We’re delighted to have received a bronze award for our personalised video brochure campaign at this year’s EVCOM London Film Awards. The award recognised the most effective consumer-focussed film in support of sales and business development.

Our campaign

At TopLine Film, our video production work is traditionally won through inbound enquiries. But we wanted to generate more leads, win different types of projects, and attract bigger clients, so we decided to pursue an outbound strategy targeting specific companies. We decided on a ‘video card’ campaign, where physical media players with a short personalised promotional film would be mailed out to the addresses of our targets. The intention was to get on their radar.

Getting personal

Our campaign was designed around physical video brochures that would be personalised to each viewer. Outbound marketing can easily be seen as invasive, impersonal, and annoying, so our job was to make sure this project wasn’t. It needed to feel less like a mass-produced mailer and more like a custom video designed for each specific recipient. Each video card had a unique opener filmed by Jamie, our Managing Director, where he addressed each target recipient by name.

Devil in the detail

But personalising video content is uniquely challenging: you can’t just use marketing automation software to change the prospect name. So we devoted the same time, attention, and internal resources to the video that we would assign to a client project. In total, Jamie recorded 200 individual opening lines mentioning each person by name, as well as six individual scenes mentioning the industry the intended recipient worked in.

Overall, our video card campaign showed that taking risks and investing in niche projects can seriously pay off. Projects like this one can be difficult to get off the ground and harder to keep in the air – but if the idea’s good enough, if the team is skilled enough, and if you understand your targets, the rewards are always worth it.

We’re thrilled that all the team’s hard work was recognised at this year’s EVCOM London Film awards.