Margie Barkley: ABM in the year 2023: A real account-based personalization with videos

Account-based marketing (ABM), has stood the test of time. It is a crucial approach to converting large corporations into long-term clients or consumers.

Account-based marketing is where sales and marketing work together to target a particular set of stakeholders. Account-based marketing’s ultimate goal is to make your buyer’s needs visible and to establish strong relationships with targeted groups and accounts.

The fastest-rising trend is to incorporate video into account-based marketing strategies. The combination of the two via ABM videos can create a powerful force to generate conversions, leads and new clients. Wyzowl reports that 86% of marketers believe video has helped generate leads, 81% claim video has helped increase their sales directly, and 87% report that video has generated positive ROI.

Video marketing is not something you should automatically avoid if it conjures images of pre-roll ads. Video marketing is all about personalizing your experience based on the preferences of your prospects. This is the best way to communicate your brand message to prospects. This medium is not considered “emerging”, considering the growing popularity of video.

Cisco reports that 82% of worldwide internet traffic in 2022 will be from video streaming or video downloads, demonstrating the prevalence of video content.

It’s here, and it’s becoming an increasingly effective approach for marketers to tell your brand’s narrative, convey your value proposition, and establish connections with consumers and prospects.

Why Personalized Videos Are Crucial in ABM

1. Increased Engagement

Personalized videos increase engagement and effectiveness by allowing salespeople to interact with your consumers. It is a creative and successful engagement tool for delighting, engaging, and converting viewers into consumers. Personalized videos are interesting, engaging, and persuasive.

2. One Medium, Multiple Results

In several ways, the video may play a distinctive role in account-based targeting. There aren’t many other strategies that will help you stand out from the crowd, generate interaction, and track statistics all at the same time. You may accomplish this by creating a video and uploading it on a corporate video platform.

3. One-to-One Interaction Opportunity

Making personal contacts is an essential aspect of an account-based marketing approach (ABM). You must make the prospect feel visible while targeting accounts. What better method to accomplish this than with a tailored video message embedded in a prospecting email?

4. Better Opportunities to Connect Decision-Makers

Prospects are five times more likely to connect with a tailored LinkedIn video message than with a typical text-based email, increasing the likelihood that they will engage and convert. Video prospecting is a reasonably simple and accessible method. You can also get a hint about the buyer’s intent based on their video interactions and actions.

However, to hyper-personalize the video, you should know the decision marker, firmographic data, technographic data, and, most importantly, the buying intent. There are very few B2B data providers who can provide you with all these required data sets with human verification. Many depend on machine verification. So even if machine-verified data providers provide more data, the data quality decreases.

What Types Of ABM Assets Can You Create?

Your account-based marketing campaigns might include a range of content types, including emails, online adverts, customized landing sites and webinars. Video assets, in particular, may play an extremely crucial role in your ABM campaign since they allow you to create trust and make a personal connection with your audience. After all, when prospects and customers can see and hear you talking, your message will have a greater emotional impact on them.

Are you looking for some ideas? Here are a few ways you can start using video in your ABM strategy:

1. Employee Bio Videos

There are tools that will help you create Meet-Your-AM (account manager) videos in which your account team members introduce themselves to customers, define their roles, and highlight how their products and services can help grow their businesses. The goal of these videos is to nurture and expand your existing customer base, and you can leverage these assets in various ways. Account managers incorporate this content into their signature lines and email signatures, and you can also use these videos in your ABM advertising campaigns that target the customer base.

Bio videos are beneficial if you are looking to:

a. Humanize your brand

Make your team comfortable and accessible to the audience before the actual interaction

b. Build deeper connections with your audience

Help your leads and prospects get a deeper understanding of your company and work culture on a more personal level.

c. Increase brand awareness and leads

These videos can be widely used in a variety of ways to make your firm appear relevant, familiar, and real—the type of company that people want to support.

2. Interactivity

Interactivity is another technique to apply dynamic personalization to your ABM videos. At its most basic, this technique may simply shout out the target’s name, account name, or industry. These small details may make a video appear to have been created expressly for this target account and use case. However, you can take it further by including CTAs, links, polls, forms, chaptering, and other features.

Fortunately, including these features in your video content has never been simpler. With Hippo videos, you can add a host of interactive elements to the videos, such as:

In-video meeting linksPolls Lead generation formsQuizzesAnnotationsCTAs – eg: reply with a video

These customized videos put the viewer in charge of the content experience, resulting in improved engagement and a stronger emotional connection.

How to Use Video Analytics in your ABM Strategy

The beauty of working with video is the back-end analytics you can view and use for ABM.

Companies may use video analytics to track what their prospects have viewed, skipped, or repeated. Knowing the viewer’s intent is crucial so you can decide or plan your next steps. With a video platform like Hippo Video, you can know the pulse of your audience with video analytics.

This information may be fed into marketing and CRM systems for segmentation, scoring, and cross-functional collaboration.

For example, with Hippo Video, you can access various reports such as the overall report, the demographic report, the shared report, the reactions report, the timeline action report, and the campaigns report.

An image showing the video analytics reports ABM can generate from Hippo Video.

The Overall Report will show you how many people have viewed your video and whether they shared it. You can also view how many people watched your video all the way through.

Demographic report shows you where and how many people viewed your video from that location. The timeline action report shows you the number of users, annotations and lead generation. It also includes CTA information such as IP address and location.

Retarget based on video views or view time

Make account-specific “tailored video” videos that address a particular pain issue. Next, embed the video into marketing emails and target retargeting ads to leads who have viewed 50% or more.

Video analytics can help you drive your automated channels. It will also increase funnel velocity and deliver relevant advertising to your target accounts. The video they have interacted with may help you decide what next to offer based on their stage in life.

This ensures that you are displaying the right information to the right audience at right time, and not wasting advertising dollars on cold leads that won’t convert.

Direct mail gifts personalized at scale

Direct mail gifts are without doubt one of the most personal marketing methods. But is it possible to scale them?

Let your sales reps create a video that identifies them and helps in gifting gifts to clients.

To personalize the follow up, sales reps can create a unique unpacking video of your direct mail gift as a special message. The video thumbnail should also include the acknowledgement of your present (by the sales agent showing it in front of the camera). This will increase views.

Next, track every video message view and send an asset that is tailored to those who accept it. This will keep them moving through the funnel.

Last Thoughts

It works. This is evident by the increasing use of account-based marketing in B2B organizations. Concentrating your efforts on a small number of high-value accounts will give you the best chance to increase your return on investment.

ABM can bring about greater results by using video content to connect, engage and convert prospects. Start your video journey today to see how easy and quick it is for you to use videos in account-based marketing campaigns.