrics are accessible, such as Start, Stop, Buffer and Complete events. With a recent campaign we were able to determine that over 70% of those who watched their personalized, 90 second video, watched it to completion.
8. What does a Personalized Video campaign cost?
The base cost of a campaign is $15,000. Video production is additional.
9. Can we shoot the video ourselves?
Yes. We can work with video that you (or a third party) has shot. We will use it to create the master template, which is something we do on our end.
10. How do we get started?
Give me a call at 610.892.7970 ext 102. We’ll start by discussing your goals and the data that’s available from your school’s CRM.
Have more questions? Give me a call (the number is above) or email me at [email protected].
