Nathan Agarwal
Have you thought about using video to grow your business or repurposing content into short videos for social media?
Hi, this is Nathan Agarwal, I welcome you to our webinar, where we discuss how to scale your business on social media by discovering what video is best for you.
Podcasting webinars, live shows, etc. leveraging your time, money and effort to yield the best results. Repurpose text and video content into short videos.
To take us through the session we have very two amazing speakers.
It gives me great pleasure in introducing Vikram Chalana, co founder and CEO of Pictory.ai.
He’s an engineer turned serial entrepreneur based in Seattle USA, is currently building Pictory.ai with the aim of democratising short videos.
Prior to this, he was a co founder of Winshuttle, an enterprise software company focused on Democratising SAP data management, which he built and scaled to 300 employees globally.
He studied at IIT Kanpur, University of Washington, Seattle.
Along with him we also have with us Pete Bennett.
He’s a YouTube creator and a consultant based in London, UK, who runs multiple YouTube channels with over 114 million views.
Since leaving the corporate world of Exxon and go to build and sold one seven figure and one six figure company using online marketing and automation strategies.
Pete holds a degree in computer science from University of Bradford. He’s a Pictory customer and also advises Pictory as a creator, economic champion.
Without much ado, I hand over the stage to Vikram to take it forward, Vikram, it’s all yours. We look forward to the session.
Vikram Chalana
Great, thank you for the wonderful intro nothing and it’s it’s really lovely to be here. It’s really exciting.
I wanted to briefly talk about why we got started with Pictory and and then and then we’ll ask Pete some questions about about his his experience and how that can be helpful to the audience here.
So while I was at Winshuttle, one of the things I realised is that I was creating a lot of content, I was creating tonnes of content for the long form content, things like white papers and podcasts and, and webinars.
And what I realised is that not many people were watching that, in the beginning, we had a lot of people in about 10 years ago, that long form content used to get a lot of traction.
And over time, what we found is that that it’s everybody was preferring short videos.
But as soon as I as a product manager as an entrepreneur, as a CTO, wanted to do short videos or figured out how to edit videos or how to create videos, I got lost, I needed to find my creative team the I used to call them people with capes and long hair.
And I needed to call I needed to find them and I could not always find them easily. And so it was it was a challenge.
I couldn’t do videos on my own.
So we started Pictory with the goal of enabling anyone to create videos or edit videos and and that’s been kind of the the mission for the last two years that we started this company and I’ll talk about kind of all the types of videos and all that stuff that that we’ve learned.
Nathan Agarwal
So, Pete, as most of the people here are business owners, they’re parts of small to midsize businesses, and how should a business thing about video and video marketing?
Pete Bennett
And how it works? Really, really good question.
And before I answer that directly, let’s just go back over the history of video for a few years, because only a few years ago, to create videos which were useful in a business sense, in other words, they contain valuable information.
And the production values were something which was acceptable in the corporate world or in the business world, you needed significant investment in both training and equipment.
When I had my translation company, for instance, which is one of the ones that I built and sold, I spent of the order of 50 to $60,000, building a studio so that I could make videos so that I could speak in much the same way that we’re talking now, with a background that that isn’t, that’s just a green screen.
But to do that kind of stuff, where you had a professional quality video, with a green screen, and with reasonable production values, you know, you you’re talking 10s of 1000s of dollars.
But I did it I was fairly early into video, in order to do two things.
One is to build the all important know, like and trust relationship that you have with your prospects, potential clients.
And secondly, to give you a platform to answer questions, position yourself as an expert, and get an authority position by sharing your knowledge as opposed to selling to people. So here’s how we did it with the translation company and how many businesses I believe, should be doing more of two types of video, there is the video which is longer form, so maybe five minutes or so where you’re explaining a subject in depth.
And by doing so, positioning yourself as someone who, you know, they should be working with because you clearly know your stuff. And secondly, shorter videos, you mentioned shorter videos and shorter videos are very hot at the moment for two reasons.
One is TikTok. Okay, you may say that that’s not for business. Well, it’s not yet. But people said that about YouTube and YouTube is clearly now becoming more and more mainstream.
And the second one is there is YouTube’s answer to tick tock, which is YouTube shorts.
So videos less than 60 seconds, answering a specific question.
So let’s say you’re a dentist, and people don’t know what’s involved in say, root canal treatment.
If you’re a dentist, and you’ve produced short videos, which answer you know, what is it like to have root canal surgery?
Or what should I expect in terms of recovery from root canal surgery, produce videos, which position yourself as an expert, and post them to the socials.
But also post them on your website, you’ll certainly reach more prospects, because it will help you with the search algorithms without getting too technical.
But also it takes you out of the commodity market.
So the moment that you’re looking into someone’s eyes, as I’m doing now, you’re not talking to a generic YouTube expert. You’re talking to me and you will feel closer to me.
Because we’ve made that connection via video. There’s no other way that you can do that, that I’m aware of. Not yet. Anyway.
Vikram Chalana
Wonderful, wonderful. So, so thought leadership videos is what is taught leadership is what videos can can help promote, whether it’s longer form or short form in both cases.
Pete Bennett
Yeah. And the key thing now is you don’t need those 10s of 1000s of dollars in order to be able to do that, thanks to services like yours.
Vikram Chalana
So my next question was going to be similar to this is what kind of videos work best like podcast, live webinars had less videos, and I think you already answered that in in most cases people want to see my face talking right? They want to see the the the top expert.
Pete Bennett
Yeah, I think it’s a mix really, as I say that there’s thought leadership so the longer form where it’s, it’s you as the personality and you as the expert But then supplement that with shorter videos which can be faceless.
I mean, I’ve done lots of these, where you effectively ask a question, and then answer a question within the video. And it’s amazing if you’re reasonably adept at script writing just how much valuable information you can convey in less than a minute. Using a, you know, a well written video script.
Vikram Chalana
Right? And you are, you’re the master of repurposing, you’ve told me about kind of different places you use these different ways you use AI to make videos.
Can you talk a little bit about that, like, so you have a content piece that you you have some ideas on? Do you write a blog about it? Do you? What else can you do with it?
Pete Bennett
Yeah, well, that’s the great thing nowadays, isn’t it that you can get one piece of work one piece of content out to multiple channels.
But let’s go back and say how do we produce the content now, I’m reasonably knowledgeable about most of the areas that I would write on. But if you are struggling with a blank piece of paper, a lot of people say that they get writer’s block, then there are lots of tools out there, I don’t know whether we’re allowed to mention them, I will, if you like, that can supplement your writing capability using artificial intelligence.
So for instance, if I was to try and write an article about root canal surgery, I know nothing about that subject.
But I can use artificial intelligence to help me research that subject, begin writing an article with it.
But then I would also obviously get that checked by an expert, somebody else in my company before putting that out into the the internet.
But the methods to do it would be to use a blog. Obviously, that’s great, because it’s content on your website, make a video of either yourself or one of the AI solutions, such as a picture it offers reading either the whole blog or a condensed summary of the blog, and make that into a video.
Post that on your website as well with burnt in subtitles, because often people will choose to watch a video, even if it contains the same information than read a blog.
Lots of people on the internet sort of selling, writing a book as being a good way of advertising your business, but I always say to them, when was the last time you watched a video, when was the last time you read a book.
Most people will have watched a video that day. Many people now don’t bother reading books, they go straight to video.
So on your website, obviously. And then we’ve got the social media. So all of the Instagrams, the Facebook’s more and more Tik Tok? Obviously not yet. That’s more aimed at the lower age groups. But you know, grey hairs will migrate there eventually.
And get the same information out in different formats. And across different channels. And there are many tools that can do that, obviously.
Vikram Chalana
Awesome. So some of the some of the format, some of the formats could be not just blog or video, but you could also create a podcast out of it. I know you’re great at using some of the AI based text to speech tools to create podcasts automatically.
Pete Bennett
It’s about putting the content in a place where people forget to consume it. So be everywhere if you can. And again, there are plenty of tools that can help you do that. So you don’t have to rework the same thing over and over again.
Vikram Chalana
Fantastic. Thank you for that. Pete.
That was that was super useful information. Even for me, I learned something I talked to you so many times before, I learned a bunch of things as well. So thank you so much. And I will take now a few minutes and go through my presentation.
And and I Pete already kind of started about talking about different kinds of videos. So I’ll actually start there.
And I will share my screen in a second. As soon as I figure it out. Give me one second I’m sharing my screen here so that way I see the types of videos are we got homepage videos.
And the reason I distinguish between homepage videos and other website videos are these are I think of it as high value videos where you probably want to invest a lot of time and effort in making nice videos, product launch videos, a similar thing where you want to hire a production company and do that.
And then as Pete mentioned, taught leadership videos, right webinars, short podcasts and even even five minute long topic videos that that that position you as a thought expert.
Then I see video ads, like really short, you know, 32nd 22nd videos that you’d see on YouTube and social media And everywhere, and then videos for organic social media. So I see all kinds of videos that that are being used these days.
So if you scroll on Facebook or LinkedIn, you see a lot of videos. So these are the kinds of videos that that we see.
And and I have a quick poll for the audience is to kind of what kind of videos do you actually create today or use today. And I see a lot of people use webinars already. So Nathan, if you guys can share the poll the first poll?
So, we can close the poll now. And maybe towards the end, we can review the results.
Or if you have the results already, we can, can we see those now? Great. So people are already using social media videos, we were already using some thought leadership videos, video ads are going to be big.
So let me let me also put things in a different way, this is actually a really encouraging number because that that social media videos is what I was going to talk more about today.
So hopefully, you’ll get some, some tips about about that from from this talk today.
I put videos in two axes here, I say, you know, videos, which have a high production quality, so you can have videos, that that, that you use a lot of resources for.
And that’s my vertical axis, the high fidelity or high production quality. And the horizontal axis is the frequency, how often you create these videos.
So obviously, the Holy Grail is high production value videos produced at high frequency. And that is like, if you’re a studio, you’ll probably be doing that all the time.
But for most other businesses, it’s hard to be on this top right quadrant. But there are some nice tools that when we talk about repurposing, you can take some high production value videos that you create, like these TV ads, or homepage videos or product launch videos, that you may not create that at very high frequency, but you can take snippets of it, and post them on social media at at high frequency.
And so you can do some of that some of this high frequency work with, with repurposing the existing existing videos.
Obviously, if it’s low production quality and low frequency, you don’t even bother. So that’s that’s that my in logic bottom left quadrant, but this is the one that I that we were focusing on today is high frequency videos, that that may or may not have a very high production quality, but something that you can produce very, very quickly.
And, easily without a lot of resources.
And that’s that’s how I think about these social media videos, these thought leadership videos, is something that needs to come up fast and in the world.
So here’s what’s going on today in the social media in the world, at least.
You constantly have to post on social media, it’s become a chore, it’s become a, an opportunity, it is something that every business has to do to stay relevant.
And, and videos we know grab a lot more attention on social media. But as we’ve talked we are talking about that videos are are harder and cost, investment of time and money.
But we’re all we’re all sitting on on most businesses that I see. You’ve you’ve either created content in other forms, in terms of webinars or blogs and stuff that are not leveraged enough for social media. And and that’s what’s happening.
That’s the opportunity here that I want to leave you with is you know, take content that you have already or if you have to use AI to create some content, create content that and then repurpose that for social media. And that’s that’s our how we get to high frequency videos.
So here’s some key metrics that I learned on social media.
For for over the last year that I’ve been researching this, and average posts that you make on social media on LinkedIn or Facebook as a business not as a as an individual user on Facebook, but our business post reaches only about 5% of your followers a single post So it’s, it’s pretty low, it used to be 10%.
And it’s, it’s getting closer to 5%. So, that’s a single post is not likely gonna be seen by more than four or 5% of your followers.
So you just have to constantly do it.
That’s the lesson from this, you have to, you have to stay on top of it all the time. videos will get higher engagement, almost two to 12x higher engagement, there’s lots of research that has been done than just posting a text or an image.
85% of the videos will be watched on mute. So whenever you post a video, you want to make sure you put captions in there. That’s highly important. And the idea length, and Pete mentioned less than one minute, and that’s for shorts and tick tock of LinkedIn says one to two minutes Facebook says one to two minutes.
So different channels will have different lengths of ideal video. But as you can see, no more than two minutes is your ideal length of a video that that can get traction.
So there’s lots of interesting things that this this this data can tell you. You have to be always posting, you have to put subtitles on your videos, you should put videos and you should put short videos there.
So some ideas of repurposing, right, so we’ve already talked about a few are and here’s some more ideas. So say you have blogs, right?
You can convert blogs to podcasts, you can have aI read it for you or you can have your own your own voice to take that content and convert it to a podcast. You can use the blog scrip blog summary as a script for a video.
And and I’ll show you some tools for that how we can use Pictory for something like that.
You can extract quotes and stats from a blog use that for social media posts, you can create summaries of the blog use that for social media. And the idea is don’t just post the blog once on your LinkedIn channel, or your or your Facebook or any other social channels.
So there’s, there’s tonnes of options tonnes of I mean, Pete was hesitant in mentioning vendor names but I said you know, hey, there’s tonnes of tools for different things. I’ll show Pictory.
But but there’s tools for summarization, there is tools for you know, stock visuals, if you’re going to post on on on social. There are all these tools for creating visuals Canva I’m sure many of you use these tools for scheduling posts like HootSuite and buffer.
For video content. There’s tools for transcription, for short video making, of course there’s the standard tools like iMovie and stuff and then there are tools for converting podcast to video. So there’s, there’s tonnes of tools out there.
I wanted to talk about Pictory today and show you how you can do many of the things we’ve talked about here using using Pictory, but but there are many options you have. So at this point, I’m going to bring up a second poll that I have about about repurposing so she can bring the second poll up.
So, you may already be doing some repurposing and I’d love to hear what what you’re already doing all right, so we can close that now and just see what what the results are.
So looks like most of you’re not doing any repurposing and so so that’s, that’s good. So hopefully you can learn things from from this today’s webinar and try to do some of these things as well.
But yeah, the multiple posts from webinars looks like you’re already doing multiple posts from one blog looks like those two, were my big recommendations.
And I’m, glad to see that that you’re doing and some of you are already doing blogs to videos, which is, which is also great to hear.
So, alright, cool. So let me talk a little bit about Pictory.
So we’ve been building this engine, as I mentioned, to create to take your existing content, and create short videos from it.
And some of the key uses use cases of Pictory are, we can take text content and convert them to short videos for social media offerings.
So that those are the use cases. And I want to now get into a demo of Pictory and spend the next five minutes before we start taking q&a. And on a quick on a quick demo.
So this is Pictory. And it’s it’s a very simple tool, which helps anybody create videos.
So I’ll start with a scenario where you might have a webinar to begin with.
And you’d have a recording of the webinar and mp4 file. So what you would do that is you would drop the webinar file right here, the mp4 file right here, and upload it.
And when it’s uploading, it actually, not just puts the file into the cloud, but it also transcribes it. And in the transcription, you can choose the language, we don’t support all the languages, but we support many languages and accents as well.
So you can choose the Indian English accent, for example, and you can upload that and that will that will help you know some of the pronunciations and Indian English might be different.
So and and then it would it would bring up those and what at the end, what we get is after the transcription is done, what we’ll get is something like this, we got the we’ll get the, the webinar transcription here on the right on the left, and the end the video you will be able to see on the right.
So I can basically now do a few things. One of the common use cases is just post publishing of a webinar.
So there’s a bunch of stuff that is that’s usually going to be in the beginning of the webinar. Can you hear me now?
Am I audible, and I can, I can take these and I can just say delete these from the webinar. So I can simply from the webinar text, I can delete, I can select sections of the text and just delete it. So I deleted the beginning but I can go into any of the any part in the middle and say, okay, delete that from the video.
So so that part of the webinar is basically removed from the video.
So you can do this at the word at the sentence level. But you can also do it at the word level. And in fact, we automatically filter out these words, the filler words, synonyms, so let’s hear this one and then we’ll remove it and see I don’t spend a lot of time with each each person.
So I tend to do this a lot and this guest speaker that we had also attend tend to do this a lot. So I’m going to use this button to remove this filler words from the video and all the filler words all the ORs and the arms are gone now and it basically puts a jump cut there and set so let’s listen to this. I don’t spend a lot of time with each each person.
So that that’s that’s one other value of it is that as You’re getting ready to post publish our webinar, you can delete some sections in the beginning some sections at the end and remove these filler words and get ready to publish this, in this.
So, from this point on, you can simply say okay, I want to show the subtitles that by default setting here, and you can just generate the video.
Here’s one other thing that that we do, which is really important for most businesses is to make sure your with your videos are branded.
So we make sure that you can add a logo, and the logo will show up either on the top left or the top right of the video, you can add an outro like a call to action at the very end.
It can be constructed with a logo or it can be something a video that you may already have that you can upload here or an image.
And you can also set up your like font and colour schemes for your business and make sure that the subtitles display up in those in those kinds of those kinds of fonts.
So then when you generate the video, it will actually respect that those those brand settings and add the outro add the logo and colour the subtitles appropriately.
So that’s one one use case of just adding captions to your video. It also will also let you download SRT files from your video and in this in a text format.
So talking about repurposing, you can take that webinar, get the text format of that webinar, create a blog from it, for example. SRT is a subtitle format that YouTube likes Vimeo likes most of these formats like the SRT file, so you can upload it there instead of burning the caption in by default, we’re going to burn the caption into the video.
But you can you can get the SRT file instead.
So now I want to talk about snippets because that was high value activity that that you can do so you can search your video for the most interesting pieces.
So let’s say where did he talk about 80%.
So this is a good interesting sentence, it’s really hard to differentiate, get people’s trust without reference.
So I can take this section. And I say this is an interesting one, I want to create a highlight out of it.
So I can create multiple highlights this is one highlight. So this shows me that this is going to be a 33 second video that that I can post and I can simplify if I all I did was I wanted this video, I can just generate a video just by selecting that sentence and generate a video, I can do that with any sentence.
I can select this one single sentence and generate a video from that.
So that would be just like that one sentence five second video. In this case, if I took this to be a 33 second video, I can add multiple highlights, I can do searches, I can say okay, I want to add this to the highlights too.
And as a con as the person who’s put together the content, you’re the best person to know what what some of the good highlights will be.
But you don’t have to think about timestamps anymore, you don’t have to send this to your video editor, you can do this yourself because you can just search for the text and you can find the right place where you want to create the highlights.
And so in this case, now I have three highlights, I can do one of two things, I can generate one video, with all these three highlights, if I just generate highlights video, it will be like the highlights video.
For the for the for the whole webinar, I can generate this one and a half minute one and one minute 16 Second highlight reel.
Or I can say I want actually each one of them to be a separate clip. And I can download these individual highlight clips as separate videos.
So all I have to do is just select this and download these video clips. So so that’s one of the things I wanted to show here, right, you can add captions and you can input post produce the webinar, but also you can create these highlights and download these highlights from the, from the video very, very easily very quickly.
The other thing I wanted to show you that we built is say you have a blog and you want to create a video from that.
Or even if you don’t have a blog, you have a tech script, you can create a video from that. So let’s go with a blog first.
So I say published a blog on medium and and I want to use that to create a video. So I just put the URL of the blog in that and and now what what our software does is it extracts the key messages from the blog.
So it’s using AI to find the most unique sentences in the blog. And, and it’s gonna it’s going to come and it’s going to show me that all these highlighted sentences are the ones that the AI selected.
Now, I some of these, I don’t want like this is just A thing here that I can just remove. So I can come very quickly and I can say I want this, but I don’t want this, right.
So I can very quickly come in and select what sections I want or don’t want in the final summary.
And so now this is my summary, that is going to be used as a script for the video. And I can go to the next step and and create the video from it.
So it says what kind of videos I’m going to pick a 16 by nine video, but there are different videos are good for different channels. So 16, by nine, YouTube likes that that format.
And now for every sentence, I am the AI here is searching a library of visuals for the best fitting visual.
So we have, we have a big library of several million pieces of videos and images, stock content that we’re looking up.
So sometimes this can sometimes the library can sometimes the image can come from the article itself, like this image was in the article, so I can leave it alone.
This one came from the stock visual, this one also came from the stock visual, so so so many of them come from the sock visual. Now, if I want something else I can, I can select something else here, it actually picked out all the other ones that were in my article as well.
So I can pick those I can search for, for something else. So in this case, traction, it actually found like car tire traction, so sometimes it makes errors.
So you can you can pick, you can pick something else instead. And I can say, Okay, this is maybe I can use this, or I can upload my own content. And this is this is actually very important.
So oftentimes, you may have nice pictures or something that you can take and, and upload there.
Either videos or images, you can take screenshots or PowerPoints and upload those. So, so those are the, that’s the visual part.
So you can you can set up the visuals. And once you’re happy with all the visuals, then you can go okay, it automatically picks out a music track. So again, we use AI to, to figure out the mood of the article. And then we match the mood with the with the mood of a music track and we pick up the music track automatically.
And then you can put put a machine voice over if you want, you can record your own voice. And, and I prefer that personally my own voice recorded.
But you can use one of these machine voices. And we use the Amazon versus Amazon as a tool called poly and we use their voices here.
And and we can pick that and have that narrated for us. So now let’s look at this video I spent maybe you know two minutes putting this together, right? Give it the URL, select a couple of sentences, maybe made a couple of changes to the visuals and now teaser videos into b2b marketing Vikram, social media, too much text content and little traction.
Whether you’re a product marketer or content strategist, creating content that engages your customer, or even your own sales representatives is your number one job.
Video is where it is at. Video boosts conversion rates by 80% video posts on Facebook get twice the engagement of others.
But creating a video is hard. So what’s a product marketer to do? What if you could create a video summary of an article a teaser video from an article automatically or near automatically
Pictory to the rescue.
So very quickly, I created this right and you can you can do it yourself with any of your blogs. You can also start with a script if you don’t want to start with the article and just type the summary here or copy and paste it from from anywhere else and create a video from there. And so those are some of the use cases I wanted to share.
And hopefully this kind of gives leaves you something with that of value that that you can take and try. We do have a special offer for for the for the attendees at this webinar.
So if you do if you do end up deciding so we have a free trial that you can sign up from on our website Pictory.ai. And if you do decide that you want to use an by by any of our plans, we’re offering a 25% discount on any of our plans annual or monthly and the discount lasts forever. However, the deal only lasts until end of November.
So with that, I will stop sharing, and we will take up any questions that you might have.
So, nothing, we went a little bit over time, but we still have a few minutes. It was really wonderful.
And be asked, I also saw real value when we had partnered with you, and we’d come up with those videos never be good thing that we could do it all by ourselves, you know, we didn’t have to wait for anyone else to do it for us.
So I don’t understand much of technology, but I could do it. So that was the best coming to the question. So the first one is from Sri Chandra Menon. He’s asking about, what about copyright for Pics or videos that are used a zoom risk, if any, is covered?
Vikram Chalana
Yeah, so we we licence all that content, we licence from a group called Storyblocks.
And and we make it available to us. So you, and it’s all fully licenced and copyright protected. So you don’t have to worry about any of that. And same thing with the music tracks, they are fully licenced.
Nathan Agarwal
Okay, the next one is by Bob Now, is there a golden number of frequency of posts per day or week? Because if unchecked, it can get annoying and counterproductive?
Vikram Chalana
Good, good question. Have not? I’ll actually let Pete answer that maybe?
Pete Bennett
Well, yeah. And it’s a very, very good question, because it varies considerably by the niche that you’re in. So long as the video is providing new quality and value, then, in my experience, to many is, is much less of a problem than too little.
But consider what niche you’re in. For instance, if you’re in the crypto trading niche, then you probably want to be doing several videos a day, because yesterday’s news is yesterday’s news. If you’re in a more evergreen niche, then perhaps you don’t need to hit it quite so hard.
I mean, you know, many things don’t change that much over time, do they? For instance, the classic one in internet marketing terms is dog training. You know, if you did one of those a week and teach your dog a new trick every week, you probably couldn’t cope with learning very much more than that in a week. Anyway,
Vikram Chalana
I will probably turn off a channel which talks about root canals five times a day.
Pete Bennett
Exactly. And also, you’ve got to think about your, your time as well, what I normally say with YouTube, for instance, is produce content at a rate that you think that you can sustain without either burning out because that’s all you’re doing and not getting any other work doing, or without becoming too repetitive and fatiguing the audience.
Great. The next is by autopen Kumar, when I think he would like to know if the video is in English, and can be transcribed into Hindi. And then that’s what a person can listen to, or vice versa. Is that possible? I think that’s what you mean.
Vikram Chalana
Pictory doesn’t have that translation support yet. But but we do support Hindi text, if you if you we have some users will basically replace the text manually. And that will work for short videos, but we don’t we don’t do automatic translation yet. We do support Hindi videos. So Hindi was one of the supported languages that you can upload videos and transcribe it.
Nathan Agarwal
Next is by Ranjit Singh, what type of video marketing tools create most impact for a b2b SaaS product.
Vikram Chalana
So I’ll take it because that’s what I’m building a b2b SaaS product. But it’s basically the same thing that Pete was talking about these thought leadership pieces, things that are broader in scope than just my product, things that that talk about the industry as a whole things that I can show that, that I’m an expert on.
And so I would say you know, all of those the video ads, you’ll still have to do for Facebook and LinkedIn, and if you want to advertise on those platforms, but for thought leadership pieces, I think that’s the that’s the main like talking head video where I come on video and record myself every once a week or once a month. If you want to add anything into that bit,
Pete Bennett
Yeah, I again, I would add the q&a type videos. Again, without getting too technical. There are ways of finding out what questions your potential prospects will be asking.
And its most basic form. You know, if you go into Google, you can you can look and see what people are searching for. And then just produce a video that that gives them the answer. It’s ever so simple. And the Google algorithm absolutely loves this post the Hummingbird update.
If you want to really give it some some boost, then you want to be using optimization tags from rich media in your HTML, and then tagging the video as being a rich media segment. And it’s like catnip to Google, we were beating Wikipedia on popular search terms in my translation agency using that technique alone.
Vikram Chalana
And also, I think demos are awesome. People love demo videos. So for SAS product, that’s always a compelling thing to just create lots of demos screen screen shares. Definitely.
Nathan Agarwal
Great. The next one is by Andrea Mukherjee can we have region specific references, reference pics and music.
Vikram Chalana
So, some of the it meant the AI may not automatically pick out region specific visuals, but but the library is big enough that that you can search and find very specific ones for India or Bengal or wherever so so we I have done that. I have to manually do the search in addition in the in in the product. But But of course if if all else fails, I always
Vikram Chalana
can bring my personal collection or from the outside and import it into the into Pictory.
Next is free Chandra minute, can I use your AI to get the best points of a blog, create a video with my face on it and add images music as necessary?
Vikram Chalana
Absolutely, I love that idea. That’s actually a really good suggestion. So just use the AI to create the summary. And then copy the summary over and use use your own face to narrate it. That’s actually the best.
Same goto letter or what are the best practices for SEO optimization of videos.
Pete Bennett
It depends on the platform. If you’re doing it on your website, then again, to mark it up using schema.org tags as rich media is probably the best thing I could say.
If you’re doing it for YouTube, then that’s a whole new sort of can of worms. But the simplest thing I could say is make sure that your title of your video includes the keywords that you’re targeting because the title is the most important part of any SEO strategy on on YouTube.
Vikram Chalana
Bid can ask a related question does do the subtitles the if you upload an SRT files does Google index dose
Pete Bennett
to YouTube? If you do that on YouTube? It certainly does. Yeah, you should definitely be doing that.
Great. Next is divish. Agarwal, what transcription of mix of Hindi and English
Vikram Chalana
That’s a tricky one division in the we’ve tried it we have some videos that some customers were trying and it’s it’s hard, multiple language transcriptions.
We don’t support that yet. And it’s it’s kind of a general research problem in AI.
Nathan Agarwal
Nitin, would like to know, average monthly costs started to mature a few 100 a month to a few 1000 a month. I think he means your package. I think that’s what it means. Right?
Vikram Chalana
Yeah, so in our pricing, individual pricing is listed on the website. And it’s, you know, it’s less than $100 per user per month. But then if you want to get go go into the enterprise package, if you have multiple users in your organisation that need to use it, our typical enterprise plan would start at about you know, about four to 5000 a year.
That’s kind of the the starting price where you where we bundle a group of users some training professional services and everything from process nine, some would like to know How about whiteboard animation for short video.
Vikram Chalana
I think it’s it’s great those though, there are some nice tools for whiteboard animation that you can use.
And I haven’t tried it I so I don’t know how difficult it is to create. But I Pete, I don’t know if you have some opinion on that.
Pete Bennett
Yeah, I think that they’re kind of unless they’re done professionally, and therefore expensively, if you do them using the standard packages. I mean, there’s doodly is probably the The best well known one, they’re looking a bit old hat now.
And it’s difficult to retain people’s attention because the novelty of the whiteboard has now gone.
I don’t think you can really beat if you want the absolute best performance is having your face on it, to be really honest, because it’s then you rather than a, you know, an abstract element that they’re connecting with.
But if you want to have them done professionally, they are ridiculously expensive, you can be you can be talking more than $100 per second to get high level whiteboarding done, which is crazy.
Nathan Agarwal
Right. Any other questions? Audience, just please go ahead. Put in the q&a, we still have a little bit of time left with us and interim, because Vikram, if you have any more tips to share with the audience, please go ahead. But more questions come in.
Vikram Chalana
Yes, why? The
Vikram Chalana
I’ll talk about kind of our own video marketing efforts that we do at Pictory and, and we do the same things that we talked about.
So I do a monthly video webcasts that I record, with me and a guest.
And, and then it’s a, it’s a video podcast, but I don’t really like it’s not a live stream thing, but we record it and then and then we do the we publish that on our YouTube channel. But we also then create snippets from it, using of course, our own product, and, and then have that scheduled on our LinkedIn and Facebook.
And we use Hootsuite for that for that scheduling. And we reschedule it for a few weeks out. So every webinar, we get, you know, maybe a dozen posts out of it, or every, every podcast, I get a dozen posts out of it.
And, then the same thing we do with the blogs, we write blogs, we convert each blog to a video, and then we post that with, with or without the video into, into the social.
And we have a YouTube channel where we put a lot of demos, a lot of demos, a lot of tips and tricks and, and these are like short ones very feature specific videos that we record. And usually it’s screencast with a with a person narrating it.
And, and those are great, those are super valuable. And and, and we get lots of views on those. And then we have one homepage video that that we did spend some money to create and and that one is not done with our product, of course by using a professional.
Pete Bennett
I just also like to add to that, if I may is my biggest tip with any of the video stuff is just get started. Just do it. And don’t expect to get it 100% Right.
First time, just start with all of my consultancy clients, that’s the biggest thing that I have to get over is that I am too scared to do this in case I do it wrong. Well, you can’t do it wrong, you’ll either get views, or you’ll get data as to what you need to do next and practice in any case, so just start.
Vikram Chalana
And one other one other benefit, by the way of this video that I have noticed myself is people will come to me and say hey, I already know you, I saw you on this on this webcast or this or this video podcast that you are doing so.
So there’s a if you get your face out there often enough, you become familiar, you become more trusted.
It’s a really great session you gave just go out and try it out. They could not be anything wrong in it. So I think we all should do that and take that advice very seriously. There’s a question by burly wearing he says, Is there not a video fatigue setting and with so many so much junk also going around?
Pete Bennett
Yes, don’t produce junk. And buy junk. I don’t mean production values. It’s find out what your audience want and then produce it for them.
So people are always looking for answers to questions. That’s why I go back. Just answer the 10 or 12 biggest questions that your clients are asking you or prospects are asking you in a video. And then by the time they’ve listened to half of those they’ll already feel like they know you.
Great. So Nitin has another question, some idle cases some number of users stability, traction, Vikram if you can just throw up on some statistics.
Vikram Chalana
Yeah, so we have maybe about 6000 customers using Pictory right now. And the most common use case is our that snippets of video snippets that I showed you, so they’ll take their webinar and create little snippets out of it.
And they, they tell us all the time as to how much effort it was saving them, they were spending 1000s of dollars every month with videographers that they didn’t have to hire. And they could do it themselves that content teams can do it themselves.
And, and then the second most common use cases where where people will start from a script or an article and convert create a video from it.
And sometimes they’ll use machine voice, but more often, the more interesting videos they actually narrated themselves.
And, and so those, those two are the use cases that I showed you as well. And, and the value that that that our customers see is they they can let a lot more people create videos and edit videos, then it was possible before they always had to find either outsource resources, or stretch their already stretched design team or videography team to do this stuff.
Nathan Agarwal
Question by Praveen, is there any restriction on the video length?
Vikram Chalana
So on Pictory, like if you’re starting from text, we limit it to 20 minute videos. Although I have to say I have to be frank I it gets kind of slow and clunky at 20 minute videos.
So on when you’re starting from a blog, or sorry, from a video itself, we were limited to, I think 90 minute videos.
And and so, so those are like a webinar, a 90 minute webinar is too long. Usually you wouldn’t, you wouldn’t do that. But we do provide a 90 minute limit.
So I think the limits are listed on our website. I don’t have the exact recollection.
Nathan Agarwal
There’s a follow up question by moodily that you were talking about editing features. What about that?
Vikram Chalana
Yeah, so I should, when I showed you kind of how you can delete segments from a video. That was the editing I was talking about. So we can edit things out of the video very, very easily. You can delete sections, sentence levels or at the word level, and remove that.
Obviously, video editing is a lot more than just that. But but a lot of things that people want to do is just that it’s it’s just taking the very specific things out of the video or just selecting those to do the things. And I think the whole point is, in video editing people had to think of timelines before you always had to think of start timestamp and timestamp.
And we’re trying to kind of get away from that timestamp thinking and just have you thinking instead, in terms of the content of the video, and using that to edit the thing, so so it doesn’t work. It may not work for everything. If you have a music video, yes, you may not be able to edit it with Pictory. It has to be a spoken word video.
Yeah, I think he wanted to know it’s not timeline editing.
Yes, it is not. It’s more on the text. The comment on it. There’s a question. Let’s take the last I think the last few minutes. Dr. Mukherjee has when we watch a video on YouTube, and we are forced to watch a promotional video, we tend to focus more on the five seconds to get over so that we can skip it now given this consumer behaviour, how to keep the audience engaged in the first five seconds.
Pete Bennett
Yeah, I think I understand the question. It’s really about how you structure the video. Most people on YouTube particularly do everything wrong, they they start with five seconds of a spinning logo, then they start with a promotional message.
And then they start with an introduction. And then they get to the content. If anybody watching this has studied NLP Neuro Linguistic Programming, there’s a technique called an NLP pattern interrupt, which in video terms means it’s best to start at a not necessarily at the beginning of what you want to say, but it’s something that’s going to grab their attention very quickly.
An example, if I was doing a video about how to cook baby artichokes in the microwave, rather than introducing myself and saying, this is what I’m going to do in the video. I might I might start the video with so I put the baby in the microwave.
Now immediately. That’s what an earth you’re talking about.
This guy’s gonna put the baby in the microwave, and then you would you would after that then you’d say in this video I’m going to teach you how to cook baby artichokes in the microwave in less than five minutes.
And if anybody was to tune out during the first few seconds There’s a better video than I think it says more about them than me.
That’s great. Right? Any further questions? Before we close the crumb and Pete, thank you so very much for taking the session for our members, our audience aware this was really informative.
Nathan Agarwal
It’s a very, very early morning for you, I think Vikram. It is an afternoon so thank you so much. Be there with us. Thank you so much audience for staying connected and asking all these questions.
It has really helped us to get more insights and inputs on we couldn’t had shared his connects contacts in his presentation. If you require people to put in this presentation as well.
Online, you could download it. The video also will be there for you to just revisit in case you want to just check about it.
And of course, Vikram has been kind enough for an offer for all of you so please go ahead and do use that offer and to trout Pictory. With that, thank you so much, everyone. Good morning, Vikram. Good afternoon, Pete and Good night everyone. See you. Thank you again. Thank
you
