How to create a Personalized Video

A Personalized Video has two main advantages:

1.
It allows us to include 1-to-1 relevant information directed to specific audiences, which improves engagement significantly, increases the view-rate and hence, the conversion rates or achieving the video goals as well (understand a message correctly, learn about a product, buy the product, or service, etc.)

2.
These videos are created 100% automatically. Using a database or form as input, Wideo’s Video Personalization Solution takes a video template to create automatically -and in a few seconds- videos with variable information.

This is how you can create huge amounts of personalized videos (we are talking about hundreds or even thousands) for different segmented audiences or even videos with singular content for each person in particular.

What kind of information can be variable and personalized?

A Personalized video can contain 3 kinds of variables: texts, images, and/or colors.

A. Texts

“Remember that a person’s name is to that person, the sweetest and most important sound in any language”
Dale Carnegie

When creating a personalized video, it’s key to include the person or company’s name if you have access to a database with that information.

By doing that, you gain the viewer’s attention immediately, involving him/her in the video.

It’s important to use the name, or any other personalized data, in an integrated way with the video and not simply overprint it above the animations or images.
As you can see in the example above, the viewer will see his/her name written on a street sign inside the video, and this is what increases the generated impact.

If you use a video footage background and you want to recreate this effect, you can do it as long as the cámara is not in movement. So consider using a tripod to record in case you’re using your own material.
Otherwise, you can overprint the text or use another kind of style using good animations.

B. Images

Other elements that you can personalize automatically are the images or videos.
You can include the viewer’s company logo, his/her photograph, specific footage, etc.

Any kind of image or video file you can access through the input database in the allowed Wideo formats (JPG, PNG, or MP4)

C. Colors

Thanks to the Wideo automation technology, you can personalize colors in the videos as well.
This increases the impact over the person viewing the video as his/her company branding colors will be present through all the video.

When you create a video template thought for automatic personalization -as long as it’s possible- you should define an accurate color palette composed of a primary color, a secondary color, plus the black and white colors (which may apply to any branding style guide)

Primary color
This is the main company branding color. Generally is the one that covers more surface on its logo. You should use it strategically in the video for backgrounds or shapes used as text container backgrounds to assure a better presence.

Secondary color
Some brands have another color with a less visual presence in the branding or used for secondary elements.
In those cases with no secondary color, you can use a derived color from the primary, darker or lighter (for example, blue primary color, white blue secondary color)

You can use the secondary color in the video for backgrounds that need to be lighter or softer to make text readable or other secondary elements in the composition.

Black and white
Any color palette can include these two colors as a compliment. You can use white for scenes, backgrounds, or details and black for texts to assure their readability.

Contrasts
When creating a personalized video for several clients, It’s essential to consider that you probably don’t know exactly which colors will be applied to those videos.
If you create just 10-20 videos, you could do an initial manual check to include all the possible cases. But if we are talking about hundreds or thousands of videos for different clients, that would be impossible.
That’s why you need to design these videos testing edge contrast cases to avoid the possibility that a text has a similar color to the background, which would make it unreadable.

Include variable information in the storytelling

Thinking and creating a personalized video is clearly not the same as doing it for a video with static information.

You need to consider the variable information in the script and storytelling creation process to integrate the elements visually and conceptually.

Before beginning, you need to find information about the people you are going to personalize the videos for. (For example, name, residence city, profile picture, etc.)

Show personalized info as soon as possible

Let’s think about a simple and short experiment. Let’s say we create an A-B test, showing two different people the same video, but one of them (who is called John) is in front of a video that shows this text in the second 2 “Hi John”, which one of them would you think will be more engaged with the rest of the video?

On any kind of video, one of the main goals is to generate the viewer a good impact during the first 5 seconds, as people continuously receive tons of other videos, messages, and information that will compete with ours. Besides, our time and attention gap are lower every day.

The time limit we have to get the viewers’ attention could be measured as the time between one piece of content and the other while they swipe the phone screen with their fingers.

That’s why the sooner the personalized and relevant information appears in the video, the bigger the impact we will generate.

Don’t abuse

Even though what we said is a key to include personalized and relevant information in these kinds of videos, we must choose strategically which data we will use and not abuse them.

On the one hand, including a lot of data could give as a result a nonsense message or a video without a concrete story. The main goal is not to demonstrate that we actually have a lot of users’ information, but to send them relevant information in an easy-to-understand, entertaining and interesting way.

On the other hand, we must have special care with which kind of information we include. Sensitive data such as bank accounts, phones, addresses, etc can generate the opposite effect we are looking for. Such as insecurity, persecution, and mistrust in the brand.

It’s better to use less information well integrated into the story in a fluent way, than including lots of data that doesn’t make sense in the main message.

Now that we covered the main aspects to take on account when thinking about a personalized video, let’s see which are the basic steps to follow for its creation:

1. Define the video goal

As in any other marketing actions, you must define the success case for the piece you are creating. Which main goal are you looking to achieve with the personalized video? It could be for instance to direct the audience to a landing page, increase a product or service sales, get more followers in a social network, etc.

2. Define the distribution of the video

The video could reach its audience through different channels such as a simple link; social networks such as Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, etc.; it can be embedded in a landing page as an explainer or welcome video; showcased in a live presentation, among others.

Each channel has its own language and behavior, as well as different technical limitations and specifications.
For example, if you are going to distribute the video in a Facebook or Instagram feed, it’s convenient to create it in a square format (1:1) to optimize its visualization in mobile devices.

Also, every channel has a particular development and set-up complexity that you should analyze with the Wideo Automation Technical Team.

3. Define the variables

Once we’ve analyzed the information we have access from an input database, we can define which variables we are going to use in the video (name, logo, branding colors, city, products for specific cohorts, etc)

When using texts, we must include those which are variable between brackets, to make them easily findable by the Wideo Automation Technical Team, which will do the setup work.
For example: {UserName}

4. Write the video template script

Now is the moment to think about the video story based on the goal and variables you will use.
There is no need to write something extremely complex, it could be a simple structure.

To create the script you can use a simple Google Doc divided into two columns, one to write the texts or voiceover (if needed) for each scene or screen, and on the other column, you can write what is going to happen visually for each scene.

Example:

5. Create the video template with Wideo Editor

Personalized videos are based on a wideo template like those you can find in the Wideo Templates Gallery.
It’s all about the main video that the Wideo automation technology will automatically edit to replace the variables (texts, colors, images) for specific information for each audience or individual.

That’s why you need to create the wideo template using Wideo Editor, which is very easy to do.
And if you need to have the wideo template created for you, just contact us, and our team will take care of this part of the process.

You can find video tutorials to learn the first steps on how to use Wideo to create your templates.

Important note about texts variables 

Any text that is used as a variable text will need to be created with an independent text box. This is because the whole text box will be used as a variable and automatically replaced later.

In this example, the text {UserName} is a variable that will be replaced with different names from a database input.

If you are using a more complex text that needs to have a variable word or words, you will need to break the text apart, to isolate the variable, as you see in the following example.

Always consider that a name or any variable text could be replaced with values with different amounts of characters. That’s why the variable text needs to be a bit wider just in case and strategically located in the scene design to avoid being cut.

NOTE: If your video has subtitles, be careful with personalizing them. It can be better to leave the personalization off the subtitles and just into the text displayed on the video. If you don’t know whether you should add subtitles to your videos, read this info.

6. Hire a Wideo Automation Solution; our team will take care of the rest

After creating the wideo template, you won’t need to worry about anything else.

Once you’ve hired Wideo Automation Solution, our dedicated team will take care of the rest of the process., which includes:

• (If you create the wideo template) Creative revisions and general suggestions.
• Parametrization and variables set up.
• Programming and integration with the database, form, or input information source.
• Programming, integration, and output setup to configure the personalized video delivery.
• Dedicated maintenance and support.

Now your business is ready to add personalized videos to your marketing actions and enjoy the amazing benefits of this great technology.
We look forward to your contact!

You can get started by trying Wideo marketing video maker today.

Facundo Romei

Wideo Marketing & Growth