If I start off this blog saying consumers expect personalization, you might, very fairly, be underwhelmed. “Tell me something I don’t know,” right?
The expectation of personalization is so pervasive it follows us from our shopping carts to our streaming queues. And it extends to every kind of content, including what people want most: video.
According to the annual State of Video Technology, most people want Personalized Videos not only from the big brands (their bank, insurer, healthcare provider, phone carrier, etc.) but also the stores they shop at, the school they attended, nonprofits they support, loyalty programs they’ve joined — and more. They don’t care about your budget or team size. They just want a good experience.
And when they don’t get it? They’re upset — at least, 45% are — and 52% might churn.
Where does this leave you if you don’t have an in-house studio or wads of cash lying about to throw at an agency that can spin up bespoke videos for all your customers?
That’s the question. And in the era of AI, there’s a real solution. In this blog, we’ll explore how AI Personalized Video is helping midsize companies close that gap.
Your Customers Don’t Grade on a Curve
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Nobody lowers their standards for you because you’re midmarket. A customer opening your email doesn’t know whether it came from a marketing team of 2 or 200, and it wouldn’t change their reaction if they did. They give you the same half-second they give everyone, and in it they decide one thing: Is this for me or irrelevant?
Savvy consumers can tell the difference, and they care. People are 4x more likely to want a Personalized Video over a generic one. Why? For around 8 out of 10 people, it’s because it’s easier to understand, more engaging and, especially critical for brand loyalty, it shows the company cares about them.
Hi-Rez Studios leaned into this. For SMITE’s 10th anniversary, the studio could have posted a thank-you graphic and a promo code. Instead, every player got a personalized “Temple of You,” built from up to 40 data points, from their achievements to their hours logged to the rivals they’d faced most.
It was a hit. Players who watched stuck with the game 2x longer than those who didn’t. Half of the returning players who watched kept going for at least another 20 days. And new signups climbed 25x against every other channel running at the same time. The result, as marketing director Stephen Hutchins described it, was “an incredible success,” driving positive sentiment and social discussion, engaging players and bringing lapsed players back to the game.
CASE STUDY
Hi-Rez Drives 25x More New Players With Personalized Showreels
How AI Solves the Bandwidth and Budget Problem
In general, the thing standing between a midmarket brand and Personalized Video hasn’t been strategy or ambition. It’s the org chart. A single video requires a scriptwriter, an animator, a video editor and a project manager, maybe a videographer and actors if you’re doing live action.
Enterprises hired for every seat or outsourced to an agency. Smaller teams didn’t have that luxury.
And that’s before we even get to personalizing it. If you’re sending out 10 videos, you can personalize each one manually. If you’re sending a thousand or a million, you’re going to need something automated. Our platform has been doing this for enterprises (and a few enterprising midsize brands) for years, but the video creation bottleneck has always remained a sticking point for smaller companies. How do you get the video creative ready to personalize if you don’t have a studio or the budget to hire one?
That’s why we created Lucas. Our AI video agent is your scriptwriter, animator, editor and director, all in one. He can start from whatever you already have: a webpage, a PDF, an image, a screen recording. Or just give him a standard text prompt. You review the draft he builds, change what you want or chat with him about revisions, and he delivers a studio-quality video. And he can personalize for any audience size.
It’s that easy. What used to take months now happens in an afternoon.
Longboat Mobility is a good example of this kind of speed. The company needed an onboarding video that personally walked customers through its service. Built in-house the old way, that typically takes several weeks. With Lucas, the final video was ready in 4 days.
Download the case study to see the video and learn how the process worked.
CASE STUDY
Longboat Launches Personalized Onboarding Video 3 Months Early With AI
What This Looks Like for Midmarket Brands
As we’ve seen time and again, Personalized Video works across industries: 17x ROI, 10x engagement, 11x sales. Those are real results from real campaigns, and they’re not limited to big brands. Here are a few examples of successful campaigns featuring midsize companies.
A Personal Welcome
For their network of charter schools, National Heritage Academies wanted to create a personalized welcome for new families joining their school. Take a look.
One interesting thing about this campaign is that it incorporates personalization for the brand (in this case, Brooklyn Excelsior Charter School) as well as the end customer (Sarah). Browse our video gallery if you want to see more B2B2C video examples. It’s a great use case.
A few other nice features in this campaign:
- They included photos of the principal and the family’s admissions rep (along with their contact info) so parents could put a face to a name.
- It’s a square video, conveniently sized for watching on mobile or desktop.
- Interactive buttons at the end let viewers access the parent portal or book a campus tour.
A Customized Gift
As a personalized jewelry brand, Jewlr knew a generic video wasn’t going to be enough. They turned their video into a personalized Mother’s Day card, adding in behind-the-scenes footage of a piece being handcrafted to tie into their brand identity.
We don’t talk about Personalized Video as a gift very often, but sending customers videos like this can be a great way to make them feel special.
Real-Time Data
Personalized doesn’t only mean a name on the screen. A video can pull live information the moment someone presses play, from current hotel rates to loyalty point balances to what’s in stock right now. This guarantees what customers see is true right when they see it.
Collabra, a B2B real estate technology company, built its videos around that kind of data, including listing prices, average days on market and average home price in a given neighborhood. Then they turned that data into dynamic videos that agents could send customers, personalized with their contact info.
We hope you enjoy the shoutout to Marge in this sample Personalized Video.
Built To Fit a Lean Team
None of the examples above call for a technical team or a new hire, and you’re not trading away quality either. You get the same enterprise-grade platform the big banks and other major brands run on, from top-notch security to built-in analytics to an AI that can create videos in minutes.
It’s what agencies who work with us love. We do the hyper-personalization. They wow their clients, just as Media One did for Hyundai with the video below.
The Personalized Video greets each new owner by name, walks them through what their vehicle can do and nudges them, with one well-timed interactive CTA, toward setting up Hyundai Connect.
Jellyvision turned the same idea inward. Its employee welcome didn’t stop at the usual “happy to have you” message. It told one new hire what he had in common with his new colleagues — like the fact that 49% of Jellyvisioners are night owls, just like him.
Pro tip: Adding data to show how your customer compares with other customers is a great way to catch your viewers’ interest. It’s exactly what Spotify Wrapped does with their year in review.
Videos like this aren’t reserved for big campaigns or big budgets anymore. Now it’s something anyone — including your HR team — can do, provided they have the right tool.
Leveling the Playing Field
Speaking of understatements (as we were at the beginning of this blog some paragraphs ago), AI is changing a lot when it comes to customer communications. Video is no exception.
The barriers that might have kept Personalized Video more in enterprise territory — specialized skills, headcount, agency retainers — are exactly what AI removes. What’s left is the part midmarket brands are already good at: knowing their customers and having something worth saying to them.
Whether it’s a welcome for new customers, a data-driven update or a video gift that makes someone’s day, Personalized Video is an easy, accessible tool for your toolkit.
Want to see what a Personalized Video could look like for your brand? Schedule a demo and we’ll show you.
