How to Segment Prospects and Marketing Leads Using Video

Marketers know that contact segmentation is an essential component of successful, targeted campaigns. Segmentation enables marketers to deliver more relevant and timely communications to prospects. Relevant content engages prospects more effectively with the net result a more efficient customer journey through awareness and conversion to sales readiness. Therefore, the better your segmentation, the better your ability to drive the next step in that customer journey. Video marketing can help you gain new insight about your prospects and allow you to capture information to improve your marketing segmentation. Here’s how:

Start with Video Engagement Data

Video engagement data captured through your video platform provides detailed behavioral indicators about your viewer. We talk about this behavior as a prospect’s digital body language. That is, are they interested, captivated, and delighted based on their digital responses.

When you send a marketing email with a video, you know whether the person was interested because they either watched the video or not. You may end up re-sending the email, but you likely avoid sending future intrusive, irrelevant emails if they do not respond. [Side note: A quick determination regarding a prospect’s interest is important to minimize unsubscribes or creation of poor brand perception. It’s important to keep these contacts active in your database and to find a more relevant campaign for them. After all, they became database prospects for one reason or another, and you want to nurture them rather than lose them.]

Now, if the prospect watches the video, you’re in business. You can gauge how long he or she watched, which reveals their level of interest far better than a simple email click. You then have better information to determine the next relevant content to send.

Tie Engagement Data to Your Marketing Automation System

For video marketers, an effective back-end integration connects your video platform to your marketing automation platform, and feeds data through to your CRM system. That allows marketing and sales to align and to have access to video’s deep viewer metrics. Video engagement segmentation can be used in addition to any existing audience segmentation based on web pages visited, emails opened, and content downloaded.

Tracking Digital Body Language

To segment viewers based on video views, marketers should consider the following triggers:

1. Automatically send emails based on percentage of video watched, which page video was watched on, and type of video watched
2. Segment email campaigns based on whether a contact watches a video or not
3. Segment and personalize video content based on data provided from a CRM or form submission

How To Segment

After you have built out segmentation rules and applied them to nurture tracks, start to group and build themes around your content. Since you may have an abundance of content that spans a wide range of topics, getting organized will make your campaigns more relevant and effective.

Create nurture tracks based on what topics your customers are interested in and if you don’t yet have video content for those topics, create some. At Brightcove we have created individual tracks for our visitors who are interested in video marketing, corporate communications, and media.

Put It All Together

A simple example of a video nurture track may look like this:

• A contact watches a recorded webinar on the topic of cement mixers on your website
• You assign her or him to the cement mixer nurture track
• Once the contact is in the track, the person receives a prescribed set of cement mixer-focused nurture touches and emails

To make your nurture and segmentation as effective as possible, you can carefully observe the viewer's behavior using your video and marketing automation data, and make tweaks to your strategy as you gain more behavioral information and evaluate campaign results.

Now that you have created initial segmentation using video, think about implementing more advanced segmentation throughout your campaigns!