Want to create amazing videos in a few clicks? Viddyoze is the video animation software you need.
By Jim James, Founder EASTWEST PR and Host of The UnNoticed Entrepreneur.
I discovered Viddyoze some time ago and it has liberated me in terms of creating cool animated graphics and videos. In the new episode of The UnNoticed Entrepreneur, co-founder and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Joey Xoto joined me from Preston, England to tell us about their video-making platform and how it can help entrepreneurs get noticed.
Image from LinkedIn
Making Video Creation Easier
Viddyoze is a web-based video creator. It allows anybody to create exciting-looking video animations for their brand online. It works as simple as choosing a pre-created template that theyâve designed themselves, customising it, and then creating it in the cloud. With their tool, it only takes two to three minutes for you to get yourself flashy assets that you can use in your content.
They take the animation heavy lifting out of the process through their massive animation team that churns out animations every month. The team does all the things involved in animating that normal people probably wouldnât know â including Joey who is not an animator himself.
Theyâve templatised the whole technology so that all youâll do as a user is to come in and change certain parts of the animation that theyâve allowed users to change. For instance, if you want to make a logo, youâll get a generic logo (that kind of moves around within a really great animation that theyâve created) and their software will allow you to replace that part of the animation. It might sound that itâs not going to look really cool, but the way that theyâve designed it is that your logo will move in semantic space â in three-dimensional space.
Image from Viddyoze
According to Joey, the vision that they had when they first started Viddyoze was to make it so that if you want to go and make an animation, you just pick a template that looks really cool. Then you can customise it with your own colours and things like that to match your brand. Nothing's off-ramp. Plus, you can also add your own assets to make it yours essentially.
In some ways, it just takes out all of that complication from the user. Because if you're running a small business, most of the time, your expertise is not in design or visuals. And that's where their expertise is. So they take that away, and they make sure that your thing looks good.
The problem with desktop applications is that theyâre not just about learning the technical part. Theyâre also about learning the visual part. You have to make it actually look good â and if you don't have a design flair or that creative eye, you're going to make something that doesn't look good.
With a really simple tool, theyâre able to solve a lot of problems. Though it sounds really simple, there's a lot of complex stuff that happens in the background
At the moment, however, they couldnât create a full video yet. But thatâs something that theyâre going to offer in the next few months. Right now, the tool specialises in making video content that looks a lot more flashy by adding all these extra elements.
Getting Noticed, Minus an Agency
Currently, Viddyoze has 600 hours of content being published within about 60 seconds.
This shows how they have a tremendous amount of content being uploaded on the web. And it means two things. First is that people love video, because it's the most consumed media that there is now. The second thing is that the market for it is extremely saturated. It's very, very competitive. And if you don't stand out â if your content doesn't look exciting and interesting â then you're going to be kind of thrown out. No one's going to notice your content.
The whole idea of Viddyoze is to help you grab attention and get you noticed. As a small business, you might not have the budget to be able to hire a massive agency or a big design team to help you with that. So what theyâre doing is essentially making it a lot easier for people to do just that but at a very small budget.
Image from Unsplash
If you're a monthly subscriber, you get access to over 2,000 different templates. There's a massive range of different types of templates and they add new ones â about 30 to 40 â every month as well. So there's always fresh stuff coming in, which is really important because their design team keeps an eye out on what the new trends are; on what's working and what's not working. Design trends change frequently, and that's something that theyâre always on top of.
And even if you only buy a one-time licence, youâll already get access to around 250 templates. There are still enough templates to play around and experiment with and get enough variety for you to create something.
Branding Your Video Content with Viddyoze
One aspect of the video-making tool is branding. And according to Joey, you can brand up all your video content with their platform really easily.
You can create things such as lower thirds and alpha animations (alpha animations refer to the things that overlay on top of a video, like arrows and titles and all kinds of graphics and elements that make your video stand out from the crowd). After all, it's all about trying to make your content more engaging at the end of the day.
Talking about how they help business owners to stay within their corporate guidelines, he also mentioned that they have a level of their product called Agency, which allows you to save your brand guidelines in a sense. They call these asset packs or asset folders.
When you're creating your content, you'll get prompted to select the colours and fonts that you use in your brand or your corporate style. You can also upload your images and things that are relevant to your particular brand. Every time you go and make a template, every time you connect your video, you can use that template process.
A lot of businesses do make the mistake of sometimes doing too many different types of designs. And that causes a disparity in what their brand is supposed to look like. What Joey and his team at Viddyoze encourage is to save your colours and things like that into their platform. Every time you create an animation or video content, you can just use that as a template that then goes and buys off your designs. Their goal is to make it as simple as possible and to help users be consistent.
But what about audio? It's one thing to have moving images. However, many people are also now getting involved with sonic branding.
With Viddyoze, all of their templates can have an audio background. They have a full audio engineering team that creates high-grade, professional sound effects and plays music for every single template that they have.
You can also select between different options as theyâve got around three to five audio options per template. Theyâre also always cranking out new audio for every single template. There are a lot of different templates that get created in their platform â and, along with those, thousands of templates and thousands of audio tracks are also produced.
Image from Viddyoze
Video Duration, Format, and Resolution
When it comes to controlling video length, Joey said that itâs something that their platform doesnât offer yet. Their templates run 16 to 17 seconds on average.
What theyâre developing at the moment for their next releases is to have that option to kind of add and take templates away so you'll be able to start dictating how long you want a piece of content will be. Currently, the workaround is to simply trim the template using any desktop or phone video editor (e.g. iMovie or Windows Moviemaker).
Now, if youâre wondering what users get in terms of file formats, he said that most of their current templates are traditional MP4 videos. You can get MOV files as well (these are traditionally used when youâre overlaying a video or putting some sort of effect on top of another video). Their videos can also be exported as a GIF file that you can embed on a website.
They recommend users to use their videos in emails because with Viddyoze, you can create these great-looking animated call-to-actions inside your email, letting you incorporate an arrow pointing down or use some really cool text colours. You can have a moving animation right inside your email. And that's something that theyâve done for clients and a couple of enterprise clients to see how they can improve their click-through rates.
While MP4, MOV, and GIF are the three main formats, they guarantee that every video is HD or High Definition. Theyâre also doing a couple of 4K-resolution exports as well. But Joey clarified that HD is more than enough for the web â it saves them a little bit of money on export and it also saves you a bit of time on uploading.
They also give a commercial licence to their purchasers. If you create a video on their platform, you have the rights to the content you export. Though the templates are their intellectual property, when you render that video out as an MP4, you can do whatever youâd like to do with it. Whether youâre using it on your own website or youâre aiming to sell it to someone else â you could do that.
On Video Trends
Asked about particular trends, Joey thinks that these days, less is more. Itâs the simple stuff that works really well.
If you look even just from an overall design perspective, a lot of big businesses are moving into this minimalistic design style. If you look at Facebook and all the new kinds of tech platforms, everything seems to be Sans Serif fonts, really slick, and is minimal in amount.
What he noticed is that even in the video, everything seems to be quite minimal. But the other side of it is about not overly professionalising. And itâs something that he advocates â things donât have to always be super corporate.
Image from Unsplash
For him, âcorporateâ is starting to become this thing that a lot of people can't resonate and relate with. This is why a lot of Viddyozeâs templates are a little bit edgier. Some of them are quite glitchy, and they see to it that theyâve got a lot of variety of different styles.
What theyâve tried to do with their platform is to cater to a lot of different types of businesses â they donât pigeonhole themselves. They try and create stuff that can be used by anybody, whether you're at Starbucks or youâre somebody at home wanting to make something for your YouTube channel.
Getting Their Platform Noticed
Currently, Viddyoze has about 250,000 users. It's been a long journey for them but this is a good-sized customer base already. Over the next couple of years, they want to reach the half-a-million mark with some good, aggressive marketing budgets.
To get their platform noticed, Joey â who also serves as the main visioner for their company â said that their main channel right now is paid advertising. About 90% of their growth comes from running YouTube, Facebook, and Google ads. Out of those three, the majority of their growth is from YouTube advertising.
It may sound simple but once you've got the kind of formula down to what type of marketing pages you need â what kind of video assets you need â it will just be a case of looking at your numbers, making sure you've got good stats (e.g. cost per acquisition, conversion), and then running that ad.
They also see to it that they rotate their advertising. They have new creatives all the time and they rub their people through those campaigns.
Additionally, they leverage their affiliate program. Over the last seven years, theyâve got thousands of affiliates who have promoted videos.
Affordable Pricing
As of this moment, you can buy a licence for $127(around £101). This gives you access to the core products. You can use over 260 templates as many times as you want. There's no limit on how many videos you can create. And that's just a one-time fee.
If you want to get access to all 2,000 templates, get new templates every month, make as many videos as you want, and access a couple of extra features â a more fully-fledged experience â itâs $37 (£30) a month.
Viddyoze is a low-cost investment. If youâre a business owner, itâs something that you can have in your toolbox that youâre not going to consider as something really expensive. Itâs just sitting on the side and you can just tap into it no matter when you need it.
The Future of Video Creation
Whatâs next then for Viddyoze? Joey described what theyâre about to do as something revolutionary because nobody's doing it at the moment â and that is to totally automate the creation of these videos.
Image from Unsplash
A lot of their customers want to make full-length videos. For instance, you might want to make a trailer for your podcast. When you log in, instead of just having this massive selection of templates, what you're going to have is an option to choose a recipe. Theyâll present you with recipes to give you ideas for actually creating a video.
One big thing that they see with a lot of small businesses is that they don't know why theyâre creating content â theyâre simply creating content. From a marketing perspective, Viddyoze now wants their users to tell them their goal for a particular piece of content. Do you want to make sales? Do you want to grow your email list? Do you want to create brand awareness?
When you select what goal you have in mind, theyâll be showing you a different bunch of recipes that theyâve put together to cater for your goals. For instance, if you choose a brand awareness recipe, that's going to be made up of a bunch of templates. In a sense, an ingredient is a template.
One recipe could start off with a logo sticker, then a cool title, and then customer reviews. Next, the platform will show an image and then a call to action.
Instead of just going and rendering one template, Viddyoze is going to pull off the full thing for you. But the coolest part about it is this: Theyâre going to do that by gathering data from you. The more you can tell us about your business (e.g. I have a podcast and itâs called The UnNoticed Entrepreneur. This is my Iogo and these are the colours I use), the better theyâre going to create your content.
You don't need to do anything. All you got to do is select what you want and the video will already be made for you. But, you can still make some tweaks if you want to. And then you can just publish it on the platform.
The whole idea behind this is they want to help you create videos in just three clicks. The whole vision of this is that they want to get to a stage where small businesses don't have to sweat trying to create content â because it's hard making content. Creating content every day, plus running a business, is a chore. Itâs not something that you really enjoy doing but you know you have to do it to keep up with your competition.
The people at Viddyoze are going to take that pain away from you by curating content â but not just any crappy content because it will look really good. It will look professional and it will look like the type of stuff that an agency would make for you. And theyâre going to automate that entire process for you.
To find out more about them, head on to https://viddyoze.com or visit Joey Xotoâs LinkedIn page.
This article is based on a transcript from my podcast The UnNoticed Entrepreneur, you can listen here.
Cover image by Buro MIllennial on Pexels
