How Templates Can Enhance Your Personalized Video Marketing Strategy

BY BLUERUSH | PERSONALIZED VIDEO

Video has become one of the most effective marketing tools. Companies failing to integrate video into their strategies will quickly fall behind the adoption curve – and fall behind their competitors. But pivoting to adopt different solutions is never easy. All new tools have a learning curve, often made steeper for marketers who are always pressed for time and resources and can’t afford to get caught in the technical reeds of a digital tool – they need to stay focused on big-picture strategy. Thankfully, platforms like IndiVideo come with user-friendly templates out of the box, allow you to build your own templates, so you can have your personalized video strategy up and running in no time. Let’s look at all the ways that having and using templates in your personalized video strategy will not just make your life easier but enhance your marketing across the board.

What is a template?

Briefly, personalized video templates help you combine a wide variety of different audio-visual and formatting elements in a way that effectively and consistently delivers your brand messaging. How and which elements you use to create a personalized video depends on your strategic needs and messaging and usually involves mixing static and dynamic content. Static content is the material in your video that never changes, like a company logo, a website address or background imagery. Dynamic content uses unique images, audios, videos, and text that you bring to each separate video, chosen for their ability to engage the viewer and bring your message to life. Regular non-personalized (‘boring’) videos uses the same static content that all customers see. Personalized videos use dynamic content that can change from customer to customer, all in real-time. While sometimes you’ll only use a handful of elements to make your video, other times you will coordinate them all in a symphony of marketing; that said, most templates consist of the following 4 basic categories:

• Intro & outro to give context to the experience
• Placeholders for dynamic content and images
• Text placeholders
• Interactive elements to take an action
• Music

But even this “introductory” level opens up a wealth of possibilities for what you can create, while at the same time not being so wide that your message is unfocused.

Why templates?

As you start incorporating personalized videos into your marketing communications strategy, you’re bound to face a few challenges. Often, marketers are a one-person team who can only devote so much time to making videos. And if the team is lucky to have creators, new staff need to get up and running quickly. Despite these challenges, marketers are still expected to ensure consistent messaging, while always keeping an eye on how to scale more (often with less). There are a lot of moving parts in the media content of every campaign, and video templates are specifically designed to connect all of the dots for you, no matter how widely spaced they are. Letting users quickly customize ongoing communications by including voice over, images, texts, and even action buttons linked to specific URLs for interactivity, means that you can optimize your resources while still creating a powerful campaign, and it is this versatility that gives your marketing an unparalleled breadth of power.

Common types and uses of templates

Given this versatility to incorporate many different elements, templates can be of many types and have many uses. For marketing, however, these usually fall into a few major broad categories, the 3 most common being:

• Master Templates. These are templates built by your active specialist or video production team with video editing skills. Here you have full control and can create any series of templates from varying levels of complexity and numerous features, while controlling your branding messages.
• Marketing Templates. These are more strictly controlled and pre-built templates where you choose from predetermined elements and can set colors, add a logo, change an image, and even lock the script.
• End-user/salesperson Templates. This template is just a record for one’s own use, where you can change one or a few data fields and quickly create an archive for your records.

Similarly, while you can customize a template to fit your exact needs, there are some field-tested uses that keep on returning results. Some of the most common, efficient, and strategic ways to use templates include:

• Acquisition. Instead of relying on sales reps to overcommunicate details or rely on websites to do the selling, help explain product details, quotes, and offers to help nudge them to take an action.
• Onboarding & Service Adoption. Once activated, new customers are often given less attention and given basic, low engaging touchpoints, leading to high attrition. Excite new customers, remind them about their new products, and inform them about features they should adopt.
• Statements. Normally a bland presentation of facts, templates can transform statements into more informative, exciting, and easier to understand documents.
• Offers. Instead of hitting customers up with print mailers that end up in the garbage or e-mails with low click-through rates, personalized video templates that allow offers to easily adopt to different client segments can increase the ROI of your marketing campaigns.

Of course, there are always more complex templates, but if you’re looking for something that will generate a professional-looking and -sounding video from the get-go, just start with the basics.

Benefits of templates

With the right mixing of elements, a personalized video template can inform, entertain, and engage – the holy trinity of marketing – making it easy to build relationships with customers at every stage of their journey. However, too many personalized video platforms fail to offer a level of quality, branding, and regulatory controls that gets you a healthy ROI for your video marketing strategy. IndiVideo stands out from the crowd by offering easy-to-use self-recording tools to make powerful, high-quality, personalized videos that deliver your message securely and compliantly. More than anything, IndiVideo makes sure you don’t need to be an expert to add or change details, whether images, words on screen, or colors – all of this happens within a pre-set structure that still lets you produce a wide variety of templates. And with a curated selection of flexible, fast, and affordable templates on top of that, marketers will always have a winning template at their disposal.

Lock down and scale up

We’ll never downplay creativity, but sometimes marketers need to lock down their tactics in order to ensure the consistency of brand messaging and visuals. And this is why, ultimately, video templates are so powerful – you can create one template and send a video to as many as customers as you want, all personalized. It is this kind of scalability that lowers costs and levels the playing field for smaller marketing teams to not just reach their goals but join the big leagues and go up against the best-in-class with their own branding.