Even relatively small purchasing decisions now must get signoff by multiple stakeholders. When selling services to healthcare, biotech, and technology companies, our marketing agency typically has to interact with and convince three or four executives with a purchase cycle of three weeks to three months, on average. For our clients, especially in healthcare, it’s not uncommon to have 8-10 stakeholders at the decision table and for the buying decision to take 12-18 months.
Consider this data from Google and HIMSS Analytics, which shows the various influencers and decision makers involved in IT and device purchases at hospitals.
Personalized content using a 1:1 marketing approach, regardless of type, shortens sales cycles. For example, a case study published on Marketing Sherpa shows how PR Newswire, the news distributor, implemented personalization to shorten its sales cycle by 30%.
Of all the content types, personalized video is getting the most attention. Twitter now allows videos and Vines up to 140 seconds with select publishers getting up to 10 minutes! There’s good reason for this – videos drive buyers to take action quicker than other content types.
Customizing videos for purchasing personas can improve these impressive stats even further. Consider the statistic that 3 out of 5 people talk with others to discuss what they learned after watching a video. Now imagine if in addition to telling a colleague about a product, they could forward a video that’s customized for that colleague’s exact role and persona. This leads to powerful engagement amongst the buying team.
The personalized interactive company Consensus has shown that automating and customizing educational videos and product demos cuts sales cycles by 68% and catapults close rates by 44%.
Many companies leave video production to last in the content creation process because it’s time-consuming and more expensive than other content types such as blog posts and case studies. However, production costs have come down significantly in the past three years due to increased competition. And done correctly, video can be repurposed into many content forms using transcripts and screenshots. The conversion numbers for video are too good for companies to ignore or delay.
Our agency has recently partnered with Consensus to produce, serve, host, and track personalized interactive and video content. In future blog posts, we’ll be sharing the results of our own personalized video experiments as we shift from generic video to personalized video based on vertical sectors and personas.
