OK, here's the tough love - if you are a marketing leader and video is not part of your marketing strategy, there's something wrong.
Fortunately it's more likely that you already have a video strategy, but you just find yourself overwhelmed with figuring out the right approach (including the types of video you need) and all the tools required to manage the various video types. You need to do something to fix that.
Palash Soni, CEO and co-founder of Goldcast, understands these challenges well and has been adding new functionality to the Goldcast platform that reduces the need for multiple video tools. But the vision he and his co-founders have for the Goldcast platform goes even further.
Goldcast launched at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Its founders, including Soni, were in business school and saw a gap in the digital events market, which many companies were shifting towards. He said that they gravitate toward specific problem-solving for a narrow persona as a team because it enables them to create the best solutions for that persona. The result was a digital events platform that provides the foundation for B2B marketers to host webinars, virtual events, and conferences.
Soni believes that the digital events market is strong but slow-growing and not huge. About two-and-a-half years into their journey, the firm began to think about what was next. What the team found was that marketers struggle with digital content development. After speaking with customers, the common thread was that marketers treated digital events as part of their video content strategy. According to Soni:
They were not thinking of online events as any kind of replacement for offline events. They are two completely different things. But these were definitely part of the video content.
The result was the creation of the Goldcast Content Lab, which takes a long-form video recording and, using AI, converts it into other assets, including video clips, social posts, blogs, and more. Soni explains:
Where our edge comes from is that we have a lot of big companies as customers, and they use the product a lot. So when they download a clip, we treat it as a signal, and we work it backwards into just changing our prompts themselves to say 'What are the characteristics of a good clip?'
Approximately 70% of the AI-generated video assets downloaded from the Goldcast platform are out-of-the-box. In addition, AI-generated text is used out of the box about 20-40% of the time, a percentage that has increased over time as Large Language Models (LLMs), like Claude.ai, have improved.
The Lab includes a free subscription that supports one hour of uploaded video a month and provides tools such as AI-generated clips, one-click blog posts, social posts, and emails. There is unlimited video creation and editing (e.g., creating as many clips as you want manually or using AI) and editing captions and transcripts. All content is branded using branded templates and AI-trained brand voice and tone.
As a for intstance, Soni describes a customer who hosted an in-person event that resulted in 150 hours of recorded video, including keynotes, sessions, and workshops. The customer uploaded the video content to Goldcast and used the Content Lab to help them create new content assets.
For example, the AI told them all the times AI and cybersecurity were discussed at the event. The AI identified key moments that occurred across different videos and stitched them together to create a multimodal (a mix of text and video clips) blog post. It's a great blog type of SEO, but doing it manually would not make sense, suggest Soni.
Goldcast wants to cater to the full B2B marketing supply chain, so it decided to build a recording studio. This - the Goldcast Recording Studio - enables marketers to record high-quality HD video assets on brand using a browser and local recording, eliminating lag, compression, and connectivity issues. The Studio can create a wide range of videos, including podcasts, video series, customer testimonials, pre-recorded webinars, thought leadership videos, and product demos.
Everything created is automatically carried over to the Content Lab, providing the Lab with the full context of the recording, including the speakers, video description, and topics. Soni says this context helps generate better output.
To complement the Recording Studio, Goldcast also offers a Video Hub that marketers can integrate into their websites, providing a comprehensive experience that includes upcoming webinars, online events, and videos from past recordings.
Goldcast is a product company, but they also want to help customers create the best video strategy for their companies. One way it does this is by producing research and reports. A B2B webinar benchmark report and the state of video report are two examples.
It is also considering a report on podcasts. One insight unearthed is that more podcasts are being developed today that are tactical, how-to style (a refreshing change from interview-style podcasts that overwhelm most marketing podcasts today).
This type of podcast as really a merging of the webinar and the video podcast. Soni concurs, arguing that a webinar can be repurposed into a podcast by editing out things that don't make sense, particularly for an audio version.
On the subject of virtual events for niche audiences or small businesses that want to target a smaller audience and leverage the content for additional formats, Soni's pitch is that marketers are looking for that "lightning strike moment" - a virtual event they pour all their energy into that can be used to build additional content assets that help drive ROI.
Soni's premise today is that video marketing is a supply chain of different people with different skill sets and tools:
There's a video person, there's a creative person, content person, social media; there are so many people involved. We think that with AI becoming more and more prevalent, it's inevitable that a lot of that budget will move from these point solution tools, from what people give out to, say, contractors or agencies. Even the headcount will probably not grow as much. And so a lot of that is going into AI. So that is inevitable.
Where Goldcast wants to play a role is in supporting mid-market enterprises, he adds:
We want to be the conduit of all video AI spend in marketing teams because we have built this end-to-end platform, right? Now we can say, 'Hey, there's a new generative AI video technology that's useful.' Let's plug it in in a way that works for the B2B market. We understand their work very well. We have a platform that can have them work as a team and get from the start to the end. Now we can expand it by adding new technologies to make them AI forward without going through the pain and hassle of adopting a lot of solutions.
Content marketing is also a supply chain, and Soni envisions a future where a martech stack will include a single platform that can create all types of content, from video to images, text, and more. He believes the marketing team will become generalists, anchored toward creative and vision, and that Goldcast has an opportunity to become that content platform.
I was curious about the Content Lab because I have been searching for an easy-to-use solution to take podcast episodes and create clips and other content. I was surprised at how easy the Lab was to use and how good the AI-generated clips were. I have more to test, but so far, it's working better than several other tools I have tried.
As a marketer, I appreciate the concept of a single platform for all content marketing assets, particularly those originating from video. Shifting between multiple tools to create different types of content is time-consuming and costly. There's also the challenge of ensuring all content is branded with the same tone of voice and look and feel. You can do it, but it takes time and effort and requires much more QA. But I'm not sure we'll get there.
