How to combine A/B Testing & personalization in video marketing?

Here are the raw facts:

Including a video on your landing page can boost conversions by 80% - 86%.

Simply incorporating video into a marketing campaign can increase conversions by 34%.

Video is the single best-converting media format out there. But it shines brightest when properly optimized.

This is where A/B testing, personalization, and experimentation comes in. These can generate significant returns by optimizing the conversions that your best-performing content generates.

Deploying these strategies to boost the success and cost-effectiveness of your video marketing assets simply makes sense. The better-informed your video marketing decisions are, the greater your optimization results can be.

1 How To Use Experimentation to Improve Video Marketing

It’s no secret that video is a heavy-hitter in the world of digital marketing assets. Yet most organizations don’t know how to leverage video to generate the highest number of conversions possible.

When it comes to video, your conversion rate optimization tools include A/B testing and personalization, along with every kind of experimentation that can conceivably increase conversions. But to do this effectively, you need to capture user data.

Without the ability to capture and analyze user engagement data, video marketers are essentially flying blind. You need to be able to capture and qualify viewer data in order to optimize video content the same way you would text and imagery.

This is not something that you can do with a run-of-the-mill video hosting solution. All of the major free video hosts collect user engagement data, but they don’t share it with content creators – that doesn’t fit into the free service format.

Instead, you need a video hosting platform that collects and aggregates viewer data from individual users. This allows you to identify opportunities to optimize your video content based on its performance with viewers.

This opens up a huge new set of opportunities. You are no longer confined to text, imagery, and functional page elements. You can now guide video content creation using tried-and-true techniques like A/B testing and personalization. You can experiment with your video content the same way you would with text or imagery.

Here are two easy ways you can do that with the right video host and your toolkit:

1. Optimize Video Placement for Conversion

Newcomers to the world of video marketing often assume that their videos will perform best on social media. Sometimes it’s true – and sometimes it’s not. In any case, making assumptions is not the best strategy for video content.

But without a clear way of measuring viewer engagement, it’s nearly impossible to identify where your videos perform best. You might be surprised to find out that social media is on the bottom of the list.

For instance, ecommerce businesses often achieve significant gains by putting videos on their product pages. Organizations that sell subscriptions often have the most to gain by putting videos on their landing pages. Serving people the right content at the right time is critical in every industry.

When it comes to landing page design, there are tons of ways you can optimize videos for conversion. You may find that placing multiple short videos in a Netflix-style gallery format works far better than combining all of your content into one extra-long video. But it’s nearly impossible to get clear results from these kinds of experiments without a clear strategy in place. 

2. Optimize Video Content Type for Conversion

Your video library probably contains a pretty wide variety of media. You might have explainers, promos, customer testimonials, and interviews already filmed and published. Each type of video answers a unique need, and is best-suited to a certain use case.

Finding the right type of video for a landing page is a challenge. Not every video marketer is blessed with the intuition to know which video will perform the best from the start. You may end up getting the best conversion rates out of the video you least expect!

This is a problem that A/B testing solves exceptionally well. Running tests for webinars, retail events, social media promotions, and your own landing pages can help you zero in on the individual elements that make up your video marketing success story.

The right video can transform your campaign. The more you know about your viewers, the better you can address their needs and answer their questions through the web’s most powerful and versatile format.