Consumer goods companies are adopting new technology to establish a tighter grip and control on their business. They want to put themselves in the driving seat to identify their customers and cater to them how and with what they want. For this they need insights into the customers’ buying behavior and habits.
Consumers are becoming increasingly mindful of what they purchase, and that conscience makes its way into businesses as well. Many consumer goods companies are rushing to innovate processes and adopt more sustainable approaches. 73% of millennials have expressed willingness to pay more for products that are produced using sustainable materials and practices. Companies that catered to these preferences grew 72% as of 2018. Sustainable products are found to generate twice the sales growth as non-sustainable ones.
To stay ahead of the changing trends and avoid learning about evolving consumer behavior the hard way, retailers are digitally augmenting their businesses with new technology. Video technology has a lot to offer for companies and brands to get close to their customers and connect with them. Microsoft is at the forefront of this transformation, working with retailers directly to help them reshape their practices and, in essence, their products, while VIDIZMO helps them leverage video technology to not only reinvent how they do business with their customers but also how they run their business internally.
The retail industry is huge and the competition is fierce. To really stand out in an oversaturated market, you not only have to be visible to your customers but also make your offering noticeable. Using video technology, you can effectively connect with your customers on a personal level. Targeted and personalized marketing videos can build a community around your product and your brand. This sense of community is what drives your business. If you’ve ever spoken to a loyal Apple fan about their preferences, you know how much a business benefits from a community of loyal customers.
VIDIZMO helps you connect with your customers through targeted marketing videos by allowing integration with your CRM, such as Dynamics 365, enabling you to analyze the information you have at hand about shoppers and producing quality content that hits the mark for groups of like-minded consumers. Integrating your disparate solutions connects your technological infrastructure together and breaks down information silos, effectively streamlining your marketing process. Marketers don’t have to deal with multiple separate applications and logins and switching back and forth all time.
Let’s take a step back for a second. Targeting your customers, or prospects, with personalized marketing content is only possible if you know your customers and their preferences in the first place. In VIDIZMO, you can collect information from the customers themselves by augmenting your videos with surveys and polls. Plus, VIDIZMO gives you a wide range of video analytics to give you comprehensive look into what your customers are thinking and what they are interested in. You can see what kind of content is popular with which group of people, which geographical areas it gains traction in, and so on.
Video is a powerful marketing tool capable of engaging your customers through visual representation of stories, narratives and information. Done right, videos can grab shoppers’ attention and sway their opinion of your brand in your favor. For that, VIDIZMO lets you share your marketing videos with specific customers or groups, time-bind content for certain promotions, lock them with passwords for special promotions, and much more.
You can also embed your videos on your website, blogs and social media pages for maximum exposure. In fact, by embedding them with your products on online stores, you can demonstrate the features of the product, answer FAQs or even give a virtual tour, depending on the product, in an engaging fashion. And it’s not specific to online stores. This approach works just as well for in-store products as well too. Customers feel more comfortable exploring multiple products and comparing them to make an informed decision. You will attract more customers by reaching them where they are, instead trying to bring them to you.
There are a lot of people involved in a retail business. There are intricate networks of suppliers, manufacturers, distributors, wholesalers – I'm sure you understand where I’m going with this. Collaboration among this network of internal stakeholders, that are not all located in the same physical location, is essential to consumer goods companies. Within a company, employees need to have a hub for effective teamwork, where they can collaborate to solve problems faster. That hub works well when it's able to function in its true sense, in that you can use it to communicate, share materials and access documents, files and data from a single consolidated entry point, instead of switching back and forth and juggling multiple software solutions.
Video use brings the stakeholders together in the network. Video announcements and messages are an effective way to not only reach multiple people at once but also get your message through to them that may otherwise be lost, say, in text like emails. Using VIDIZMO’s rich sharing options, you can share your video content with specific personnel or even groups of people within your company. This can be certain departments, like marketing, or certain roles, like managers. Artificial intelligence (AI) insights such as facial, object, speech and text recognition, make not only the videos, but specific parts within the video easier to find based on who’s saying what and how.
Company-wide announcements are much easier with VIDIZMO because of its scalable live streams. Most retail stores function across different regions, cities, and even countries. To reach all those employees, partners and such easily, VIDIZMO has an expansive CDN that can easily scale up your live streams almost infinitely. After the live stream ends, VIDIZMO publishes it as an on-demand video for those who missed the live stream or want to revisit it later.
I’m willing to bet that you use a reasonable amount of video conferencing within your company as well. VIDIZMO integrates with almost all video conferencing solutions, such as Microsoft Teams, Zoom, BlueJeans, and ingests recorded meetings into the video portal, which is, again, valuable for those who may have missed a meeting or want to rewatch it for a quick refresher.
Another way video connects your enterprise is through recorded expertise and training. As the factory floor becomes increasingly dominated by robots, there is plenty of wisdom that would be lost with the retiring workforce. You can record that expertise in videos and feed it into the video platform for the workforce of the future to get insights from. In the same vein, you can record your training material to use for employee training and onboarding in the future, occasionally punctuated with live lessons from instructors.
Furthermore, as mentioned above, VIDIZMO allows open-ended integration with your disparate information solutions. You could be managing and storing your documents on SharePoint and, through its integration with VIDIZMO, easily access files through a singular entry point and even associate relevant documents with certain videos for comprehensive coverage on a topic. Similarly, you can integrate your Learning Management System (LMS) for a complete training and learning solution as well.
Finally, owing to the Azure CDN and VIDIZMO’s automatic transcoding, your company’s multiple stakeholders can easily access all kinds of data and information from anywhere and on any device with no qualms.
With so much information driving the business, it’s imperative that you ensure the integrity of your data. Especially when you’re gathering information on your customers, you need to make extra sure that the information is stored behind robust security and privacy policies.
VIDIZMO comes with a comprehensive set of security policies. Deployed on the Microsoft Azure cloud, VIDIZMO is compliant with all kinds of security and data privacy regulations, such as CCPA and GDPR.
Furthermore, VIDIZMO allows you to store, manage and share video content on the platform securely. You can assign every user on the portal specific roles that align with your organizational hierarchy and individual roles, using role-based access control (RBAC). It lets you make sure that everyone behaves in a predictable way on the platform and only performs actions and accesses content that they are expected to.
Similarly, using the audit log, you can monitor the activity on the platform by tracking the actions performed by each individual user. Plus, we’ve discussed that there are several different options for sharing videos through VIDIZMO. You can set the shared content to be available after a certain time and to expire after a predetermined period. You can protect every single video with a password and only allow certain users – or group of users – to access the content.
There is so much more where that came from. VIDIZMO also lets you customize all security policies to specifically fit your enterprise needs.
To learn more about VIDIZMO’s offerings and capabilities