ABM in 2023: Real Account-Based Personalization with Videos

Account-based marketing (ABM) has withstood the test of time and established itself as a critical approach for converting major corporations into long-term consumers or clients. 

Account-based marketing is a strategy in which sales and marketing collaborate to target a specific set of stakeholders. The ultimate purpose of account-based marketing is to create full visibility of your buyer’s demands and to build strong connections with specific groups and targeted accounts.

Incorporating video into an account-based marketing strategy is the most rapidly rising trend. Combining the two through ABM videos creates a powerful force for generating conversions, leads, and new clients. According to Wyzowl, 86% of marketers say video has helped them generate leads, 81% say video has helped them directly increase sales, and 87% say video has helped them generate positive ROI.

If the word “video marketing” conjures up images of pre-roll advertising that you automatically avoid, it’s time to reconsider. Video marketing is about creating a personalized experience focused on what your prospects want to watch and listen to. It is the most engaging way to convey your brand message to your prospects. Looking at the rising popularity of videos, this medium is no longer considered an “emerging” platform.

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 links
• Polls
• Lead generation forms
• Quizzes
• Annotations
• CTAs – 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.

In the Overall Report, you can check how many people viewed and shared your video. You can also see how many people watched your videos all the way through.

Demographic report gives you the location and how many people from that particular location viewed your video.
In the timeline action report, you get the total number of users, annotations, lead generation, custom poll, promote playlist, and CTA, as well as user data such as IP and location.

Retarget Based on Video Views or View Time

Create account-specific “tailored videos” that may readily address a specific pain issue. Then, embed the video in marketing emails and target retargeting advertisements to leads who watch 50% or more of the video.

Allow video analytics to drive your automated channels and enhance funnel velocity by delivering relevant advertising to your target account. Based on the stage of their journey, the video material they interacted with might inform you just what to give them next.

This guarantees that you’re displaying the correct information to the right audience at the right moment, rather than wasting ad dollars on leads that are too cold to convert.

Personalize Direct Mail Gifts at Scale

Direct-mail gifts are undoubtedly one of the most personal marketing strategies. However, is there a way you can scale them?

To begin, let each of your sales reps make a personalized video to assist in putting a face to their name when gifting presents to target clients.

Then, as a follow-up message, have sales reps create a one-of-a-kind unpacking video of the direct mail gift to personalize the follow-up even more. Also, showcasing the acknowledgement of the present in the video thumbnail (of the sales agent showing it to the camera) will undoubtedly boost views!

Next, track each video message view and send a tailored asset to people who see and accept it. This will keep them going through the funnel.

Final Thoughts

The increasing usage of account-based marketing by B2B organizations is sufficient proof that it works. You have the best chance of boosting your return on investment (ROI) by concentrating your efforts on a limited number of high-value accounts.

Video content as part of ABM to connect, engage, and convert B2B prospects can provide greater outcomes. Begin your video journey today and see how quick and easy it is to efficiently use videos in your account-based marketing campaigns.