One of the most overlooked aspects in a video marketing strategy is the ability to capture data from current customers and prospects based on their video viewing habits. With this data you can generate relevant, targeted video messages that appeal to individuals based on their interests and online browsing activity. 

Why is it important that your videos are relevant? Because marketing experts know that relevant marketing increases engagement with your audience, increases search engine rankings and results in higher conversions.

This process of capturing data from customers can be accomplished with a video marketing platform that has behavior-based marketing capabilities. Behavior-based marketing relies on technology such as web analytics, cookies, browsing histories and IP addresses to create user profiles of individual consumers. 

Then, based on a variety of data such as browsing history and videos viewed, a specific video with a specific offer can be displayed to a customer in real time.

Let’s say a consumer visits your dealership’s website and watches a service department video titled “How to Know if Your Car Needs a New Transmission.” Then that same consumer surfs over to a third-party site and watches several new car inventory videos. 

Based on this data, you may surmise this person is a potential candidate for a trade-in offer. Therefore, you might want to serve that customer a display banner ad featuring a trade-in special or cash back deal on the same vehicle make/model that the customer is viewing videos of. Or, you might want to offer a coupon for transmission repair.

Here’s another example: a consumer watches the same inventory video on your website more than three times, then views one of your dealership value proposition videos. You can assume this shopper is almost ready to buy so it would be suitable to make an especially appealing or aggressive offer in a video ad.

One advantage of video marketing is that you can create a library of videos that can be used for multiple purposes. Then, to make the videos relevant for a specific user, you can customize the banners and other embedded video elements based on a number of pre-set rules. 

For example, you might have one general service value proposition video that profiles your shop and your technicians’ expertise. But the offer in that video will change based on individual viewing behavior. If one service prospect has been searching for brake jobs, the offer displayed on a banner in that video will promote a brake job special; if another customer has been searching for 30,000-mile maintenance packages, that offer will appear to them. 

Banner ads on videos can also be used in geo-targeting and geo-fencing campaigns to display specific offers to consumers who are watching videos on a mobile device at another location. Think about car shoppers at a competitive dealership or people attending a sporting event at a local stadium, both might be locations where a specially designed video ad might get extra attention.

The ability to customize messaging in each video significantly expands your digital advertising footprint for a low cost. For example, you might spend thousands of dollars to promote a Labor Day sale via email, direct mail, traditional and digital advertising campaigns. These strategies often include purchasing ads on third-party auto shopping sites or creating pay-per-click ad campaigns.

With a behavior-based enabled video platform, video banner ads can be instantly updated on multiple touch points including third-party sites. This eliminates the need to create new videos, purchase additional online ads or upgrade listings on those sites. Additionally, banner ad information can be easily changed out on existing YouTube and Facebook videos, reducing social media and pay-per-click advertising costs. 

Behavior-based marketing campaigns can be created for any type of dealership video, including inventory videos, value proposition videos and service videos. The campaigns can be applied to videos across multiple touch point locations including the dealer’s website, YouTube, third-party auto shopping websites and in video emails to customers. 

Setting up a behavior-based video marketing campaign might take a bit longer than a “regular” digital marketing campaign, primarily because each campaign can have multiple rules that determine which consumers see which banner ads. The more rules a campaign has, the more relevant the offer or message is.

But taking the time to do this is worth it, because once you have the rules set up, it’s easy to track viewing behavior and even predict where a car shopper is in the purchase process, so you can make an appropriate offer to lead them down funnel.

Adding conversion widgets to videos also helps to guide car shoppers to a specific landing page on your website, such as a trade-in calculator or service specials page.

Finally, behavior-based video marketing allows you to track metrics that you find useful; such as number of video views, completion rates, banner ad impressions or click-through rates from videos. All of these enhance your insight into how consumers view videos and shop for cars on your website, as well as how they convert into website leads.

The power of relevant marketing is magnified with videos. Not only are videos more engaging to begin with, but videos with the right message at the right time give customers a reason to do business with you.

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