3 Ways to Connect Video Advertising to the Customer Journey

This post originally appeared on Oracle's Modern Marketing Blog and was created as part of our partnership with them.

There’s more opportunity than ever to create engaging journeys that provide value to your customers. And while video advertising is the fastest-growing component of your strategy, as well as the best way to establish emotional connection and build brand favorability, it’s not used to its full potential. This is mostly due to the fact that video is primarily used for reach and because video advertisements have historically been disconnected from other marketing channels.

Based on our experience working with data-driven marketers, we’ve observed strong trends towards video personalization and increasing demand to integrate video marketing into the customer journey. As a result, marketers now have the ability to show a personalized video to the right person at the right time—at scale. Connecting video advertising to a marketing stack will ensure that all channels are driving maximum impact and creating a synchronized, personalized journey for each customer.

To fully maximize your video strategy, here are three ways you can connect video advertising to the customer journey and make it work harder for you—ultimately gaining higher ROI.

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1. Leverage a variety of data to personalize your video creative

Putting yourself in your customer’s shoes—aren’t you more likely to pay attention to video ads that speak directly to your specific needs? You already use data to personalize your marketing channels, including website, email and display advertising, so why not do the same with video?

To drive awareness and consideration, leverage existing first or third-party data from your data management platform and marketing automation platform, including interaction data from previous website visits, previous email engagement, CRM data, demographics, location and more. By personalizing video ads, you can better align the message to the customer, optimize the experience and drive engagement.

For example, a telecom company can offer phone upgrades through video ads if customers reach the end of their contracts, based on their CRM data, rather than general awareness messages. Moreover, the brand can personalize the videos to show the most recommended phones for those customers based on their current phone and usage data.

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2. Use video interactions to discover your customer’s intent and use it to improve marketing automation

What your customers do or don’t interact with in your video ad says a lot about their interests. Use this valuable data to improve your persona segmentation and further target your customers with more relevant messages through various channels to increase their receptivity.

An auto brand, for instance, can gauge product features of interest based on what customers click on within your interactive video. If they are shown information about safety, technology and financing, but only interact with safety content, the brand could then use this data to apply a further layer of segmentation to those customers by showing more content about car safety the next time that those customers return to the website. Similar methods can also apply to personalized email, mobile and other channels in your video strategy. This demonstrates how you gain more insights about your customers to make their experiences more valuable.

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3. Infuse video into the right places in your customer journey

While video is widely used to generate awareness, it can also lead customers through the purchase funnel. Video is the most effective type of media with sight, sound and motion, and when connected into all of your marketing channels, it creates more impactful customer journeys by re-engaging and driving them towards conversion.

All you need to do is choose the right points in your journey where video can bring value and amplify your message. Historically, retargeting was focused on your website, email and display, but you can also use video to retarget customers even more effectively to learn more about the product or complete a purchase online.

For example, a global hotel chain can retarget website visitors with a video ad that shows current pricing for different hotels in a specific city that they had previously searched for on the chain’s website. Based on their interaction with the different hotels in the video, the hotel chain can further target them with offers for their preferred hotels. This approach keeps your brand top of mind and creates a consistent experience across all of your channels. That way, you can deliver increasingly customized messages that make your overall marketing efforts more effective.

Video has entered a new era for data-driven marketers—with cohesion between video and other marketing channels—making the whole greater than the sum of its parts. The possibilities are endless and will only become vaster as brands partner with leading innovators to push marketing boundaries.

Click here to find out how our Marketing Cloud Suite can help you maximize your customer journey with video.