Why Choosing The Right Video Platform Is Essential For Your Business

The amount of video being created today, as opposed to pre-pandemic, has skyrocketed. 

I’m not necessarily talking about marketing videos, although those numbers have certainly grown and will continue to. 

I’m talking about the behind-the-scenes stuff. The recorded Zoom meetings. The new employee training that used to be done in person, and are now conducted virtually. The brainstorming sessions and virtual product demos and client onboardings. 

When you add in all the customer-facing communications, from Instagram Reels to YouTube Shorts to TikTok and social ads, it’s easy to see why agencies and brands alike are drowning in a backlog of video content that needs to be edited and pushed live. 

In fact, the video editing process is one of the biggest creative bottlenecks challenging organizations today. And the effects of these bottlenecks are severe, as entrepreneur and founder of the video editing platform Kamua, Paul Robert Cary, says. “It slows down time to market. It interferes with brands’ ability to produce more versions of a video and test it meaningfully in the market. It raises their costs. And in terms of the internal team, these issues decrease job satisfaction among the team.” 

That’s why one of the best investments a brand or agency can make in 2021 is in a video productivity tool—a platform that helps you edit, resize, repurpose, caption, and handle all the myriad, tedious tasks that are part of turning raw footage into effective internal or external communications. 

Here are a few ways that video productivity tools can save your brand huge amounts of time and money, and eliminate bottlenecks. 

Automate tedious tasks

Undoubtedly, one of the most time-consuming tasks that video editors and content managers face is cropping videos into the right aspect ratios for different platforms. 

If you’re repurposing content (and if you’re not, you should be!) from, say, YouTube to Facebook or Instagram, you’ll need to adjust the aspect ratio to fit the new platform. 

You also have to consider whether the video will likely be viewed on a mobile device, and whether the viewer is more likely to hold the phone vertically or horizontally (Millennials and Gen Z tend to hold their phones vertically to watch video). 

Rather than spend hours making these changes manually, editors can turn to video platforms that can actually do these things automatically. Kamua is one of the few tools available that can automatically crop and resize videos for different platforms, and the only web accessible tool designed specifically for marketers. 

Another benefit is auto-captioning. Captions are fast becoming a must for social videos—research has found that adding captions can boost viewing time by 12 percent, and increase engagement by 40 percent. 

Captions are also highly useful for internal communications like meetings and brainstorming sessions, when employees may need to refer back to specific points repeatedly. That’s not to mention, of course, the accessibility that captions offer to users with differing abilities. 

Automated captioning should be a non-negotiable when it comes to finding the right video tool for your brand. If possible, you’ll want capabilities for captioning in multiple languages, as well as searchable and clickable transcripts. Kamua offers both of these, as do some other video tools on the market.  

Bottleneck eliminated: Content repurposing becomes far faster and easier, resulting in more content pushed live in more places. 

Create more versions, or cutdowns, using your source footage

Another challenge with repurposing footage is creating different versions that are best suited to the individual platform. 

You may want to create a TikTok video from a longform TV ad or branded content video. Instead of hunting through your footage frame by frame to find the right pieces to stitch together, an AI video platform can break your footage up automatically. 

Kamua’s AutoCut is a perfect example: It splits your videos up into clips based on transitions, edits, or logical breaks in the footage. Jasmine Bortters, a creative content producer at AfroLand TV, says that this kind of automatic splitting saves her team huge amounts of time. “It would normally take us around two hours or more editing one 30-second video,” she says. “With the AutoCut tool that same process takes less than 15 minutes.” 

For animated videos, tools like Raw Shorts allows for easy drag-and-drop editing so you can easily and visually create multiple versions of the same video. 

What these capabilities do, in addition to speeding up the video content production process, is allow brands and agencies to actually test their videos. “One client of ours was able to triple their output,” Cary says. “For every one social cutdown they used to produce, they now produce three. And so for the first time they were able to do meaningful A/B testing, posting each video on Facebook so that the algorithm could tell them what was working.”

Bottleneck eliminated: Teams can create more versions of a video for more audiences, as editing time is massively reduced through easy, visual editors. 

In 2021, the right video editing platform can mean the difference between a frustrating, inefficient process, or exponentially increasing your video output. And with the importance of video, the former just isn’t an option any longer.