Tell Your Story Using Tools, Dynamic Video and Customization
Storytelling is a great way to think about your marketing practice. Stories are personal creations that reflect their creators and speak to their audiences. Stories are moving and exciting and contain no irrelevant details – well, good stories, anyways. Traditional marketing has always let marketers tell their story to their audience – but now, digital marketing lets your audience tell you theirs as well.
Interactive Tools
Interactive tools are a great example of this. “Tools” can be so many things – quizzes, questionnaires, calculators, assessment tools, product selectors, decision guides, data visualizers, and more. If they offer the user choices and the chance to experiment and see for themselves, they’re tools.
Take product selectors, for instance. These let you showcase everything you have to offer – the range of products available and the ranges of options too. They let you tell your audience just how much you can do for them. By letting the user navigate and compare and contrast for themselves, you let the user approve or disapprove of them. And with analytics, you can listen closely to what they have to say.
Personalized Video
Personalized video, also called dynamic video, is an even more direct form of storytelling. They play rich visuals like videos, but can be changed and customized on the fly, like a tool. They’re as educational and shareable as videos, and as customizable and interactive as tools.
For example, say you wanted to send out a video that has the viewer’s name in it – to try and grab their attention. With regular video, you’d have to publish hundreds, or even thousands, of different videos, each with the name changed. With personalized video, you just publish one, and with a little line of code, change the name to whatever you want.
They’re capable of so much more than just changing names, though. You can change the order of scenes, so that the sections that are most relevant to the viewer are played first. You can change animations depending on data, so a graph in the video can always stay accurate and up-to-date. You can ask the viewer a question in mid-video, then change the rest of the video depending on how they answer. And personalized videos are totally open to analytics as well, so you can know how people are responding to them.
Customization
What tools and dynamic videos have in common is the use they make of customization. They can be preloaded with user-relevant data, and they respond to user inputs to let users personalize their own experience. This gives them what they’re looking for – and sometimes it’s easier to listen to people than to guess what they have to say.
Customization helps you stand out in a crowded marketplace. With increasing competition for decreasing attention, it helps to be able to provide the most pertinent, information-rich experience available. Sometimes you know exactly what audiences are looking for, and you can provide that to them directly. More often, though, each viewer is looking for something different – and with interactive tools and personalized video, you can connect with them by helping them connect with you.
