AI Video - Cheat Code for Professional firms

While it is incredibly cool watching AI create small cinematic snippets of video, for most professional businesses this is a distraction. Sure, I suspect it will change Hollywood-style content creation pretty dramatically in the future. And sure, a day is rapidly approaching when you will make on-demand content. However, I think it is much more important to focus on what we can do now.?

So, what can you do now?

I thought I’d spill on what we are doing at Beyond Billables with both our own content and for our clients.?

• Using AI to take advantage of productivity gains that mean we can do more for less.
• Overcoming some of the barriers that have been in place for professional firms, especially on certain platforms.?

Quality Original Video First

It might be a surprise, but where I strongly believe we need to focus is improving the quality and production of non-AI video content first.??

We have been recording our podcast as a video-first podcast. This is not revolutionary, the biggest shows in the world like Diary of a CEO and The Joe Rogan Experience all feature video as their focus. What that has meant for the Beyond Billables Podcast is that we have invested in shooting the show at interesting places, and in having a full video production process. No more dodgy skype style videos, proper shoots that make our guests look great and give everything a lot more character.??

For our clients, instead of having them come up with the content ideas themselves we prepare a series of focused questions on their key content pillars that we know we will be able to cut into various shorter form videos. We then do an interview style shoot, record it all and turn it into a variety of long and short form videos. This cuts down the clients preparation time, takes the stress away from needing to come up with ideas, and allows us to then produce high quality videos on the most important topics for our clients audiences.?

Sounds good right?

The better the quality of the longer form content, the better it can be used by various AI marketing tools like Opus Clip, Vidyo, Klapp or Cap Cut to make high quality short form video.?

This allows us to make more pieces for platforms like Tik Tok and YouTube where volume is important. The algorithms on those platforms reward creators for a large volume of content, in fact, multiple pieces a day, and that just hasn’t been viable for us as a small business to create at the right quality, and neither has it for our clients.?

What’s the Strategy Behind Doing More?

More has rarely meant better. But as explained above, with a good core piece of content, “more” is simply giving you more pieces to reach your audience with.?

For video, platforms like Tik Tok and YouTube Shorts are all about volume. If you are serious in building an audience and ultimately getting clients from these platforms, you need to invest in enough volume to make it happen.?

These tools also help spread the performance risk. In the past, I would have been investing in video just to get one long cut done, and it had to perform. But now, each podcast is cut into over 20 different videos, which is 20 different opportunities to reach our audience.?

For our professional firm clients of ours, this means we can help them get started on Tik Tok and YouTube shorts in a far less costly way. It still takes time and there is still editing work to do, but it allows us to produce more for less, and we are passing that on to our clients who want to take advantage of it. Roughly, it means a shorter video cut is half the cost now to clients than it was this time last year.?

Bigger picture - that means the chance to reach more people for less than it cost last year.?

What About AI Originated Content and Avatars?

For most professional firms, your reputation is built on a personal level. That means you and your story matter. It also means you do need to show up in the videos! That all seems pretty straight forward, but it is an important difference between your business and someone selling a product. Trust is central, and you do that with real people.

One tool we have experimented with is HeyGen. HeyGen allows you to create a video avatar of yourself. You can then create a video simply by giving the software a script. Many similar and better tools are sure to keep cropping up and becoming more advanced. You may have seen yourself on TikTok (always written as one word) with people using similar AI tools to create deep fakes of celebrities. It’s worth noting that those high tech results are pretty out of reach for the layman. The crazy good deep fakes we see are usually optimally coded by professionals who are able to take the technology further than surface level applications we see.?

Right now, this is not something I am going to recommend to clients. Having signed up and used it thoroughly myself I think it is incredible, but it is very clearly not me. The accent is not accurate and has given me a strange American twang I just can’t unhear. Beyond that, it is clearly not me when you look at how the avatar acts.?

So, What are We Advising Clients?

Right now, my best advice to any professional firm owner or marketing manager who reads this is to do what we are doing: focus on producing a high quality piece, use the best tools to efficiently create more cuts than you could in the past, and post them!?

You need to invest in the core video first, but from there the additional costs to produce vertical videos are half of what they were this time last year.?

If you want to reach more people, use other platforms like TikTok and YouTube Shorts, I’d definitely be considering adding more vertical video to your content mix now it is more achievable for firms of all sizes.?