What is Video Automation?
Videos are one of the best tools for brands looking for exposure. But video content creation can be very time and resource intensive. Oftentimes, a single video can take days or longer to craft and distribute.
Enter video automation. Video automation is changing the online content creation space. Essentially, video automation takes out the tedious parts of the production process and makes it so that brands can generate videos quickly and easily.
Increased output means a brand can keep a greater number of clients engaged. And that has a net value: by cutting down on the time it takes to produce quality content, a brand can maximize marketing potential and boost sales.
For those reasons, video automation is likely to continue to be an indispensable part of the digital landscape in 2022.
What Does Video Automation Do?
Video automation can be anything from personalization, creating smaller snackable clips from a longer video, or the automatic addition of graphics, such as titles and transitions.
1. Personalization
Facebook anniversary videos are a good example of personalization. And anyone who’s thrown a like at videos like these, knows how effective they are.
Personalizing your marketing and internal communications increases conversions, improves lead nurturing, and builds a passionate audience. Video automation tools that offer personalization features can add info such as viewer’s name, email, job title, profile image, company name, or logo to your video content. Adding the ability to do this quickly, easily, and at scale can help your communications connect with your audience in a real way.
2. Shorter Clips from Longer Videos
It’s important to get the most out of all your content, and segmenting longer videos into smaller “snackable” portions is a great way to do that. But it’s also time-consuming to do by hand. By letting video automation tools do the hard work, you can spend your time on strategy and making the best use of all your new content instead.
3. Automation of Graphics, Titles, Transitions, and Other Elements
Video automation sidesteps some of the most tedious tasks, such as logo placement, font selection, and voiceovers. Text-to-speech tools can easily convert information, regardless of the language. Text overlays can also add style to those videos, and introducing animation effects can help those videos stand out even more.
Taken altogether, video automation tools are straightforward. You choose a template, enter in text and images, and have a video within seconds.
Why Video Automation is Useful …
… for Marketers
Rather than spending time generating content, video automation gives marketers the ability to create countless videos without starting from scratch each time new content is needed. That means videos can become more scalable, more easily.
For brands and individuals, it’s also time that can be put elsewhere — and that doesn’t just go for digital marketers. With video automation, content is becoming a vital source of passive income.
Video automation platforms are enabling digital teams to create increasingly customizable versions of their videos. Rather than struggling to recast the same video, platforms are providing more versions of a concept which ultimately appeal to specific audiences and clients.
Marketers can A/B test content to figure out what works best in their campaigns. Or they can tailor videos how they see fit. Once a brand figures out which type of content is appealing, it can adjust accordingly and connect with an audience or individual in a more personalized way. Many customizable templates are now serving a twofold purpose: ensuring videos remain unique while staying consistent enough over time to be recognized across channels.
… for Influencers
Video creation can be a long process. Typically, it can be a multi-day slog spent on concept planning, shooting, editing, archiving, uploading, and distributing.
With video automation, YouTube stars no longer have to spend as much time doing the legwork of constantly creating videos. Instead, they can streamline their content creation process and focus on growing other aspects of their business, such as client retention and social media promotion.
Furthermore, you no longer need to log in to each of your social media accounts for content to go live. Instead, you can post a video across multiple channels all at once. That means you can post to Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and other sites with a single click, which can make a world of difference in your day-to-day workflow.
… for Anyone
As the software industry adapts to video marketing efforts, it’s also guaranteeing that brands don’t have to compromise their standards or look after introducing video automation to their creation process. Let’s not think of it as a one-size-fits-all solution; in the end, you still have the final say on the finished product.
Once you’ve created a diverse collection of content by using these automation tools, pairing them with video analytics and engagement data can add a lot of value and efficiency to your process by telling you how well each video performs. See how many people watch the entirety of your video, and highlight any drop-off points where future content could use improvement.
This way, you can test diverse thumbnails, titles, and other features until you find the combination that performs best. It’s a feedback loop; once data shows what viewers are watching, video automation tools can generate content that will further bolster performance.
Consider hosting your automated videos on a platform with a video player API, or application programming interface. Marketers can use APIs to set protocols for how their videos interact with the player, as well as automating additional aspects like optional social sharing and embed code sharing for all their video content.
How to Choose a Platform
Choosing a platform simply depends on your needs. Are you a novice? Are you looking for something with more advanced design capabilities? Do you need something that’s user-friendly? Do affordability concerns top the charts? From there, you can choose a platform accordingly.
Video automation offers a variety of tools that can help virtually any video content creator, regardless of whether you want to make a shorter or more complex piece.
Conclusion
Video automation is making content easier to produce for a fraction of the work. To realize how it is changing the world of digital marketing, you simply have to look at the sheer number of software vendors alone. For example, personalization platforms like Magisto, Rocketium, Invideo, and Wibbitz are revolutionizing the video landscape by offering this solution.
Video automation is transforming the industry for the better by making it easier for creators to produce videos that lead to higher engagement. Our prediction is that video automation tools will likely continue paving the way forward this year and beyond.
