# Vyond
> Contact: vyond@nkv2.com
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#### “Holy Moly, This is Hard Stuff”: Sarah Diggs on Training Highly Technical Workforces
Your mission, should you choose to accept it: train new employees on a machine so complex, it once required 100+ pages of documents and diagrams to explain it. And, oh yeah, you’ll also never see it up close — it’s covered in stainless steel, and fully enclosed in glass.
Welcome to an average day for technical training expert and Vyond customer Sarah Diggs.
A laser physicist by background, Sarah Diggs has devoted over 20 years of her career to designing and developing technical training programs for various industries, such as pharmaceuticals, lasers, aerospace, weatherization, and automotive manufacturing and operations.
It started while she was serving as a laser manufacturing manager in Silicon Valley. With fierce competition for new laser technicians, she proposed her company could fill the huge demand by training recruits from San Jose City College and “right off the street.” In partnership with San Jose City College and with her newly developed computer-based and hands-on training program, she was right. Since then, Sarah has worked with firms like San Francisco International Airport, Boeing, and KLA-Tencor to onboard, upskill, and reskill their workforces.
We sat down with Sarah to talk about how she’s reimagining technical training for high-stakes, high-tech industries like pharmaceutical manufacturing. Here’s what she had to say.
Vyond: What role do you see technical training playing in today’s economy?
Sarah: Technological disruption is happening at a pace and scale we’ve never seen, especially in high-tech manufacturing industries. They’re introducing advanced technologies and looking to automate and digitize as much as possible. Companies more broadly are scrambling to figure out how to keep up, how to train their workforces, and where they should invest in training so they can benefit from tech advancements.
Skills shortage is the biggest barrier preventing industries like manufacturing from scaling up their technologies.
Skills shortage is the biggest barrier preventing industries like manufacturing from scaling up their technologies. There’s intense competition across especially the semiconductor, pharma, and laser industries for technical talent. The work can’t all be done by engineers and PhDs. The question becomes, how do we create a pipeline of people who can perform this work and move them into these industries? Technical training is crucial for ensuring there’s people with the necessary skills to perform the work.
V: You’re doing training work now with a pharmaceutical manufacturing company. Who’s your audience, what are the goals, what are the stakes, and who are the experts you work with?
S: We’re building training programs for machine operators working on automated machines and processes. Some of these machines can be the size of a room, fully enclosed in glass, with stainless steel sides and limited access to see inside.
We have two major goals: get operators up to speed quickly and efficiently, and standardize the training process so we know all operators are starting at the same level.
This is a heavily regulated, “sterile pharmaceutical product” environment, where the FDA mandates that contamination rates of finished product can be only one in one million. Mistakes mean a patient could die. Or big money can be lost when production has to stop. Operators are the greatest source of contamination, so we focus on reducing that risk throughout the production process. The hardest part might be the lack of access to the machines we’re training on: even though we’re developing training on the machines, we’re not allowed onto the production floor except for special times when the machines are shut down.
To create this content we partner with trainers, product owners, manufacturing quality control, automation engineers, and equipment manufacturers. And we supplement with lots of our own research. For one project I learned all about depyrogenation (a process to remove any substance that can cause fever) from an awesome doctor in the UK who posts short videos online about pharma manufacturing. We used some of those snippets in the course. I learn something new on every project and I think, holy moly, this is really hard stuff.
Sample of one of Sarah’s training videos on a manufacturing process
V: How do you like to use Vyond for technical training?
S: Working in the pharmaceutical industry, our audiences have all different education levels and some speak English as a second language. And most of us are visual learners. With Vyond, being able to put something together that visualizes these complex machines and processes has been a game changer for technical trainers.
With Vyond, being able to put something together that visualizes these complex machines and processes has been a game changer for technical trainers.
With my earlier pharma project as an example: previously, aspiring machine operators might’ve been handed a hundred-page document describing and showing a machine’s components in diagrams and asked to memorize them, come back, and draw the diagrams from memory. It was mostly only engineers and PhDs that were successful.
We rebuilt the training program trying to simplify these complex ideas, processes, and machines to make them accessible. It has become a four-level course that increases in complexity, from an introduction to the machines and parts in Level 1, all the way through Level 4 on how to handle a shutdown or changeover, where every step is critical and every minute the machine is down is money lost. Vyond helps us bring 2D diagrams to life and helps operators get familiar with these machines even before they step onto the manufacturing floor.
The training program now takes weeks where it used to take months. Learners are making connections much faster. And it’s allowing a broader pool of operators to be successful, beyond the expected engineers and PhDs. Which means those folks can focus where they’re supposed to: on improving processes and launching new products.
Sarah on how Vyond fills important gaps for creating technical training
Get techniques for creating training on technical and tricky topics.
Watch the On-Demand Webinar
V: What’s your high-level process for developing a technical training project?
S: First we meet with product owners and stakeholders to discuss the project details, deliverables, and dates, and then gather all the relevant documentation, drawings, images and video we can get our hands on.
Next we get ourselves into the learners’ point of view: what do they want and need to know? What might they know already? From there we’ll research and work with experts to determine what’s critical for success with each topic. What should learners be doing?
After that we’ll decide the types of media that’ll be best to transfer the knowledge we’re including. We work with experts on any photo and video shoots of the machines and processes — this can be tricky, as we can only get onto the production floor in the rare windows of time when machines aren’t operating.
Then we get into designing and producing our course templates and structure, and add animations, video, and images. At this point we’re working in Vyond, and I like to use Articulate too for interactivity. From there we get into an iterative review and update process with experts: they review small chunks of the content and get us feedback so we can make tweaks.
Finally, when the course is fully baked, we send it for functionality testing with an outside team to ensure everything’s working as it should. Once that’s complete, the course is ready for release to the learning management system.
Sarah’s process for designing a technical training course
V: How do you measure success?
S: We look at application to work. Over time, is the company seeing fewer mistakes? Better throughput? Has quality improved? Are they experiencing fewer critical events that require processes to stop? This data takes months to gather, but when we start to see those stats, we don’t have to investigate whether learners were engaged or not — we know they were, because the training worked.
For one project, my client’s head of global manufacturing was looking at a quarterly performance report and throughput was so high, he thought there was an accounting mistake. When they investigated, the only thing that changed was training. That’s my definition of success.
V: What’s a lesson you learned the hard way?
S: Give subject-matter experts small chunks of content to review at a time — one video, one animation, one chapter or module. Most of our experts spend their time focused on new product development. Upskilling operators isn’t their main focus so it can be hard to get them engaged. When we work in an agile fashion like this, with small samples for review rather than huge documents or the whole portfolio, we’ve had much more success getting a response from experts and affirmation (or not) that we’re on the right track with technical content.
And we’ve noticed Vyond is giving us an unexpected perk here. Before, when training content was text and photograph-heavy, it took some prodding to get a response from experts, and even then it wasn’t always thorough. Now that we’re building content in Vyond, we’ve noticed experts are more interested. They’re responding more often and with more feedback. Vyond has helped us step up our game.
V: How has technical training changed in the past few years? Where do you see it headed?
S: Cloud-based eLearning development apps and tools like Vyond are an amazing innovation over the past decade. The old way was, we hired teams to develop courses: videographers, voiceover talent, flash animators. It was very expensive and time consuming. And by the time you delivered the content, it was on its way out of date. Not anymore!
AI will be a gamechanger, of course, once we all learn how to prompt it correctly. I think augmented reality is the most exciting thing on the horizon. We’ll be able to project 3D images and audio right into a user’s view. How exciting for a learner to be able to immerse themselves in an actual process in real time. The applications will be huge for technical training, especially in industries and environments where getting hands-on experience is challenging.
To learn more about Sarah and her firm Cognitably, visit their website or drop Sarah a line.
If you’ve been meaning to give Vyond a whirl, try it now, for free. Want to get your whole team involved? Try it as a group! Chat with us about a team pilot.
#### [Case Study] TalkRoute makes an explainer video with Vyond
We recently spoke with Paul Howey, Co-founder and CEO of TalkRoute, a Chicago-based startup re-designing the way small businesses receive incoming calls. TalkRoute used Vyond to make an explainer video, front and center on its homepage — and we wanted to get some feedback on the experience.
Paul said he was familiar with Vyond before he set about to create the video and that, since his company was a small business and a startup, he “wanted to use the tools that his customers did, instead of hiring an outside company.”
Paul set out with a $500 budget.
The first thing he did was purchase a Vyond GoPremium Plan for $79. He then, in collaboration with his staff, worked on the script for about a week. This was a high-visibility project and they wanted to be deliberate and get it exactly right.
He then went into the Vyond studio and made the movie itself. Working with care, he said the video took “2 or 3 solid days.” Some folks work a bit faster, but when you’re marketing your baby to the world on your homepage it’s worth the investment of time.
When the script and the video visuals were set, Paul used his excess budget to hire a voiceover professional. Paul’s approach was fascinating; he read several studies showing that consumers are more apt to purchase goods and services from voices they are familiar with. So he therefore set out to find a voice that was extremely popular.
He tracked down Mike O’Brian, who’s done voice work for giants like Microsoft, Amazon, Coke, Sprint, and Facebook. He paid for the quality — and exhausted what remained of his budget — but felt it was more than worth it. The voice sounds really awesome.
Next Paul sagely used our friends at Wistia to host the video on TalkRoute’s site. He loved Wistia’s handsome interface and the ability to get instant data on how the video performs.
And that was pretty much it. For about $500 TalkRoute created a professional, animated explainer video. Paul even wrote a blog post about the experience.
Looking back on his decision to use Vyond, Paul says “We are growing as a start up, and we were at the point where an explainer video like this could lend to our credibility. And it turned out great.” Take a look at the video, above.
About Vyond
GoAnimate is now Vyond. Learn more about the changes.
Vyond allows people of all skill levels in all industries and job roles to create dynamic and powerful media. With features that go beyond moving text and images, you can build character-driven stories or compelling data visualizations that engage audiences and deliver results.
Start making your own videos today. Sign up for a free trial and attend our weekly tour of the Vyond Studio.
#### [Watch] The Top 5 Business Communication Use Cases for Vyond
In training circles, Vyond’s a mainstay. But as thousands of Enterprise companies know well, Vyond is way more than a tool for creating great eLearning and training content. It’s also a silver-bullet solution to enabling your entire company — yes every team — to communicate better everyday with easy-to-create, on brand, and engaging GIFs and videos.
Before Vyond, making professional-quality videos was second nature to maybe…five percent of the people at your company? Ten? With Vyond, now everybody can effortlessly make the video content so many people prefer in our screen-first world.
The possibilities for using Vyond are endless, but here are five business communications use cases that benefit our customers the most.
To see how effortless video creation is with Vyond, sign up for a free trial.
#### [Webcast] Achieving Blended Learning Success With Bite-Sized Videos
Achieving Blended Learning Success With Bite-Sized Videos
People forget 90 percent of what they learn each day; information tends to go in one ear and right out the other. So how do you ensure that your learners are taking away more than 10 percent of your e-learning content?
In this pre-recorded webcast with the Association for Talent Development (ATD), you’ll learn how Orchard Supply Hardware uses a blended learning approach to engage its learners. Using microlearning videos, handouts, and physical conversations, Orchard Supply Hardware creates content that resonates with its learners and eliminates noise.
You’ll learn:
how to create effective microlearning videos simply and quickly
how to incorporate other mediums with video to reinforce taught concepts
the best ways to look at the whole project from start to finish and how to eliminate excess noise.
Click here to watch the recorded webcast. Please note that after December 30th the recording will only be available to ATD members.
You can also watch OSH Hardware’s Product Knowledge Library of microlearning videos on YouTube.
Ready to create your own microlearning videos? Click here to get started.
#### Introducing the New, All-in-One Vyond: AI Avatars, Screen and Webcam Recording, and Exciting Vyond Go Enhancements
With our new 2024 release, we’re excited to present the new “all-in-one” Vyond – bringing an expanded range of visual styles including AI Avatars, exciting new features and updates, a mobile app, and more to our AI video creation platform.
Listen to our webinar, All-in-One, All Right Here: How Vyond is Making Video Creation Effortless, for a more detailed look into the features of this release with a special introduction from Vyond CEO Gary Lipkowitz.
Listen to the Replay
AnyStyle. Every audience.
With Vyond AnyStyle, you have an ever-expanding variety of style options ranging from animation to photorealistic and everything in between. So now, getting the right look for the right audience is convenient and effortless.
AI Avatars
Availability: All plans with the purchase of avatar access; available now
Add a human element with AI avatars. Choose from 30 avatar templates (with more on the way) representing diverse age groups, genders, and ethnicities. Perfect for training videos, customer service messages, and personalized sales and marketing content.
Learn More About AI Avatars
Screen Recording
Availability: All plans; available now
Now you can easily capture motion and actions on your computer screen for use in videos right in Vyond! Ideal for tutorials, demonstrations, and walkthroughs, screen capture and recording allow you to create detailed, instructional content that guides your audience step-by-step.
Try It Now
Webcam Recording
Availability: All plans; available now
Smile for the camera! Add a personal and direct connection with your audience when you capture and incorporate audio and video recorded with your device’s microphone and camera into your Vyond videos.
Try It Now
Dual Video
Availability: All plans; available now
Open up a new world of style possibilities with the ability to combine two different video elements within a scene. Inset a webcam recording within a screen recording for an easy tutorial or instructional video. Split screen an AI avatar and animated video for a unique look.
Text to Image
Availability: Professional plans and above; available now
We’ve enhanced Text to Prop to become Text to Image. Now you can generate any visual or background you can imagine in six distinct visual styles: Block print, Paper art, Gradient vector, Colorist, Photorealism, and Concept art — with more coming soon!
Try Vyond Today
More options to protect your brand.
Applying Logos
Availability: Vyond for Enterprise; releasing September
Turn any (or every!) character into a brand evangelist with the ability to apply your logo to character clothing tops and hats. You can now more easily represent and enhance your company brand and culture across videos.
Accessibility enhancements.
Caption Translation
Availability: All plans; available now
Instantly translate your caption text into any of our 95 languages to match your TTS translation. Make your videos more accessible to a global audience right from your workflow.
Try Vyond Today
Enhanced input capability in Vyond Go.
Document to Video
Availability: All plans; releasing September
Unlock the information stored in already existing documents to help shape your Vyond Go video! Upload a .doc, .ppt, or .pdf document for reference by Vyond Go’s generative AI. Further shape how Vyond Go uses the document or add additional input with your text prompt.
Script to Video
Availability: All plans; releasing September
Get ready to have Vyond Go repeat after you. Literally. With Script to Video, you can create a video that follows your uploaded script verbatim. Now you can get the exact dialogue you want while still using Vyond Go to instantly create your video for you!
Vyond Mobile: Capture, create, edit, and share on the go.
Availability: All plans; available now
Now, video creation can happen whenever, wherever with Vyond Mobile. Capture, create, and edit text, characters, and voices right from your mobile device and have your edits sync seamlessly across devices.
Sign up here to learn more about our latest features and enhancements and start your free trial today.
#### From Content Support to Revenue Infrastructure: What 514 Buying Cycles Reveal About Sales Enablement Priorities
Introduction | Executive Summary | Methodology | Insight #1 | Insight #2 | Insight #3 | Insight #4 | Insight #5 | 7 Vendor Evaluation Questions | Conclusion
Introduction
Sales enablement leaders are increasingly exploring new AI tools that promise to accelerate revenue growth. But the most important evaluation criteria are often unclear.
Based on internal Vyond data, this report is designed to help enterprise sales enablement decision-makers more confidently assess the business value of a key segment within the category: AI video creation platforms.
Drawing on 514 buying decisions, the findings highlight the priorities shaping these investments — and identify the platform characteristics most likely to drive long-term adoption, renewal, and expansion.
Executive Summary
Key Finding
This report shows that sales enablement leaders don’t evaluate video creation tools on content quality and production features alone.
They’re also assessing whether these platforms can function as revenue-driving infrastructure that’s easy to integrate, accelerates ramp, improves quota velocity, and can prove its impact in the reporting dashboards buyers already use.
More specifically, the data found that:
Most buyers are still looking to displace static documents, not other video tools
Quicker ramp times are the top revenue-related priority
Content velocity is the best predictor of platform renewal
Horizontal team adoption best predicts account expansion
And the most-voiced AI governance concern for Sales Enablement is “reps making off-brand content with AI tools”
Methodology
The findings in this report are derived from Vyond’s own enterprise buying conversations conducted between January 2024 and December 2025. These conversations were recorded, structured, and coded into a taxonomy of buying themes across 2,143 distinct buying cycles. This report analyzes 514 enterprise buying cycles led by sales enablement and revenue operations leaders, extracted from that broad data set.
A cycle was classified as enablement-led when the primary initiating stakeholder was Sales Enablement, Revenue Operations, or Revenue Leadership, and when the primary evaluation criteria centered on seller productivity, quota attainment, or ramp acceleration.
ParameterDetailEnablement-led cycles514 of 2,143 total (24%)Primary stakeholdersSales Enablement Directors/VPs, RevOps, CRO, VP SalesDefining criteriaRamp velocity, content-to-quota linkage, CRM/LMS integration, rep adoptionSecondary stakeholdersL&D, HR, Marketing, IT (in governance-intensive cycles)Company size distributionMid-market (1,000–4,999): 44%
Enterprise (5,000+): 43%
Growth (250–999): 13%
Study Limitations: This study has not been independently audited or verified by a third party. Percentages represent the frequency with which a coded theme appeared within buying cycles. They are not survey-derived statistics, market share estimates, or projections of future behavior. Vyond makes no claim that these findings are representative of the broader enterprise software market or of organizations that did not interact with Vyond during the study period. Findings reflect observed evaluation behavior and may reflect self-selection bias inherent to that population.
Insight #1: Static Content is Still Status Quo
In 56% of enablement-led cycles, the platform being displaced was a static format: slide decks, PDFs, or ad hoc email content. Only 29% of cycles involved direct comparison to competing video creation platforms.
Displaced Format% of Enablement Cycles Format Was Mentioned InApprox. Number of CyclesPowerPoint / Google Slides38%195PDFs and static documents18%93Zoom/Loom screen recordings9%46Agency-produced video6%31Competing video platform29%149
Takeaway for Enterprise buyers:
If you’re solving for engagement and production bottleneck challenges — and are just starting to investigate AI video platforms — you’re not alone. Most of your peers are just beginning to explore AI video as an alternative to static content, not looking to upgrade existing video tools.
Insight #2: Shorter Ramp Time Is the Most Cited Benefit
Our buying conversations made clear there was interest in using AI video creation platforms for both onboarding and ongoing education purposes. But the revenue-driving benefit referenced the most in buying cycles was ramp reduction, at 41%.
The reasoning was consistent: faster ramp gets reps to their first deal sooner. Even when ramp time reductions are modest, this can lead to compounding revenue impact.
BenefitPattern Observed% of Enablement Cycles Benefit Was Mentioned InTime-to-first-deal reductionFaster content access → earlier rep confidence → faster deals41%Onboarding consistencyStandardized video → consistent messaging across hires37%Ongoing readinessContinuous video updates → reps stay current on product changes29%Coaching at scaleVideo replaces or supplements 1:1 manager coaching time22%
“We track ramp in Salesforce. That’s how we’ll know if this works.”
— CRO, Technology Company, ~4,000 employees
Quota Velocity: The Second-Order Effect
In cycles where buyers prioritized ramp reduction, quota velocity (the rate at which new hires reach full quota contribution) was the most commonly referenced downstream metric. Buyers tracked this in Salesforce or CRM dashboards, not in video platform analytics.
Takeaway for Enterprise buyers:
Sales Enablement buyers see AI video creation platforms as a revenue lever that can support both onboarding and ongoing education and coaching. Consider this as you’re comparing platforms — and imagining use cases.
Insight #3: Off-Brand Rep Content Is the Biggest Sales Enablement AI Governance Concern
AI features were referenced in 64% of enablement-led cycles. However, the governance dynamic in enablement contexts differed from non-enablement cycles: concerns centered on brand control at the rep level, not general AI risk.
AI Governance Concern% of AI-Referenced Enablement CyclesReps creating off-brand or off-message content54%AI-generated scripts that don’t match approved messaging41%Inability to lock down templates for specific use cases37%Legal review concerns for AI-generated content29%Data privacy for AI training on prospect/customer data22%
Takeaway for Enterprise buyers:
Sales reps using AI to freestyle content is an enablement failure, not an AI failure. The platform that wins enablement-led cycles is the one that gives reps AI-powered speed within governance-enforced guardrails. Unconstrained AI is a liability in quota-critical communication.
Insight #4: Cross-Team Adoption Predicts Account Expansion
Accounts that expanded licenses within a year of initial deployment showed a consistent pattern: the platform expanded from one team to adjacent teams without a top-down mandate.Specifically, 89% of expanding accounts showed cross-team adoption before the expansion event. And accounts with multi-team adoption at the six-month mark were 180% more likely to expand their license at the point of renewal. Here are other strong expansion signals:
Expansion Signal% of Expanding AccountsWhat It PredictsCross-team adoption (Sales → HR, Marketing, Comms)89%High NRR, license growthCRM or LMS integration completed76%Renewal durability, reduced churn riskTemplate library actively maintained + shared68%Horizontal adoption, lower contractionMonthly active creator growth (non-enablement users)61%Organic cross-department pullContent reuse rate above 40%54%Operational embedding, friction-free renewal
“We started with onboarding. Now marketing wants to use it.”
— Sales Enablement Director, Technology / SaaS, ~4,200 employees
Takeaway for Enterprise buyers:
Prioritize AI content creation platforms that have a track record of supporting multiple departments’ needs and integrate well with existing software. Once implemented, consider showing the platform to other department heads. The more value it delivers within your entire org, the more likely you’ll be able to secure budget year after year.
Insight #5: Content Velocity Best Predicts Renewal
Across 514 enablement-led cycles, renewal outcomes were analyzed against content production patterns in the preceding 12 months. A clear and consistent trend emerged:Regardless of team size or plan tier, accounts with high content velocity (30%+ annual production growth) were 230% more likely to renew without license contraction than accounts with flat production numbers.
Takeaway for Enterprise buyers:
When you’re asked to articulate the value of your AI video creation platform internally, anchor on the volume of content created with it, more than user satisfaction scores.
7 Vendor Evaluation Questions for Enablement Buyers
In enablement-led buying cycles, adoption — not features — determines outcomes.
The questions below reflect the evaluation patterns most predictive of enterprise adoption, renewal, and expansion. Use them to quickly separate platforms that scale from those that stall after purchase.
1.Does this integrate natively with our CRM?If not, expect fragmented adoption tracking and unreliable revenue attribution.2.Can a rep create an on-brand, usable video in under 30 minutes — without design support?If not, production friction will limit adoption.3.Can we enforce brand governance without limiting our reps’ ability to personalize? This balance determines whether AI supports or undermines quota-critical messaging.4.Where is ramp impact measured — and is that data in our CRM or HRIS?If it lives only in a vendor dashboard, it won’t influence core enablement decisions.5.How does content velocity differ between expanding and contracting accounts?This is a leading indicator of expansion. Vendors should be able to show it clearly.6.What is the path to consolidating existing tools into this platform?A clear consolidation story is often required for CFO approval.7.Can you show us AI-generated content with strict brand constraints, not just open-ended demos?Reps’ default demo isn’t enough. A governance demonstration tells you whether this platform scales in a quota-critical environment.
Conclusion
Sales enablement leaders are no longer evaluating AI video platforms as standalone content tools — they are assessing them as infrastructure that directly influence revenue outcomes.
Across 514 buying cycles, the platforms that succeed are those that integrate into existing workflows, accelerate ramp, and make their impact visible in the systems leaders already trust, like CRM dashboards.
The implication is clear: long-term value is not determined by content quality alone, but by adoption, measurability, and governance. Platforms that drive consistent on-brand content creation, expand easily across teams, and enforce data security standards without slowing reps down are the ones most likely to secure renewal, expansion, and sustained investment.
#### 10 Animated Marketing Video Examples And What You Should Steal From Each
Animated marketing videos can influence consumers during the buyer’s journey. A late 2020 study showed how brands’ videos convinced 84% of people to buy a product or service from the company.
There are different types of videos, with explainers, product demos, and tutorials being some of the most popular. This versatility lets you pick the format you like the most and fulfill your marketing goals: awareness, trust, or sales.
1. Fabulous
Fabulous is an app that teaches you how to build habits faster. The brand published a detailed answer to a customer’s question related to habit-building, following some of the tips they feature inside their app.
The video revolves around customers, making them trust that the brand values their opinions. Since Fabulous is addressing all their concerns, customers don’t have a reason to seek another vendor.
You can build trust, too, by giving customers a space to share concerns about your product or service. An animated Q&A is the best format to address these concerns. The structure is casual, so you and your customers can speak without fear of sounding unprofessional.
2. GM Voices
GM Voices pairs companies with professional voice actors to use for voiceovers, on-hold messages, and Interactive Voice Response (IVR) among others. They made a promotional video of a father trying to speak to Santa through the North Pole’s contact center.
The video shows the stress a client goes through because of a faulty contact center, which GM Voices can solve through one of their services. Viewers relate to the story, leading them to question if there’s a better alternative to inefficient phone systems.
The first step in creating relatable videos is to understand your audience. Research the undesirable situations people go through with other vendors. Then, create a storyboard that highlights these situations. Viewers will realize these situations aren’t optimal and reach out for a solution: your brand.
3. City of London Corporation
The City of London Corporation is the governing body of London, working toward a thriving and secure city. They created a video to encourage people to participate in apprenticeships.
This video is effective because it uses characters of different ages and backgrounds to communicate that any person can apply for an apprenticeship. It also shows how their workplace is friendly for all types of people, attracting diversity and inclusion advocates.
Research from Accenture shows how 63% of global consumers favor products and services from brands that share their values and beliefs. Share your opinions and how social causes influence your company’s operations so that you can attract potential customers interested in what you stand for.
4. Learndutch.org
Learndutch.org is an education platform that teaches people how to learn Dutch through online self-paced courses and live e-summer schools. Some of their YouTube videos, like the one below, teach basic Dutch lessons to anyone looking to learn the language.
This YouTube video allows the brand to promote itself by providing an idea of how learndutch.org structures its Dutch lessons. Viewers can see how the product looks at no cost before they purchase.
So if you want to sell courses online and/or increase your e-commerce performance, you need to showcase your product and process so customers can see what their customer experience will look like. It will help them feel more comfortable buying when they know more about how your service works.
5. Cleveland Water
Cleveland Water provides high-quality potable water in Northeast Ohio. To help the region, they produced a brief video teaching civilians how to find a water leak.
While the video’s goal isn’t to sell but educate, teaching consumers impacts sales. Cleveland Water exposes its service effortlessly through educational videos, reaching potential customers in a format they want to see more often.
Consumers visit Google and social media every day to answer questions or discover more about a topic they’re interested in. These are moments to expose your brand to customers. You can leverage these moments by creating educational videos around industry trends, giving tips to improve a specific skill, or going over the steps to perform a task.
6. Matt Moran
Matt Moran offers coaching services to teams and individuals who want to improve their communication during internal and external events. In one video, Matt uses animation to visualize the habit of using filler words while we speak.
Mixing animation with live-action videos allows Matt to present high-quality examples of people using filler words. Besides being a cost-effective alternative to hiring actors, animated examples remind viewers of a problem’s drawbacks. In this case, a weakness that viewers can work with Matt to overcome.
Potential customers aren’t always aware of a problem or its drawbacks. Like Matt, you can use animated marketing videos to show and add context to the problem you solve while saving thousands of dollars in actors and animators.
7. Microsoft Enable
Microsoft Enable focuses on making Microsoft’s technologies accessible to people with disabilities. In this three-minute video, they explain how game developers can make video games accessible to colorblind people.
The video builds brand awareness for Microsoft Enable by introducing developers to their inclusive technologies. It also lets developers know they can lean on the team’s technologies for future projects. You can replicate what made this video effective by describing the problems your product solves, the undesirable situations people go through because of these problems, and how your product is a solution.
8. Pious Projects
Pious Projects is a non-profit organization raising money to support humanitarian emergencies and needs across the world. They used an explainer video to describe their Ramadan Race, an event to collect funds for those in need.
Companies use explainer videos to describe an event, product, or service in detail. These videos highlight a brand’s value propositions, motivating potential customers to purchase. MailLift, for example, increased its conversion rate by 67% after adding an animated explainer video to its homepage.
Creating an explainer video doesn’t have to be complicated. You can simply go through the steps potential customers follow to buy from you and then record a walkthrough. The goal is to highlight the value and end doubts. So, support your video with engaging animations, real-life footage, and screenshots if necessary.
9. Brandman University
Brandman University is a private educational institution with campuses in California and Washington. The university produced a video to introduce the CII, an in-house team.
Videos empower 93% of professionals to spread knowledge, which gives Brandman University the confidence that their new update will reach their entire customer base: students from all campuses.
Animated marketing videos can help you create engaging videos your target audience wants to share, whether you are launching a new product or service. When creating them, remember to keep them free of jargon so that even someone mildly aware of your product can share it with a potential customer.
10. Parabol
Parabol is a tool that agile teams can use to run retrospectives, check-ins, and estimation meetings to spot areas for improvement and develop plans to overcome obstacles. They summarized their features in a short video.
Parabol’s tools follow nuanced processes, which makes capturing them in a short article a challenging task. Unlike text-based messages, videos do a great job of capturing complex topics and data. You can add graphics, examples, and motion graphics to describe your product or service in detail.
You don’t have to exclude subtle details of your product or service because they are hard to explain. Instead, lean on examples and visuals. They allow viewers to grasp the value you are providing and proceed with a purchase.
Tick all your marketing KPIs from your checklist with Vyond
Vyond is a beginner-friendly animation software for producing engaging animated marketing videos. Our assets simplify video production, whether you are a startup, small business, or marketer. We give you access to a high-ROI communication format through templates and animation styles that you can align with your marketing strategy.
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#### 10 Product Demo Videos To Inspire You
Your enthusiasm for your product is contagious. When you talk about it, people grasp the value immediately, but you don’t have time to sit down with every possible user and walk them through it. That’s where the power of the demo video comes in — you can capture your product’s best features and unique use case all while entertaining and engaging your audience. Plus, it’s easier for fans to pass around to tell their own peers why they love your product so much!
We’ve selected ten demo videos from all over the web that illustrate best practices: a clear problem and solution, appeal to your unique target market and a great audio track, from smooth narration to sound effects and music. Include some of these into your video and you’ll capture the hearts of potential users. Enjoy!
Lucky Ant: The video begins with narration from several characters, and I bet you would empathize with at least one of them. Lucky Ant’s service is like a Kickstarter for local small businesses. The narration is clear and interesting, and the music keeps things moving along.
Padmapper: This site plots apartment or other home rental postings from Craigslist and similar sites onto a map. Even if you’re looking for a place in Los Angeles, you’re a bit amused to hear the French accent — who doesn’t wish she was about to move to Paris? It’s aspirational. But beyond that, the narrator recognizes the basic customer needs and explains how the service can meet those needs.
Shopify: This video starts with a compliment. Even if you weren’t looking for this service, you start thinking, hey, maybe I could use this! The voice talent is friendly and approachable, a big part of what makes this video a win.
Zazzle: First off, who can forget unicorn poop? That’s what makes this video memorable, it is a quirk that so aptly describes reality. The video also goes deep into the pain point of creating shirts and it’s easy to see why this service is so popular.
MovieClips: Sure, your service does a million things and solves a thousand problems. But in a video, you have little over a minute to retain viewers’ attention. That’s why MovieClips chose one pain point that was universally applicable and used it as a selling point.
Duolingo: Videos are of the utmost importance for the products that are the most complicated. Duolingo is one of these. It begins with a classic problem — how languages can be exclusive — and wraps their web solution inside. Now, its product is not just translating websites, it’s connecting people.
Groupon: This is very simple and to the point: It begins with the value proposition, followed by a call to action, and the animation is a clear illustration. Think of objects shown like the bag of cash — it aptly defines Groupon as a “thing that saves money.”
Cottonique: Sound effects can be used in nearly any video. They serve to make actions more realistic. Notice the baby crying at 00:46. It might not capture attention, but it does grab your emotions.
Twitter: One way to capture your audience is to present your product through the eyes of a skeptical user. Common Craft does that here, with Twitter. General needs lead in to specifics and the unique value proposition is met.
BitTorrent: Here, Common Craft allows one character to explain the service to another. This is more friendly than the all-knowing narrator, especially when the technology is complex. No hard sell was needed — the biggest hurdle for BitTorrent was providing understanding of the product because that itself proves value.
#### 100+ Video Training and Video Marketing Statistics for 2022
There are a lot of video training and video marketing statistics floating around online, and we have compiled the most trustworthy, current, relevant, and/or useful to help inform your internal training and external video marketing strategies. The stats below are sourced from well-respected companies in the video and marketing industries, so you can feel confident about using them.
Why video?
Video marketing was crowned ‘King of Content‘ as early as 2015 and it still holds the title in 2022. Over the next few years, online video viewing is predicted to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 21% from 2021 and 2028. Hundreds of hours of video are uploaded every second, 3.1 billion users worldwide consume video, and billions of video views are happening daily. And to top it off, video consumption is not just for entertainment purposes, as more people are watching videos for learning new skills and fostering a sense of community.
Why video for business?
Consumers are using video to research products before they buy them. Brands are using video to improve their marketing outcomes. And businesses are creating video content to better train and onboard their employees. Without a doubt, video is here to stay, and the following statistics serve as evidence of its popularity and importance.
Demand and Popularity of Video is Increasing
People are watching more video content and paying more attention to video than other types of media.
By 2021, video will represent 82% of all IP internet traffic. (Cisco, 2017)
79% of the global mobile data traffic will be video in 2022. (Cisco, 2019)
People watch on average 19 hours of online video per week, and an average of 2.5 hrs per day — this is a 5.56% increase compared to 2021. (Wyzowl, 2022)
In 2019, there were over 2.6 billion digital video viewers worldwide. That number is projected to reach over 3.1 billion by 2023 (Statista, 2021)
In 2017, 81.1 percent of U.S. online users accessed digital video content. In 2020, this number is projected to be 83.3 percent. (Statista, 2018)
People pay attention to video content, but they skim or multitask with written content and podcasts. (HubSpot, 2017)
People spend an average of 2.6x more time on pages with video than without. (Wistia, 2018)
Marketing Videos Are a Great Way to Reach Consumers
“In today’s fast-paced world, video marketing is one of the few types of online material that provides the value, relevance, and flexibility consumers need, all while catering to the on-the-go lifestyle they want.” (Forbes)
Types of Marketing Videos
Marketing videos come in many forms, including explainers, social media videos, product demos, user-generated content or customer videos, and more. According to a 2021 report from Vidyard, the most commonly used business video types are:
Product Demos (63%)
Training Videos (47%)
Live streams (32%)
How-To’s (51%)
Social Video (41%)
Thought Leadership (29%)
Explainers (51%)
1:1 Video (40%)
Internal Communications (29%)
Webinars (51%)
Customer Testimonials (38%)
Culture Videos (26%)
The Benefits of Video for Businesses and Consumers
As video has become increasingly popular, consumers and businesses have found many benefits. 84% of Enterprise organizations report using video for five or more purposes and 28% use video for nine or more (Kaltura, 2018).
Salesforce reports 90% of marketing organizations use video. Moreover, they deemed video as the star channel of 2021. (Salesforce, 2021)
Consumers prefer to learn about a brand and its products Through Video
When it comes to receiving branded content or learning about a business’s products and services, consumers prefer video over other types of content.
85% of people would like to see more video from brands in 2021. (Wyzowl, 2021)
Newer generations consume more video than the previous ones. 1 in 2 Gen Z and Millenials report not knowing how they’d “get through life without video” (Google, 2019)
From the same Google report, we learn that 46% of global viewers use video content to learn something new. (Google, 2019)
More than half (54%) of consumers prefer to see video content from a brand than other types of content. (Hubspot, 2017)
Two-thirds of people (66%) said they’d prefer to watch a short video to learn about a product or service rather than read a text-based article, website, or post (18%); view an infographic (4%); download an ebook or manual (3%); attend a webinar (3%); receive a sales call or demo (2%). (Wyzowl, 2020)
43% of survey respondents say that branded video is the most memorable type of content shared by companies. (HubSpot, 2017)
94% of people have watched an explainer video to learn more about a product or service. (Wyzowl, 2021)
When researching new products and services to make B2B purchasing decisions, millennials prefer video-based content (29%) more than a case study (19%), white paper (16%), brochure (15%), webinar (11%), or infographic (11%). (Merit, 2017)
84% of people say that they’ve been convinced to buy a product or service by watching a brand’s video. (Wyzowl, 2021)
79% of people say they’ve been convinced to buy or download a piece of software or app by watching a video. (Wyzowl, 2021)
Consumers seek out video to help them make purchasing decisions
Many consumers have searched for videos on Google or YouTube to help them decide what products to buy.
More than 55% of people search for a product on Google and then learn more by going to YouTube before they buy it. (Google, 2018)
Top three reasons people watch a video after using search when researching products to buy: 1. To see a product before they buy it or to see how others have used it; 2. To learn more about a product they have in mind; 3. To see credible or authentic reviews from others. (Google, 2018)
Nearly 50% of internet users look for videos related to a product or service before visiting a store. (Google, 2016)
Over 70% of shoppers say online video has helped them learn more about an auto product they intended to buy. (Google, 2019)
50% of electronics shoppers say they purchased products they discovered on YouTube. (Google, 2018)
Video searches for ‘which [product] should I buy’ doubled from 2017 to 2018. (Google, 2018)
Video Helps with Learning, Training, and onboarding
Nearly 75% of enterprise companies are using video for internal learning and development and 98% see video use in their organization as steady or growing. (Kaltura, 2018)
Many employees, regardless of remote status or age, wish their company offered more types of training (60%) and they were available on-demand (65%) and there were different levels available (65%). (Vyond, 2022)
Employees mostly prefer self-led online training [like video] (51%), followed by instructor-led training (47%). (Vyond, 2020).
The most common trainings employees have at work are data security (58%), ethics (58%), and discrimination and protected classes (57%). (Vyond, 2020)
The trainings employees would find most beneficial are ethics (49%), management (45%), and data security (44%). (Vyond, 2020)
“Enterprises see a high value for video, especially for video communication and learning. 98% say video is valuable for improving communication and for training employees better and faster. Other areas in which video is thought to have a positive impact include connecting geographically-dispersed employees (95%), increasing brand awareness and lead generation (93%), and empowering employees to share knowledge (93%).” (Kaltura, 2018)
According to a survey by the Association for Talent Development (ATD), 72% of organizations plan to create microlearning videos in the near future, if they aren’t already. (ATD, 2017)
Psychologist Richard Wiseman’s research shows that whiteboard animation leads to greater retention. His study determined an astounding 15% increase in recall in the test takers who viewed a whiteboard animation versus those who didn’t. (Wiseman, 2013)
98% of enterprise organizations site video as being valuable for “Improving communication” and “Training employees better/faster. (Kaltura, 2018)
4 in 5 people said digital video helps them learn new things. (YouTube Data, 2017-1018)
Google searches for online courses grew by over 70% globally between the last week of March and the first week of April 2020, while global YouTube watch time for lectures on spoken languages have grown more than 6X year over year. (Google, 2020)
Google asked 12K viewers aged 13-64 the number one reason why they watched what they watched in the past 24 hours.‘Teaches me something new’ was the second-most popular choice. (Google, 2020)
In one 2014 study, 80% of respondents believed that video would have a positive impact on making the onboarding process smoother for new employees. 87% also believed that video would have a positive impact on training employees faster, and more cost-effectively (Kaltura, 2014)
Video gives marketers a significant return on investment
With video growing in popularity and consumers using video to make purchasing decisions, it’s not surprising that marketers are finding significant ROI from marketing videos.
95% of video marketers say video has helped increase user understanding of their product or service. (Wyzowl, 2020)
87% of video marketers say video has increased traffic to their website. (Wyzowl, 2020)
83% of video marketers say video has helped them generate leads. (Wyzowl, 2020)
81% of video marketers say video has helped increase the average time their visitors spend on a page. (Wyzowl, 2020)
80% of video marketers say video has directly helped increase sales. (Wyzowl, 2020)
43% of video marketers say video has reduced the number of support calls they’ve received. (Wyzowl, 2020)
89% of video marketers say video, in general, gives them a good return on their investment. (Wyzowl, 2020)
99% of people who use video for marketing say they’ll continue using video in 2020. (Wyzowl, 2020)
18% of first-time video marketers started using video in 2019 because they feel clearer about the ROI of video. (Wyzowl, 2020)
92% of marketers who use video say that it’s an important part of their marketing strategy. (Wyzowl, 2020)
95% of video marketers plan to increase or maintain their spend on video in 2020. (Wyzowl, 2020)
The average success rate of video marketers, across all platforms, is incredibly high. On average, where marketers use video channels, 79% of them report success—although this number differs across platforms. (Wyzowl, 2020)
Marketing videos have become easier and more cost-effective to make
Many non-video marketers have recently added video to their marketing strategy because they believe they are easier and more affordable to create.
47% of first-time video marketers started using video in 2019 because they believe it’s become quicker and less time-consuming to create video content. (Wyzowl, 2020)
48% of first-time video marketers got started with video because they found it easier to convince others in the business of its value. (Wyzowl, 2020)
46% of first-time video marketers started using video in 2019 because they believe video is becoming more affordable and because it’s easier to create video content in-house. (Wyzowl, 2020)
Video Improves Email Marketing Results
Including video in your marketing emails can increase your click-through rate.
Including video thumbnails instead of images in your email can increase clicks by over 21%. (Wistia, 2017)
In a single quarter, one Vyond customer experienced a 130% increase in click-through rate (CTR) for emails with animated video compared to the CTR for emails without animated video. (Vyond, 2017)
Social Media is a Prime Destination for Video Marketing
With so many platforms to choose from — Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, etc. — and billions of users among them, social media is a prime destination for brands to place their marketing videos.
Videos are consumers’ favorite types of content to see from a brand on social media. (Animoto, 2018)
On social media, video ads are the number one way consumers have found out about a new brand/product before purchasing. (Animoto, 2018)
93% of marketers say they’ve landed a new customer thanks to a video on social media. (Animoto, 2018)
88% of marketers are satisfied with the ROI of their video marketing efforts on social media. (Animoto, 2018)
80% of marketers feel good about the ROI of video ads posted on social media. (Animoto, 2018)
Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram are the top three platforms for marketers posting social marketing videos and video ads. (Animoto, 2018)
Social media is the number one reason marketers named for creating videos in the last 12 months. (Animoto, 2018)
73% of marketers create at least two videos a month for social media. (Animoto, 2018)
YouTube Video
With hundreds of hours of video uploaded every minute and its popularity among users 18-34, YouTube has become a key platform for video marketing.
People upload 500 hours of video to YouTube every minute. (Statista, 2020)
The average YouTube watch session on mobile lasts more than 60 minutes. (CNET, 2018)
More than 70% of what users watch on YouTube is driven by its recommendation algorithm. (CNET, 2018)
On mobile in an average week, YouTube reaches more 18+ year-olds during prime-time TV hours than any cable TV network. (Google, 2017)
Two-thirds of YouTube users watch YouTube on a second screen while watching TV at home. (Google, 2017)
50% of viewers aged 18-34 said they would stop what they were doing to watch a video from their favorite creator. (Google, 2017)
65% of people use YouTube to help them solve a problem. (Google, 2018).
88% of video marketers plan to include YouTube in their 2020 video marketing strategy. (Wyzowl, 2020)
YouTube remains the most widely used platform for video marketers, with 85% of video marketers using it in 2019. (Wyzowl, 2020)
83% of video marketers that have used YouTube said it had been successful for them. (Wyzowl, 2020)
The number of channels reaching 1+ million subscribers increasing by more than 65% year over year. (YouTube, 2020)
Facebook Video
While YouTube is the social destination for video, Facebook has gained traction as a video destination for users and marketers.
Videos are becoming increasingly popular post types, accounting for about 11% of Facebook posts. (Quintly, 2019)
Square Facebook videos get 35% more views than landscape videos. (Buffer, 2017)
It costs 7.5% less to get someone to engage with square video on Facebook. (Buffer, 2017)
65% of people surveyed say they watch publisher video on Facebook every day, while 35% watch multiple times per day. (Facebook, 2019
94% of survey respondents who watch a publisher video report sharing it. (Facebook, 2019)
62% of people said they were more interested in a product after seeing it in a Facebook story. (Facebook, 2018)
Facebook has become more effective as a video marketing channel than YouTube, with 79% of video marketers using it — and 85% of those people say it’s been a success. (Wyzowl, 2020)
76% of video marketers plan to include Facebook in their 2020 video marketing strategy. (Wyzowl, 2020)
32% of video marketers plan to include Facebook Live in their 2020 video marketing strategy. (Wyzowl, 2020)
81% of marketers have placed spend against a video on Facebook. (Animoto, 2018)
Facebook is the top organic and paid social media platform B2C marketers use. (Content Marketing Institute, 2019)
Instagram Video
Many consumers are watching branded video on Instagram through its feed, IGTV, and Stories, making it a key platform for marketers’ video marketing strategy.
49% of consumers have watched video on IGTV; of those, 70% have watched an IGTV video from a brand. (Animoto, 2018)
28% of video marketers plan to include Instagram TV in their 2020 video marketing strategy. (Wyzowl, 2020)
47% of consumers enjoy watching ads on Instagram Stories. (Animoto, 2018)
74% of marketers have posted at least two videos on Instagram Stories a month. (Animoto, 2018)
65% of video marketers plan to include Instagram in their 2020 video marketing strategy. (Wyzowl, 2020)
Twitter Video
Though not as popular for video marketing as Facebook, YouTube, or Instagram, Twitter is still an important part of many marketers’ plans.
There are over 2 billion video views on Twitter each day, which is 67% YoY growth, according to Twitter’s internal data. (Twitter, 2020)
Tweets with video attracted 10x more engagements than Tweets without video. (Twitter, 2020)
Promoted Tweets with videos save more than 50% on cost-per-engagement. (Twitter, 2020)
93% of video views happen on mobile. (Twitter, 2020)
Keep your Tweets short: Videos with minimal Tweet copy vs. longer Tweet copy have a 13% higher brand and message recall and overall view time. (Twitter, 2020)
Ready to Get Started with Video?
Now that you’ve read how marketing videos can benefit your business, if you’re ready to get started making videos, here are some best practices.
Keep it short, but not too short
Video engagement remains at 51% for videos less than a minute long. The engagement slowly decreases as the video length is increased. To a minimum engagement of 16% at 60+ minutes. (Wistia, 2022)
The video completion rate for 15-second clips sits at nearly 90%. (KoMarketing, 2020)
60% of videos are less than 2 minutes long. (Vidyard, 2021)
In one experiment, 30-second ads had a 30% higher view-through rate (VTR) than 15-second ads. (Google, 2016)
45% of viewers watch a video all the way through regardless of its length. This is a decrease compared to 2019 (52%). Just over half (58%) of viewers watch a video to the end if it’s less than 60 seconds, but only 24% will finish a video if it’s more than 20 minutes. (Vidyard, 2021)
Younger generations are more likely to seek out short-form content such as webisodes, tutorials, and short video clips produced by professional and amateur creators. User-generated content is often short form, and younger viewers are more likely to watch both. (Google, 2020)
Videos that are longer than 20 minutes only get about 24% audience engagement. While Videos that are less than a minute long get 58%. (Vidyard, 2021)
A Vyond customer reports that 75% of viewers watched up to two minutes of a job aid training video. The percentage of viewers dropped off significantly after the two-minute point. (Vyond, 2019)
Have a distribution strategy
The majority of business-related video views (87%) still take place on desktop computers. (Vidyard, 2019)
Chrome is the top browser by a wide margin, with nearly two-thirds (61%) of video watchers using the browser. This is followed by Internet Explorer, which, at 15%, has fallen significantly year-over-year. (Vidyard, 2019)
Audiences watch business video content more on Thursdays than any other day of the week — 22% of views happen then. (Vidyard, 2019)
Websites, social media, and landing pages are three of the most popular places to embed video content. (Vidyard, 2019)
Use captions
92% of consumers view videos with the sound off on mobile. (Verizon, 2019)
80% of consumers are more likely to watch an entire video when captions are available. (Verizon, 2019)
When captions are available, 37% of viewers said they are encouraged to turn the sound on because the videos seem more interesting, and 29% said that even with the sound off, they were better able to understand the video because of the captioning. (Verizon, 2019)
Consider Animated Video
By switching to animated video, a Vyond customer experienced a 67% reduction in onboarding time for a group of new employees. (Vyond, 2017)
In a single quarter, a Vyond customer saw a 130% increase in the click-through rate (CTR) for emails with animated video compared to the CTR for emails without animated video. (Vyond, 2017)
Another customer experienced a 375% boost in video shares on social media and a 21% increase in YouTube views by adding animated video. (Vyond, 2015)
By using Vyond to create more than 200 animated videos, one customer saved between $600,000 and $1.4 million in production costs and saved their clients’ HR team more than 2,000 hours in unproductive meetings. (Vyond, 2016)
Conversion rates jumped 67% when MailLift added an animated explainer video to their homepage. (Vyond, 2015)
A Vyond customer reports saving eight hours per week on video content production by adding animated video to their previously Adobe-only toolkit. (Vyond, 2016)
Training & Video Marketing Statistics Show the Benefits of Video
Whether you’re looking to help customers learn more about your products, improve your marketing ROI, or increase your email click-through rate, these statistics show the benefits of incorporating video into your marketing strategy.
Create your own animated videos. Start a free trial of Vyond.
#### 11 Actionable Video SEO Tips From YouTube Experts
1.7 billion people visit YouTube every month, with 92% of internet users watching at least one form of video content each week. With so many people on the platform, even attracting the attention of 0.0001% of its users would make most businesses profitable.
But you are not alone on YouTube. Your competition knows about its reach and will probably use it at some point—they likely use it already.
You need to follow these actionable, expert-backed video SEO tips to help you outrank your competitors’ videos in search engines.
1. Target topics with SEO potential
High-volume keywords can have search results with millions of views. While targeting these keywords and capturing a portion of these viewers is appealing, your chances of ranking for these keywords are slim with a small channel.
Jim Costa is the head producer of an ad agency making TV, radio, and social media commercials for corporate clients. He reviews the search results to find truly low-competition topics, which leads to increased views in both the short and long term.
Use YouTube keyword research tools like vidIQ to find topics with reasonable search volume but low competition. For Costa, this signifies keywords with 1,000 to 25,000 monthly views and where existing videos don’t have many views, say under 100,000. Once you have the best keywords, you can make videos targeted directly at the audience you want to attract without having to fight for views.
2. Promote your channel with press releases
You can pitch blog posts with embedded videos to news sites to increase the videos’ view counts. The higher view count tells YouTube your video is worth sharing. Sea stack climber Iain Miller uses press releases for brand awareness. Thanks to his efforts, he’s reached hundreds of thousands of people.
According to Miller, the first step for newsworthy videos is to edit them into a suitable length. Most of his videos are shorter than two minutes. The short length helps PR agents quickly see his video and decide if it’s newsworthy.
Compose an email to pitch your press release. “The key points of a press release are email subject title and a link to the footage in the first sentence,” says Miller. Label your email subject line as “Press Release: title of the story.” A study of over a million press release subject lines found that PR agents are more likely to open-labeled pitches.
Include a link to your video in the first line, so that even PR agents who close your email watch your video. You should also include one or two GIFs and images throughout the body of the email—add more than two, and your email will take longer to load and look convoluted.
After your videos gain traction, Miller says, agencies like Newsflare and Caters will offer to promote your footage. Iain always gives permission, but he always asks for a link back to his site.
3. Include your competitor’s tags in your video description
YouTube tags help its algorithm understand your video’s topic. Tagging your video with the same tags as your competitor will tell YouTube that the videos are related. Related videos target the same people, meaning you’ll take a portion of their viewers.
Download vidIQ and search for competitor videos on a topic you plan to record soon. Then, check the right side of the screen for vidIQ’s statistic box to find your competitors’ tags. They’ll have a blue number next to them, so they are easy to recognize.
Tim Vasquez, video optimizer for Dickey’s Barbecue Pit, uses this tip to outrank competitors on Google search and YouTube. He recommends writing a video description that includes these keywords. “I haven’t put my keywords in the tag box for a couple of years,” says Vasquez, “and it hasn’t affected my rankings in the least.” However, by adding them to the description, he’s outranked competitors with millions of views, despite managing a smaller channel.
4. Use a different thumbnail for every platform
Fonts, images, graphic placement, and colors influence a thumbnail’s performance. You can design a thumbnail for each social media platform where you’ll post a video to find the one that generates the most clicks.
Jeff Moriarty from Moriarty’s Gem Art creates high-performing thumbnails and then turns them into his YouTube videos’ cover images. After switching his YouTube thumbnail to the highest-performing one, he sees more views and followers and thus has an easier time ranking with new videos.
Use Canva, Photoshop, or other design software to create different versions of your thumbnail. Change the typeface, text placement, colors, images, or graphics. Then, set a different thumbnail for each platform where you’ll publish your video and track the click-through rate and time spent viewing for each one using the platform’s analytic software.
After a week, use the highest-performing thumbnail on your YouTube channel to increase your click-through rate and views. When these two metrics improve, YouTube will show your videos to other people and increase your rankings.
“When we tested and found the winning thumbnail for our video,” says Moriarty, “we used it for all our blog posts, organic social media posts, and YouTube. It is now one of our highest-viewed videos with over 6,000,000 views.”
5. Optimize your video for your audience first
When posting your video, use a thumbnail and title with words and images that your audience would understand. This setup boosts your video’s views from the start because the video will sound intriguing to your audience.
Once views plateau, switch your title to a more SEO-oriented one. Since you have views and credibility, non-followers will be more likely to find and click on your videos.
Randy Rektor, the senior content producer at Voices, used this strategy to grow the company’s YouTube channel from 9,000 to 21,000 subscribers.
Create a video thumbnail and title that motivates followers to click. “A good example,” Rektor says, “would be ‘This ______ Has ALMOST Everything I Asked For’ with a thumbnail showing a question mark or a missing puzzle piece.” The title doesn’t include specific keywords about the contents of the video but generates curiosity for your audience. Once views plateau, switch the title to something like “The New _____—Beginner’s Tutorial” to appeal to the algorithm.
According to Rektor, new videos receive more views right off the bat with this technique, typically outranking Voices’ old videos. He also says they rank very high when they swap the title to be more SEO-oriented.
6. Add your target keywords to your video file name
Add your target keywords to your video file name, so the YouTube algorithm better understands who you’re targeting. According to Cesar Valencia, who has over 10 years of YouTube video production experience, nine out of 10 videos that don’t follow this tip rank lower or perform more poorly than those that did.
Choose a keyword using vidIQ, Ahrefs, TubeBuddy, or other YouTube keyword research tools. These tools will give you information about the keyword’s competition and volume.
Unlike when choosing the keyword to target with your video, pick high-volume keywords regardless of competition. The algorithm will relate your video to these keywords, even if your channel is not big enough to rank for the keyword’s top search results. Once you find high-volume keywords, add them to your video and thumbnail file names.
7. Study your target audience to help the algorithm rank your videos
Target topics related to your audience’s pain points, wants, or needs, even if keyword research tools say these topics don’t have promising SEO value. YouTube’s algorithm will show your video to fewer people if the topic is too specific. But the video’s specificity means most viewers will come from people aligned with your business’s ideal customer.
Russ Knopf owns a YouTube channel on dividend investing. For a recent video, he discovered people didn’t know if they should buy or sell AT&T stocks after a dividend cut. So, he created a video explaining why he bought more. This is one of his best videos because people who didn’t know, like, or trust him would have a rational self-interest to click and find out about his decision.
Engage directly with your audience to learn about their wants and needs. Ask your target audience for an interview or survey in exchange for a reward, like a guide teaching a skill they value or a discount code for your product. You can also read YouTube comments and relevant subreddits to see what’s bothering your viewers lately.
Write a list of recurring problems that your audience has and that you can solve. Then, use the same words, metaphors, and stories your audience uses to discuss problems during your video. Add them to your thumbnail and title. While not every person will decipher the video’s topic right away, viewers interested in what you offer and know will be excited to watch your video.
8. Include the words you want to rank for in your script
Google uses auto-transcriptions to understand your video’s content. As a result, including your keyword on your video ensures that Google finds it, understands your video’s topic, and shows it to relevant viewers.
Travis Johansen, the lead video producer at Provid Films, includes keywords in the scripts he creates for clients like Best Buy and U.S. Bank. The videos rank well because of this small action. He offered a great example: If you want to rank for “Best manufacturing company in Minnesota,” say that phrase near the beginning of the video and then a few more times.
Alternatively, find a keyword that your video mentions a lot and add it to your title. Johansen did this trick to boost a video that wasn’t performing as he wanted. The algorithm understood the video better after the change, resulting in over three million views.
9. Embed videos on your website
You can embed videos on your website to increase the time people spend on a page. A longer page session tells Google that website visitors enjoy your content, boosting your site’s ranking on the search results. More ranks for your post mean more views for your embedded videos.
As part of his marketing agency job, Richard Garvey embeds clients’ videos on their websites to take advantage of Google visitors.
Find blog posts discussing topics you covered in videos. Then, embed these videos at the top portion of the article to raise the likelihood of readers seeing your video. When Garvey’s team embeds videos on posts, they usually see views skyrocket within a few months.
10. Add timestamps to your videos
Google shows your YouTube video’s timestamps in its search results as “key moments.” Each moment ranks for the keyword in the timestamp’s name, meaning that one video can rank for multiple keywords in Google’s SERPs.
Divide your video into sections. If your video title is “6 ways to cook chicken,” each cooking method would have its own timestamp. Make sure to include important keywords in the titles of the timestamps. You should also include the timestamps in your video description to maximize the reach of your keywords.
David Lynch drafts outlines and optimizes Payette Forward’s YouTube channel of over 900,000 subscribers. Adding timestamps to videos has been a core part of the channel’s success. He structures timestamps as the section number followed by the title of the timestamp with the keyword included and ends with the minute marker. So, for the chicken example, a timestamp would look as follows: 5. Broil chicken with spices [7:51]. This simple structure ensures timestamps are organized and include keywords.
11. Group videos discussing similar topics in a playlist
YouTube promotes channels that keep people on the platform. The auto-play feature from playlists is perfect for this goal, as it encourages binge-watching. Through playlists, you promote other videos to viewers that get to the end screen, reducing their likelihood of leaving the site.
To create playlists, log into YouTube Studio and head to the Playlists section on the left. Click on New Playlist and include a keyword that you want to rank for that describes the playlist’s topic. Then click the playlist thumbnail and then on the three dots to add any of your videos.
Paul Baterina groups videos into playlists as part of his job as COO at Sleep Advisor. Sleep Advisor has a sub-series reviewing mattresses. Once they grouped these videos into a playlist, some started receiving tens of thousands of views instead of a few thousand.
Create your first YouTube video using Vyond
Billions of people watch YouTube videos every month. You can attract a portion of these people through engaging Vyond-made animated videos. With our templates, any individual can turn an idea into an educational or sales video in a few hours.
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#### 11 Best Communication Tools for Remote and Hybrid Teams
Do your employees feel heard? 25% of employees believe their leaders don’t do a good job communicating with them and 40% think communications from leadership are too infrequent.
Strong internal communication is essential. Without it, employees are less likely to share innovative ideas with leadership, ask colleagues for support to speed up their workflow, or let team members know of a stressful situation affecting their performance. Effective communication becomes all the more important in the digital and distributed workplace.
You can encourage employees to build relationships between colleagues and leadership, feel heard, and collaborate effectively with any of these ten tools for remote and hybrid teams:
Blink
Notion
Hailey
Sococo
ProofHub
Threads
Parabol
Range
Loom
CoScreen
Vyond
11 Best Tools for Remote and Hybrid Teams
1. Blink
Blink is an all-in-one employee engagement app that provides a solution for frontline workers and remote employees to stay connected to their organization. It improves the employee experience in meaningful, everyday ways, giving employees mobile access to the communications and applications they need to do their job and feel part of the company. This creates a culture of productivity, retention and collaboration, where the frontline is engaged, gives feedback and feels valued.
Key features include a personalized feed, one-to-one & group chats, file sharing, employee hub & directory, employee recognition, and integration with hundreds of other workplace systems. With features like these, Blink provides everything that’s needed to engage your deskless and remote workers with a modern work experience.
There are four available pricing plans, ranging from the basic Essential plan starting at $3.40 per person per month, through to the Enterprise Plus, suited for large organisations. Full details of the pricing are available on request on the Blink website.
2. Notion
Notion is a platform where your company’s wiki, projects, and learning material are entirely customizable. Notion offers various formatting options, like a calendar or board view, which gives you the flexibility to create and organize your content however you like.
Notion’s tools allow teams to share information with colleagues and search for specific data through their filters and search bar. These tools speed up remote teams’ workflows. Instead of interrupting a coworker to ask them a question, employees can visit the company wiki to find a previous article or report that poses a solution to their issue.
Companies like Loom and Boxed use Notion to build and maintain a wiki. This internal database hosts dozens of documents from all areas of the company—from an onboarding checklist to each team’s projects. The wiki is open to everyone, so every employee can visit it and establish discussions around possible tweaks to make a given section clearer or more helpful.
Notion for teams will host all your files, whether you upload an image-based article or an animated video to solve a teammate’s doubt. Their plan for teams costs $8 per month for each employee.
3. Hailey
Hailey is a Slack bot that connects remote teams through conversations, challenges, and mini-games. Installation takes 5 minutes or less.
Once a day, Hailey kickstarts social interactions in your team’s #watercooler channel. The conversation starters are fun, original, and thought-provoking, with plenty of dog GIFs. Teammates can even share their own custom prompts. With Superlatives, teammates vote on awards like the “Giphy Award: Most likely to respond with the perfect GIF”. In Guess Who, teammates learn about each other with 24-hour multiple choice trivia questions.
Hailey is designed to drive asynchronous conversations, where teammates can participate in their own time zones, on their own schedules.
Hailey costs $29 per team per month, with a 30-day free trial.
4. Sococo
Sococo creates an online workplace where employees can log in to work together and simulate the experience of being in a physical space.
Companies can rearrange and decorate rooms to make the space more pleasant for employees and encourage more frequent interactions. Like in real life, some rooms focus on casual interactions while others are work-related. For example, you can join the lunch area to have more laid-back conversations with colleagues already there. Alternatively, you can “knock” on any of the online coworker’s doors to discuss an innovative idea you just had.
JetBlue employees use Sococo to host and assist with meetings, whether they are on a plane or out of the office. Because of the versatility of the virtual office, an absent employee can join a room, work, and help anyone who knocks on the door.
Sococo costs $13.49 per team member each month. For that price, you will receive a customizable virtual office, the ability to have a birds-eye view of where everyone is in the office, and other tools for remote teams to simulate the experience of working under one roof.
5. ProofHub
ProofHub is a project management and team collaboration tool with a simple user interface. It enables you to gain ultimate control over your hybrid teams and projects.
It includes everything you need to plan your tasks and collaborate with remote teams in real-time, track progress, stay organized, and meet deadlines.
With the ability to move between to-do lists, Kanban boards, Gantt charts, and Table view, it provides a flexible approach to task management. With ProofHub’s online proofing tool, it gets easier to streamline your remote team’s review and approval process.
The native chat application helps in quick communication, and a dedicated location for real-time discussions makes collaborating with your scattered team a breeze.
ProofHub comes with a flat-fee policy. The Essential plan starts at $45/month (billed annually), and The Ultimate Control plan starts at $89 /month (billed annually).
6. Threads
Threads is a tool to create and organize asynchronous discussions around one specific topic, so that team members can track the areas where their attention is needed.
Remote teams can use this tool to see colleagues who saw the thread, plan to participate in it, or who addressed the question and wish to bring a close to the discussion. These processes happen asynchronously, so as long as team members update their threads, employees don’t rely on a colleague being online to move on to the next stage of a project.
Employees from Buffer use Threads to recognize a colleague’s recent achievement, post company announcements that everyone will see regardless of their time zone, and collaborate to make decisions with coworkers from different continents.
Companies can host forum-like conversations around projects, announcements, and suggestions for $10 per month for each team member.
7. Parabol
Parabol offers multiple features—like a retrospective tool and check-ins—to help agile teams figure out the projects and actions that need to receive the most attention.
In Parabol’s retrospective, employees follow the tool’s steps to discuss hurdles and areas to improve from a recent product launch. Teams can choose from several retrospective formats and templates and ways to submit feedback inside Parabol’s platform.
Once you collect feedback, the retrospective tool guides discussions around each reflection and helps structure a plan to improve in these areas.
Besides their retrospective tool, Parabol offers a check-in tool for remote teams to improve team communication and integrations to keep your team synchronized from a distance. You can access all of these for $6 per month per team member.
8. Range
Range is a check-in tool that employees can use to share a project’s status while also forging more personal connections.
Through daily check-ins, teammates can offer a hand to a colleague struggling with a project, or congratulate someone for a recent success. This camaraderie results in more meaningful interactions and trust between worldwide team members. The communication Range enables also strengthens the bond between leadership and employees, which is important because senior leadership unknowingly intimidates 29% of employees, keeping them away from speaking during meetings.
Members from the Content Experiences & Innovation team at Adobe live in Bangalore, Noida, and San Jose. The team used Range’s daily check-ins to build trust across the international squad and align on a project’s status. Initially, check-ins allowed the team’s manager to understand where her crew focused their attention. Once the pandemic hit, check-ins became a tool to discover personal and work-related issues, the team’s mood, and a bond-strengthening solution thanks to Range’s team-building questions.
Range’s $8 per employee plan can host unlimited teams, check-ins, meetings, and objectives, so that remote teams consistently find areas where their expertise or presence is needed.
9. Loom
Loom is a video-based asynchronous collaboration tool that employees can use to record themselves asking detailed questions, adding context to a recent deliverable, or providing feedback to a teammate.
Remote teams can use Loom to record themselves highlighting critical information for others, regardless of where they are. The videos will have footage from your screen, camera, or both. These options allow you to emphasize data based on your preferences: you can use hand gestures to support your words or stick to adding context to a project in real-time. Once your video is ready, you can edit it or share it with your team so that they can check it whenever they log in, revisit it for doubts, and eliminate the need to host a meeting.
Marketers, engineers, and leaders from PostClick used Loom to share news, updates, and ideas across the entire organization, reestablishing a one-team culture. Because of the easy accessibility to information, the brand hosts 50% fewer meetings than pre-Loom times.
52% of employees favor company announcements in an audio or video format over those made through emails or blog posts, according to our 2021 study. With Loom, you can start spreading information across your company—in a format your employees like—for $8 per month per team member.
10. CoScreen
CoScreen allows employees to share hand-picked app windows from their desktops with colleagues. Everyone with access to the window can view and control the app as if they were in the same room.
CoScreen focuses its attention on engineers and developers who, for example, need a faster way to collaborate in coding projects. However, other teams can use CoScreen, too. Design teams can use it to receive more precise, real-time feedback from leadership as they present a new logo or brand style guide through Figma. Similarly, writers and editors can assemble live sessions to go over an article and avoid feedback loops.
Developers from Grid AI used CoScreen’s simultaneous screen sharing, multi-screen editing, and high-quality communication tools to speed up pair programming and debugging sessions by at least two times.
CoScreen’s unlimited screen collaboration sessions and remote control of any applications are features that benefit most teams. You can access them for $18 a month per user.
11. Vyond
Vyond is a video creation tool that brings your storytelling to life with animated characters and props for any given scenario. Vyond excels at providing hybrid teams with all of the advantages of video communication without the hassle of having to face a camera. As a result, employees using Vyond Studio are able to easily create accessible content that is self-paced, portable, and easy to share with others.
With Vyond, you can keep your remote team captivated while still delivering important information. Due to video’s ability to tell stories, businesses can improve message delivery and retention. And the data is clear, about 75% of employees are more likely to watch a video than to read text. Moreover, recall/retention increases by 15%.
Have fun with video and build a strong work culture! Use videos for interviews, news-style updates, and employee introductions. Vyond has a free trial period. After that, Vyond starts at $58 a month with a Starter plan annual subscription.
Encourage camaraderie across your team while working remotely.
Communication is an essential part of remote work. Maintaining and improving the frequency and quality of interactions between colleagues can lead to better interpersonal relationships, more engaging communication formats, and better alignment during projects.
Most of the tools we shared for remote teams rely on video, a communication format most employees consider more engaging than text-based for company communications and announcements. With Vyond, you can turn your company’s most crucial information into engaging video animations without previous animation experience.
Start communicating in video with a free trial of Vyond, no credit card required.
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#### 11 Examples of Successful Employee Training Videos
Compelling training videos help L&D and HR teams share knowledge across the organization and help employees build the skills necessary for your company to thrive.
In this guide, we’ll share the ingredients to a successful training video–and share 11 examples of employee training videos covering some of the most common training topics, all made with Vyond’s versatile all-in-one video creation platform. Specifically, we’ll cover:
Table of contents
What is an employee training video?
What are some common types of employee training videos?
Qualities of effective employee training videos
11 examples of successful training videos for employees
What is an employee training video?
An employee training video is a visual instructional tool designed to educate employees on specific skills, procedures, or policies within a workplace. It often includes demonstrations, examples, and explanations to improve understanding and retention of the material.
Whatever their purpose or vibe, training videos come with a distinct advantage: high-quality engagement that translates to 95% retention (compared to only 10% retention for text-based learning).
There are three primary reasons why an organization may want to make an employee training video, including:
Knowledge transfer: Video delivers essential information efficiently during the onboarding process and over the employee’s tenure with the organization.
Skill development: Training videos help employees at all levels acquire new soft or hard skills or update existing ones.
Compliance and risk mitigation: Video helps organizations meet legal and regulatory requirements by delivering content on topics like workplace safety, anti-harassment, data protection, and other compliance issues.
Regardless of which of these purposes an employee training video may fulfill, there are infinite ways to make it come to life. Let’s look at some of the most common.
What are some common types of employee training videos?
Employee training videos come in many forms, but these are some of the most popular:
Explainer videos help viewers learn a concept or an idea.
Scenario-based training videos show examples of situations and how people should respond.
Tutorials/how-tos show learners processes step-by-step and may include screen recordings or mixed media.
Presentation-style videos bring your slide deck out of the meeting and into the team brainstorming session.
Interactive videos allow learners to make decisions, answer questions, and explore various paths within the video. This hands-on approach enhances the learning experience by making the content more personalized.
Microlearning videos break down complex topics into smaller, easier-to-digest nuggets of information.
Talking head videos feature on-screen presenters–either subject matter experts themselves, or hosts relaying information the way a TV anchor does.
Hybrid or mixed media training videos include multiple elements from the types listed above. For example, you might use screen capture, tutorials, and interactivity to keep viewers engaged with highly technical skills training.
Whatever type of training video you choose, it’s essential to understand what makes these instructional tools effective.
Qualities of effective employee training videos
Here are the crucial elements that make training videos stand out and drive successful learning outcomes:
Goal-focused: What are your objectives, and how will you measure those results? Your video should be laser-focused on your primary aims.
Right length for the subject matter: The traditional wisdom is that users prefer videos of only a few minutes in length. However, Techsmith’s 2024 research shows that respondents cited 10- to 19-minute-long videos as their preferred duration. Bottom line: a video should be as long as it needs to be to get your message across clearly.
Engages employees: Effective videos make employees pay close attention and get emotionally invested in the material. Use specificity wherever possible and humor when appropriate — and don’t forget to make the content as relevant and personalized as you can.
Clarifies complex ideas and concepts: Use simple language, appropriate use of text and images, and metaphors to help ideas stick.
Helps drive new behaviors or actions: These videos aren’t just about learning for learning’s sake. You want people to be better equipped to handle real work situations and make better decisions.
Supports your company’s growth and retention efforts: When people are well-trained, they become more skilled. This makes your company better, which in turn makes employees want to stick around longer.
Most importantly, focus your video on a particular audience and the specific skill or process you want to teach.
11 examples of successful training videos for employees
Here are some examples of training videos in a range of styles and topics for inspiration.
1. New hire orientation video example
Using videos to onboard your new hires boosts the chances that they’ll digest and retain critical information about your company culture, their new team, and their role. (Research shows that people are more likely to remember information that they receive in a video format than text alone — even after six weeks.)Note how this video adds a human touch by incorporating characters representing members of the new hire’s team, along with their actual voices.
2. Workplace safety training video example
Nearly three million people are injured on the job each year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Safety training videos can cut down on accidents by ensuring that workers understand the safest ways to use tools and equipment on the job.
Note how this video both engages and educates by presenting a real scenario, blending photorealistic, whiteboard, and animated characters, and breaking down important steps in a clear, visual way.
3. Department onboarding video example
Need new sales reps to get up to speed quickly? A series of short animated onboarding videos is a perfect fit.
Of note in this video (which is one of a series): By using an animated narrator like this, you don’t have to worry about onboarding content become dated if sales leadership changes. It’s evergreen, with a fun human touch.
4. Compliance training video example
As this video demonstrates, clever storytelling and humor can help make even the driest compliance topics seem compelling. It may seem counterintuitive to add lighter elements to content about serious topics. But it works.
5. Cybersecurity training video example
This cybersecurity training video is a great example of how to use lively animations, voiceover narration, and music to engage learners.
6. Sales training video example
In sales, the difference between a missed opportunity and a closed deal often comes down to a single phone call.This sales training video sharpens the essential skills reps need to succeed over the phone — listening, asking the right questions, and enunciating, to name a few. Notice how the friendly vibe of this video fits the message, too.
7. Technical training video example
Adding animated elements (arrows, motion lines) to a visual of a machine or system is a simple but powerful way to help learners understand how it works, as this video demonstrates.
8. Soft skills training example
In a recent survey from Wiley, two-thirds of the employees surveyed said that the soft skills training they received had a positive effect on their job performance. This video, “Empathy in the workplace for remote teams,” uses animation and on-screen text to demonstrate how remote colleagues can work to understand and accommodate one another more effectively.
9. Diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB) training video example
This diversity training video expertly uses animated characters acting out very short scenarios to highlight examples of ageism–and show learners how to avoid falling prey to it.
10. Product or service training video example
This engaging example takes a mixed media approach, combining live footage of a “talking head,” screen capture footage, animation and text to demonstrate two ways Vyond makes it easy to make training videos on any topic.
11. Leadership training video example
This leadership training video equips remote managers with actionable tips to navigate these hurdles and build stronger, more cohesive teams, no matter where they’re located. The combination of minimal text and colorful visuals makes it easy for the viewer to follow along and retain the information.
Build effective training videos for employees in minutes with Vyond
No matter what kind of employee training video you’re hoping to create, Vyond’s all-in-one AI video creation platform makes it easy.
Create videos in a variety of styles, including animated, photorealistic, mixed media, and everything in between. Generate a video script and draft in less than a minute by entering a simple text prompt into Vyond Go. Or use our Text to Image AI tool and deep library of templates to make something quickly in Vyond Studio.
Want to check out Vyond for yourself? Sign up for a free trial:
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#### 11 Ways to Boost Sales and Enable Your Sellers with Videos Created in Vyond
Updated in March 2026: This article outlines how AI-powered video tools like Vyond can improve sales enablement by helping teams ramp new reps faster, accelerate pipeline conversations, and support retention through consistent messaging across the customer journey. It highlights 11 practical AI video use cases for sales trainers, SDRs/BDRs, and technical sales teams, including onboarding, personalized outreach, meeting recaps, demos, and customer update videos. The content is a helpful, product-focused resource from Vyond, supported by industry research and real-world examples.
Buyer behavior is evolving, sales cycles are more complex, and buying committees are larger than ever. But one thing hasn’t changed: sales teams win when they’re equipped to engage the right stakeholders with the right message at the right time.
Today, sales enablement isn’t just about creating content — it’s about accelerating revenue. The fastest-growing teams use enablement to:
Ramp new reps faster
Keep deals moving through the funnel
Deliver consistent value messaging that protects renewals
In this article, we’ll explore how Vyond’s AI-powered video tools and templates help sales teams increase pipeline velocity, reduce onboarding time, and strengthen customer retention — from first touch to renewal.
Specifically, we’ll look at how tailored videos made in Vyond support:
Sales trainers and enablement teams
SDRs and BDRs generating pipeline
Technical sales and sales engineering teams supporting complex deals
Enable Your Sellers with Engaging, Revenue-Driving Videos
Use cases for sales trainers
Sales trainers face constant pressure: new hires need to ramp quickly, messaging changes fast, and sellers don’t have time for long training sessions.With an AI-powered video platform like Vyond, trainers can create relevant, customized content in minutes — helping reps become productive faster and reducing time-to-quota.
Vyond makes it easy to build onboarding and training content with:
AI-generated videos from prompts or existing materials
Editable templates designed for sales teams
AI avatars and multiple visual styles
Instant Translation into 95 languages
The result: scalable training that improves retention, consistency, and execution across the field.
Check Out Our Sales Enablement Product Page
1. Get reps ready to sell 5x fasterOnboarding can make or break a rep’s ramp. Instead of relying on PDFs or slide decks, use short, engaging videos that help new hires absorb key information and land meetings ASAP.
With Vyond Go, you can upload existing materials and generate a draft video in under a minute — giving reps what they need without slowing down enablement teams. Or bring one of our sales enablement video templates into Vyond Studio, and customize it as you see fit.
Here’s an example of an editable employee training video template in Vyond:
2. Make customer pain points stick with better persona explainersReps sell faster when they understand who they’re selling to. Character-driven persona videos (in animated or avatar styles) help sellers internalize motivations, objections, and messaging more effectively than static documentation.Recently, one multinational tech company replaced a 2.5-hour text-based persona course with a 30-minute Vyond video series — cutting training time by 80% while increasing engagement.Said the company’s Senior Director of Learning Experience: “You’re learning the same information as the text-based course, but you’re learning it through the roleplay of conversations, and it’s so much more interesting. It’s not boring anymore. People are genuinely telling us that it’s fun.”
3. Boost seller confidence and alignment with quick skills trainingSales skills evolve quickly, and traditional training content becomes outdated fast. Vyond videos are easy to update, reuse, and tailor — without expensive production cycles.Indeed used Vyond Go to replace ineffective slide decks with engaging eLearning videos in just two hours — accelerating adoption of a key sales tool.
4. Improve in-person selling with best practices videosIndustry events (like conferences) are pipeline-rich opportunities — but only if reps know what good looks like. Use quick videos to reinforce best practices for lead qualification, booth conversations, and follow-up.
Now that we’ve discussed enabling your sellers, let’s turn to how videos created in Vyond can help your sellers educate and engage their key audiences.
Check Out Our Sales Enablement Quickstart Kit
Sell Faster with Instant Videos and Tailored Templates
Use cases for SDRs and BDRs
SDRs and BDRs are often the first point of contact with your buyers. And their job is all about speed and relevance: breaking through crowded inboxes with a human touch, shaping their pitches to address urgent needs, and generating pipeline as quickly as possible.Instant video tools and plug-and-play templates help these reps personalize outreach at scale, increase response rates, and push deals forward.
5. Land more meetings with eye-catching outreachDrop a prospect’s name into a template or send a personalized GIF intro. Video adds a human layer that helps outreach stand out — and helps conversations start sooner.Here’s one of Vyond’s pre-built prospecting templates:
And here’s account executive Alex Seminary explaining how he uses Vyond to create personalized prospecting emails that have landed meetings with some of the biggest companies in the world:
6. Articulate product value clearly and memorably
Forget the PDF attachments. Introduce yourself and showcase your product’s value proposition with an overview video your prospect will be intrigued to watch.Here’s a product teaser or demo preview video template:
7. Revive stalled deals with a human touchAfter a meeting, send a recap video summarizing key points and next steps. These quick touchpoints keep momentum high and make it easier for champions to share internally.
Here’s an example:
8. Build trust with easy-to-build case study videosCustomer stories are more persuasive when they’re easy to consume. Turn static case studies into short videos that reinforce proof points and help buying committees align.Here’s a Vyond customer story video template that can feature an AI avatar or real human host:
9. Reduce deal friction with video responses to buyer questionsWhen stakeholders raise objections or technical questions, respond with a short video made in Vyond Go instead of a long email thread. Fast answers help protect deal velocity and reduce friction.
Check Out Our Sales Enablement Quickstart Kit
Support Complex Deals with Technical Enablement Videos
Use cases for technical pre-sales and sales engineering
Solution engineers play a critical role in deal protection: validating fit, answering technical questions, and ensuring smooth adoption post-sale.Vyond helps technical teams create clear, scalable content that supports both pipeline and retention.
10. Boost buyer confidence with simplified technical demosCombine animated storytelling and screen recordings in one video to help technical buyers understand not just how something works — but why it matters in their environment.
11. Support renewals with value-focused updatesEnablement doesn’t stop at the close. Feature release video updates help customers adopt faster, see value sooner, and stay engaged — increasing renewal likelihood.
How to create sales enablement videos quickly in Vyond Go
From onboarding to prospecting to renewal enablement, Vyond helps revenue teams communicate faster, stay aligned, and keep deals moving.
Ready to try it for yourself? Sign up for a free trial to explore Vyond Go, Vyond Studio, and our full library of templates. Or reach out to talk to one of our (highly enabled) reps:
Contact Sales
#### 12 Best Logo Maker and Creation Tools
Twitter has a bird, Nike a tick, and Apple an apple. All of these are instantly familiar icons. Your logo is one of the most recognizable things about your business. That’s why it needs to be simple, striking, and professional.
And, although you could work with an agency to create your logo, that route often proves expensive. Luckily, there are now great marketplaces like Upwork, Fiverr, and Designhill for freelance logo designers. If hiring someone is completely out of your budget, however, you’ll need an affordable alternative—like an online logo maker software.
Read on to understand the various logo-making options available, and learn how to create your own logo animation in Vyond.
Jump to sections:
12 best logo makers
How to animate your logo in Vyond
Try Vyond for Free
Logo maker tools 101
A logo maker is a software or web-based application with stock design templates, fonts, images, and more, so you can create a logo in minutes.
A small design budget is no excuse for not having a logo. There are plenty of low-cost logo makers that organizations can use to create custom, memorable logos.
Logo makers vary widely, so it’s important to know what you’re looking for in a program to meet your design needs.
User-friendliness: How easy is this logo maker to use? Consider your design skill level to make sure you pick a logo maker that you can use.
Professional: While saving money with logo makers is optimal, you don’t want to settle for a low-quality logo. Make sure that a logo maker has professional-grade designs to avoid downgrading your brand.
Customizable: With generic templates, you can’t create a memorable, stand-out logo for your brand. A logo maker should offer enough customization options to help you create a unique image.
Cost: While a logo maker is less expensive than hiring a designer, it’s important to check their fee structures to make sure the tool fits your budget.
To help you find the right logo maker, we’ll break down 18 tools by each of these factors. With this framework, you’ll be able to clearly assess each logo maker and decide which tool is the best fit for your brand and organization.
12 Best Logo Makers and Creation Tools
When it comes to logos, every organization has different design priorities. A more formal company, like a law firm, might care most about achieving a professional look, while a fashion store is going to focus on unique stylization.
Considering what your organization is looking for, you can assess each logo designing software based on our criteria. The quality is higher as the rating value increases.
user-friendliness (1-3)
professional (1-3)
customizable (1-3)
cost ($ – $$$)
Using this framework, find design tools with strengths that align with your organization’s priorities. Once you’ve chosen the best logo maker, you’ll be set to create a logo that fits your budget, enhances your brand, and draws people to your organization
1. Wix Logo Maker
If you have a sharp taste and are looking for a professional logo design, you may want to consider the Wix Logo Maker. Wix’s complementary drag-and-drop website builder can be bundled with the logo tool, making it a great choice for anyone building a brand from the ground up.
Start by sharing info like your business name and line of work, and the logo maker will automatically generate a range of logos to choose from. Then, customize the text, icon, and color palette to your liking.
If you have a more specific vision or want more customization, you can also use the tool to get matched with a professional designer.
The tool learns from what you like to create your design. It asks you to vote on a series of logos to better understand your preferences and taste.
It costs $49 to download basic logo files or $99 to download all versions (including vector versions). That price drops to $11-$24 per month when you sign up for one of Wix’s premium website plans.
Wix Logo Maker is a fantastic solution for anybody who lacks design skills but knows what they like. The wide-ranging but not-too-broad options for customizing your logo, make it easy to quickly create a professional-grade design.
Factor
Rating
User-friendliness
3
Professional
3
Customizable
2
Cost
$$$
2. Logo.com
Like many of the other input-based logo makers, logo.com‘s strength is speed and convenience rather than rich design capabilities.
After entering your company name, slogan, color palette, and industry type, Logo.com creates a variety of logos with different fonts, colors, and icons.
Each suggested logo is customizable with several layouts and color options.
Logos are offered for free, and logo.com offers more robust design tools for $10 a month or $96 a year.
Being able to create a logo so quickly and easily with logo.com is a big plus for those with a busy schedule and minimal design skills. With that said, Logo.com’s designs look somewhat simple with generic fonts and icons. If you have the ability to put more time and energy into your logo, other advanced logo makers may be better for creating a more polished look.
Factor
Rating
User-friendliness
3
Professional
1
Customizable
2
Cost
$
3. Adobe Illustrator
Illustrator —part of the Adobe Creative Suite—remains the kingpin of graphic design software and for good reason. It packs a punch with a host of features that give you control over every aspect of your logo design.
The pixel grid makes it easy to cleanly align objects.
The precise shape-building tools, brushes, and advanced path controls give you the freedom to create almost any graphic you can think of.
Perspective grids can help create realistic depth and distance.
When color needs to be used sparingly, gradients can be very effective. Illustrator enables interactions with gradients directly on an object. Users can even apply gradients to individual strokes while still controlling placement and opacity.
However, Illustrator, with so many advanced design tools, can be intimidating for beginners. It’s also a bit more expensive than most logo makers at $20.99 per month. If you’re new to graphic design, a more basic, low-cost program may be more up your alley.
Factor
Rating
User-friendliness
1
Professional
3
Customizable
3
Cost
$$$
4. Canva
Canva is a graphic design-tool website that’s used for logos as well as many other design projects. Its easy drag-and-drop editor along with its sleek, professional layouts make it a great choice for non-designers and professionals.
Canva has over a hundred templates to build and design logos easily.
Its drag-and-drop editor makes it easy to arrange elements—either Canva’s elements or your own uploaded graphics—within your logo template.
The templates are high-quality, so logos made with Canva tend to look professional.
The logo creation process is free if you use your own elements or Canva’s free elements. Additionally, they offer premium elements for $1 each and high-quality logo files when you try Canva Pro for $12.99/month.
Canva simplifies design, so it’s an especially great logo maker for those without experience. While it has fewer customization features than more advanced programs, the logos you create with Canva’s high-quality templates are bound to look stunning and professional.
Factor
Rating
User-friendliness
3
Professional
3
Customizable
2
Cost
$
5. Tailor brands
If you want to make minimal design choices, Tailor Brands‘ logo maker takes care of the work for you while still giving you plenty of professional logo options.
Based on which type of logo you want (image-based, text-based, etc.), Tailor Brands asks you a quick set of questions about your style preferences. From your input, they offer a variety of logo options.
Their templates look quite professional with uniquely designed fonts and a variety of colors.
You can access the logo with a basic $2.99 monthly plan or a premium $10.99 monthly plan.
You can only customize the logo if you’ve purchased it.
For those with little design experience, the professional templates and easy questionnaire process of Tailor Brands make it an ideal option. However, it’s slightly limited for those who want more design capabilities since you can only customize once you’ve purchased.
Factor
Rating
User-friendliness
2
Professional
3
Customizable
1
Cost
$$
6. Logo Design Studio Pro
Summitsoft’s Logo Design Studio Pro combines the best of both worlds with advanced design features and an affordable cost.
The logo maker has vector graphics and tools that allow you to change your logo to any size without losing sharpness or clarity.
It has over 2,000 customizable templates and over 6,000 vector shapes, images, fonts, or graphics. If you want even more designs, you can purchase an expansion pack for more templates.
There are plenty of special effects, such as lifting your logo from the canvas or adding a 3D bevel technique.
The cost is $29.99 for the first month, then $7.99/month. Or you can purchase a 30-day license for $49.99.
Logo Design Studio Pro has a rare combination of advanced design tools and a reasonable price tag. With that said, its features aren’t at the premium level of a tool like Adobe, so the designs look a tad unpolished and bare compared to top brands’ logos.
Factor
Rating
User-friendliness
2
Professional
2
Customizable
3
Cost
$$
7. Designhill
The Designhill logo maker is an ideal solution for someone who doesn’t want to handle individual design choices but wants a lot of logo options to choose from.
You select logo design styles, colors, and icons, and the tool generates a wide selection of custom logos based on your preferences.
There aren’t many customization options—mainly altering the colors and size shapes on the logo template.
The logo maker charges $20 for a low-resolution file of the logo and $65 for a high-resolution vector file.
With few customization options, Designhill is best for those who have little design experience looking for a quick, easy logo creator.
Factor
Rating
User-friendliness
3
Professional
2
Customizable
1
Cost
$$
8. Hatchful by Shopify
When you’re on the go, Hatchful is the ideal logo maker. Designed for mobile devices, this app uses machine learning to create brand assets for you.
The app comes with a wide selection of templates, so you can build a logo in minutes.
Using machine learning, Hatchful suggests logo designs based on your selected industry and other custom factors.
The app offers both free templates and premium templates for up to $8.99 each.
Designing on mobile can be restrictive. With a smaller screen, it’s difficult or impossible to create the complex logos that many professional brands have. At the same time, designing on mobile with Hatchful is great for convenience. If you need to create a quick logo for a last-minute project—a social media graphic, or event design—it’s nice to be able to quickly do so from your phone or tablet.
Factor
Rating
User-friendliness
3
Professional
2
Customizable
2
Cost
$
9. Squarespace logo maker
In addition to providing website-building software, Squarespace also offers a bare-bones logo creation tool. It’s one of the simplest tools on this list, so it’s a great choice for those with limited time or design skills.
Arrange text and icons in a drag-and-drop editor.
Text and icons are customizable by color, shape, and style.
Customization is limited since the only available elements are text and icons.
Low-res, watermarked versions can be downloaded for free, or you can download a high-res version for $10 (free if you’re a Squarespace member).
The strengths of Squarespace’s tool are immediacy and cost—you can quickly create a logo for little to no money. With that said, customization is challenging since the only elements are text and icons, and the lack of templates makes logo creation a challenge for non-designers.
Factor
Rating
User-friendliness
3
Professional
1
Customizable
1
Cost
$
10. Graphicsprings
GraphicSprings‘ logo maker offers both ease and convenience along with a few advanced features. You can easily create a logo in minutes or spend more time customizing and refining the logo if you’d like.
GraphicSprings automatically creates a logo for you based on the business name you enter and the industry-based graphic you select.
Once your logo is created, you can adjust more detailed effects—stroke, shadow, glow, and more—to create a more polished look.
There aren’t templates, so it can be difficult for those with little design experience to readjust the logo elements’ arrangement.
Once the logo is created, you can download a JPEG file for $19.99 or a high-quality vector file for $99.99
GraphicSprings is great for quick, affordable logo creation, and the fact that it has some advanced design tools and the ability to own a predesigned asset is a nice plus. But with no templates and a lack of more design elements, GraphicSprings is not the ideal choice for those who want to see and experiment with a variety of logo looks.
Factor
Rating
User-friendliness
2
Professional
2
Customizable
1
Cost
$$$
11. Logo Design
If you’re looking for drag-and-drop features with the flexibility of custom graphic design software Logo Design is for you.
Create your logo automatically or search for your desired symbol from over 5000 designs. Then customize your symbol by adding text, shapes, and effects like drop shadow, shine, gloss, stroke, or opacity.
The tool lets you customize symbols without logging in or paying. It’s only when you want to download it that it asks for $39. You can also download low-res versions for free.
Logos are $57 for two and $97 for three.
For those looking for a quick and easy fix, LogoDesign.net offers value for your money. With a long list of modern fonts and a variety of illustrative symbols, you are bound to get a logo that will match your business needs.
Factor
Rating
User-friendliness
3
Professional
2
Customizable
2
Cost
$$
12. DesignEvo
When we first stumbled across DesignEvo, we knew it merited a spot on this list. Their logo customization wizard includes thousands of high-quality logo templates that are wonderful to look at and easy to customize.
Preview your logo and make changes on the spot. Their tool is snappy and allows you to drag and drop any element you want.
Build your design quickly by using one of their 10,000+ templates. With such a wide selection, you’ll be able to find a style that fits your brand with no problems.
Get your choice of several low-cost options. You can download a low-quality file for free, or make a one-time purchase ($49.99-$99.99).
While DesignEvo, like others on this list, has a somewhat limited range of customization, it’s still a great fit for any business lacking a designer and the budget for a pricier solution.
Factor
Rating
User-friendliness
3
Professional
3
Customizable
2
Cost
$$
A Quick Refresher
Can’t remember each of these logo makers? Here’s a quick recap of the tools we covered:
Logo Maker
User-Friendliness
Professional
Customizable
Cost
Wix Logo Maker
3
3
2
$$$
Logo.com
3
1
2
$
Adobe Illustrator
1
3
3
$$$
Canva
3
3
2
$
Tailor Brands
2
3
1
$$
Logo Design Studio Pro
2
2
3
$$
Designhill
3
2
1
$$
Hatchful
3
2
2
$
Squarespace
3
1
1
$
GraphicSprings
2
2
1
$$$
Logo Design
3
2
2
$$
DesignEvo
3
3
2
$$
Try Vyond for Free
Boost Your Brand with a Dynamic Logo Creator
Logos aren’t just for large corporations. Thanks to online logo makers, any organization, big or small, can create logos that stand out and convey its style and mission.
We created this breakdown of 12 online logo makers so you can find the tool that’s best for your organization. Consider your own situation—your design skills, budget, and more—so you can find a logo maker with strengths that align with your specific needs. Have this design tool on hand, and you’ll be set to create a meaningful, appealing logo that attracts audiences to your brand.
About Vyond
Once you’re done generating your new logo, it’s time to animate it! Vyond allows people of all skill levels in all industries and job roles to create dynamic and powerful media. With features that go beyond moving text and images, you can build character-driven stories or compelling data visualizations that engage audiences and deliver results.
Sign up for a free trial and attend our bi-weekly tour of the Vyond Studio.
Watch and learn how to animate your logo in Vyond:
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#### 12 Video Ideas to Improve Company Culture
Working in HR, it’s easy to feel stretched thin when building a company culture. You’d love to interact with every job candidate and employee, but time, resource, and geographic constraints mean that’s often not possible.
Video removes those constraints and makes it possible to reach everyone and build a strong culture.
Powerful and flexible, video can promote your company culture anywhere, anytime. Whether you’re targeting candidates, new hires, or seasoned employees, you can create videos that build and strengthen your corporate community around every functional area of HR.
Building awareness: Introduce prospective candidates to your company with videos that highlight your company’s mission and explain different job roles.
Recruiting: Convince candidates to apply and accept their offers with videos that show the personal side of working at your company.
Onboarding: Help new hires feel at home with videos that connect them with the rest of the team and explain core principles of the job.
Ongoing development: Keep work meaningful and valuable for employees with videos that connect them to the company’s progress and recognize their contributions.
Benefits: Nurture your employees with videos about your company’s perks, such as wellness offerings and corporate discounts.
Creating a positive company culture is different for each HR function, so you need a versatile medium like video to tackle each one. Here are 12 powerful video ideas to build your company culture for every HR function, from recruiting to retention.
Build Awareness: Introduce Candidates to Your Culture
Say a job searcher likes what they see in your posting and they want to learn more about your company. They are unfamiliar with your business, so you need to interest them with the fundamental aspects of your culture, such as your company mission. Convey the essence of your culture in an authentic, compelling way and you’ll drive candidates to consider the role and submit an application.
Introduce yourself—Vyond
Your company values are the most essential aspect of your culture. They define what you believe in as an organization and what you hope to accomplish.
Inspiring and meaningful, these principles are the best way to introduce prospective candidates to your company. You can highlight your values with an “About Us” video.
By sharing your company’s values with video, you enable candidates to build a personal connection with your company purpose. Instead of just reading copy, they can hear a voice-over and see clips of your work to fully understand why they should be excited about working for you.
As an example, check out Vyond‘s own video on our About Us page.
Right away, founder Alvin Hung clearly states our core value—Vyond helps clients forge deeper relationships with all types of people, whether that’s a customer or a fellow employee. Viewers can see his and other employees’ expressions when they describe Vyond’s values, so their statements feel authentic.
With an About Us video that showcases your core beliefs, prospective candidates can quickly understand what your mission is and why it’s important, and they will be inspired to learn more.
A Day In the Life—J.P. morgan
Prospective hires can read your job descriptions to learn the details of the position, but text alone won’t give them a sense of the culture surrounding the role.
A “day in the life” video can show candidates the social norms of a position. By watching employees describe their tasks and how they interact with the rest of the company, candidates can assess whether they’d be a good fit for the job they are applying for.
As an example, J.P. Morgan released a day-in-the-life video featuring a corporate banker at the company.
Beyond describing the tasks of her role, this corporate banker explains what it’s like to work with her teams and clients and what life outside of the office is like.
After watching a day-in-the-life video, candidates will have a full sense of how the company culture relates to their role.
Get a few laughs—Dropbox
There’s value in bringing a professional demeanor to work, but a culture that feels too serious can de-energize employees and make work feel less fun.
Show candidates that your company can be lighthearted with a funny video about your business. Prospective hires will be more open to engaging with your company once they see that you don’t take yourself too seriously.
Dropbox, for example, shows a bit of humor with a work-culture video featuring puppets.
The characters alone can get a few laughs with their bulging eyes and crazy hairstyles. Plus, viewers might chuckle about a funny contradiction: the puppet “employees” keep talking about how much they love the people at Dropbox.
Warm candidates up to your company by showing a bit of humor through video. The end result will express the personal side of your business that candidates want to see.
Recruiting: Convince Candidates to Apply
After doing a bit of company research, candidates are ready to hear about the perks and programs that your business has to offer. Use video to explore why your company is a wonderful place to work. Seeing all of your business’ benefits, candidates will feel excited by the position and be eager to apply.
Show life outside of work—bamboo hr
Candidates care about more than their prospective job—they also want to have a fulfilling life outside of the office.
Showcase how great your company’s work-life balance is with a video about team members’ lives outside of the office. Seeing that you prioritize employees’ personal lives, candidates will appreciate your business even more.
The work–life balance at Bamboo HR shines through in their culture video.
The video doesn’t just blankly claim there’s a work–life balance—it actually shows clips of employees with their families, friends, and more to make the culture feel authentic.
Highlight your service work—Tom’s
People usually care about the greater impact of their work—which means they don’t want to work for a company only obsessed with turning a profit. Inspire candidates by showing them how you’re making a positive impact outside of the office with a video highlighting your service work.
The shoe company TOMS, for example, outlines the positive impact of their products with this vibrant video.
With a mixture of visuals and text, this video highlights the problem that TOMS focuses on—a lack of footwear—to help people around the world.
After watching a video about your company’s service work, your candidates will be eager to join a business that’s driven to make a positive impact.
Outline your benefits—HubSpot
Most people spend the majority of their week at work, so they’re not looking for a stuffy, cubicle-filled office—they want a comfortable, friendly environment that they’ll look forward to being in.
Show prospective hires that your company has a positive, exciting atmosphere with a video that highlights your perks. You can use film to not only highlight the benefits—such as snacks and cool office design—but also show how employees enjoy them.
HubSpot showcases all of their benefits to prospective hires with this video.
Instead of just listing perks, this video shows shots of the office, where there are plenty of benefits: snack rooms, video games, and more.
With a video about your perks, your benefits feel real and authentic to candidates. They can actually see the accommodations you provide, so they’re much more likely to understand your culture and apply for your position.
Onboarding: Helping New Hires Feel at Home
No matter how qualified they are, new hires need a proper introduction to your company with onboarding. This stage is where you can take a moment to connect the new hire with the rest of the company and make sure they feel comfortable in their new work environment. Here are a few video ideas to help new hires transition seamlessly into your company.
Have new hires introduce themselves—Vyond
As a new hire, introducing yourself to the rest of the company can be tough. Many other employees might not be in your department, or they might be located elsewhere if there are multiple offices or it’s a remote company.
To make them feel more integrated with the team, have new hires create a video bio to send throughout the company. This video helps the team feel more connected because everyone can quickly get to know new coworkers.
As an example, check out this video bio from one of Vyond‘s own employees, Sofala.
This bio serves as a great introduction, thanks to Sofala’s openness. Along with talking about her professional background, Sofala shares personal details to help other teammates build a connection with her.
Encouraging new hires to create a video bio is a fun, creative way for them to introduce themselves to the company. With this intro, these new employees will feel a bit more at home at your company.
Explain your diversity initiatives—Google
A strong workforce isn’t homogeneous—the best employees come from all types of backgrounds, ethnicities, identities, and more.
Make new hires feel welcome with videos that showcase your diversity. It’s not just about demonstrating that you have a diverse workforce—you want to show new hires that you actively support all employees.
As an example, check out this video by Google‘s Asia-Pacific offices, showing how the company supports women.
The women in this video describe multiple ways that Google supports them. Seeing the women’s sincerity, viewers get a feeling of authenticity from the video and can believe in the company’s diversity initiatives.
With a video that shows your support for all types of employees, new hires will feel welcome as they start out at your company.
Ongoing Development: Give Employees a Sense of Purpose
Once new hires become adjusted to working at your company, they’ll look for opportunities to grow and thrive in their position. Facilitate their development with videos that integrate them with the company’s larger goals and recognize the achievements they’ve made.
News announcements—Washington hospital
Employees value transparency—they want to feel like they’re a part of their company’s work, so they appreciate communication about your business’s news and updates.
To create a more inclusive, transparent environment, share videos about the latest company news and leadership discussions. Hearing the most recent updates will help employees feel more connected to the company and realize the impact they’ve made so far.
The Washington Township Health Care District, for example, posts videos of their board meetings for members of their hospital to see.
With complete transparency, this video shows exactly what leadership is discussing, so members of this hospital can stay updated and feel included in the district’s work.
By keeping employees up to date on your company news, your video can help them find more meaning in their work and see potential opportunities to become more involved.
Employee recognition—Lcph hospital
When your employees are doing a great job, it’s sometimes easy to forget that they still need recognition. Without acknowledging their work, employees can easily feel undervalued and disappointed in their role.
Show your team how much you appreciate their work with an employee-recognition video. It will motivate your seasoned employees as they see the positive difference their work makes.
As an example, Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital created a video to appreciate their wonderful staff.
The hospital went the extra mile in showing a wide range of customer testimonials about the strength of the employees, including recognition from celebrities Steve Carell, Condoleezza Rice, and Andrew Luck.
Share a heartfelt recognition video like this with your team and they’ll feel valued and realize how much of an impact they’ve made.
Benefits: Reward Employees for Their Hard Work
To stay motivated, employees need more than a paycheck—they also want amenities and fun activities at work. Highlight your perks with videos that outline your benefits to keep employees excited about coming to work.
Help employees stay healthy—Vyond
Employees appreciate when their workplace offers health initiatives. Jobs can often be stressful and time-consuming, so it comforts employees to know that their company cares about their well-being.
But instead of just putting up a flyer about healthy habits in the break room, you can engage employees a bit more with a video featuring healthy strategies. Focus on a specific issue and offer visual tips.
For example, this video was created by yoga and meditation teacher Lihi Benisty to teach Vyond employees how to minimize stress at work.
By teaching different health strategies, your video helps employees stay happy and well and appreciative of their workplace.
Host a competition—Vyond
There’s a reason why almost every office has a March Madness bracket—employees love competition! It makes the workplace feel a bit more fun and friendly, plus it gives team members a rewarding opportunity if they happen to win.
If your office is hosting a competition, get employees excited about it with a promotional video. Seeing visuals of the contest rules and rewards, your coworkers will be eager to participate.
Here at Vyond, for example, we created a video for our February Heart Healthy competition.
With visuals and a voice-over, the video gives employees a clear idea of the competition and why they should participate: potential prizes and the reward of a healthy heart.
Through this type of video, you build hype around your contest and make your workplace feel fun and lighthearted.
Build a Positive Company Culture with Video
Rather than solely rely on in-person efforts, it’s easier to build and promote the different aspects of company culture through video. Whether you’re dealing with onboarding or employee development, video allows you to communicate your culture at a meaningful level while also being versatile enough to address many different topics.
You can start using video to establish your culture with the 12 ideas in this post. Once you have these videos created, you’ll have a permanent showcase of content to build a positive culture with job candidates and employees in the future.
#### 14 Best Presentation Software Alternatives to PowerPoint
To create a powerful, dynamic presentation, you need software with rich media capabilities. And when you use presentation software with features other than just adding images and text, you increase your chances of holding your audience’s attention from start to finish. The challenge is that higher-quality presentations don’t equal more ROI unless you know how to use the software.
The following are 14 presentation software alternatives to PowerPoint. All but one are easy to learn and provide distinct features to solve various needs, making each the best presentation tool for a specific purpose.
We’ll also talk about how new AI-powered document to video generation tools make it possible to upload a PowerPoint presentation and transform it into an engaging presentation-style video.
Try Vyond for Free
14 Presentation Software Essential For Teams
1. Prezi Present: Best for non-linear presentations
Design library: 200+ templates for several industries and needs.
Shareability: You can send revocable share links to team members or friends for feedback. You can add collaborators with an email associated with a Prezi account to co-create a presentation.
Cost: The price varies depending on the number of projects you want to create and the functionalities you require. There is a free plan, a Plus plan for $15/month, and a Premium one for $19/month.
Compatibility: Prezi’s desktop app with offline access works on Windows and Mac. You can also use the Prezi Viewer app to view, present, and share (but not edit) presentations on your IOS or Android devices.
Prezi lets you create a non-linear story, meaning you don’t have to go from slide A to B to C. Instead, you can jump straight into the section that interests your audience the most and avoid boring them with other data.
Prezi’s interactive presentations continuously prompt viewers to keep watching. For example, you can first share a bird’s-eye view of what the presentation will cover as an introduction. Then, you can zoom in to specific topics to further teach your audience about a problem, new product, or idea.
2. Vyond: Best for engaging video presentations
Design library: Hundreds of fully customizable templates in a variety of mixed media, avatar-focused and animated styles.
Shareability: Teams can work on the same project simultaneously. You can also work together asynchronously by uploading assets, custom templates, and characters into each project.
Cost: The Starter plan starts at $58 a month , the Professional plan at $100 a month and our Enterprise plan at $137 a month. Visit Vyond’s Pricing and Plans page for more details.
Compatibility: Vyond is a browser-based software you can access via Windows and Mac.
According to Kaltura, 98% of enterprise professionals think videos are better and faster at training employees. Vyond lets you quickly create engaging presentations in a variety of video formats proven to increase learning retention.
Here are three ways to make video presentations in Vyond:
Drag a PowerPoint presentation into Vyond Go, our instant script and video generator, select the content you want to use as fodder, generate a video draft in the format and visual style you want, and edit as needed
Grab a video presentation template from our Vyond Video Template library, customize as you see fit, and share
Go into Vyond Studio and craft a presentation from scratch
In addition to creating full video presentations, you can also quickly create custom GIFs and video snippets using Vyond Go and then embed them into traditional click-through PowerPoint presentations.
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3. Zoho Show: Best for teams that don’t care about fancy design
Design library: 59 free templates built for businesses across industries.
Shareability: You can collaborate in real-time with teammates, tag them to notify them of a change you just made, and comment on areas that need some context.
Cost: Free.
Compatibility: Zoho Show works on all Android and Mac devices, from laptops to phones to TVs.
Zoho Show is presentation software that uses an uncluttered interface so you can focus on organizing your ideas. There are animation tools too, which help you make portions of your presentation stand out. While it doesn’t offer interactive options, it’s perfect for teams that need to create a simple presentation in the least amount of time.
4. Beautiful.ai: Best for teams conscious about time and design
Design library: There are 62 templates. Each focuses on one use case, like pitching a company idea or presenting a case study.
Shareability: You can work with teammates and add comments to your presentation if you have a Teams account. Once the slides are ready, you can present them from your browser.
Cost: The $12 per month plan lets you create unlimited slides and track analytics. For $40 a month, you can edit presentations with your team, create custom template libraries, and more.
Compatibility: You can show and edit presentations through your browser.
Beautiful.ai is presentation software for teams that need to deliver high-quality presentations fast. Its artificial intelligence rearranges your slide’s elements so they’re clear, appealing, and sized correctly based on their importance. The active AI lets you create presentations in less time without worrying about design principles.
5. Soapbox: Best for teams creating content in bulk
Design library: Soapbox doesn’t have a library of design assets. However, you can customize the color of the video player, the thumbnail, and your video’s page with your logo.
Shareability: Anyone with a link to your video can see it. Since recordings happen in real-time, there’s no way to collaborate unless a teammate sits next to you.
Cost: Free for teams with basic needs, like recording and sharing videos. Starting at $300 a year, you’ll be able to track how viewers interact with your videos and book meetings straight from them.
Compatibility: You can record Soapbox videos from Windows and Mac. Anyone with a smartphone or PC can watch them.
Soapbox is a presentation software you can access from your browser. You can use it to record yourself, your computer screen, or both.
It takes just two clicks to record, making Soapbox ideal to create product or content videos in bulk. For example, you can organize your background, write a list of topics on a piece of paper, and then record videos for many departments, such as sales, HR, and marketing.
Unlike other tools, you won’t have to create slides or charts. You can hit record and cover the topic from your seat.
6. Canva: Best for teams looking for designer features
Design library: Canva contains thousands of templates and millions of stock images, videos, audio, and graphics. While not every template is for presentations, you can use their Pro plan’s resize tool to take graphics from one template to another.
Shareability: You can share and collaborate with others while creating your presentation.
Cost: You can access most of Canva’s features for free. You gain access to a larger stock image and video library, elements, auto-publishing features, and more for $119/year. They also offer customized pricing options.
Compatibility: Canva works on Windows, iOS, Mac, and Android devices.
Canva is the leading all-in-one design tool for non-designers. You can create eye-grabbing infographics, include engaging images, and position your elements exactly how you want without ever leaving the platform. Their templates are professional and carefully crafted, letting you stand out from competitors without using external design tools.
7. Google Slides: Best for teams migrating from PowerPoint
Design library: 23 themes that change your slide’s colors, typography, and layout.
Shareability: You can share presentations with team members and work on them at the same time.
Cost: Free.
Compatibility: Windows, Android, Mac, and iOS devices.
Google Slides is a presentation software anyone can use because of its intuitive interface. Since it’s free and available on all devices, it takes teams just a few clicks to start collaborating, no matter the device they use. The browser-based app is the ideal presentation software for teams ready to leave PowerPoint but not ready to learn more complex features.
8. Keynotes: Best for native presentations on Mac and iOS
Design library: 30 captivating themes.
Shareability: Teams can present and collaborate on slides as long as they are Mac or iOS users. You can also download Keynote files as PowerPoint files to work with PowerPoint users.
Cost: Free.
Compatibility: Keynote is compatible with Mac and iOS devices.
Keynote is a great option for Mac users who want access to templates—and not themes—for visually appealing presentations. It integrates with iOS apps and devices to create presentations faster. For example, you can add colors and comments to presentations using your iPad’s Apple Pencil.
The ability to turn Keynote files into PowerPoint presentations allows Mac lovers to cooperate with teammates on the platform each one likes the most. Its similarity with PowerPoint and Google Slides also allows for a simple transition between presentation apps.
9. SlideDog: Best for those indecisive about which software to use
Design library: SlideDog doesn’t offer a template or design library.
Shareability: The audience can see SlideDog slides, ask questions, share feedback, and answer polls directly from their device. All you need to do is share the presentation link.
Cost: There is a basic option available for free. For $19 a month, you can present offline, receive free software upgrades, and use SlideDog on two devices simultaneously.
Compatibility: You can access SlideDog from any web browser.
SlideDog’s value proposition is the ability to combine multimedia assets with presentations from Prezi and PowerPoint. While you won’t create a presentation with SlideDog alone, this feature lets you use each platform’s most engaging attributes. Integrating assets enables you to show a unique presentation without distracting your audience by switching tabs.
10. Ludus: Best for creative teams
Design library: You can import assets from popular design media services like Unsplash, Iconscout, and Giphy without leaving the platform. Ludus also offers self-made and community-made templates you can use.
Shareability: You can collaborate in real-time with team members. Once the presentation is ready, you can choose a custom URL and domain to present your work.
Cost: $14.99 a month per user up to 15 people. Teams of 16 or more users need to request a quote.
Compatibility: You can access Ludus from your computer’s browser.
Ludus is a presentation software geared for designers who want complete control over how everything looks. Ludus has a learning curve for non-designers, but it’s straightforward for those used to design tools like Sketch and Figma. Like other software, you’ll be able to include images, videos, and text. You’ll also be able to create reusable assets, edit elements’ corner radii, and access other features designers give up when using other presentation tools.
Type and font lovers can set a specific cap line, line height, and spacing for their text elements. Those who work with shapes can give them borders and shadows and turn them into overlays.
11. FlowVella: Best for interactive presentations
Design library: FlowVella offers dozens of templates designed by professionals.
Shareability: You can play FlowVella presentations using any browser.
Cost: The free version lets you have four public presentations in your account. You can access the $10 or $20 per month plan for more presentations, privacy, and features.
Compatibility: FlowVella has apps for iOS. Windows users can use it through a browser.
FlowVella lets you create presentations that operate like websites. You can include videos, PDFs, and a navigation bar to show your audience various media without leaving your presentation. The interactive features also give viewers the option to learn more about the topics that interest them the most once the presentation is over.
During events, it’s common for booth hosts to talk to multiple people at once. Multitasking can cause hosts to unknowingly ignore a lead. FlowVella’s Kiosk mode lets you show presentations event visitors can interact with but not alter, answering their questions and keeping their interest in buying from you.
12. Visme: Best for managing all design operations from one software
Design library: Thousands of presentation templates people across all industries can use. The app also has millions of images, audio files, and videos you can use to create a presentation precisely as you envision it.
Shareability: You can share a project to receive feedback or edits from your team. Their most complete plan offers personalized roles, which you can use to organize your entire presentation crew.
Cost: Free option with limited templates and design assets. The $15 and $29 per month plans let you export presentations in more formats, access the entire design library, and store more files in the cloud.
Compatibility: Visme works on every device that can access a browser.
Visme is a suite of design assets for non-designers. It’s perfect for teams that want to centralize their design operations, as it offers a wide range of valuable tools for many departments.
Visme has customizable animated icons, images, charts, and characters you can use to create presentations that look and sound like your brand. While the presentation maker has more functionality than PowerPoint, it’s intuitive enough for anyone to learn Visme’s basics in just a few minutes.
13. Vidyard: Best for sales teams finding leads
Design library: Vidyard doesn’t have a design library.
Shareability: Teammates can access your company’s video folder and share your videos for you.
Cost: Free for those who want to record and share videos. Teams that wish to include calls-to-action for prospects or security features will need one of three paid plans, ranging from $15 a month to $1,250 a month.
Compatibility: You can record videos using an iPhone, Android, or your browser.
Vidyard is a browser extension and app to record sales-oriented video presentations. These videos will help you stand out from canned cold emails, building trust with prospects and getting them to watch what you offer.
You can also use Vidyard to present precise answers to a prospect’s objections or follow up with the steps they should follow after becoming a customer. Thanks to its engagement analysis features, you can track the number of viewers who act after watching your video. You can then export this data directly to your CRM to see the ROI from video prospecting.
14. Loom: Best for internal communications
Design library: Loom doesn’t have a design library.
Shareability: Teammates can watch your videos if they have the link. Then, they can film their Loom videos commenting on yours to communicate asynchronously.
Cost: It’s free to record and present Loom videos. But you’ll need the $8 a month plan for engagement insights, transcriptions, and closed captions.
Compatibility: You can use Loom on Mac, Windows, iOS, and Android.
Loom offers video editing features like filler word removal to make your presentation unambiguous and concise. The drawing tool and mouse emphasis feature also help you bring attention to your presentation’s most essential data. These tools make Loom ideal to create a database of clear internal use videos, like presentations about job expectations or your company culture.
These videos give managers time to focus on more critical tasks and employees the ability to re-watch internal information as many times as it takes to assimilate it.
Note: If you like the functionality of Loom, but want it bundled as part of a more diverse video creation platform, Vyond has you covered.
Create more dynamic presentations with Vyond
Whether you want to create custom images or video clips to add to your presentations or transform static content into engaging video presentations, Vyond has you covered. Either use our instant script and video creator, Vyond Go; our deep template library, or Vyond Studio’s drag and drop interface to create presentations that are eye-catching, personalized, and effective.
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What’s the easiest way to create a video presentation?
Vyond is one of the best tools out there for creating presentation-style videos quickly and easily. Vyond lets you turn scripts or slide content into a wide range of videos without needing any video production skills. You can easily add motion graphics, custom characters and avatars, branded assets, your own photos or video clips, and professional-quality animated elements in just a few clicks. Unlike traditional video creation tools, Vyond is built for speed—and is versatile enough to create any style of video you need, in a format that reflects your personality or your company brand.
How do I turn a PowerPoint into a video?
With Vyond Go, you can upload a PowerPoint (as well as a PDF, Word document, or URL) and use elements of it to create an original video. The video can be a simple walkthrough of your slides or capture the main ideas in a “talking head,” narration, or conversation format.
Can you use Vyond to create images and GIFs for presentations as well?
Yes! Vyond is designed primarily for creating videos, but you can definitely use it to create short animated GIFs and images to improve your presentations. To make a GIF, just select and copy the scene(s) into a new timeline, click Export/Download, and select GIF as your preferred format. As for images, our generative AI Text to Image and Text to Avatar features let you create images in a variety of styles by simply typing in what you want. Or if there are elements in your videos you want to display as an image, you can screengrab those as well.
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#### 16 Top Web Accessibility Resources for 2022
The World Health Organization estimates over 1 billion people experience disability. These people may encounter challenges when visiting websites that aren’t accessible. Those with hearing impairments can’t watch videos to learn about products if they don’t have captions. Meanwhile, color-blind people can’t navigate websites where they perceive every element to have a similar color.
There are many disabilities out there. As a result, it’s impossible to guess which design, word, or code choices will hinder someone from finding the products and information they need. Use the following 16 resources to make your website accessible to everyone. This unrestricted access keeps visitors and customers coming back and helps you attract new ones.
Jump to a section:
1. W3C’s WCAG quick reference guide
2. W3C’s guide to video accessibility
3. A11Y Project’s checklist
4. AccessiBe
5. AudioEye
6. User1st
7. Perkins Access
8. TPGI’s Colour Contrast Analyser (CCA)
9. #NoMouse Challenge
10. Harvard’s caption and description principles
11. Inclusive Design for a Digital World: Designing with Accessibility in Mind by Reginé Gilbert
12. Accessibility for Everyone by Laura Kalbag
13. Web Accessibility Specialist (WAS) Certification
14. The University of Illinois’ Information Accessibility Design and Policy (IADP) course
15. Article on the Downsides of Person-First Language (PFL)
16. eLearning Accessibility: Improving the learning experience
1. W3C’s WCAG quick reference guide
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) shares the standards website owners should follow to keep the web evolving. They wrote a reference guide that lists accessibility terms and explains their importance. Teams that know about web accessibility can use the guide to remember what they should do without reading thousands of words. When you use W3C’s reference guide, you follow the most credible source in the space.
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are principles to make the internet more useful to everyone. The W3C establishes them with the help of individuals and governments worldwide. Their reference guide is constantly updated, meaning you can trust it to provide the best advice to make your website accessible for everyone.
The guide is skimmable. You can quickly jump between sections and see when W3C adds updated items. Visit the page frequently to see if there are new ways to improve your content.
2. W3C’s guide to video accessibility
Most people prefer watching brand videos over other types of content. W3C wrote a guide on making videos accessible for people with hearing, speech, and visual impairments. You lose potential customers when these people can’t view your videos.
The resource covers the entire video production process. Once you’re ready to produce, apply its lessons to create high-quality and accessible descriptions, captions, and video content anyone can enjoy. Each of these steps has its own page with links to even more resources. Making an accessible video is easy, even if you’re following these principles for the first time.
Try to apply most of its tips. Fewer people will leave your website because they can now watch the videos. More viewers mean greater chances of turning video viewers into fans or customers.
3. A11Y Project’s checklist
The A11Y Project teaches companies how to make their websites more inclusive. Their WCAG compliance checklist helps you build a website anyone can read or listen to. Instead of telling you to do the hundreds of potential accessibility changes, it presents the most impactful actions you can take.
Items comply with two of the three levels of accessibility compliance:
The A level covers the bare minimum you should take to make your website easy to navigate.
The AA level has actions many public bodies and governmental sites must take to make their websites compliant.
The checklist divides actions into categories, like audio, appearance, and color. Each task has a dropdown menu with instructions and prompts that explain how to do them. The explanations are concise, actionable, and easy to follow.
Doing every task will make your website more pleasant for anyone to navigate and will ensure that people with disabilities will be able to work with you after learning about your products or services.
4. AccessiBe
AccessiBe is an accessibility testing software that analyzes whether your website is accessible. If it’s not, their AI adjusts your website’s look and content so that people with disabilities can use it.
The process is automatic. You paste the code they give you into your website and wait 48 hours. After that time, your website will meet screen reading, keyboard navigation, and web accessibility laws.
The software re-scans your website every day to detect visual or code changes you made in the last 24 hours. It will adjust these elements if anything is not accessible. You can edit your website knowing AccessiBe always supports you.
5. AudioEye
AudioEye is a dashboard that shows accessibility problems on your site and offers advice on how to fix them. They have 15+ years in the space, so they have the expertise and knowledge to help you solve all of your accessibility issues.
Their tools and professional counsel can also help you avoid legal problems. They spot potential issues and help you solve them before people see them. If you already have a legal challenge, their team will act as an advisor and help you work through it. This support means you’ll never be alone if you face a lawsuit.
6. User1st
User1st does website audits that spot accessibility issues. You can learn to fix these problems by yourself or let their team of experts train you on how to do so. Training your team in this area allows them to assist customers with specific accessibility needs.
This knowledge also means you won’t always have to rely on tools, plugins, or experts to make your site accessible—you can do it all yourself. You can use the money you save for further training or more urgent tasks. If you do need to hire someone to improve your accessibility, you’d have the knowledge to tell if they’re doing a good job.
7. Perkins Access
Perkins Access reviews website sketches and shares tips to make the finished website accessible. The review process starts early, before you write a single line of code. Doing this as the first step and not after launching your site means you’ll save money and time redesigning a website that isn’t accessible.
Their mockup review process also helps you choose the right font size, colors, images, and CTAs, among other web elements. These guidelines ensure your website is accessible from the get-go. They also allow you to guide users toward your page’s most relevant sections, leading to more sales.
8. TPGI’s Colour Contrast Analyser (CCA)
You can use TPGI’s free Colour Contrast Analyzer to ensure your website’s colors contrast well. When colors are too similar, people struggle to distinguish elements and read text. People with visual impairments have an even more difficult time and are often unable to use your site.
Overlooking these individuals’ needs means ignoring the WCAG’s required contrast levels. Companies can face legal issues because of this. Meanwhile, those in the private sector will miss out on potential customers. If a person can’t navigate your website, they can’t inquire about your products.
The contrast checker makes your website accessible by telling you if two colors are too similar. You can experiment with similar hues, tones, and shades of your added colors. This lets you find a color like the one you want to use but that contrasts enough with other colors to be clearly different.
9. #NoMouse Challenge
Some people have disabilities that make using a mouse challenging. The #NoMouse Challenge tests if you can use your website features like menus, buttons, and dialogs with just your keyboard.
A keyboard is all you need to simulate a mouse-free page session. Press Tab to see if the page transitions from one link, form, or button to the next. Or press Shift + Tab to see if it moves to the previous one. If you fail the test, you can scroll to the bottom of the page to find solutions to navigation issues.
10. Harvard’s caption and description principles
Harvard’s brief guide explains how to use transcriptions, captions, and descriptions so people who can’t hear videos can still watch them. Ignoring these guidelines makes it more difficult for people with disabilities to watch your videos and costs you potential customers.
But these principles don’t only help people with disabilities. According to Verizon, 92% of consumers watch videos with their phone’s sound off. You can use captions to capture the attention of those who can’t hear well or simply wish to watch on mute.
The guide has links to comprehensive articles that explain how to include captions and descriptions. These articles include step-by-step guidance on how to do it yourself and tips on hiring someone to do it for you. They cover the most common video and audio formats, so their suggestions will help you with your project.
The guide has a section with three questions you can ask yourself to see if your video is accessible. Apply the page’s lessons until the answer to every question is positive.
11. Inclusive Design for a Digital World: Designing with Accessibility in Mind by Reginé Gilbert
Regine Gilbert’s book presents tools and steps to design an accessible app or website. This information is based on her ten years of experience working as a user experience designer and researching digital accessibility and inclusive design.
The book includes case studies that walk you through accessibility problems. You learn the nuances behind these challenges, what causes them, and how an expert solves them. This level of detail gives you a comprehensive understanding of these situations. By the time you encounter them in your workdays, you’ll be able to solve them confidently.
12. Accessibility for Everyone by Laura Kalbag
Web designer and developer Laura Kalbag teaches you how to plan and test accessible design in Accessibility for Everyone. She first summarizes the accessibility needs and landscape. Then, Kalbag provides more advanced instructions on how to write accessible code.
Writing accessible code is necessary because some people rely on software to navigate websites. This software reads the page’s code to know where to move. If your code isn’t accessible, assistive technologies won’t detect elements such as menus, buttons, or sliders, so people with disabilities won’t be able to access them, even if someone using a mouse or keyboard can.
13. Web Accessibility Specialist (WAS) Certification
The WAS certification exam tests people’s knowledge of advanced accessibility topics. It goes beyond basic accessibility rules. For instance, they test whether the person can identify accessibility issues in the code and whether they can predict the consequences of a design decision.
It’s possible to not answer every question correctly. If that’s the case, look back at the questions you didn’t answer well, research these topics, and implement what you learn to provide a more pleasant website experience for your visitors.
The test is challenging. Passing it allows you to show stakeholders that you can direct the company’s accessibility efforts. This trust may make them more likely to invest in the projects you pitch.
14. The University of Illinois’ Information Accessibility Design and Policy (IADP) course
Sometimes you need more hands-on guidance to help you master tricky subjects like accessibility design. The IADP course starts by teaching basic accessibility topics like design principles. It then moves into advanced concepts like emerging media-rich design trends. The comprehensive syllabus makes the course suitable for those who need to get up to speed with accessibility needs.
The program is divided into three areas, taking you from basic concepts to advanced tactics as you progress. This sequence lets you learn about a topic, apply its lessons, and test each area’s tips. It also allows people newly introduced to web accessibility to grasp the fundamentals before diving into complex topics.
15. Article on the Downsides of Person-First Language (PFL)
Disability rights activist Emily Ladau argues that person-first language may offend people with disabilities. This is because person-first language separates the person from the disability. For example, you would call a person who can’t hear “a person who is deaf,” leading with the word person and then saying the disability.
Ladau asserts that, while this wording aims to fight stigma, it actually amplifies it. It implies someone can only be a whole person if you separate them from their disability. A better alternative is to use identity-first language. A person who is deaf would be a “deaf person” in this language. According to Landau, identity-first language is not derogatory.
Ladau has found that deaf and autistic people prefer it when others call them autistic or deaf. This is because these traits are part of their identity. Separating them from the person means treating them as shameful.
The essay shares actionable advice to replace person-first language with identity-first language. It also provides principles to follow whenever you’re interacting with these people.
16. eLearning Accessibility: Improving the learning experience
This past Omniplex webinar discussed how to create online courses anyone can learn from. The lessons came from their experience training professionals in the learning and development space. As a result, the webinar covered the impairments people should keep in mind when designing their courses.
The company partnered with companies that provide tools to help experts in the space:
Creating online courses
Managing learning material
Creating virtual learning experiences
This broad knowledge of what helps people learn allows Omniplex to easily answer complex questions.
Use Vyond to create accessible videos
You can use Vyond to animate engaging videos that grab and maintain every visitor’s attention. Our asset gallery has hundreds of props, characters, and sounds you can use to create any situation. Adding familiar scenarios to your courses or videos helps viewers put themselves in the character’s shoes. When they face a similar situation, they’ll act according to what they’ve learned.
Once you have your video ready, follow the resources from this article to include captions, sounds, transcriptions, and other elements that make a video accessible.
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#### 19 Types of Sales Enablement Content to Win More Deals
Is your sales force drowning in information overload from tedious training sessions? There’s a better way to equip them for success. And that’s through engaging sales enablement content.
Sales reps have a lot to remember—like every feature, use case, target audience, nuance, and persona to name a few. Access to sales enablement content that’s clear, memorable, consistent across teams, easy to access, and simple to share makes a hard job a little easier.
In this guide, you’ll discover effective types of sales enablement content so you can train your sellers effectively and start closing more deals. You’ll also see the breadth of formats being used today, and more importantly, what types are best for what contexts.
Here’s an overview of what you’ll learn in this guide:
What is sales enablement content?
Why is sales enablement content important?
19 types of sales enablement content
What is sales enablement content?
Sales enablement content is content that makes the sales process more successful, persuasive, and effective. It encompasses a range of resources that help sellers perform efficiently so they can win more business. Some popular examples include compelling videos, playbooks, and outbound email templates.
While high-quality sales enablement content will help sales pros improve their effectiveness, it adds value in other ways as well.
Why is sales enablement content important?
Sales is a team sport. Every sales team member sees benefits from the right kind of sales enablement content:
Sales trainers can use onboarding videos to help prepare new hires for their roles, as well as sales scripts and sales playbooks and scripts for sellers of any tenure.
Sales development representatives (SDRs) and business development representatives (BDRs) can more effectively educate customers and drive sales with a wide variety of content types, including one-pagers and presentation decks.
Technical sales professionals can show the depth of a product’s features and benefits with explainer videos and product sheets.
Effective sales enablement content results in stronger client relationships and more deals, regardless of which type your team uses. However, it pays to understand your options before deciding which types are right for your organization (and when to use them).
19 types of sales enablement content
Here are the key types of sales enablement content that can help your team drive revenue growth:
1. Training or onboarding videos
Move beyond canned training videos and static PowerPoints. Create custom training or onboarding videos that help sales reps learn how to do their jobs, evangelize your products and services, and connect with prospects and clients. Animated videos are particularly effective at engaging new reps, explaining tricky concepts, and delivering scenario-based training content.
Some common examples of training or onboarding videos include:
Competitive analysis videos, illustrating the competitive landscape
Persona videos that help sellers understand their target audience
Pitch videos to help sellers visualize real-life situations
Process videos explaining each step of your company’s sales process
Hard/soft skill training videos to help your team use technology or close deals more effectively
Unlike other training tools, software that creates custom videos can help you speak directly to your team’s needs and demonstrate best practices in a way that standard presentations can’t manage.
Here are some tips for making effective onboarding videos:
Know your message: What is this video about? What’s your objective?
Keep it concise: Focus on your main message and avoid unnecessary details.
Customize your content to your audience: An onboarding video will have a very different angle than a tech training video for experienced sales reps.
Use multimedia: Incorporate visuals, sound effects, animation, etc., to engage your audience. AI-powered video tools make it easy for non-technical staff to create videos that grab users’ attention.
Tell a story: Know where you want to take your audience and let the content support the journey.
Discover more about improving employee training with video with this free eBook!
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2. Product explainer videos
What’s better than telling your clients about your products? Showing your clients how your products work. Product explainer videos demonstrate the value of what you’re selling. Use them alone or embedded in your pitch deck.
Product explainer videos are short, targeted videos demonstrating a product or a service. According to 2023 data from HubSpot, 96% of marketers say these videos help boost consumer understanding of products.
Common use cases for explainer videos include:
Prospecting
Sales pitches
Social media marketing
Email campaigns
Addressing objections
Plus, once you have a solid explainer video to share, you can use it in multiple places, from your company website to social media to client calls.
Introduction and upselling videos are other helpful variations of explainers. For example, introducing yourself via video enables you to develop relationships with prospects before you even have your first sales call. And with upselling, the dynamic and engaging possibilities of video explainers make it easy to engage loyal customers and persuade them to expand their accounts.
To ensure your explainer video is impactful, keep it short—two minutes or less should do it. Know your audience and your message and target your content. Above all, avoid cluttering your video with too much imagery or special effects. You want your audience to walk away thinking about your message, not the bells and whistles.
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3. Sales playbooks
Every sales team hopes to provide a consistent—and satisfying!—experience to all their customers. Sales playbooks ensure that sellers can deliver just that. These documents compile best practices and sales documents like pricing sheets, making this information readily accessible to sales reps.
Sales playbooks also function as continuing education for sellers. Whether a sales rep has just joined your organization or has been on the team for years, they can learn something from your sales playbook. Think of it as a repository for the collective wisdom of your team, and a road map for navigating common sales challenges in real time.
But these playbooks are only as good as the effort you put into them. To ensure maximum effectiveness, ask your best sales reps to contribute their insights. And don’t forget to integrate your playbook into your training and onboarding programs.
4. eBooks
What are your target buyers’ most pressing questions? Ebooks are your opportunity to answer those queries and gather that essential intelligence in one easily accessible and shareable place.
Typically 3,000 words or less, ebooks can have multiple functions. You can use them like a blog post on steroids or as a thought leadership vehicle for an executive. They can also act as an FAQ for common questions or a tool at the top of the sales funnel, driving email subscriptions or prospects.
To create effective ebooks that drive leads and build customer relationships, remember your audience’s pain points and goals. What do they need most? A good ebook will be guided by this principle. Also, consider visuals: a chart or graph may help make your point better than several static paragraphs.
5. Case studies
Nothing is more persuasive than success. Case studies allow you to show your customers what your product can do by showing what your product has already done for other companies in the industry.
Case studies can use a variety of formats, from traditional blog articles to testimonial videos to presentations. You can also combine these types, for example, embedding video into a PowerPoint to create a dynamic, engaging demonstration.
Regardless of the form, case studies accomplish one very important thing: they demonstrate concrete results.
To create a compelling case study, you need several things:
An impressive customer: You don’t need Fortune 500 clients to make an effective case study, but ideally, you’ll feature organizations with name recognition in your industry or area.
A big problem: The most persuasive case studies document the resolution of big issues–production bottlenecks, major cultural challenges, technical silos, or similar.
A remarkable solution: Clients want to see measurable change that’s directly attributable to your product.
Demonstrable results: Faster results, money saved, and stress avoided are common ones. Bonus points if you can include statistics.
Evidence that you can recreate the magic: Don’t forget to drive home the point that your organization can achieve these results for other customers.
6. White papers
White papers are in-depth, meticulously researched documents that often focus on highly technical material.
While white papers demonstrate how your product solves customer problems, they’re not intended to convert customers on the spot. Rather, they support your organization’s position as an authority on a topic. Any persuading that happens is (nearly) incidental, although white papers can generate leads or build email lists, similar to ebooks. White papers can be targeted either at customers or sales reps.
Remember that this type of content is intended to provide value to readers. Focus on solving their most common and pressing problems. You might also address industry trends, thought leadership, or research.
Above all, ensure that your content is readable and easy to scan. Incorporate visuals and pay attention to layouts and formatting.
7. Webinars
Want to show your customers how your products can solve their problems and achieve their goals? Consider hosting a webinar.
This type of sales enablement content is incredibly effective for explaining how things work—especially if you have subject matter experts who can demonstrate how to use your product or service.
Webinars typically last 60 minutes or less and can be prerecorded or shown live. You can also integrate this content into your other materials. For example, use clips from a webinar as part of a sales presentation.
To maximize your webinars’ effectiveness, ensure you have the right experts on board. You can use someone from your staff or an outside expert who is passionate and knowledgeable about your product.
8. Email templates
If you’re looking to save time, ensure messaging continuity, and improve communication with clients, email templates can help.
Unlike most of the other sales enablement content types on our list, email templates are internal. Intended only for sales reps and other employees, email templates serve as a blueprint for communications with customers and prospects.
Your organization might develop email templates for several reasons:
Cold outreach
Follow-ups
Re-engagements
Meeting requests
Thank you notes
The best thing about email templates is that they can be flexible—and in fact, they should be to ensure that your team gets the most use out of them. Provide plenty of customization options, and remember to invest in training your team to use these materials.
9. One-pagers
Think of one-pagers as an elevator pitch for your organization (or one specific product or service you offer). In one concise page, you sum up your value proposition in an easily understandable way.
One-pagers can target many different audiences. You can make separate one-pagers for clients, investors, and even other departments or branches. Share them digitally before or after sales calls and stock hard copies in your booth at tradeshows.
To create effective one-pagers, know your audience—and use your limited space wisely. Identify your audience’s pain points, concerns, goals, and key questions before you sit down to write.
The visual presentation of your one-pagers is as important as the text. So make sure they’re easy to read and understand.
10. Presentation decks
Presentation decks have evolved past the static PowerPoints of the past. You can now enhance or replace decks with video elements and incorporate GIFs and other visual effects to tell your story and connect with your audience. And there’s good reason to—a 2023 study found that video can help your viewers retain up to 95% of your message compared to just 10% when text! You can use these new and improved presentation decks in sales training, onboarding, customer calls, and more.
There are two important things to keep in mind when preparing presentation decks. First, make sure you’re addressing your audience’s concerns and goals. Second, consider developing easily customizable templates for future presentations (or to share with your team).
Want to create more engaging PowerPoint presentations by embedding video clips? Here’s how to do it.
11. Testimonials
Sharing simple customer testimonials is another effective way to win over prospects.
Partner with your colleagues in Customer Success to source these endorsements, and always double-check that you have the customer’s permission to publicly share their praise. (Nothing sours a customer relationship faster than compromising their trust.) Use them broadly—in proposals and sales presentations, as well as on customer-facing websites and social media.
While getting a “quote” is great, a video clip is even more powerful. Ask enthusiastic clients if they’re willing to vouch for you on a Zoom call as opposed to a standard phone call. That footage can then be edited into a polished video testimonial later and repurposed into a variety of other media formats, including quotes with headshots for your website, short video clips for social media, and so on. (Here’s a good example.)
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12. Sales battlecards
How do your products stack up against your competitors? Sales battlecards make it easy to answer this question.
Usually a brief one-pager—sometimes with visual elements like comparison charts—sales battlecards provide easily digestible competitive analysis for your sellers and sales support staff. These are internal documents only and can exist on their own or as part of your sales playbook.
Sales battlecards often focus primarily on your company’s products and services. Generally, these cards outline customer pain points and methods of addressing them, especially in the context of how your product solves their problems better than competitor solutions.
All sales battlecards can be used as training materials, fodder for sales pitches, or ongoing educational resources.
13. Buyer personas
A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers.
Buyer personas help ensure that your sales and marketing messaging speaks to your audience’s needs, makes sales pitches more effective, and aligns sales team members on target prospects and how to sell to them. Developing effective buyer personas takes a good deal of cross-departmental teamwork, but it’s worth it.
Some examples of characteristics that may go into creating a buyer persona include:
Job title
Company information (size of company, industry, specific challenges, etc.)
Goals and pain points
Preferred communication methods
Demographic information (age, gender, location, etc.)
Keep in mind that you’re not limited to static templates and PDFs. With today’s custom video tools, bringing buyer personas to life is easier than ever.
14. Blog posts
Blog posts are another classic sales enablement content type. Sales trainers can share relevant blog posts with new reps to educate them, just as sales reps can share relevant blog posts with prospects to show they understand the prospects’ challenges and offer a great solution.
Blogs are also an incredibly flexible content type. They can be as long or as short as you prefer, targeting highly technical content or commenting on industry trends and emerging research. You can also integrate other content types into your blog posts, like infographics and video testimonials.
To write effective blog posts, your first goal must be to understand your audience. For instance, technical professionals will have different expectations than (most) C-suite executives.
15. Product sheets
If you had less than a minute to describe your product and its value proposition, could you do it? Product sheets make it easy for sellers to summarize their product’s finer points quickly.
Generally confined to one page, product sheets give an overview of a product’s most attractive features. This content type typically features bold visual imagery—including enticing product images—and persuasive writing, as well as a compelling call-to-action.
Sellers may distribute product sheets digitally on sales calls, in person at tradeshows, or work with the marketing team to include them on the company website if appropriate.
16. Customer journey maps
A recent Salesforce study found that 80% of customers consider the experience your company provides to be just as important as your product. Customer journey maps ensure that the customer experience is as smooth as possible.
This sales enablement content type provides a visual representation of that journey and outlines every step customers take during their interaction with your company. Those steps will differ depending on your product, service, market, etc. However, you might see something like this:
Awareness: Customer becomes aware of the product or problem that needs solving.
Consideration: Customer learns more about the product and their options.
Decision: Customer chooses a solution.
To build an effective customer journey map, start by setting goals, e.g., increasing customer retention or upselling existing customers. Then, integrate your buyer personas and dig into the process. What steps does your ideal customer hit along the way to a sale?
17. Product demo scripts
Product demo scripts can mean the difference between a confident presentation and a wasted meeting.
This isn’t to say that sales reps should write down every word they plan to say. In fact, that can seem stilted and forced. However, an effective product demo script should contain essential product information so the audience won’t forget the key points during the presentation.
Your team can also choose to enhance or replace product demos with video, making the scripting process less stressful (and more consistent across seller presentations). Product explainer videos can be particularly effective in these presentations.
18. Sales scripts
A sales script (or talk track) is a list of key points that sellers keep in mind during their sales presentations and client meetings.
Similar to a product demo script, sales scripts shouldn’t include every word the sales rep plans to say. The goal is to be spontaneous and to connect with the client—something that’s easier when you know you have all the necessary information at your fingertips.
19. Win and loss stories
How do you turn failures into future wins, and current success into a guidepost for future sales? Win-loss stories.
This content type focuses on sharing wins and losses among the team. Sellers share how they won (or failed to win) various deals in the hopes that their experiences can help other team members.
Apps like Slack have made sharing these stories easier and more effective. A simple screen recording of a person recounting their wins and losses can work—but it can be even more engaging to bring their storytelling to life with images and animations.
Additionally, win-loss stories are sometimes great opportunities for situation-based training videos. If a frequent win or loss is occurring in your sales team, developing a video that walks through this common scenario can help your sellers learn or refine a particular sales tactic.
Sales enablement content helps your sellers exceed their goals
Your sales team has a lot to keep track of. Engaging and relevant sales enablement content can help organize your sales strategy, ensure consistency across individual sellers and teams, and maximize business from your most loyal customers.
Whether you’re making product explainers, training videos, testimonials, case studies, or win-loss stories, Vyond’s AI video creation platform can help.
See for yourself how Vyond videos can revolutionize your sales enablement strategy.
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#### 20 Color Palettes For Your Brand Design
For more information about our newest AI-Powered features, read Vyond’s Fall 2023 Release – Generative AI, Accessibility, and an infinite library blog post.
You’re driving down the interstate and hoping to find a quick bite. You see the yellow arches of McDonald’s up ahead and quickly decide that you’ll have a Big Mac for lunch.
Everyone identifies McDonald’s by its arches. The shape is especially recognizable because of its color—a bright, attention-grabbing yellow that is noticeable from a distance.
Whether its the yellow of McDonald’s arches or the green of Starbucks’ logo, color has a psychological impact that is essential to consider when designing a brand. As Vyond’s creative design lead, I regularly apply the fundamentals of color perception to help our company connect with our target audience. In this post, I’ll explain the effects of color on perception and help you find a palette that best conveys your company’s personality and attracts your core audience.
The Psychological Impact of Color
Humans are visual creatures. Through evolution, our ancestors developed the ability to detect and interpret color, which allowed them to survive. For example, early humans who could recognize the red of fire could understand that the color signaled scorching heat.
In our need to survive, we developed shared responses to colors that still exist today. In a 1994 UCLA study, researchers found that colors impacted peoples’ emotions in similar ways. Blues and blue-greens inspired pleasant reactions while yellow and yellow-greens caused unpleasant reactions. At the same time, humans have developed unique associations with colors, depending on their environment. Colors, for example, are often interpreted differently across cultures. *
Taking into account both universal and unique color perceptions, you can use color to make your audience feel a certain way about your brand. To do this, you should understand common emotional responses to color and how the context of your industry may impact color interpretations. Applying this knowledge, you can predict how your target audience will perceive different colors and find the right hues and shades to connect with your audience.
20 Color Palettes for Brand Design by Company Type
You don’t need to spend hours researching color theory to find the right palette for your brand. To help you save time, we’ve provided color recommendations for different industries with explanations of why these colors are effective choices. Review these 20 color palettes for brand design, and you’ll be set to find one that best conveys your company’s personality.
If you’d like to use any of the color palettes below in your next Vyond video, sign in to your account or free trial and click here to access each color palette as a Vyond scene template.
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The caretaker companies: Blues and pinks
Organizations that serve patients—hospitals, dental offices, clinics—must craft brand images that feel trustworthy. By using colors that feel stable in their logos and advertisements, companies can show that they are reliable.
Many healthcare companies feature blue as a brand color because it drives feelings of trust and stability. Pink is also often used by these organizations because it provides feelings of warmth and comfort for patients.
The all-natural companies: Earthy tones
To build a following, eco-friendly organizations must cultivate a brand image that conveys their kindness and their connection to nature. If it’s clear that a company is helping the planet, environmentally conscious people will jump to support it.
Eco-friendly organizations should use earthy tones to communicate their positive impact on the planet. Green and brown are both commonly used because they reflect natural elements, such as grass and dirt. Some organizations may opt to use yellow as well to emulate sunshine and invoke feelings of happiness.
The showstopper tech companies: Reds, yellow, and orange
Tech companies want their audiences to see them as visionary organizations that will create the next big thing. To build excitement around their businesses, the brand designs of these companies must reflect their innovation.
Red is a popular brand color across tech companies because it creates a sense of speed, and these businesses want to be seen as fast-moving. These companies may also use shades of yellow and orange to convey their fun, exciting startup energy.
The dreamer companies: Vibrant shades
Artistic organizations, such as design firms or film production companies, thrive by producing unique, well-crafted work. Their brand imagery should reflect this creativity to strengthen support for the organization.
Vibrant shades communicate the excitement that drives creative projects. Orange conveys this energy especially well, while green reflects the ability to create and grow projects.
The planner companies: Blue, black, and brown
Financial organizations and consultancies handle high-stakes services for clients, such as making large investments or restructuring businesses. Given the importance of their services, these brands must appear strong and steady to their audience.
Blue typically gives feelings of trust and security, so it is frequently used by companies. These brands will also use black and brown to communicate their formality and seriousness to clients. Adding accents of yellows and reds can help to evoke a contemporary vibe.
Color psychology isn’t a precise science, so there is no guarantee for how people will feel when they view your brand color palette. With that said, brands can and should make informed color decisions by considering common emotional reactions to color, as outlined in this section. By applying an understanding of color perceptions to your brand, you’re more likely to elicit positive responses to your company and connect with your target audience.
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How to Use a Color Palette in Vyond
Once you’ve selected your brand palette, you can begin creating content—images, logos, videos—that reflect your color selection.
For Vyond customers, it’s simple to create branded videos in Vyond Studio. Our Contemporary animation style is 100% color-customizable. Simply enter the HEX codes for each color in your brand palette and our product will find the exact shade you’re looking for and then apply it to your video.
You can also copy the video below into your Vyond account to automatically access each color every time you begin a video project.
Follow these steps:
Sign in to your Vyond account or free trial
CLICK HERE to open this video as a template project in your account
Save the color palette you wish to use as a scene template
Add that scene template to each new video and access your brand colors from the Quick Access panel.
Show Your Brand Personality with Color Palette Design
A brand’s color palette isn’t arbitrary; research indicates that colors can affect the way we view a company by influencing our emotions. Ensure that your target audience responds positively to your company content by mindfully selecting your brand colors. Considering the fundamentals of color perception—as covered in this article—you can create a brand color palette that attracts your audience and makes them comfortable doing business with you.
Read and watch more about how to brand your videos from our creative design lead, Brittany Bailey.
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* A 1997 study found that Germans associated envy with yellow, while Americans associated envy with black, green, and red.
#### 20 eLearning Video Templates to Effectively Build Your Course
eLearning video courses are a powerful way to train employees and educate learners all over the world. By simply clicking play, people get certified in various skills and grow their knowledge base on virtually any topic. There’s only one problem: without the right tools, creating these videos can be time-intensive and expensive.
This is where eLearning video templates come in.
With a template, you can take control and design your own eLearning video without the time it takes to start from scratch. eLearning templates include a baseline video with interchangeable characters, props, text, and more. This makes it easy for you to quickly build and customize an eLearning video within hours, or even minutes.
Here at Vyond, we offer our customers a set of pre-designed eLearning video templates so they can create credible courses in no time. To help you get started, we’re sharing 20 of our favorite free templates, along with tips on how to make the most out of these resources.
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Why Use an eLearning Template?
Creating eLearning and training videos can be time-consuming if you’re outsourcing the work. Given the coordination needed between so many players—animators, editors, you name it—something as simple as a minute-long video can take months to create. That’s time that can’t be spent on researching new knowledge gaps and building more educational content.
eLearning video courses can also be costly to create, sometimes as much as $37,000 to make a single one-hour course. Training material development is a multi-step process.
A high-quality eLearning video template cuts down both the time and the cost required to create a course. Instead of relying on an entire team of designers, you can create a video on your own with drag-and-drop technology. With fewer people to coordinate with, the time and the price of making your video drops significantly.
20 eLearning Templates to Jump-Start Course Creation
With Vyond, you don’t need any design experience to start creating a video. And to make video creation even easier, we offer our customers a set of free video templates to use or modify. Simply pick a template that looks like a good fit for your goal, open it in Vyond Studio, and start customizing. Free trial users can access and modify templates and Vyond customers may download their edits and use videos for free. Take a look at our guide to using Vyond video templates for full details.
The following templates are great jumping-off points for a wide variety of eLearning topics. Each template can be easily tweaked to fit your audience, match your brand, and deliver your lesson.
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Explain Complex Topics
Use this set of videos to break down difficult, complex concepts into understandable chunks.
1. Conflict Resolution: Attribution Bias
If you work in an office, you know that there are always opportunities for conflicts to arise. This template provides the perfect format for teaching employees how to understand and address their own biases in order to resolve issues. This template specifically focuses on the issue of attribution biases, but you can replace the text, images, and narration to address another topic.
Access this template
2. 7 Tips for Airline Travel
Forward motion is key in this video, as the character travels through various scenes. On-screen text is placed on top of the animation as it’s happening, giving the video an energetic feel. Use this template to share travel tips with your team or swap out the characters, text, and even the backgrounds to provide tips on an entirely different topic.
Access this template
3. Proper Bedside Manner
Use this template to teach health care professionals strategies for building positive relationships with their patients. Highlight “dos and don’ts” by adding your own text next to the video’s large red X and green checkmark symbols. The video doesn’t include a voiceover recording, so it’s especially easy to update to an entirely new topic.
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4. History of Skateboarding
It may be unlikely that you’re looking to tell this exact story in your training, but this template video illustrates how to get creative with character creation, motion, transitions, and effects in Vyond. Replace scenes and props in this video to explain the history of a topic or pull out individual scenes to use skateboarding elements in your training videos.
Access this template
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Customer Support Training
Customize these templates to teach communication skills—phone etiquette, empathy, positivity, timeliness—to support team members.
5. Tips for Successful Support Calls
Teach your team how to successfully run support calls with this template about customer communication. Substitute your company’s favorite support call tips for the recommendations we include with this template. You can also replace the voiceover recording and speech bubbles to show the script you’d like your support reps to follow.
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6. Customer Support Training: The P.E.T.E Framework
Use this template to help employees manage sales and support calls more effectively. This video focuses on one particular framework—the P.E.T.E. model—but you can change the voiceover and individual points to model best practices for your own support team.
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To dive even deeper into this video, watch our team build it from scratch.
7. Phone Training: Insurance Claims Scenario
Teach your support team best practices for interacting with customers with this scenario template. It uses the example of a customer who is frustrated about their insurance, but you can easily replace the narration to make the story about your own product.
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Policy and Compliance
Not sure how to explain your policies? Video, especially animated video, is an ideal medium for teaching the guidelines. You can break down the complicated details of these policies visually, making them easier to understand.
8. Parental Leave
Use this template to inform employees about your company’s parental leave policies and your state’s parental leave laws. The video is currently about California’s policies, but you can replace the state image and supporting text to fit your own locale.
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9. Information Security Awareness
This template is useful for teaching employees why information security is important and to share best practices for avoiding data breaches. You can easily replace the voiceover recording and/or the text to add information about your company’s security policies.
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10. Retaliation Scenario
This instructional video shows a hypothetical workplace scenario in which one employee reports another’s unsafe practices to management. Even though the employee who reported the safety issue had everyone’s best interests in mind, he is teased, shunned, and retaliated against by others. The video is designed to help you create your own branched story about what retaliation is and how to handle it.
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11. Sick Leave Policy
Explain your company’s sick leave policy to employees with this video template. Update the video by creating a new voiceover recording for explaining the unique details of your company’s policy.
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How-To Videos
Show steps in a process or break down a larger topic with these how-to video templates.
12. Overcome Your Creative Block
This template is a great jumping-off point for any topic, with split-screen scenes that allow you to quickly explain a process. The scenes can be swapped, making this template especially great for any simple explanation.
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13. Going Green
Educate your audience on the perks of going green with this video. The first half of the video has quick facts about pollution and waste, while the second half contains tips that can be swapped out with ones that fit your workplace.
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14. How to Play Dreidel
While you’re unlikely to be training on this exact topic, you can easily update the scenes and swap out the dreidel assets for something else entirely. This video starts out by explaining the game of dreidel and moves into the steps. You can try doing the same in your eLearning videos.
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Sales Training
Without proper training, your sales team can’t cohesively and accurately represent your business. Teach employees how to effectively deliver pitches about your company, communicate over the phone, and sell solutions instead of features.
15. Perfecting the Pitch Scenario
Teach employees how to effectively deliver pitches about your company. Update this template video with a new voiceover recording so the main character is talking about your company instead of about Vyond. You can also edit the character details to depict one of your own employees, so the video feels a bit more personal for your team.
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16. Phone Skills for Successful Sales Calls
Educate your sales team on best practices for interacting with prospects over the phone. The template includes an overview of best practices, which you can easily update or change to fit your training goals.
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17. Solution Selling
Having a great product with the best features isn’t always what it takes to earn a sale. By listening to customer problems and providing a solution, your sales team is more likely to close the deal. Help your team understand “solution selling” with this template video.
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Mental Health and Stress Reduction
In today’s hectic world, there is a major need to educate on mental health. This set of templates includes useful tips for alleviating stress.
18. Reducing Stress at Work
In this template, yoga instructor, Lihi Benisty, shares strategies for reducing stress at work. Use this template to provide concrete tactics for employees who may be feeling overwhelmed. To customize this video for your workplace, create your own character based on someone from your team to share the tips.
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19 Mental Health: 4 Tips to De-Stress
Help employees manage the ongoing pressures of work. Keep just the four tips that are already provided in this template, add tactics that are especially relevant for your workplace, or swap out these assets to tell an entirely different story.
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20. Anti-Stress Activities
Use this template to educate employees about managing stress in their professional and personal lives. April is a great time to share the video with employees since it’s Stress Awareness Month, but it will be equally useful for your team at any point in the year.
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This is only a small sampling of the many templates available from Vyond. No matter your industry or audience, there’s a template that can be tweaked to fit your needs in our template library.
How Vyond Supports eLearning
Vyond’s eLearning video templates make it easy to create your own custom eLearning course in no time. But besides offering templates, there are a number of reasons why Vyond Studio is ideal for creating eLearning video courses:
True to life character and object movement. Thousands of pre-animated objects, expressions, and character actions work with an easy-to-use motion path tool to make your characters and objects move and act naturally.
Realistic and automatic lip-sync. Give your video course an immersive feel. Watch Record audio with your computer microphone, upload an .mp3, or use text-to-speech to make your characters come to life.
Branding & customization. Make assets and objects match your brand. Upload your own images, assets, and company logos too.
Team collaboration. Share custom characters, uploaded assets and templates throughout your team. Share videos to your entire team,individual team members, or give view-only access to people not on your team. Videos can be password protected.
Dedicated customer support team. Available via phone, email, or live-chat 18 hours a day. Our help center has articles to quickly answer common questions.
Enterprise level security. Administrator-controlled password compliance, SSO, and GDPR/ISO 27001 compliance. Learn more.
Create High-Quality Courses Efficiently with Vyond Templates
Creating your own eLearning video can be costly and time-consuming, but it doesn’t have to be. By using templates, you’re able to create a large volume of eLearning videos without compromising your schedule or budget.
There are a number of eLearning templates available online, but not all of them will support the level of customization required to make them feel unique. When it comes to eLearning, your message has to land with your audience. Customizing your eLearning to fit your audience will go a long way toward making this happen.
Start creating a video course with the templates we shared in this post, and check out our template library for even more options. Then make sure to take a look at our guide to using Vyond video templates for full details.
Don’t have a Vyond account yet? Access the free templates in this post by trying out our product with our Free 14-Day Trial.
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#### 2021: Vyond Studio’s Year in Review
It’s been quite the year at Vyond, with many new features and enhancements to Vyond Studio! Take a look below to see Vyond’s 2021 highlights reel, along with Vyond Studio’s new features!
New Features in Vyond Studio
Align and Distribute
Align and Distribute enhance your productivity by ensuring that your props and characters are quickly and perfectly spaced across your scene. Take a look at the link below to learn more about how these features can level up your videos!
Read More
Video and folder layout enhancements in list view
We made some big updates to list view in 2021 thanks to your feedback. Now you can organize your video library more efficiently with this latest update that sees large thumbnails for recent videos, a new navigation path, as well as bulk actions on folders and videos.
Grid and safe area guidelines
2021 gave us the option to use line guides in Vyond Studio, making it even easier to compose balanced scenes in your videos. You can find the Guides menu on the right side of the stage just above the timeline, with the option to show ‘Grid’ and ‘Safe Area’ lines.
Read more
Custom Aspect Ratios
2021 brought us the ability to change the aspect ratio on videos! Next time you’re in Vyond Studio, head to the Video Settings menu. You can change the aspect ratio from the usual Horizontal (16:9) to become Square (1:1), Vertical (9:16), or even a custom size.
Learn more about aspect ratios from this article >
*Please note, this feature is available to Premium, Professional, and Enterprise users.
All-New Audio Tracks
2021 brought a new wave of audio tracks to Vyond Studio. We retired 58 of our older tracks and added 79 new ones.
A list of the new audio tracks can be found here.
Lock Assets on Stage
This year brought the debut of an often-requested feature: the ability to lock assets to the stage! Select the assets you would like to lock to the stage then right-click to open the menu to see the Lock option. You can unlock the same way, or try the keyboard shortcuts. This feature makes things much easier when you have lots of assets on the stage during video production.
Background Manipulation
2021 brought us the ability to use custom images and even videos as your video’s background in Vyond Studio! And not only can you add images and videos, but you can crop, rotate, and use other manipulation tools to make sure your video looks exactly the way you intend.
Read More
In-Platform Multilingual Search
This year, our team worked incredibly hard to allow speakers of languages other than English to easily search within Vyond Studio. Search for props, characters, audio, scene templates, and more in your desired language. Switch the language next to the search bar, and it will translate the search terms to match them with corresponding results from the library.
Learn more about which languages are supported in the search bar from this Help Center article >
Shared Spaces
Last but certainly not least, this year we released our all-new collaboration feature Shared Spaces for Vyond For Enterprise!
Shared Spaces allow you to quickly and easily invite team members to collaborate, making teamwork simple. Shared Spaces allow users to create a space, move or copy your videos into the space, and invite members throughout your organization to join – giving new team members an easy way to get onboard. This reduced time and increased collaboration lead to easier onboarding, enhanced ability of administrators to see what’s going on within their teams, and faster completion of projects.
#### 3 Challenges Facing Video Marketers (And How To Overcome Them)
If there’s one word triggering equal parts eagerness and anxiety in marketing meetings everywhere, it’s ‘video’.
Marketers are eager to use video because of its proven effectiveness (51.9% cite it as the content type with the most ROI), and because the medium has become so pervasive; 75% of senior executives watch work-related videos weekly, and almost 60% of these executives admit they prefer to watch video than read text.
But many marketers feel anxious about video because of the perceived investment of effort, time and resources required. Even though the hurdles are fewer than ever before, for many, video production still feels intimidating.
Although almost 80% of B2B companies are using some form of video in content, the remaining marketers cite three main reasons for their hesitation, including:
Lack of expertise (44%)
Lack of budget (41%), and
Lack of staff/bandwidth (32%)
In this post, we’ll address these three obstacles and some practical approaches for overcoming each.
1) You’re not Steven Spielberg (or a screenwriter, producer, videographer etc.)
While you might feel at home with other content types, video feels admittedly out of your comfort zone. You might not know how to script for a visual medium, or organize the logistics of a live video shoot, but that’s not necessarily a limiting factor to get started. Producing video often requires recruiting people with these exact skills.
In fact, a video marketing benchmark report created by GoAnimate and the Content Marketing Institute found that 46% of the most successful video marketers to date use a combination approach to production using both in-house and outsourced resources:
Image source: CMI report “Start Smart, Scale up, and Stand out With Video”
In short, it’s rare to find a one-person operation – and as the rest of the report showcases, it’s a challenge to scale video across the business. But if you’re shying away from video altogether because of inexperience, it could be because you’re unsure what’s really involved in video production from start to finish.
Defining your video’s purpose
When embarking on any new video project, you’ll first want to determine three things:
Your intended target audience and how you’ll reach them (who is your audience and where will you distribute your video to ensure they see it?)
A meaningful message you want to share (what do you want your target audience to know, and what specific action do you want people to take after watching your video?)
Some video concepts that can convey your message (to help with this step, look to stories that already resonate with your audience, or even your target persona’s interests to spark some video ideas).
Understanding the production process
Once you have an idea developed for a specific target market, you can embark upon the video production process. It typically looks something like this:
Ideation / Scripting
Script your concept. In this stage pay careful attention to how your idea will be shot live or created as an animation, and be mindful of length (under 2 minutes is ideal for something intended for the top of the funnel).
Storyboard how your video will look from shot-to-shot with some sketches. This will help you get a sense of the shots you need to tell your story and how they’ll be arranged in the edit.
Pre-Production
Determine your budget, locations, and rentals. In this stage you’ll schedule your live shoot, outline the logistics and equipment involved, and secure any needed permits for the area you’d like to film in.
Book any required on-screen talent. This is video dependent as some videos will require an on-screen persona and others can use voice over talent that can be outsourced later.
Production
Capture your live footage. Or, create animation / motion graphics to match up with your script using a cloud-based animation software like GoAnimate.
Record any needed audio (voice overs, sound effects, etc.) and select your background music. You can find some great resources for choosing your background audio here.
Post-production
Edit together a first draft of your video guided by your storyboard. You can use software like Final Cut Pro for live action videos, or WeVideo, a collaborative cloud-based editing tool.
Make final edits and distribute. For a live action video you’ll want to pay close attention to your audio and color correction in this stage. For animation, you’ll want to ensure your story runs seamlessly and includes all the points you outlined as part of your message.
These steps can vary in complexity depending on the project you’re working on and whether you’re dealing with live action or animation. Nonetheless, the production process stays pretty close to this basic order every time.
The point is, even if you’re not a professional video producer with years of experience, at your core as a marketer you’re a strategic brand storyteller, and that’s all you need to get started.
By beginning to understand the production process and experimenting a few times with a DIY approach in house, you’ll start to feel comfortable expanding your skillset and calling upon outsourced professionals to help as needed.
2) You don’t have a Super Bowl budget
Beyond experience, many marketers believe video requires a massive budget, but this isn’t true.
Creating your own videos is now more feasible than ever because of the high-quality recording devices everyone has access to at reasonable prices (in fact, you likely have one of these devices in your pocket!). From iPhones to GoPros, tablets, and even lower-end point-and-shoot cameras, the tools are readily available for capturing footage you can be proud of, so budget isn’t truly a limitation any longer.
If you have some natural lighting, a mic, and a strong pre-production plan, you’re set. You can find some solid tips for creating in-house video on a budget with the following resources:
Wistia’s Video Library
Sunny Lenarduzzi’s Video Marketing Channel
Reel SEO’s YouTube Channel (for all things YouTube)
Vyond Resources
Beyond access to great equipment for live action videos, there also are various cloud-based alternatives and apps available for creating animated videos.
Save money with animation
If you go the animated route for your first few video assets, you’re even less subject to concerns about budget.
Unlike a live-action video where location, on-screen talent, and logistics can get tricky (and costly if you need a reshoot for any reason), you can use animation software to create a ton of different variations of your video without spending excess from your marketing budget.
Animated videos are a great option for a range of videos including product explainer videos, infographics, FAQ videos, or even stories for the top of the funnel, like EdWire’s explainer video about their Microsoft Power BI platform.
Overall, whether you choose live-action or animation, a huge budget isn’t needed if you’re able to communicate a strong point.
Take for example the Arizona startup Crowd Mics, whose scrappy marketing caught the eye of content marketing expert, Ann Handley. Their video didn’t have a mega budget, or super high production value, but as Ann points out, it’s useful, inspired, and empathetic to their target customer.
3) You don’t have dedicated resources or a ton of time to spare on a project
Even with a determination to get scrappy and create video in-house on a shoestring budget, there’s still the challenge of finding resources and overall bandwidth for completing a video asset.
Luckily, the fact that you have two options of live-action and animation available to you is very helpful for this particular issue.
Limit your live-action crew
In the case of live-action videos, you can get away with using two to three people maximum to create an asset, including:
A producer/writer: responsible for outlining the needs of the video (for the audience and the business), scripting the content, liaising with the videographer, and planning the logistics of the video shoot.
A videographer: responsible for collaborating on the script, storyboard, capturing footage, and the various edits.
On-screen talent: responsible for narrating the story or appearing in the video, delivering lines as needed.
As mentioned, however, you can always learn to capture footage, star-in, and put together an edit yourself, overcoming the amount of people needed on the project. Using the how-to resources listed previously is a great way to discover how to become a production studio of one (or two/three max).
For help on sourcing a videographer (for when you can’t swing it alone), try a resource like Veed Me or Video Brewery. These services match you up with a videographer or content creator in your price range, and you can hire per video you need vs. hiring a resource full time.
Skip the crew altogether and pick animation instead
As hinted at before, going the animated video route can be an excellent means of overcoming an issue of time and resources.
With animation software, you can put together a short video for almost any purpose in much the same way you would create a Keynote presentation for a meeting. With a library of animated resources at the ready, it’s simply a matter of:
Thinking in pictures
Scripting for a visual medium
Storyboarding your idea
Figuring out on-screen animations vs. other rich media like sounds effects / audio
Selecting the animations and transitions that work for your purpose, and
Creating a video conveys your message quickly
In fact, in terms of bandwidth, the entire animated video process can be performed independently.
Ultimately, you only spend the time you personally allot to the project (be it a few hours, 3 days, or up to a week), instead of working with a live-action dependencies, like the availability of locations, shoot dates, a crew, or your videographer’s schedule.
Even if you purchase background music or voice-overs via an outsourced option in the production stage, you’re still acting as a team of one and can deliver a video in less than a week.
Unleash your creativity (even with a crew of 1)
Additionally, animated video helps you avoid some of the creative barriers inherent in live-action video.
When scripting live action, for example, you have to limit yourself to locations you have reasonable access to. But with animated videos, you can showcase any location and include as many characters as you like. (Your video can take place at a ritzy hotel in Dubai and star 7 characters, but none of it requires leaving your desk or paying a hefty tab).
Animated videos can also aid in comprehension when explaining complex topics. With animated videos you can use icons or custom graphics to explain concepts that might be difficult to convey if you had to use live action.
For example, if you’re creating a video about the financial industry, you might need to explain the concept of the housing bubble, or terms like ‘credit default insurance’. Or as the TRACS Group did, you may have to explain tax credits in Georgia.
Animations can be more helpful than live video in cases like these (when explaining detailed mechanics), and you can generate the step-by-step animations independently when you have a library of illustrations and transitions at your fingertips. The asset library of an animation software can save you reaching out to a designer and adding more complexity to your project.
So wait no more!
The obstacles of inexperience, budget and bandwidth may have been keeping you from producing video content to date, but we recommend taking these suggested steps to overcome them.
Creating video doesn’t have to be a challenge. But if you still feel overwhelmed, try animated video by signing for a free trial with GoAnimate.
If you have overcome obstacles to deliver great video assets, we’d love to hear what’s worked for you!
Tweet us your questions or comments using the handle @GoAnimate, or contact us via Facebook.
#### 3 Simple Ways To Start Your Video With A Bang
These days putting a video online is a lot like dropping a needle into a haystack. A whopping 60 hours of video are uploaded every minute to YouTube alone and, with numbers like that, viewers need to be impressed. They’ve got a lot of content to choose from and if your video doesn’t strike their fancy, another video is just a click away, literally.
Thanks to the massive selection of online videos, not to mention the plethora of other online distractions, attention spans are shorter than ever. If you want viewers to sit through your entire video you’ve got to grab their attention, and you’ve got to do it fast. We’ve put together a list of 5 simple ways to start your video with a bang so you can beat the odds and make a video that your customers will actually want to watch.
A quick “Don’t” before the “Dos”
Before we get to our list, let’s just get one big “don’t” out of the way. Do not waste the first seconds of your video on branding. As beautiful as your motion graphic-enhanced logo looks, you are wasting precious time by opening your video with it. You’ve got to hook your viewer within the first 15 seconds if you have any hope of keeping them interested.
Not sure how to make a movie that’ll hook ’em? Try some of the tips below.
1. The Preview
Viewers want to know what they’re getting into when they start watching an online video and one of the best ways to let them know is to tell them, plain and simple.
“Hi there, I’m Joe from Gizmos.com, and I’m going to show you how to get your gizmo set up in one minute flat!” In this example there’s no question about what the video is going to be about. Joe is going to teach the viewer how to set up his or her gizmo…in one minute flat! If a viewer knows what the content of the video is going to be straight from the get-go, they’re more likely to stick around for the rest.
2. The Question
When you create a movie that begins with a good question the viewer is immediately sucked in because they are bringing their own experience to the table and want to see how their answers relate to what you are going to tell them.
Let’s say you want to make a movie to let viewers know about a financial tool that will help them save money. Start out with a question like, “What would you do if you could save an extra $10,000 every year?” Not only will they be thinking about their answer, but they’ll also be intrigued and want to find out more about how this could be possible.
3. The Problem
Another way to start your video with a bang and hook your viewers is by presenting them with a problem that they’ll be able to relate with and letting them know you can solve that problem.
Viewers want to feel invested — like they’re going to get something out of sticking around to watch. As the video maker, when you present viewers with a common problem and offer them the possibility of a solution, you give them reason to stick around.
A note on production quality
Snagging your viewer with a catchy intro isn’t only about your script – it’s also about production quality. If you want your viewers to take you seriously your video has to look and sound professional.
Luckily these days it isn’t hard to pull off a professional look for cheap. Most of us have HD cameras on our mobile phones and online video maker services allow us to create great videos and even professional animations with little to no experience. If you haven’t already checked out GoAnimate, definitely have a look.
Pairing nice visuals and audio with a great hook like a question, a problem or a quick tease telling viewers what they can expect can help your video stand out from the hundreds of millions of videos on the web.
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#### 3 Takeaways from “Create Engaging eLearning Faster with the Power of AI”
Our recent webinar, “Create Engaging eLearning Faster with the Power of AI,” offers L&D and HR professionals an introduction to AI tools and how they fit within the learning and HR spaces.
Omniplex Learning’s Head of Learning Solutions, Leena Randhawa, and Vyond’s Director of Customer Success, Erin Champion, discuss the pros and cons of several leading AI tools and how to integrate them into your eLearning workflow.
Watch the webinar replay for all the insights. And in the meantime, here’s a summary of key takeaways.
Watch the Webinar On Demand
AI is here to stay, so jump in
Generative AI is creating a big shift in tech. Tools are coming to market at pace, and many of them make it possible to create quality content faster across teams.
It’s becoming clear that AI will be a game changer for L&D and HR. But for many professionals, just keeping up with developments and getting familiar with these new tools can be daunting.
Soon, you won’t have to seek out disparate AI tools: the best AI will come to you
At Vyond, we believe this time of “AI tools overwhelm” is temporary. As the AI space evolves, the best AI will come to you — improving the workflows you already have in tools you already love.
In the meantime, with AI set to impact a broad range of roles and industries, it’s worth those in HR getting familiar with AI in a wider sense.
And when it comes to creating content, AI tools for video and image generation are an obvious place to begin.
The best approach is to start small — but do start. Shop around, ask your L&D network who’s using what, and don’t be afraid to experiment. Remember, this is a learning curve for everyone!
Some tools are more suited to eLearning than others
While it’s a good idea to explore the world of AI for yourself, the teams at Vyond and Omniplex have already done some groundwork. The conclusion? Not all AI tools are created equal. For engaging content that’s media rich, these are the areas where AI can contribute most.
Text
From video scripts to quizzes, platforms like ChatGPT will help you make headway with writing tasks. With a good prompt, ChatGPT quickly and convincingly creates copy from scratch, but can also be used to do research, summarize long documents, or generate ideas. You can input specific data relevant to your subject matter and train it to your tone of voice. You’ll still need to do some fact checking though — the tech isn’t foolproof.
Image
Using visuals in your content makes it more appealing and aids learning, but imagery can be expensive. And not everyone has access to graphic design resources.
Tools like DALL·E 2 and Midjourney use a similar system to ChatGPT, where they generate images from text-based prompts. You’re quickly served up a selection of images, which you can refine until you have what you need. These tools can produce a wide range of styles and will help keep your content fresh and relevant.
Image generator tools draw upon the internet’s library of photos, illustrations, and graphics to produce new imagery in response to your prompt
Audio
High-quality audio is another must when it comes to creating valuable content and bringing videos to life. Sometimes your project calls for voiceover talent, but your budget doesn’t accommodate a human voiceover artist. Tools like Murf.ai, Speechify, or Vyond can help. These text-to-speech tools take your script and use AI to synthesize the human voice. The workflow is fast and flexible, and outputs are getting ever more realistic. Plus, you can choose different styles, genders, and tones.
Video
Unlike text, image, and audio, AI video tools that produce video completely from scratch are still an emerging category. Facebook and NVidia are both developing solutions, but right now they’re limited to GIF-length output that’s pretty low quality.
One text-to-video tool that’s already in market: Vyond Go, Vyond’s AI-powered script and video generator. With a simple prompt, Vyond Go delivers you a first-draft video in seconds — thanks to the generative power of ChatGPT — and gives you the flexibility to edit to perfection in Vyond Studio.
Other AI-powered timesavers in Vyond Studio include:
Instant translation: Automatically translate all the text in your videos — text-to-speech, on-screen text, and dialogue scripts — into 73+ languages
Photo-to-character: Create characters in a matter of seconds. Take or upload a photo to generate a fully editable animated character (we often hear leaders and subject-matter experts get a kick out of this!)
Background remover: Upload any image, remove the background, and you’ve got a custom prop for your video
And if you’d like to make your content interactive, you can bring video clips into Articulate 360. Add animated menus, branching scenarios, and gamification, all with a few clicks.
Omniplex Learning’s Leena Randhawa demonstrates adding interactivity to a Vyond video with Storyline
This is the sort of eLearning content that turns heads and captures attention. And now it’s within reach, even for trainers with modest budgets and technical skills.
AI can help with eLearning development from start to finish
AI can save you time across the entire eLearning content development process. Here’s how you might bring these capabilities at various stages.
Research and discovery: Use AI tools in early phases to record and transcribe interviews with subject matter experts (e.g. Otter.ai). And ChatGPT can be helpful as a research assistant, helping your team brainstorm, or creating work schedules and timelines.
Content production: When you get to the content creation stage, use AI to craft scripts and quizzes, develop music or improve audio quality, create images for slides, and translate your content into different languages.
Update and maintain: AI tools can help you keep your eLearning content fresh and up to date, whether that calls for creating new section images, generating new video scripts, updating characters, or changing process details.
Here’s how an AI-infused eLearning content process might look.
We hope these highlights have been useful, and that you feel ready to harness the power of AI to produce high-quality eLearning content faster!
For further insights, we highly recommend watching (or rewatching) the full webinar. And if you haven’t yet tried Vyond (and Vyond Go) but would like to, you can try it for free.
#### 3 Takeaways from “How AI and Gamification Deliver More Engaging Learning Faster”
On our recent webinar, Professors Karl Kapp and Jessica Briskin, along with Cargill’s Christopher Annand, joined Vyond’s Van Diamandakis for a discussion on gamification, AI, and the importance of making employee training relevant and engaging.
The panel explored what gamification is and how it has changed, the power gamification has to engage your employees, the impact AI is making, and why the stakes are higher than ever when it comes to effective training, especially for compliance.
Below are three key takeaways from the session. For the full insights, be sure to watch the webinar replay.
Watch the Webinar
Gamification is more than badges and leaderboards
“Gamification” in learning may be a buzzword, but Professor Karl Kapp says there’s still confusion about what it really is — and what it isn’t. And it tends to get oversimplified.
At the highest level, people play games to overcome challenges, make difficult decisions, and get engaged in a context or environment.
So Karl defines gamification in learning as using game-based mechanics, aesthetics, and game thinking to engage people, motivate action, promote learning, and solve problems.
Where it once may have been only about leaderboards, badges, and points, gamification has evolved. Now, “gamification 2.0” means the content itself is becoming more game-like. Gamified learning immerses people in environments and puts them in situations where they have to think critically.
There’s lots of room (and reason!) for gamification’s wider adoption
When gamification is done well, Karl says it can bring many benefits, like incentivizing and accelerating learning, providing transparency into goals and expectations, and offering learners realtime and realistic feedback. Companies like Walmart and Deloitte have gotten some impressive results with gamified learning. Plus, Karl says, it’s just more fun.
Professor Karl Kapp on gamification: impressive results, plus having fun in the process
But for all its potential, gamification still isn’t widely adopted. And if companies are doing it, it’s mostly at a basic “1.0 level.”
That’s a huge opportunity for wider adoption at a time when, more than ever, we need to engage learners in meaningful content. If you’re not doing it, your competitor is, Karl adds.
The stakes for creating effective, engaging compliance training keep getting higher
Christopher Annand on the power of scenario-based learning for compliance
Regulators and government entities continue to set stronger rules and higher expectations for companies, which is a good thing, says Christopher Annand, a compliance leader at Cargill, the largest private company in the U.S. with a global workforce operating in 70 countries.
But it’s a challenge to make sure compliance messages are impactful and valuable for a global workforce, and that the compliance team is seen as a partner to the business, not an obstacle, he says.
Christopher has found gamification and scenario-based learning to be powerful approaches for communicating the company’s requirements, procedures, and expectations to Cargill’s 155,000 employees. And he says additional AI-powered tools like Vyond can help make the training creation process simpler and faster, ultimately making the compliance team’s jobs easier.
To get further insights and to watch the audience Q&A session, check out the full webinar. And if you haven’t yet tried Vyond (and the AI-powered Vyond Go) but would like to, you can try it for free.
#### 3 Takeaways from “Using AI to Design More Human-Centered Learning Experiences”
On our recent webinar, ATD Master Instructional Designer and co-founder of Lavender Dragon Team Mary Nunaley joins Vyond Customer Success Manager Laura Kennedy to discuss what might sound like a counterintuitive idea: how AI tools are helping instructional designers create more human-centric eLearning content.
With her 25 years of field expertise, Mary offers practical advice on how to assess and integrate the latest AI tools out there: from generative AI tools with broad use cases to L&D-specific AI-powered software.
Mary explains the psychology underpinning human-centered design, the characteristics that define it, and which AI tools can help ensure you’re honoring those characteristics with your training content.
And she reminds us why, ultimately, generative AI tools are only as good as the personal input and experience of L&D professionals using them.
Below are a few takeaways from her presentation. But for all of Mary’s insights and AI tool recommendations — and to listen to the great L&D questions she answered in our Q&A — make sure to watch the full webinar recording.
Watch the Webinar On Demand
When it comes to exploring AI tools, keep an open mind and critical eye
In the first AI wave we had Siri, search engines, and transcription software. Then ChatGPT and image generators like Dall•E joined the fast-growing collection of AI-powered tools.
As even more advanced apps and software explode into the L&D space every week, it’s important for professionals to sort the hype from tools that really are time-saving and effective — and decide how to best use them.
The sheer volume of tools may feel daunting to keep up with right now. But at Vyond, we believe this is a passing phase.
As the AI space evolves, soon you won’t have to seek out disparate tools. The best AI will come to you, in your favorite tools.
Human-centered eLearning content is relevant, accessible, inclusive, diverse, and enjoyable
Human-centered design is an approach that runs counter to top-down, old-fashioned approaches that treat learners as empty containers to pour knowledge into. Human-centered design is empathetic and asks instructional designers to get curious and put themselves in learners’ shoes.
Human-centered eLearning experiences seek to understand and solve for root problems, and are user-friendly, accessible, inclusive, and enjoyable, Mary says.
Seek to understand and solve for root problems
This characteristic maps onto the ADDIE model’s “analysis” phase: doing your due diligence and ensuring you understand the challenges at hand by consulting subject-matter experts, interviewing actual employees, and speaking to stakeholders.
Take compliance training as an example. Most companies mandate annual anti-sexual harassment training. And in many cases, it’s what instructional designers would call “click next to continue” training: everybody completes it, but it’s cookie cutter and not likely to influence institutional behavior.
How would we give that training a human-centered makeover? Mary says it would mean talking with employees to understand their lived experience with the company culture, then creating a tailored, meaningful training to reflect those findings.
The one-size-fits-all course is a trap: far easier to push out and check the box — yet unlikely to spark behavioral change.
Be accessible
Imagine all the potential challenges your learner audience might face when they try to engage with your training. Think about people’s different abilities and consider the physical or digital environments that courses will be shared in.
To see which AI-powered accessibility tools Mary recommends, check out the full webinar.
Be user-friendly
Focus on giving information to people when it’s needed, in the flow of their actual work, rather than fixing it to a scheduled time.
To see which AI-powered tools create more convenient learner experiences faster, check out the full webinar.
Be representative and inclusive
Reflect the diversity of your audience — race, gender, sexual orientation, age, etc. — in how you communicate your content, through characters, voices, and languages.
Video platforms like Vyond allow you to customize characters to better represent your audience and subject matter. AI language tools such as Vyond’s instant translation features a variety of AI voices and dialects. The new Deepl app is also proving invaluable for translating content in workforces where more than one language is spoken.
Make content enjoyable
The bar is high for keeping people’s attention and making learning fun. AI tools can help you create eLearning that entertains, surprises, and doesn’t feel like it’s dragging on. Incorporating storytelling, real-life situations, and relatable characters makes eLearning more involving and fun to watch.
To see which AI-powered tools can help you generate more creative, eye-catching content, check out the full webinar.
Mary recommends following two L&D influencers on LinkedIn who are experimenting with AI and game-based learning: Sarah Le-fever and Mohsen Memon.
Even the coolest AI tools need a “human touch” to create effective employee courses
While AI tools are brilliant at kick-starting our creativity, human-centered design can’t rely on them alone. AI is trained on data, not experience. Emotional intelligence, experience, understanding context, and being funny — humor is something that ChatGPT hasn’t quite nailed yet — these are qualities that only living, breathing people can deliver in a high-quality learning experience.
We hope these takeaways have given you some useful insights into AI in eLearning and shown how you can use AI tools to create even more human-centered experiences.
To get further insights and to watch the audience Q&A session, check out the full webinar. And if you haven’t yet tried Vyond (and the AI-powered Vyond Go) but would like to, you can try it for free.
#### 3 Things You Need To Know To Be Successful With Vyond
Hi! I’m Erin Champion, Director of Customer Success at Vyond. I’ve worked with countless customers over my time (5+ years) at Vyond and have synthesized what I believe are the most important and impactful things to be successful using Vyond Studio.
I understand there are countless use cases for Vyond. Some customers want to create quick marketing videos for Facebook, while others are busy building out microlearning video libraries. No matter the type of video or end goal, understanding the design and capabilities of Vyond Studio’s key features will save you time, improve your overall productivity, and leave you with more visually interesting videos.
1. Continue Scene
In my opinion, the easiest, most manageable way to create fluid animation in Vyond is to use the Continue Scene function. Continue Scene is a concept that is unique to Vyond and prevalent in the world of animated video. In fact, this technique has existed since the first cartoons aired.
You can think of scenes in Vyond more like frames in an animated movie. Say you want your character to walk into the scene, then wave at the camera and then walk off of the screen. In Vyond you would break these parts down into 3 scenes to be exact. Check out the following video showcasing the capabilities of Continue Scene:
The thing that often confuses and frustrates new Vyond users is the fact that the character can only take one action per scene. This is similar to the idea I spoke about earlier, back when the first animated films were created they were made painstakingly frame-by-frame, when you put all the frames together and speed them up a beautiful fluid animation is created.
The concept in Vyond is similar, but not nearly as painstaking. Instead of using hundreds of individual frames to give a character motion, you can simply use the continue-scene function to keep your character walking, talking, and high-fiving across your video.
2. Expanded Timeline
Upon first glance, you might not know Vyond Studio has the ability to open/close the timeline. But if you look closely you’ll notice a tiny little arrow (see image below) that will change the way you edit your videos:
This feature will help you fine-tune the timing of all of the elements (props, characters, scene transitions) in your videos. And if you need to adjust the timing of your audio & visual elements this is the quickest way to achieve down to a fraction-of-a-second synchronization. Here’s how you can seamlessly time elements in a video:
Pro tip: You can even adjust the duration of the enter effect if you want to make it longer or shorter to speed up the visual pacing or add drama.
3. Camera Tool
So you want to create a rich, engaging, visually appealing video? It’s time to get familiar with the camera tool. In my opinion, this is the most under-utilized tool in Vyond and the tool with the MOST visual impact.
Much like the expanded timeline, this is a hidden weapon that can take a simple video from snooze-worthy to captivating. Before I dig into how to use the tool let’s talk about why it’s so important.
Any television show or feature film you’ve seen is the product of hundreds, if not thousands of different camera shots. The raw footage is then edited together in post-production to tell the story. You might see wide shots of landscapes or cities when a location is being established.
Medium shots: when two characters are having a conversation.
Extreme close-ups: when a character is experiencing intense emotion, like sadness or grief.
The point is directors film different shots for different purposes so the editor can then piece them together in a way that tells a story.
In contrast, the only videos you probably see that consist of 1 camera shot are security camera footage. Just think about watching a security camera for an hour, you would be bored out of your mind. The subjects of the video are always shot very far away. You can’t really tell what they’re doing, or how they’re interacting with one another. There’s no change in perspective, so even if there is any real action, it’s hard to tell what’s happening at a granular level.
Now think about your favorite television show. I’ll use Grey’s Anatomy as an example. The show might begin with a shot of the hospital’s exterior. Then a few seconds later cut to the operating room, with a doctor talking to a patient. At this point the conversation might be getting very intense, the character’s tearing up, cut to an extreme close-up of the character’s watery eyes.
Next time you watch a television show or a movie take note of how many different shots you see and how the editor chooses to piece them together to evoke emotion.
Get Inspired and Create Beautiful Videos with Vyond Studio
I hope that these tips will give you the confidence to go forth and experiment with your videos in Vyond. One exercise I recommend to customers I work with is to go back to a video you’ve previously created and make a copy. Now, using the new things you’ve learned, see how you can improve the look & feel of that video.
It could just be adjusting the timing to match with the audio, or adding a close-up shot to emphasize something important a character has to say. The more you use these features the quicker, easier & more impactful it will be for you to build video in Vyond Studio!
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#### 30 Tips to Help You Improve Your Presentation Skills
An email from your boss pops in your inbox—-she’s asking you to give a talk at an upcoming conference. You groan and your stomach flips at the thought of speaking in front of such a large group.
Public speaking can be a nerve-wracking experience, but it doesn’t have to be. With good preparation, delivering a presentation is empowering. Not only are you sharing knowledge, but you’re also establishing yourself as an expert on your presentation subject.
Whether you’re giving a speech to hundreds or showing a PowerPoint to five co-workers, we’re here to help you deliver a powerful, engaging presentation. In this post, we’ll highlight 30 tips to help you improve your presentation skills. Read about how to plan, write, and deliver a presentation that is clear, thoughtful, and engaging.
Planning your presentation
Once you learn that you’re delivering a presentation, it’s time to plan what exactly you’re going to present. Figure out the scope of your topic early on, and you’ll make the most of your time when creating the presentation
1. Create a mind map to explore the sub-topics of your topic.
Rekindle your knowledge of the subject by creating a mind map, or diagram, that shows all of the different ideas relating to the topic. Refreshing your understanding will help you feel more confident about delivering the presentation and will give you ideas for points you want to make.
2. Connect your subject matter to audience needs.
Your presentation will be full of useful information if you connect your audience’s interests and needs to your topic. Identify the details of your audience—their profession, industry, interests, etc. — so you know how to frame your subject in a relevant way.
3. Avoid covering too much material.
Covering a long list of ideas will overwhelm, rather than educate, your audience. Decide whether you need to narrow the scope of your topic by considering the time you’ve been allotted for your presentation and the complexity of your subject.
4. Watch other presentations.
Observe how other professionals give talks — from their body language to their flow of ideas — to find tactics that you can use in your own presentation. You can watch more presentations by attending conferences or watching recordings of good presentations online. For example, the TED Talks channel on YouTube is an excellent free resource for watching great presentations.
This presentation “How to speak so that people want to listen” is one of the most popular TED Talks on YouTube with over 20 million views.
By doing this prep work, you’ll know what you want your presentation to cover and achieve and will be able to create it more efficiently.
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Writing your presentation
Writing for speaking situations is different than writing content that is meant to be read. To improve your presentation skills, you have to make sure the language you use flows when spoken without cutting down on its substance. Here are a few tips to help you assemble a rough script for your presentation.
5. Start with an outline.
Before you draft a full speech, jot down the main points of your presentation. Seeing a basic sketch of your ideas gives you an opportunity to quickly change or switch certain topics without investing much energy and time.
6. Include personal anecdotes to connect to your audience.
“Great stories expose our flaws and our struggles,” says Nancy Duarte, CEO and communication strategist. “This is what makes them inspiring, and not sharing them is such a missed opportunity to connect with your audience.”
7. Throw in some humor.
Besides being entertaining, a joke here and there reminds the audience that you’re human. The audience is more likely to listen if you seem relatable to them.
8. Say lines aloud as you write.
A compelling speech doesn’t necessarily follow the clear-cut grammar and usage rules of written language. Say your presentation aloud as you write it to maintain a conversational, yet engaging tone.
9. Build in repetition.
As you write, make sure that you’re planning to repeat the core ideas of your presentation throughout the talk. Frequently mentioning the key ideas of your presentation boosts your audience’s memory of these concepts.
10. Create several takeaways.
Great presentations are useful, so explicitly point out the valuable lessons of your talk for your audience. Along with writing these takeaways in your speech, you can emphasize these tips with visual aids (more on that later).
Spend time figuring out the words you want to say, and you’ll be able to express your ideas and expertise in a concise, clear way to your audience.
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Establishing a presence
Beyond words, your presence as a speaker — body language, volume — has a huge impact on whether your audience pays attention and understands your ideas. Execute the following tips to enhance your presentation skills.
11. Be authentic.
Audiences can tell when a speaker looks or sounds insincere. You have to be yourself to connect with your audience and hold their attention. Imagine that you’re talking to your best friend, and you’ll appear natural and comfortable on stage.
12. Make eye contact with audience members.
This non-verbal tactic keeps you and the audience engaged with each other. They can see that you’re paying attention to them, and you can read their facial expressions to see if you need to adjust your delivery to boost their attention.
13. Demonstrate confident body language.
Maintain a straight posture with your hands out of your pockets to show your audience that you are at ease. Even if you’re actually feeling a bit nervous, this body language can reduce those anxious feelings and help you feel more comfortable on stage.
14. Interact with the audience.
Encouraging audience participation—whether it’s asking everyone a question or getting a volunteer on stage—is a simple, yet powerful way to connect with everyone watching. It makes each listener an active audience member rather than a passive one.
15. Articulate and project when you speak.
A great presentation is wasted if you aren’t heard by the audience. Not to mention, you will feel more confident and seem more confident to your audience if your voice is loud and clear. Present your speech with confidence, and the audience will see that you’re a subject matter expert who is comfortable expressing their ideas.
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Engaging with slides
Your audience is more likely to remember the information you share if they can hear it and see it with visual aids. Add slides to your presentation to help them retain more of your content.
16. Limit text.
Fill your slides with words and bullet points, and your audience will be too busy reading to pay attention to what you’re saying. Minimize your text and share knowledge by saying it aloud. The audience will be more likely to stay engaged, and you’ll be able to showcase your expertise.
17. Use high-quality graphics.
Grainy, low-quality images on slides hurt your presentation — they’re difficult to see and they make the presentation seem unprofessional. Aim for the highest image resolution possible, especially if you’re presenting on a large screen.
18. Create your own theme.
PowerPoint templates are used so frequently that they aren’t worth using. Show that your presentation is original by creating your own background theme, or you can browse online to find custom templates created by others.
Here at Vyond, we adapted a conference’s custom template to fit our branding:
19. Include videos.
Add movement to your slides with video and your presentation will be more eye-catching and engaging. For example, you might introduce yourself in an early slide with a video bio, or turn dry statistics into an animated GIF to capture attention.
20. Keep your slides simple.
If you include too many elements on each slide, your audience won’t know where their eyes should focus. Guide your audience seamlessly through each slide with a simple, minimal design that has a clear focus.
21. Coordinate audio-visual (AV) support beforehand.
Whether you’re speaking in your office or at a conference, figure out the technical details of showing slides beforehand. Preparing for the set-up process will help you avoid hiccups when you need to present. With visual aids, your audience will be more likely to understand and remember your presentation content. Rehearsing your presentation will minimize any stress or fear you feel around public speaking. The more you’ve practiced, the more confident you’ll feel in your ability to deliver the presentation.
22. Don’t read your slides.
If you’re constantly turning back to see your PowerPoint, your audience won’t be able to see your face and you’ll seem less knowledgeable. Practice your presentation facing forward with your content memorized, and your audience will be able to see your expressions and feel more confident in your expertise.
23. Write cue cards.
Remember what you want to say in your presentation by writing your main talking points on flashcards. Include a limited amount of text and write in large letters to make your notes easy to read on stage. As you practice more, try to look down at your cards fewer times and focus on keeping your gaze on the audience.
24. Time yourself.
Most conferences have time limits for each talk, and if you’re giving an internal company presentation, your boss will have a sense of how long your meeting presentation should last. Make sure you’re within these time frames by timing your presentation as you practice. If you’re consistently running over, review your presentation to find areas that you can cut.
25. Slow down.
People tend to talk more quickly when feeling nervous during public speaking. However, rushing through your sentences can make your presentation difficult to understand as an audience member. Focus on speaking at a steady pace as you practice your presentation.
26. Have a practice run in front of someone else.
Find someone you trust — a friend, family member, or co-worker — who can watch you deliver a practice presentation. Delivering in front of someone else will prepare you for facing an audience, and they will be able to provide useful feedback for improvements as an observer. Start practicing a few weeks prior to your presentation. By the time you’re ready to give the talk, you’ll have ingrained these tips in your delivery style. Delivering your presentation Even after practicing your presentation, standing in front of an audience can still be nerve-wracking for some. Use these tips to relax and feel comfortable right before and during your presentation. Feeling calm, you’ll be able to share your expertise with poise and confidence.
27. Take deep breaths.
Right before delivering a presentation, it’s normal to feel a bit nervous — your heart beats quickly and your palms may even feel a bit sweaty. Calm down by taking several deep breaths. Inhale for three counts and exhale for three counts for each breath. Slowing down your breath and becoming aware of it will help you relax before presenting.
28. Think positively before it starts.
Take a moment before you deliver your presentation to imagine it going extremely well. You showcase your knowledge beautifully, and your audience stays engaged. Picturing this positive vision will boost your confidence before you begin, so you’re more likely to deliver the great presentation that you imagined.
29. Drink water
Your mouth may get dry after speaking for such a long time. Bring a bottle of water on stage in case you need to refresh yourself during the presentation.
30. Smile!
This is a simple, yet essential tip. Smiling makes you seem approachable and friendly to your audience, so they’re more likely to pay attention. For those with a fear of public speaking, putting on a grin can even help lower your stress levels, according to research. Using these tips, you can calm your nerves and keep your cool throughout your presentation.
Giving a great presentation is a process
Public speaking isn’t an inherent talent—to improve your presentation skills, you have to practice. Brainstorming and rehearsing your presentation well in advance enables you to deliver it in a powerful, memorable way. Use the tips in this guide to plan your content and practice your delivery, and you’ll be ready to showcase your expertise on presentation day.
Want to create videos for your presentations? Vyond is an animation platform where any person — regardless of their experience — can create a professional video in no time. If you don’t have an account, sign up for our free trial to make your first animated video today.
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#### 4 Animated Video Use Cases for HR Teams
Human Resources has long relied on extensive documentation to protect its company and employees, but the days of boring booklets and PDFs are long over.
This year, we’re dealing you in to better ways of communication with a full deck of ideas for using Vyond. Here are four ideas for using animated videos in human resources to communicate in a more engaging way:
Explaining Benefits
Onboarding
Introducing Processes & Tools
Employee Appreciation
Read on for examples and templates for creating HR videos in Vyond Studio!
Try Vyond for Free
Animated Human Resources Video Ideas
1. Explaining Benefits
Benefits information is important but often dry and confusing. By adding a video summary to your job posts, onboarding materials, and open enrollment communications, you can serve up an effective primer of what your company offers.
Beyond being more engaging, videos that explain benefits and policies can go a long way in reaching employees who might otherwise be too uncomfortable to ask. By tackling sensitive topics—like mental wellness and parental leave—with on-demand video, you can better ensure the right employees are seeing it at the right time.
The example above—created in Vyond Studio—is available to Vyond customers as a customizable video template.
CUSTOMIZE THIS BENEFITS EXPLAINER
2. Onboarding
80% of employees say video would have a positive impact on the onboarding process, and it’s no wonder why. Video is one of the most effective mediums for explaining complex ideas in an engaging and focused manner. That clarity counts during a process like onboarding, which hits new hires with a ton of information at once. With video, you can provide your new employees with the critical information they need to know in a more engaging, easy-to-understand way.
The example above—created in Vyond Studio—is available to Vyond customers as a customizable video template.
CUSTOMIZE THIS ONBOARDING VIDEO
3. Introducing Processes & Tools
Instructional videos are often associated with more comprehensive training programs, but you can bring video-based learning into your organization without making a huge project out of it.
Sometimes, even a quick skill-building clip can go a long way in getting everybody on the same page with common practices and tools. In the video above, the speaker uses an annotated screen recording to show how their company uses Google Calendar to schedule meetings.
You can create your own version of this video if you already have a Vyond account.
CUSTOMIZE THIS TRAINING VIDEO
4. Employee Appreciation
Employee Appreciation Day falls on the first Friday of every March. Odds are, though, that your team is worth celebrating year-round.
Show your appreciation at special events (or everyday!) with videos like the one above. You can create custom animated characters that look like your co-workers, or take a mixed media approach that incorporates your favorite photos.
If you’ve already got Vyond Studio, you can use this video as a template to swap in photos of your own team.
CUSTOMIZE THIS EMPLOYEE APPRECIATION VIDEO
Create Your Own HR Videos
There’s an infinite number of ways to use video for Human Resources. All you have to do is get started. By creating your own videos for HR, you can tailor the information to your context while unleashing your creativity. Vyond Studio makes it easy for anybody to create media that moves. Give it a try with our free trial.
TRY VYOND FREE
#### 4 Initial Steps to Creating Microlearning Videos
Before you make a microlearning video.
Microlearning videos are a rapidly growing component of many organization’s eLearning strategies. According to a survey by the Association for Talent Development (ATD), 72% of organizations plan to create microlearning videos in the near future, if they aren’t already.
For more on why microlearning is such a powerful strategy, check out the first two articles in this series: What is Microlearning? 5 Key Benefits for Today’s Employees and Why Your Company Should Create Microlearning Videos.
Ready to get started?
The first step of any successful microlearning video (or video in general) is pre-production — a.k.a., planning. It may be tempting to skip this step in favor of going straight to the execution stage. Don’t!
Steps to Creating Microlearning Videos
1. Set goals.
First, explicitly identify the main training goals for your learning program. Then, think about how this microlearning video (or series of videos) will align to those goals.
Consider questions like:
What specific objective are you trying to communicate with this video?
What objectives are you trying to communicate with the larger series this video will be a part of (if applicable)?
Who is your audience for the video (e.g., all employees or employees in a certain job function or department)?
How will the video be used in your training program? E.g., is it a supplement to an in-person training session or a stand-alone lesson? Is it an optional or mandatory component of the program?
How will you measure success (e.g., viewership, engagement, assessments, etc.)?
2. Identify the scope.
Before diving into creating a microlearning video — whether you’re planning to make one short video or hundreds — consider:
What is your budget (both for the training program overall and for the individual video)?
What is your timeline for creating the video(s)?
Who are the main stakeholders in the project, and what approval processes do you need to follow? Involving decision-makers early on and clearly setting expectations about how you expect to share drafts and receive feedback will prevent headaches down the line.
What resources do you have available to help with content and production? Do you need to hire a subject matter expert, or request time from someone within your organization?
How long will your video be?
How many videos will there be in the series, if more than one?
3. Decide what kind of video you plan to make, and how.
Your goals, budget, and scope will help determine what kind of video it makes most sense to create. Will your video be live-action, animated, or a combination of both? If you have hired outside consultants or have a production team on staff, this is a decision you can make collaboratively.
Drag-and-drop animation is a great option for organizations of all sizes looking to create videos — especially if those videos need to be created quickly and cost-effectively. Animated video offers all the benefits of live-action, with far fewer resource requirements (e.g., no actors or studios or sets). Even organizations with larger budgets often choose animated video because it’s easier to update training modules while ensuring stylistic consistency across a video series.
Regardless of what type of video you choose, now is the time to sort out logistical concerns. What software program(s) do you plan to use? Do you need to rent or buy equipment or studio space? Do you need to hire or train additional people to produce the videos?
4. Brainstorm and outline.
Putting together a creative brief for your video is a good way to kick off the production process. Here’s a video brief template from Act-On Software that might be helpful as a starting point. Be sure to include goals, topics, and takeaways as well as who is responsible for each component of the process.
Then, develop an outline. Think about questions like:
Is this a scenario-based video? Will you have a narrative? Is there interactivity?
What is your main learning objective, and how do you plan to communicate this in the video?
What situations or storylines could help bring your main point home?
Will you have a narrator? Characters? Both? If a narrator, what will his/her personality and purpose be? If characters, who are they are and what will their story arc be? How will you use them to educate and engage your audience?
Remember, microlearning videos are “micro” for a reason. Each video you create should address one main learning objective. Trying to take on too much in such a short period of time is antithetical to the main benefits of microlearning, such as reducing cognitive load, maximizing engagement, and improving retention. Give yourself permission to create an expansive first draft, then be ruthless about making cuts. Remember that you can always produce multiple videos if you need to communicate multiple learning objectives.
Read Next: How to Script a Successful Microlearning Video
About Vyond
Vyond allows people of all skill levels in all industries and job roles to create dynamic and powerful media. With features that go beyond moving text and images, you can build character-driven stories or compelling data visualizations that engage audiences and deliver results.
With Vyond, it’s easy to create video for your social media marketing. Start a free trial and sign up for our weekly webinar.
#### 4 Leaders on the Business Value of Vyond
Sure, Vyond is beloved by video creators at thousands of companies around the world.
But the leaders our beloved creators report to love Vyond too. Why? Four leaders from across L&D, compliance, sales enablement and internal communications break it down:
#### 4 Must-Have Tools To Make Your Small Business Video
Looking to produce your own small business video? Smart move. Content rules on the web, whether it’s a promotional video, informational video, explainer video, or a testimonial. But how do you do this without blowing the budget or timeline? These four tools will make the process as quick and painless as possible without breaking the bank. GoAnimate How does the idea of creating visually appealing animations with no prior experience sound? Let your personality shine through in your small business video with GoAnimate. Getting started with GoAnimate is a cinch. With dozens of templates, characters, backgrounds, props, and music tracks, you’ll have complete control over your video with business-focused Full Video Makers. Move the camera the way you want it to and add special effects. To speed things up or to easily explain difficult concepts, try using Starters, nestled in the backgrounds tab in the Full Video Maker. The learning curve is negligible, a key consideration for the busy small business owner. As for distribution, videos are hosted as part of your account. Basic viewing statistics are collected. GoAnimate also offers one-click publishing to YouTube and has similar arrangements with other hosting services – no extra work on your part required. GoAnimate offers three business plans starting at $25 a month (billed annually). Full HD commercial videos without a watermark are available at the premium level for just $50 a month (billed annually).
Camtasia When it comes to screen recording, Camtasia sets the standard. If you’re looking to create demos or tutorials, Camtasia is ideal for capturing the ‘explainer’ element – no video camera needed. Just click record and start using your computer, and it will follow your actions and (if desired) your voice narration. Whether you need to capture software walkthroughs, slides, web pages, or import photos or camera video, Camtasia pairs this with video editing tools to create a polished final product. Jazz up your small business video with themes, graphics, clickable links, and other visual and interactive elements. If you’ll be reusing media files to produce multiple videos, these can be saved for easy reference in the future. The array of options and the user-friendly interface (complete with bundled tutorials) make it a great choice for any small business video. A license for Camtasia costs $299, but there’s a free trial available so you can test it out and decide if it’s right for your small business. It exports for web, mobile, DVD and integrates with YouTube for one-step upload.
VoiceBunny You may want to hire professional voice talent to add polish to your small business video. That’s where VoiceBunny comes in. VoiceBunny makes it easy to get crowdsourced voiceovers from a pool of screened voice actors, all of whom work from professional home studios. There are three ways to use VoiceBunny. Users can search the database voices and book an actor directly; post a casting call and evaluate the responses; or, for a speedy turnaround, let the system match them with a suitable candidate within a few hours. Need variety for your small business video? VoiceBunny offers a range of voices and accents in 50 different languages, from Arabic to, er, Vulcan. Other services offered include syncing of recordings to a video, royalty-free music, and special effects. Rates start from as low as 4¢ per word, and the upfront pricing makes it affordable and easy for small businesses to predict their costs. (If you’re not happy with your recording, you won’t be charged.) Audio is conveniently sent back edited and ready to use.
Wistia You can’t go past Wistia for hosting your small business video. The embed builder lets you customize every visual aspect of your video and is packed with tools designed specifically for business. Add social sharing buttons, a clickable call to action, or collect viewers’ emails to add to your marketing database. Wistia videos are also Twitter-friendly and can be played within a tweet. Both Flash and HTML5 versions are encoded automatically at multiple resolutions. Wistia’s biggest selling points relate to content management and user tracking. Private video sharing lets you control who’s invited to access videos, manage what they can see and do, and monitor how they interact with your content. Meanwhile, the analytics package includes a heatmap for every view, showing when an individual watched a video, what parts were skipped or repeated, and what else he or she has previously viewed. Armed with these insights, you’ll be well placed to produce even more compelling videos going forward. In short, unlike YouTube or Vimeo, Wistia is designed to cater to the flexible needs of businesses. There are a number of packages to suit all types of users, including a basic free plan for small businesses with hosting for up to three videos.
#### 4 Reasons Your Startup Needs an Animated Video
Ben Bernstein, Social Marketing Manager at Viewbix, guest posts on Business 2 Community. In this post, Ben talks about the common misconception that video is a luxury companies cannot afford, and explains why startups need an animated video.
Here’s a snippet:
“Working in a startup often means long hours, bad coffee and a harsh learning curve which forces you to learn from your failures. It means that your budget isn’t all that big and that no expense is taken for granted. Practically, that means that often video is considered a luxury that your company cannot presently afford. This is a mistake. Creating a video and specifically an animated video is something your company needs.”
Read the whole piece here on Business 2 Community.
#### 4 Steps to Making Customer Testimonials More Effective
Social proof is one of the essential tools that a business can use to attract and keep a wider audience. It’s no longer a question if you should use testimonials, but how can you get the most out of them.
Publishing a photo of a satisfied user with a quote on your social media can get some positive reactions, but it isn’t enough to grab attention and convince people to give your product a chance.
If you want to add impact to your testimonials, you need prospects to connect with the message, recognize their issue in it and feel that it’s more than another generic user review.
Let’s go over some checkpoints that will help you step up your content and create more effective testimonials that will give a crucial contribution to your results.
How to Make Customer Testimonials that Stand Out
1. Use video.
It’s not a secret that video content is one of the core elements of marketing strategies for many brands. This trend goes perfectly hand in hand with sharing positive experiences that customers had with your brand. Creating B2B video testimonials provides you with an opportunity to go in-depth and showcase each story with a special treatment that will make it more believable.
Don’t let the thought of producing a video scare you away – you don’t need a full crew with expensive cameras and many hours to edit it. Thanks to available tools, you can even create an effective video testimonial remotely without even meeting the participants in person.
Even though you still need to meet some quality standards to make the content watchable for your audience, the focus shouldn’t be on making it as flashy as possible.
Instead, the value of taking the video approach is that it gives you a dynamic way to tell a story of how you can help the prospects without dropping a block of text on their head or asking them to sit through hours of explainer videos.
This form can provide a more sincere feel to recommendations, as they can hear a real person talk instead of feeling like your brand is addressing them. Of course, just because something is in the form of a video, it doesn’t mean it will automatically be a success.
2. Don’t make commercials.
If you want to get the word-of-mouth feel in your video testimonials, you need to use real people and let them tell their stories. This doesn’t mean that everything should be improvised, but you need to resist writing a full script for your speaker.
When you get a returning customer that’s willing to be in a video, the focus should be on their first-hand experience with your product and how it helped them solve a specific problem. Think about it as a conversation between friends – how would they describe to someone why they should give you a chance.
Preparation should include sharing with them your general vision, key points you’d like them to cover and the technical things they need to know. The rest is better kept organic. You can use a basic form to keep the story structured:
Introduction – a short talk introducing the speaker, their situation and the challenge they were facing. This is the part where you set the stage and establish the emotion that will hook the viewers to hear the rest.
The experience – after they pull the audience in, they should go on to cover the exact way you’ve solved their problem, but not listing bullets they could’ve read on your website – genuine emotion and conversational tone are the best way to convince the viewers that the recommendation is not staged.
The point – wrapping up, the customer should conclude that they’re satisfied with all the aspects of their experience. This should seal the relatable nature of the talk, concluding with a note about the before-after of using your product.
3. Make the video engaging.
Firstly, try not to lean into putting everything into the video. It’s tempting to use as much material as possible when you have satisfied customers talking about you, but this can get tiring and make viewers drop off without getting to the point.
Instead, go for a shorter piece of content that will hold the audience’s attention throughout and tell a story with a purpose. For example, 30 minutes of conversation can become a 90 seconds video that packs a punch and puts the prospects in the speakers’ shoes.
A good rule of thumb is to think about if the video would deliver the same message without a sentence. If it doesn’t change anything, it’s safe to say you can do without it.
It’s not only the length that impacts the viewing experience. If you go just for a talking head approach even a minute can make the viewer doze off. Implementing B roll that showcases product being used, speakers’ workplace or even just different angles of the person talking or laughing can help hold focus.
If you want to go another step up, introduce graphics and text overlay. This helps the video be engaging, while also being a convenient way to highlight some data or put emphasis on certain information.
Just be careful not to overdo it, as it can go in the opposite direction and become too overwhelming for the audience.
4. Promote testimonials the right way.
When you have a finished piece of content you’re satisfied with, you need to push it through your channels with the goal to maximize the effect.
Your brand’s social media pages are the easiest way to distribute your video testimonials. Still, you shouldn’t just post the video everywhere and call it a day. You should think about the channel specifics and adjust the content accordingly.
For example, think about going with vertical videos for Instagram and Facebook as they’re mostly browsed through mobile devices. Subtitles are also a simple way to make the content more social-friendly.
There should also be a clear call-to-action added to the post to avoid your audience just scrolling away. Connect the testimonial to a landing page on your website, suggest they view previous content that you have explaining everything they just heard in more detail or even lead them further down the funnel with a leads form.
Another place that can work well with your video testimonials is embedded on your website. Creating an engaging landing page that collects your customer video testimonials can increase the time users spend there and increase the domain authority of your site. You could also submit testimonials to other websites to get a backlink to your landing pages.
Video content can also be a great addition to your email marketing campaigns, especially for users that are in later phases of the buyers’ journey. Insert a short clip inviting the prospects to see more on your website or just embed the whole video making it a centerpiece of a newsletter depending on your frequency.
Your sales team can also leverage the video content to close deals, both in their offers and in outreach campaigns instead of sending classic FAQs.
Going forward
Creating effective testimonials asks for additional effort compared to other content, but when you do it the right way it quickly pays off. Just keep in mind that the customer should be the face of this type of content and that it should be different from other types of direct promotion.
Take your time to find the right speakers and prepare everything so they know what’s expected from them. When you got everything mapped out, feel free to experiment with different formats and gather material that will, later on, be turned into something relatable and dynamic.
Put the time in crafting the final product as well, because you can use it in multiple ways later on. Video testimonials are a valuable asset in your strategy that can be served in multiple ways, keeping them fresh for different channels and stages of buyers’ journey.
About the Author
Sam Shepler is the founder and CEO of Testimonial Hero. 150+ B2B revenue teams at Google, UiPath, Medallia, InsightSquared, and many others use Testimonial Hero to easily create customer videos that engage prospects, reduce friction in the sales cycle, and drive more revenue faster. Follow Sam on Twitter on LinkedIn!
#### 4 Things to Consider When Creating Age Diversity Training
Age diversity doesn’t have a very large share of the popular discourse around diversity, equity, and inclusion. When left unchecked, though, ageism can become just as pervasive and damaging to your organization’s culture as any other -ism.
At face value, age diversity means your team comprises people of varied generations and ages. As with other lenses of diversity, age diversity can advance innovation while deepening your organization’s diversity of thought.
To foster age diversity at your organization, you also need to put in the work to ensure that you don’t only hire diverse people, but that you keep them, and give them a seat at the table. That’s where age diversity training comes into frame.
By creating your own age diversity training program, you can foster inclusivity across all generations. Read on for key considerations to take into account as you build age diversity training for your teams.
Key Considerations for Anti-Ageism Training
Choosing an Accessible Training Format
In order to be effective, your age diversity training will need to be accessible to all—especially across the praxis of age. The format you choose can have a huge impact on engagement.
Our 2020 study on the silent issues of remote work found that 50% of Boomers feel disconnected from their colleagues. With that insight, we can think about what kind of content these employees might find more engaging. Rather than impersonal, text-based communication, a hybrid training experience that blends learning with personal interaction might be the way to go.
Without assuming the technical abilities of your teams based on their age, you can consider the likelihood that people of different age groups have different relationships with digital experiences. Before building this training into the flashiest eLearning platform you can find, take some time to research what systems will be the most accessible for all age groups that your training serves.
Animated videos like the one below are a great way to not only reach all learners, but to truly engage them with accessible material using dynamic visual content. If you’re a Vyond customer, you can use this example as a video template to create your own anti-ageism training.
USE THIS VIDEO AS A TEMPLATE
Inter-Generational Exchange
When employees are disconnected across age groups, the work suffers. That’s why it is important to tap into the rich perspectives that come with age diversity.
“Know-how is available [across] generations but is never really talked about,” says Fabiola Gerpott, a thought leader in diversity management. But while it’s available, she says, employees assume their colleagues aren’t interested in their respective areas of expertise.
According to Gerpott, cooperation between generations is critical inside companies to share knowledge and information. Look for opportunities to build intergenerational exchange into your age diversity training. These moments allow your team to benefit from experiences that are more removed than their own, while also forging relationships that they can carry onward into their work.
Ageism in Recruiting and Hiring
Discriminating against candidates during the hiring process is illegal, harmful, and woefully widespread. Recently, AARP found that 45% of older job seekers felt discriminated against while searching for a job, keeping them from joining the workforce.
Any unchecked hiring trends at your organization that favor members of a certain age group will not only inhibit age diversity, but make it harder to help everyone feel included. If some employees feel particularly out of place at your organization, you may face deepening obstacles to intergenerational communication.
It’s valuable to have age diversity training that targets employees once they are hired, but it’s equally important to cover age diversity even before candidates are hired. Consider covering hiring diversity in your age diversity training, or create a separate module on the topic for your recruiters.
Creating training videos that help expose biased practices are highly effective at unrooting ageism. For example; you can provide guidance such as not asking for a candidate’s age, or guessing their age based on graduation dates found on their resume.
Addressing All Forms of Ageism
Very often, age diversity training falls into the trap of treating ageism as a one-directional issue. In fact; ageism can happen in all directions, across many generations, and even as a bias against members of the same generation as one’s own.
It’s important that you capture that nuance in your age diversity training rather than presenting ageism as exclusive to a particular generation. Present examples through scenario-based training videos that show ageism from older to younger employees, and younger to older employees, and beyond. Be sure to represent diverse ages in your videos, too.
Your content shouldn’t only represent diverse scenarios and characters, but it should also speak to all audiences, especially across age groups. The vocabulary, values, and skills you develop with your age diversity training program should be shared across the entire organization, not targeted toward a particular demographic.
Animate an engaging age diversity training
Age diversity training—and diversity training in general—matters. Do it the right way by carefully considering your content, and delivering it in an impactful way. By creating your own age diversity training videos with Vyond, you can captivate your audience’s attention with representative, character-driven, scenario-based training that gets to the heart of the issue. Try Vyond Studio for Free.
TRY VYOND STUDIO FREE
#### 4 Video Marketing Ideas
As the digital media landscape has gotten more cluttered, video has emerged as the best way for marketers to reach audiences. Two-thirds of consumers reported that they’d rather learn about a product from a video than any other medium, and 74% of shoppers say they’ve been convinced to buy something from a video.
Need some inspiration for your video marketing strategy? Look no further! We’ve got 4 video marketing ideas for you.
This year, we’re dealing you in with 52 ways to communicate with video. Today, we’re focusing on four fresh ideas for marketing:
Use Visual Metaphors
Build a Personal Brand
Share Customer Testimonials
Advertise on Social Media
Read on to get inspired, and make your own marketing videos with Vyond!
Try Vyond for Free
Video Marketing Ideas
1. Use Visual Metaphor
Video works because it engages audiences organically through rich media. By layering visuals with motion, music, and sound, you’re able to captivate the attention of your viewers.
If you have a complex idea—particularly for B2B video marketing—it’s wise to create rich media moments that communicate through metaphor. The Vyond marketing video above showcases common idioms and metaphors that can be used to get your message across with animation.
Can you think of any others? Customize these metaphors and add your own by importing this video into an existing Vyond account.
USE THIS VIDEO TEMPLATE
2. Build a Personal Brand
Video marketing isn’t just for selling a product. Use video to build a personal brand and develop a professional network!
We’ve seen tons of great examples from the Vyond Maker Community of building your personal brand with video, from video resumes to videos of recommendation and beyond! We asked one such maker, Louis Ceaser IV, to tell us more about how he creates videos for LinkedIn:
By sharing your story with video, you can create a more personal connection with your network while building a visually recognizable brand. Get started in Vyond Studio today, or connect with Louis for help.
CONNECT WITH LOUIS
3. Share Customer Testimonials
You put a lot of time and effort into making your customers happy. Once they’re singing your praises, it should be easy to get those testimonials out into the world.
Animated video provides a unique solution to sharing compelling social proof. By making your own testimonial video, you’re able to produce the content quickly and cost-effectively. With animation, you give yourself the opportunity to share testimonials anonymously with graphics and characters instead of live-action footage. The format also lends itself to easily updating the testimonial down the line.
If you’re already a Vyond customer, you can use the video above with placeholders to kick-start your own video testimonial project.
USE THIS VIDEO TEMPLATE
4. Video Marketing for Social Media
Using video in digital advertising isn’t necessarily a new idea, but there’s still plenty of room to innovate.
Another member of the Vyond Maker Community, Rued Riis, relies heavily on video to reach potential customers with Facebook video ads. In videos like the one above, he goes beyond the traditional 1-2 minute promo video to share long-form video content in his paid advertisements. These allow him to deliver meaningful value to his customers and engage them deeply despite the noisy digital landscape.
By using animation to create video ads for social media, you’re able to easily optimize your video content, too. Conduct A/B tests with slightly different versions of the same video, and continuously tweak and edit your content in response to ad performance.
Ready to master the art of animated ads? Take Rued’s course on creating animated videos with Vyond.
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Make professional marketing videos.
You don’t have to go to film school to start making high-quality videos. With Vyond Studio, marketers and entrepreneurs alike can create professional animated video that inspires, connects, and converts. Get inspired with more video ideas, and sign up for a free trial to start making media that moves.
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#### 4 Ways Vyond Speeds Up Revenue Velocity for Sales Teams
You need sales enablement software that shortens your sales cycle, protects your pipeline, and expands your customer footprint.
Powerful AI video creation tools deliver speed, relevance and results – at every stage of the sales and renewal cycle. With targeted, on-brand videos made in minutes, you can:
Get new hires battle-ready 5x faster
Equip reps with critical competitive intel on the fly
Rescue stalled deals with strategic video touches
Boost retention with QBR “value” videos that stick
Let’s dig in:
Driving Rep Readiness
Go from first day to first deal 5x faster
Stop info-dumping during onboarding. Reduce ramp time and boost confidence with strategic microlearning videos that stick.The key? Eye-catching formats. Relevant, on-brand messages. Clear next steps. And one idea per “snackable” video.
Using an LMS? Just export your Vyond videos into SCORM or any LMS-friendly format — and go.
Here are three common sales onboarding use cases built with Vyond:
Sales onboarding needObjectiveHow to make it in VyondTech stack tutorialsShow the real impact sales tools have on streamlining workflows and closing deals fasterPick template + swap in preferred avatar, photos, and narration → shareTalk track breakdownsHighlight what works—and what doesn’t—in real sales calls.Pick template + swap in preferred avatars + talking points → shareProspect persona explainersBring buyer personas to life with animated characters or avatars. Instantly improve talk-track differentiation.Pick “talking head” template for each persona in Vyond Go + add script or notes as prompt + generate → share
Vyond at Work: The night before a sales kickoff, Joel Fleet, Senior Director of Field Readiness at Salesloft, used Vyond to quickly create videos featuring five prospect types sharing their needs and concerns. With each unique persona fresh in their mind, reps workshopped how to tailor differentiation talk tracks to every audience. Said Fleet: “It was a big hit.”
Prepare reps for competitor convos with real-time intel
Yesterday a competitor dropped a buzzy new release. Today Gartner published a new industry report.
By tomorrow, your reps need guidance on how to adjust their pitch – and earn your prospects’ trust.
With AI video tools, turning today’s updates into tomorrow’s enablement takes minutes.
Drop in your competitive intel, let Vyond Go do the heavy lifting, share immediately.
Accelerate competitive readiness
Turn market noise into pitch confidence
Strengthen buyer trust with informed guidance
Quarterly competitor updates don’t cut it. Reps need new intel yesterday. Vyond delivers “right-on-time” insights at the speed of sales, no video skills required.
Driving Deals and Renewals
Rescue stalled deals with personalized video touches
Deal stuck in neutral? Struggling to re-engage buyers?
Don’t resend the proposal deck. Turn it into a personalized 60-second video recap that highlights their key needs, your value, and clear next steps — and send that instead.
Why it works: Forrester research finds that employees are 75% more likely to watch a video than read a document or article. But until recently, creating personalized videos at scale wasn’t practical for reps.
Now, AI video creation tools make it easy to condense proposals into concise, customized videos that get watched – and shared.
Rescue stalled deals with clarity and a personal touch
Reinforce your value — without another meeting
Respect buyers’ time with a distilled pitch
When attention is scarce, clarity and brevity win. Help reps make every touchpoint count with short, personalized videos that get seen, understood and shared — fast.
Ensure renewals with “visualized value” QBR recaps
How effectively you communicate value during QBRs can make—or break—the outcome.
Make your impact concrete and tangible, and renewals follow. Miss the mark, and they won’t.
An engaging two-minute video recap brings your ROI story to life better than a PowerPoint walkthrough. And it extends your message to decision-makers who weren’t in the room.
Either drop your QBR notes or deck into Vyond Go to generate a custom video. Or add info to our pre-built QBR video template. Your customer will feel heard—and remember exactly why they should renew.
Make your value clear (and impossible to forget)
Reinforce renewal confidence by showing, not telling
Use video to extend your reach with stakeholders
Vyond at Work: Our Customer Success Managers create and share these videos ahead of QBRs. They take just 10 minutes to make and cut in-meeting recap time in half. This frees up more time for personalized problem-solving and ROI improvement conversations, which leads to stronger customer relationships and more referrals.
See how Vyond can help your team drive revenue faster
Revenue velocity depends on readiness, relevance, and consistent value communication.
Vyond helps sales and customer teams deliver all three — transforming key messages into engaging videos that prepare reps faster, unblock stalled deals, and make your impact unforgettable to customers.
Want to learn more?
Watch This Interactive Video Demo
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#### 5 Free Animated PowerPoint Templates for a Presentation That Captivates Your Audience
Employees and customers have explicitly shared their preference for video for over a decade. In 2010, executives claimed they’d pick video over text to learn about a topic as long as a video was available. Three years later, viewers said they could retain 95% of a message they watched, compared to only 10% of a message they read.
This craving for video content is still going strong today. Today’s employees don’t like text-based communications because they often miscommunicate their messages. Meanwhile, viewers will skim or multitask content that isn’t in a video.
These five animated presentation slide templates will help you create videos for Microsoft PowerPoint (PPT) presentations or GIFs for static ones. These moving elements turn uninteresting text-based presentations into engaging ones that attract and keep your viewers’ attention.
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1. Goal Progress Thermometer animated presentation template
You can use our Goal Progress Thermometer presentation template to showcase your team’s progress toward a particular goal.
A goal thermometer shows employees’ progress on a business priority. Visualizing progress encourages accountability and better performance, which are crucial to thriving.
You can use this animated PowerPoint presentation template to indicate progress toward any goal. For example, you can use it to contrast the number of onboarded employees or customers during the last month against your hiring or sales goals.
You can follow these steps to create your goal progress thermometer:
Open the template in Vyond Studio.
Scroll to the third scene, click on the Trees, and then the Mask option in the top right corner. You can then Replace Masked Content with an image related to what your team progressed on, like pictures of people to represent an increase in customers.
Finish by editing colors, fonts, and text boxes.
You can now click preview to see the thermometer and the progress number increase, then download the template once it’s finished.
2. Quarterly Planning presentation animated template
You can use the Quarterly Planning Presentation template to show staff the next quarter’s goals and the plan to achieve them.
When each team pursues what they think is best for the company without consulting other departments, they can work on isolated initiatives that don’t produce significant results. One solution is to define priorities and then host quarterly meetings to check if these priorities are relevant to the current market.
This PowerPoint template animates ideas related to the planning process, like an arrow hitting a target as a metaphor for what you want your staff to do and a magnet attracting customers. You can turn your template into a ready-to-export slideshow in a few steps:
Click on Use This Template.
Add your targets using the templates between scenes three and six.
Write your action plan using the templates between scenes eight and twelve.
Change icons and colors to match your style guide.
Preview and download your project.
You can also finish the presentation by recording a voiceover—if it’s an asynchronous presentation—or including music to support your voice.
3. Video to Replace PowerPoint Presentations animated template
You can use the Video to Replace PowerPoint Presentations template to create a dynamic presentation of your product’s features and pricing tiers. The template uses transition effects, icons, and animated graphics that highlight your product’s value propositions for each pricing tier. For example, the template uses the star wipe to focus the viewer’s eye on the key-value you want to highlight. The star icons also help bring a positive, aspirational tone to your presentation.
Editing the Video Product Presentation template is simple:
Click on Use This Template.
Include the images, colors, graphs, and text that suit your presentation.
Delete the audio track and add your voiceover using the Mic Recording option in the top left corner. Alternatively, you can drag and drop an audio file into the timeline.
If you want to add a few animations but ignore the product presentation structure, customize the scenes you want to add to your animated slides, delete the rest, and export the project.
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4. Annual Team Recap animated PowerPoint presentation template
You can use the Annual Team Recap template to reveal the team’s performance at the end of the year. Performance reviews can motivate staff to excel the next year or validate the strength of an existing strategy.
This template is excellent for team recaps, as it comes with dynamic bar and line charts and animations you can use to highlight key improvements in your team’s performance. You can follow four steps to customize it:
Click on Use This Template.
Select the Bar, Proportional Ring, and Line charts.
Edit the charts’ data using the Chart Data tab in the top right corner.
Change the color of your “Best Months” to emphasize triumphs.
You can now export the entire project. If you only want to use specific animations, delete the scenes you don’t want to turn into a GIF and export the remaining ones as animated GIFs.
5. Metaphors for Content Marketing animated template
You can use the Metaphors for Content Marketing template to access visual metaphors that you can add to your PowerPoint presentations.
Metaphors turn complicated or obscure ideas into simple ones that your viewers can understand. And when ideas are relatable, viewers can better understand the importance of the situation you are describing.
Every scene from the template represents a metaphor, like time is money or bringing ideas to life. So, unlike with other PPT templates, all you need to do is open the template and export the metaphor you want to add to your PowerPoint presentation.
Use Vyond’s free animated PowerPoint templates to create engaging slideshows.
You can edit projects or individual scenes with a trial Vyond account at no cost. Once you subscribe to a plan, you can export high-quality GIFs or video PPT presentations that match the style—minimalist, modern design, or pitch deck—of previous PowerPoint slides or your company’s style guide.
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#### 5 Learning Theories L&D Professionals Should Know (and How to Apply Them)
According to L&D pro Elaine Biech, “Learning is not an automatic consequence of pouring information into another’s head. It requires the learner’s own mental involvement and participation.”
So, how can Learning and Development teams hope to design effective training programs if they aren’t aware of the mental forces that drive learning?
The short answer is, they can’t.
Learning theories are attempts to model out the “mental involvement” that enables learning. Philosophers, scientists, and psychologists have been trying to untangle exactly how we learn for some time now. Although no one theory reigns supreme, certain frameworks stand out.
In this article, we’ll go over five such theories—and suggest how L&D teams might apply them for better learning outcomes:
Constructivist Learning Theory
Adult Learning Theory (Andragogy)
Learning Curve Theory
Connectivism
Collaborative Learning
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Learning Theories to Apply in L&D
1. Constructivist Learning Theory
Is the learner an active participant in the learning process or a passive recipient of knowledge? Is the learner’s mind a “black box,” meaning researchers can only rely on visible behavior? What’s the role of socialization in learning?
These are a few of the many questions learning theorists have tried to answer.
Here’s what proponents of the constructivist learning theory have to say:
Learning is an active process
Learning is a social activity
Learning is based on personal, existing knowledge and experience
It’s worth studying learning as an inner (mental) process
We can define the theory further:
“Constructivism is the theory that says learners construct knowledge rather than just passively take in information. As people experience the world and reflect upon those experiences, they build their own representations and incorporate new information into their pre-existing knowledge (schemas).”
As opposed to behaviorists (who see learning as essentially a set of physical responses to stimuli), and an agreement with cognitivism, constructivists focus on learning as an inner mental process. But, in contrast to the latter, they believe the learner takes a particularly active role. They also put more weight on social interaction as part of effective learning.
Two key constructivists that have helped shape the way we understand teaching and learning include:
Jean Piaget: A Swiss psychologist, Jean Piaget is credited with pioneering research around the developmental stages of cognitive ability and learning in children. For Piaget, “the teacher became not a transmitter of knowledge but a guide to the child’s own discovery of the world.”
Lev Vygotsky: Vygotsky lived and worked at around the same time as Piaget, coming up with related but distinct theories of child development. He’s credited with the theories of the Zone of Proximal Development, and the teaching method of “scaffolding.”
Though original constructivist theorists were focused on how children learn, their frameworks are useful for anybody looking to instruct, teach, or train.
How to Apply Constructivist Learning Theory
Since constructivists believe in the active role of the learner (and the importance of social involvement), here are a few ideas for building courses around this model:
Q&A: Existing knowledge and experiences are important to constructivists. Assess prior knowledge with pre-quizzes or questionnaires to gauge where learners are. Encourage employees to ask and answer their own questions through research and group discussions.
Explore different media: Don’t rely solely on lecture-style training. Find ways to build interactivity into courses, whether through the medium itself or the way learners interact with the material. Peer learning and dialogue—with the instructor as the facilitator—is encouraged.
Include relevant context: For constructivists, learning is personal and can’t be uncoupled from our lived experiences. Ground learning moments in a context that’s relevant to your employees.
This notion of the learner as an active driver of learning is also fundamental to another important learning theory, especially for L&D teams: adult learning theory.
2. Adult Learning Theory (Andragogy)
Believe it or not, before the Second World War, theorists were almost exclusively concerned with studying the way children learned—nobody gave any thought to whether the process in adults was any different. Then came Malcolm Knowles.
Knowles is credited with formulating the theory of “andragogy” (adult learning theory) in the U.S. in the 1980s. He specifically sought to untangle the differences in how adults learn versus how children do. He adapted the pedagogical model to accommodate major differences in motivation, process, and style.
The major points of his theory are based on six assumptions about how adults learn:
The need to know: Adults crave to understand why they’re learning something.
Learner’s self-concept: In a learning situation, adults need to be treated as adults, with pre-existing knowledge, experience, and points of view.
The role of learner’s experiences: Adults’ varied experiences mean they can more actively participate in a learning process than children (who lack that life experience).
Readiness to learn: Adults should enter learning situations when it makes sense in their career, life circumstances, or life goals.
Orientation to learning: For adults, learning courses should be grounded in a real-world context, not abstract “learning for learning’s sake.”
Motivation: Adults are primarily driven by internal factors, like a desire for higher self-esteem.
All this would seem to make a world of sense. But pedagogical models, where the instructor is the authority figure and where learning is “poured into the heads of students,” are more prevalent than one would think—even in L&D settings. How can learning and development teams respect the principles of adult learning theory in their training?
How to Apply Adult Learning Theory
Adult learning theory insists that the (adult) learner needs to be in the driver’s seat more often than not.
Use a bottom-up approach to training needs analysis. Instead of relying on top management to determine learning needs, let employees lead the way.
Let adults share their experiences. Your learners are rich with prior experience and knowledge. Let them be the subject-matter experts in the areas they know about, and engage in some peer learning.
Opt for self-directed learning. Lesson planning, researching, independent study…L&D teams act more as facilitators than all-knowing instructors in this set-up. Learners self-direct when possible.
Of course, whenever you learn anything, there’s always going to be some trial and error. Even if you embrace adult learning theory, it will take some time before learners truly get the hang of new material. Learning curve theory can help explain that.
3. Learning Curve Theory
For some new tasks, it might take no time at all to get up to speed. For others, it could feel like a slog before you finally get the hang of it—and then you’re off and running. The learning curve theory explains this phenomenon.
The origins of the learning curve theory begin with German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus in the late 20th century. Ebbinghaus pioneered fascinating research about how people learn (and forget), uncovering cognitive biases like the serial position effect. Though he didn’t use the term “learning curve,” his experiments led him to explore the differing rates at which people retain and forget information.
It wasn’t until 1936 that a certain Theodore Paul Wright applied this idea with a more economic bent. He was interested in the question of labor productivity (in the aircraft industry). In a publication titled “Factors Affecting the Costs of Airplanes,” he explained that, “the cost of each unit produced decreases as a function of the cumulative number of units produced.” Production costs decreased as workers grew more comfortable with the task (over time).
This idea was solidified in a mathematical model called “Wright’s Law”: Y = AX^B.
Y = cumulative average time (or cost) per unit
X = cumulative number of units produced
A = time (or cost) required to produce first unit
B = slope of the function
Later research by the Boston Consulting Group would broaden these ideas out to include more factors affecting productivity, with the publication of their “experience curve.”
How to Apply Learning Curve Theory
If you like to play around with mathematical models, you could have a lot of fun predicting and forecasting (using Wright’s Law) employee, team, or department productivity over time. If you’re so inclined, here are some tips for common types of learning curves you might encounter:
The diminishing returns learning curve: employees are getting the hang of things quickly, but keep an eye out for costs when the plateau hits.
The increasing returns learning curve: This would indicate that people will need a while to get the hang of these tasks, but once it’s under their belts, they’ll become proficient quickly. Keep employees motivated and engaged in that early “shallow curve” phase.
The S-curve: learning will be slow at first, followed by a steep acceleration to proficiency and then a plateau. The lower down the plateau, the better.
The complex learning curve: This is what will probably appear for tasks that will take a while to attain mastery, even after many repetitions. Improved training techniques and qualified candidates will help keep costs down.
Useful conclusions can also be drawn from Ebbinghaus’ earlier research on memory and recall.
The primacy effect: when given information in a sequence, people tend to better recall the first information given.
The recency effect: when given information in a sequence, people tend to better recall the most recent information given.
So, keep the most important bits of information during a training at the very beginning or right at the end of a course. This is certain pertinent information for applying our next learning theory: connectivism.
4. Connectivism
Connectivism is a more contemporary learning theory crystallized by the MOOC-pioneer George Siemens in 2004/5. It explores the importance of networks in how we learn, and was developed as the internet was radically changing how people absorbed information the world over.
For Siemens, “when we learn, we’re essentially involved in a process of pruning, forming, and developing our networks.” These include those:
Based on biology (neurons connecting to enable learning)
Based on our school systems/formal learning, like in a university
Based on external social networks or systems, including phone apps, internet-powered networks, and AI-powered platforms
For him, learning is an essentially shared, chaotic, networked, and ever-changing process, and doesn’t occur only in the mind of the individual.
His theory is driven by eight guiding principles:
Learning and knowledge rest in diverse opinions
Learning is a process of connecting specialized nodes or information sources
Learning may reside in non-human appliances
The capacity to know more is more critical than what is currently known
Nurturing and maintaining connections is needed to facilitate continual learning
The ability to see connections between fields, ideas, and concepts is a core skill
Currency (accurate, up-to-date knowledge) is the intent of all connectivist learning activities
Decision-making is itself a learning process
Though connectivism isn’t without its critics, it’s one of the first real attempts to understand what it means to teach and learn “in the digital age.”
How to Apply Connectivism
The role of teachers and instructors in connectivism is minimal—they’re meant to enable learners to set up their own learning environments and tap into learning networks. You can do this by:
Encouraging learners to search for information on social media, through MOOCs, websites, and other digital platforms
Enabling learners to “hook up to networks” that will enable a flow of information: forums, buddy system, peer-to-peer learning
Encouraging honest and transparent feedback loops
The role of collaboration in connectivism is clear, but perhaps not as easily attained in a learning and development setting as it is in our next and final learning theory: Collaborative Learning.
5. Collaborative Learning
We work in teams, so why wouldn’t we learn as a team?
This is the main premise behind Collaborative Learning.
Collaborative Learning is a training methodology where people share knowledge and expertise by teaching and learning from one another. While traditional learning settings are top-down, with instructors determining learning needs and disseminating training, Collaborative Learning is different. Learning needs are declared by employees themselves, and subject-matter experts step up to create courses, share knowledge, and provide feedback loops:
360Learning‘s platform combines collaborative tools with the power of an LMS, and we’ve seen the results of what collaborative learning can do — our clients drive course completion rates of over 90%, and the the average time for course deployment on our platform is just 11 minutes.
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Three Examples of How to Apply Collaborative Learning
Instead of instituting a corporate re-skilling initiative for 1,000 engineers, a company could encourage each employee to set their own learning goals based on their specific aspirations and priorities for development.
When the company adopts a new billing software, the Customer Ops team is able to quickly create best practices and a course on how to use the software. Employees are able to start using the software right away. Customer Ops can then continue to update the course to reflect employees’ questions.
Instead of a sales enablement manager setting mandatory pitch-assessment modules to be completed by all reps, she could give reps the opportunity to declare where they were running into problems and propose solutions. Then she could create learning paths that offered the support and guidance needed to improve.
The Takeaway
These are only five of the many learning theories out there. Some frameworks seem diametrically opposed, while others dovetail nicely. At 360Learning, we’re certain of the mind that Collaborative Learning, as a training methodology, proves the best results—we see it every day with our clients. Pick and choose the elements that provide the best results from the different learning theories you know about—we’ve got a feeling that those that are peer-based, collaborative, interactive, and democratized will yield the best results.
About the Author
Robin Nichols is the Managing Editor at 360Learning. Robin is interested in the crossroads of technology and culture.
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#### 5 Small Business Video Marketing Ideas and How to Execute Them
Yelp, YouTube, Facebook Shops, LinkedIn, and other social media platforms host billions of users who potentially have—or know someone who has—an interest in your product or service.
Each of these platforms also hosts video, which means if you create just one video, you can use it across all platforms to attract leads and bring customers to your business.
Regardless of the platform, video marketing efforts can help small businesses expose their products and services to more people, convince potential customers to purchase their offers, and form stronger bonds with existing clients.
1. Customer testimonials project social proof
Customer testimonials and reviews—videos where clients share their feedback around your offer—act as social proof for potential customers. Social proof is a psychological occurrence where we let other people’s opinions influence our decisions. A testimonial gives potential customers access to a client’s opinion of your product. As long as the feedback is positive, leads will be one step closer to buying your product.
Notion, a digital workspace tool, generated social proof for their product by featuring employees from one of their customers, Loom, discussing the numerous benefits that Notion provides for their team.
To create a high-quality customer testimonial video, you first need to acquire customer testimonials, so contact previous customers and ask if you can record them speaking about your brand. To entice them to agree, and in exchange for their time, offer them something that benefits them—like an extended warranty on your product or a discount on their next purchase. If they’re unable to record a video testimonial, ask them for a short interview in which you record their responses.
Once you have gathered input from several previous clients, present them individually or combine them into one video and finish with a compelling call-to-action, so you remind potential customers what they should do next in their purchase decision process.
2. Explainer videos introduce your product
Explainer videos are a video format where you thoroughly describe your offer to a potential customer. These marketing videos are typically sales-oriented, so companies use storytelling, concise takes, and fast-paced visuals to increase the likelihood of someone watching the entire video.
Explainer videos familiarize strangers with the benefits and features of your company’s products. The point of an explainer video is to give the customer information about what makes your product unique, so they make a purchase.
In the example below, Sophub uses a whiteboard animation style, happy characters, and lively music to explain their business forecasting service. This makes for a good explainer video because it helps the narrator describe the product by visualizing what he’s saying.
Having a basic knowledge of your product’s features isn’t enough to create an outstanding explainer video. According to Lee LeFever, co-founder of Common Craft, these types of videos require you to understand your audience and their needs and critical aspects of your products that solve those needs. This information will become the foundation of your explainer video’s script, which you can learn how to write here.
3. Case studies prove the benefit of working with you
Case studies are narratives that describe the results one of your customers achieved after working with your company. They feature qualitative and quantitative data to prove their narrative. Video-based case studies generally start with a problem to show how difficult your customer’s life was without you. Eventually, the video introduces a solution you provided, emphasizing how much better your client’s life is now, thanks to you.
Google used a case study format to tell the story behind their interaction with one of their customers, L’Oreal. While short, the video discusses the issues L’Oreal was facing, Google’s approach to fixing them, and the quantitative results from the partnership between the two companies.
Most comprehensive case studies share three sections: background on the company and their needs, the context of your client’s struggles and situation before working with you or purchasing your product, and the data-backed results of the interaction.
Graphics, data, and expert insights from your company and your client add credibility to your case study. You can pair these elements with sound effects and motion graphics to avoid losing viewers in the middle of your video—just before they perceive the value of your offer.
4. Q&As answer questions and preempt doubts
Question and answer (Q&As) videos are a format where brands address doubts from existing or potential customers either live or from a list of questions that customers submit beforehand. You can use Q&As to preempt questions during future interactions with your customers.
Airbnb held an event where Airbnb homeowners presented their concerns to a company member and received a real-time response.
If you plan to host a Q&A, first decide if the event will occur in a physical space or through social media.
A real-life Q&A requires you to assemble team members with a deep understanding of how your company operates. Picking team members capable of answering any question is crucial. Otherwise, the customer will leave the session unsatisfied with the session and your brand.
Suppose you can’t assemble staff members and customers in one place. In that case, you can gather questions through website forms and social media surveys and then record your employees answering these questions. These videos are less personal than a live session and don’t allow customers to expand on their questions. However, they are an excellent alternative for companies looking to craft the perfect answer for each concern that their customers have.
5. Behind-the-scenes humanizes your brand
Behind-the-scenes videos show your staff’s passion and values by filming your team during work, interviewing employees, or presenting them in roundtables where their personalities can shine.
These videos humanize your brand, too, so that customers can associate your company with qualities that a friend, colleague, or family member would have. Brands that invest in displaying human qualities rather than just a logo or slogan connect on a deeper level with customers. According to Accenture, 63% of worldwide consumers would rather purchase from a company that reflects their values and beliefs than from one that doesn’t.
Webflow, a no-code website building tool, used a behind-the-scenes roundtable format to introduce customers to the faces that make their startup’s operation possible. Staff members sat down for close to an hour, presented themselves, and dived into the details of the changes in their lives after joining Webflow.
Filming a behind-the-scenes video can be as simple as producing a casual video that takes your customers through your company offices, day-to-day tasks, or internal contests.
Whether you are filming a roundtable or recording one of your marketers outlining an email marketing campaign, it’s vital to protect the core ingredient of a great behind-the-scenes video: informality. Humans laugh, stress over details, and make mistakes before landing on the perfect version of a product, so instead of using editing software to cut unpolished sections during video production, highlight them through zoomed shots or sound effects.
Attract new customers through small business video marketing
Video content is a versatile content format that you can use as part of your marketing strategy.
You can post explainer videos on search engines like YouTube to create brand awareness among your target audience, optimize the videos for SEO, and attempt to send them to your website or landing page. Once they are on your page, you can welcome them with a customer review, as research from BigCommerce shows how consumers are “58% more likely to convert” and “generate 62% more revenue per site visitor” after interacting with a review.
Whether you are creating a product video, tutorial, or case study, Vyond’s intuitive set of animation tools and templates can help you produce compelling online videos that attract, entertain, and educate existing and potential customers.
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#### 5 Types of AI Video Platforms (with Examples)
What are AI videos?
What do companies mean when they say they offer AI videos? In this article, we surveyed the top vendors in this rapidly evolving space to find out.
On one end of the spectrum we found tools that use bleeding-edge generative AI to create video content from a prompt—but that aren’t ready for business use. On the other end, we found business-friendly platforms that feature traditional AI functionality focused on streamlining production tasks and making it easier to repurpose video content. And in the middle, we found an exciting category that successfully pulls from both.
If you’ve been frustrated by the promise of generative AI video (only to find it wasn’t really like that after trying out the tool), this article will help you navigate the 5 main categories in the AI video ecosystem.
The 5 types of AI video platforms
Generative AI video
AI-powered stock media search
Synthetic AI video
AI-powered video editors
AI-powered video creation (Vyond)
How we wrote this article
To explore the video creation ecosystem, we’ve partnered with Miguel Rebelo, a software writer who covers the AI video category.
For this article, Miguel analyzed industry trends, researched over 30 AI video platforms and ran in-depth experiments on 10 of these to ensure we have the most accurate, hands-on and up-to-date view of the current landscape.
A brief history of AI videos
Since its inception in the 1950s, AI and machine learning have been used for an increasing number of specific tasks. Narrow AI deals with image recognition and basic natural language processing, enabling smart features in digital assistants such as Siri or Alexa.
Beyond narrow AI, reactive machines perform an action or decision based on a starting stimulus. Having no memory to rely on, they’ve been widely used to keep spam out of your inbox, increase the quality of Google Search results and defeat human chess masters.
One step above, limited memory AI helps models make decisions based on stored information, powering technologies such as self-driving cars and the first chatbots.
And then, ChatGPT entered the market in late 2022, representing a new category: generative AI, models that can create original responses to a prompt. It shocked the world with its high-quality responses and wide applications in various tasks.
How does this work? After training on a massive amount of text data, large language models like GPT-3 take a prompt and find the words that are more statistically likely to appear in response to your input, based on its experience and tuning.
Generative AI image and audio models work in a similar way. These sectors grew significantly throughout 2023, with plenty of powerful apps available in the market today. Generative AI video is still catching up due to its data-heavy nature and the high computational power required to create video content. But at the rate this technology is evolving, generative AI will be central to video production before we know it.
Why should you invest in AI video now?
According to a study by the Nielsen Norman Group, generative AI tools can increase employee productivity by 66%.
This means that the earlier you invest in video tools that use traditional and generative AI, the more time you’ll have to identify the best use cases for your business, and create efficiencies before your competition does. And as you become more familiar with these AI video tools, you’ll be able to adopt other AI platforms and features earlier and faster, too.
Generative AI video platforms
Generative AI video feels like magic. Starting from a text prompt, the AI model uses its experience—the videos it processed during the training stage—to create original footage that no one has seen before.
Runway is the best generative video option for individual creators and artists right now. When you input your prompt, it generates four seconds of video, with a range of settings for changing visual style and controlling camera movements. If you like the first four seconds, you can keep extending your creation at four extra seconds each time.
Runway’s output to the prompt “a castle in the mountains,” no other controls applied.
The first hours are fun, but Runway becomes complicated to use and control over time. The model occasionally fails to understand that you want subjects to move, instead generating a static image with camera movement. When it finally picks up on the intent, the movement doesn’t look believable. This demands a lot of trial and error until you get an output close to what you need. And since each attempt costs credits, it can get expensive both to learn and get results.
There’s one redeeming use case for Runway: it’s a great match for abstract, dream-like projects. Fitting the output into any realistic-looking video will be a challenge, making it a niche tool.
The second option is the OpenAI Sora model. It’s currently in limited preview, only available for AI red-teamers—experts who attempt to break the system to reveal safety issues—so we didn’t have a chance to test it. However, the preview videos show a lot of promise.
OpenAI Sora’s preview output of the prompt “A movie trailer featuring the adventures of the 30 year old space man wearing a red wool knitted motorcycle helmet, blue sky, salt desert, cinematic style, shot on 35mm film, vivid colors.”
Based on the technical specifications, it generates a 60-second video without audio. At first glance, it looks better and is more believable than Runway’s output. It has a good grasp of camerawork in scenes with movement, offering smooth panning while keeping the core of the action in the frame.
Some preview videos also show that Sora has a good sense of editing and that it can understand content types. In the astronaut movie example above, it generated a sequence with frequent cuts and intense close-up shots to convey the excitement and epic feel that a trailer should have.
OpenAI Sora’s preview output of a birthday party scene highlights the limitations of interactions between subjects and objects.
The cracks start to show when you get over the initial excitement of these previews. If you look closely, you’ll notice imprecisions especially where movement is involved. In scenes with multiple subjects and objects, it fails to understand how they should move or behave as a result of actions. For example, in the birthday party above, the subject blows out the candles but they stay lit.
Generative AI video deserves at least a few hours of experimentation. It’s fun and opens up your mind to future possibilities. Artists and individual creatives can use the unique look and feel to bring variety to their projects. For businesses, this category is not ready due to the lack of realism, low control over the output, and limited branding tools.
Pros of generative AI video platforms:
Ideation. If you need visual inspiration for a project, be it diving into a new mood or visual style, getting a generated video will provide a fresh new angle.
Unique look. Generative tools can put out videos that may be very hard (or even impossible) to recreate or shoot in the real world.
Low-cost special effects. Depending on the prompt, you can create video that would otherwise cost millions and require computer generated imagery (CGI) video experts to produce.
Cons of generative AI platforms:
Low editability. Most of the control over the output lies in changing the original prompt and regenerating the video over and over. The other existing controls are hit-and-miss.
Low brand control. When creating branded content for your audience, you want to be able to control the style and visual elements connected to your products and services. Due to limited editability features, generative AI doesn’t offer a good kit of branding tools.
High time investment. The complexity, learning curve, and adjusting prompts can make projects more unpredictable from a time perspective.
Unclear privacy standards. Depending on the policies of each app, your prompts and brand assets may be used for fine-tuning or training new models. This means that your original assets could end up being remixed and appear in someone else’s output.
AI-powered stock media search platforms
While the user experience is similar to generative AI video, AI-powered stock footage search platforms don’t actually use a generative AI video model. Instead, they use a combination of text/voice generation with agent software to:
Understand your prompt, generate a text script and build an audio voice-over with AI.
Search stock media databases for music and video content matching the topic.
Assemble everything into a video that you can quickly publish.
invideo AI is an example of such a platform. When you enter your prompt, it generates a script for the video, offering a voice-over and a sequence of matching stock footage to kick off the project. You can then swap out the suggestions for your footage, and use text prompts to delete scenes or edit parts of the script.
invideo AI lays out the result of your prompt in a single sequence, offering basic controls to replace the suggested media with your own.
The limited controls can seem like a shortcoming, but these platforms are all about speed. They’re designed to take an idea to video in the shortest time possible, making them a good match to support your social media content production if you’re tight on time.
Pros of AI-powered stock footage matching platforms
Quick results. You don’t have to spend hours scouting and collecting stock footage. You get workable suggestions faster.
Useful for social media content. You need to keep posting on a schedule to ensure you stay visible, so you can plug gaps in your publishing calendar as you produce other content types.
Cons of AI-powered stock footage matching platforms
Inconsistent stock footage quality or content. For more niche prompts, the clip sequence may not make sense from a visual or content perspective. You’ll have to adjust your prompt.
Limited editability. This depends a lot on the platform, but most focus on speed, meaning they don’t offer deep video editing controls. If you want to create custom transitions or do precise trimming, you’ll have to take your video to another app.
Not actually generative video. You’re just getting a composition of stock media footage, which may or may not be editable.
Gated or limited access to stock libraries. Depending on the video platform, they may have access to different libraries, or even gate access to premium stock footage. If you want to see everything and get access to the very best, you’ll have to hop on the priciest paid plans sooner.
Synthetic AI video platforms
Synthetic AI video platforms come in two flavors: deepfake generators and AI avatar apps.
In the first one, the sole purpose is to take the image of a real human and help the user embed it into an image or a video, offering controls to make it look as realistic as possible. Then, the user uses this image for blackmail, manipulation, or public shaming of the real person.
The fact that these platforms endorse this kind of unethical behavior is a clear signal that your business should stay away from them. If they have this kind of ethical flexibility, they may display the same disrespect for your business data.
The second category is more helpful and well within the parameters of legality and ethics. AI avatar platforms make talking-head videos easier to produce. Select your AI avatar, upload your script and hit generate: these platforms will quickly pump out a result you can add to your knowledge base. There are multiple business use cases here, as you can turn static text into a presenter-style video without investing much time and effort.
A popular option in this category is Synthesia. Pick an avatar from a deep library of people that could’ve been born anywhere in the world. Then upload your script and line up your scenes, positioning your avatar in each slide, like in Google Slides or PowerPoint.
Synthesia’s editor screen, where you can input your script and configure how the AI avatar should read and act it out.
When you hit play, the app will generate the speech and animate the avatar to replicate the expected movements when saying those words, moving through the slides you set up.
Synthesia also offers the possibility of training an AI model with your likeness and voice. This is a good option if you want to leverage your identity to quickly create talking head videos by just writing the script. Just be careful to keep your account secure, as anyone with unrestricted access to this tool could steal your identity and create deepfake content.
Pros of synthetic AI video platforms
Lower production cost for talking-head videos. Instead of hiring an actor and crew, you can simply write and generate the video. This also makes these kinds of projects more predictable, as there are fewer people involved and fewer steps from brainstorming to publishing.
Better than text-based content. Create content that’s a bit more engaging for most training and explainer video use cases by using AI avatars.
Cons of synthetic AI video platforms
Triggers uncanny valley reactions, especially on bigger screens. When something looks almost human, it can trigger feelings of eeriness and unease in viewers. This greatly impacts realism.
Low engagement format. Talking head videos are easy to produce, but they’re seriously limited in terms of their engagement value. This is especially true if you’re trying to explain complex ideas in a memorable way–or get an audience emotionally invested in your topic.
Low flexibility. These platforms usually focus on AI avatars, exclusively. If you want to create other kinds of video content, you’ll have to look elsewhere.
AI-powered video editors
This category is broader and more varied than the others we’ve explored so far. Here, AI video platforms have 3 objectives in mind:
Speeding up video production by automating parts of the workflow.
Adding special effects easily without needing to learn and use more advanced tools.
Repurposing video for multiple channels (for example, webinar to TikTok).
In the Descript editor, editing the script automatically trims the video.
Descript is an example of a tool that speeds up production by saving time in the editing stage. It transcribes uploaded videos, placing the transcription and the preview window side by side. When you edit the text, the video is trimmed and cut to match those edits, a much faster experience than timeline-based editing. If this creates problems in the voice-over, you can use your voice to train an AI model within the platform, letting you use text-to-speech to patch parts of the video as needed.
In addition to generative AI, Runway includes AI tools to manipulate video and speed up workflows.
As for special effects and simplifying production workflows, two options stand out. Runway lets you isolate subjects to remove background, detect scenes to automatically split the video or create a super smooth slow-motion video by generating more frames based on the original footage.
Wondershare Filmora offers a wide range of AI tools in the editor, from special effects to motion tracking.
Wondershare Filmora, a long-standing option in the market, can generate video thumbnails, cut out objects from the background and animate visual elements with AI. The feature set is a great match for YouTubers and creative marketing teams, offering plenty of colorful effects and transitions.
Lastly, AI content repurposing platforms aim to break down long videos into snackable tidbits ready to post on any social media channel, offering robust branding features. Peech is a prime example: after adding your brand assets, you can start uploading your videos. You can then break them down into multiple assets, customizing captions, aspect ratios and video frames to match the requirements of each channel.
Pros of AI-powered video editors
Higher quality with less effort. Instead of learning more advanced tools or going through dozens of hours of training, you can quickly implement motion tracking or create complex scenes.
Saves time. Some of these features automate parts of the video creation workflow, so you don’t have to deal with the repetitive work.
Cons of AI-powered video editors
Diverse feature sets. Each platform has its unique approach to video editing, so it may not have all the tools you need. You may still have to subscribe to other AI video software solutions for their niche features, which can get costly depending on your needs.
AI-powered video creation (Vyond)
How does Vyond compare with these subcategories? As an AI-powered video creation platform for business use, it has all the tools you need to create content consistently, with outstanding results—all without spending hours learning how to use every tool.
Here’s how our combination of generative AI, AI-powered video editing, and stock media search helps you produce better video.
Vyond Go
With Vyond, you can generate a professional quality script and video draft by entering a simple text prompt and choosing from a range of controls, including layout, vibe, format, and language. These options allow you to create scenario-based videos with characters, scenes, and transitions on any topic; videos featuring an animated talking head narrator; and character-free videos built from mixed media templates that feature narration, text, and stock images and videos. (Notably, animated narrators don’t suffer from the “uncanny valley” problem synthetic avatars do.)
Changes to the text and imagery can be made directly in Vyond Go, with the tool’s Quick Edit function. Or if you want to make more involved changes, you can bring your video file into Vyond Studio, the company’s flagship video creation platform (subscriptions to Vyond include both). Translating content into 95 languages is also simple, with the platform’s AI Auto Translate feature.
What’s unique about Vyond is that it brings together a variety of powerful AI technology to give video creators both the freedom to make videos on any topic they can imagine–and the control they want over the final product.
Text to Prop
Vyond has a deep library of props and assets you can use in your projects. If you can’t find what you’re looking for, you can use the Text to Prop AI tool to generate net-new assets in the Vyond style.
Video to Action
With AI Video to Action, you can record yourself carrying out a complex action in the real world. When you upload it to Vyond, their AI engine will automatically transpose that action into the characters in your video, both saving you time—and boosting the realism of your animated characters.
Choosing an AI video platform for your business
Adding a new niche video creation tool to your tech stack every time you want to try something new is the perfect way to quickly dry up your software budget. And when you need to use multiple apps to produce each video, you’re adding complexity (and additional learning curves) to your workflow, not simplicity.
This is why Vyond hits the sweet spot: by incorporating all the best features in this category, users are able to quickly create videos for any business use case in a wide variety of styles within a single platform. More specifically, Vyond:
Offers more control over your content than generative AI (ability to edit, update and brand content easily)
Helps you create more engaging content than synthetic AI platforms
Provides access to Shutterstock for stock media (one of the highest-quality libraries available)
Features a range of AI editing tools that cover the most common business use cases.
Getting started with AI video
Viable generative AI video isn’t ready for prime time yet, but there are plenty of powerful AI video creation tools on the market that can help you create content relevant to your business. Keep the above five groups in mind as you explore this exciting new category, looking for the best AI video tool to introduce into your company’s content workflows.
For a more detailed look at the leading AI video tools, check out this comparison piece. And to see for yourself how Vyond can help you create more engaging videos faster, sign up for a free trial.
More from Vyond
Vyond’s AI avatars. Your professional spokesperson on demand.
AI tools for video creation.
Instant, effortless video. AnyStyle. Every audience.
#### 5 Video Marketing Templates for Your Next Campaign
Videos create emotional responses in viewers that drive them to engage with your brand, whether that’s sharing photos of your products on social media or making the leap to place an order.
It used to be the case that you needed to have a big marketing budget and production staff to create videos for your business—not the case today. Thanks to software like Vyond, all types of businesses can easily create their own videos.
And templates speed up the creation process. They come with the necessary design elements—text, characters, props—for you to edit so you can have a video ready to go in minutes and modify it again for future videos.
Ready to get started? Here are a few Vyond video templates to try out in your next campaign. Vyond customers will be able to download videos created from these templates. Everyone else will have the ability to modify templates on a free trial and share a link to a watermarked video.
Highlight a Sale
Static images of online sales have become an expectation of shoppers when they visit online stores. They reach the homepage and barely notice a “Sale!” banner at the top because almost every other shop has one too.
Catch customers’ attention by making your sales move with a video. Unlike a static ad, the movement of a video promotion grabs shoppers’ focus from their peripheral vision. Stopping to watch the video, customers have more time to consider using your discount than they would if they just saw a static ad.
To create a video for a sale, use the template below:
To open this video and make your own edits, sign into a paid Vyond account or free trial and then click here to open this template video in your account.
Once you have the template loaded in your Vyond account, you’ll want to make a few quick edits to it so that it’s uniquely designed to attract your customers. Here are a few editing suggestions:
Identify which items are for sale. When companies don’t mention which items are discounted, customers are less motivated to check out the sale—they don’t know if it applies to a small section or the entire inventory. Name which items are a part of the promotion so customers feel confident in engaging with the sale. Show these items in your video using animated or real images.
Give an idea of the sale’s time frame. Your customers can’t participate in the sale if they don’t know when it begins and ends. Making this time frame clear keeps buyers in the loop. And as a bonus, it also builds hype and FOMO around your sale so customers are excited and ready to use the discount.
Once you’ve customized the template, publish the video of your promotion on your business’ homepage so customers are immediately aware that they can use the discount. Additionally, you can include it in an email to customers about your promotion, or you can share it on social media or use it as an ad.
Encourage Customers to Create UGC
User-generated content (UGC) campaigns have become a low-cost, yet powerful way to spread brand awareness. Thanks to Instagram, your business’ loyal customers can spread the word about your brand quickly with a hashtag.
But before your customers can spread brand awareness through UGC, you have to make sure they’re aware of your UGC campaign so they can participate. Contributors to UGC campaigns are visually-driven, so a video is a great way to spread the word about your UGC campaign. Seeing a well-designed video that clearly shows which hashtag they should use will drive users to participate in your campaign.
To create a promotional video for your UGC campaign, use this smartphone frame template.
To open this video and make your own edits, sign into a paid Vyond account or free trial and then click here to open this template video in your account.
When you customize the template, here are a few editing tips that will drive users to participate in your campaign:
Clearly show the hashtag. Bold the hashtag of your UGC campaign and set it to a large size so viewers clearly know how to follow your campaign.
Highlight any rewards of the campaign. Many companies include some sort of reward, like being a featured post on their social media account or being entered in a contest, in their UGC campaigns. Make sure you clearly show what this reward is in your video so customers are driven to participate in the campaign.
Since UGC campaigns are already on Instagram, this social media platform is a great way to share your UGC promotional video. Already on Instagram, users can easily post a photo with your UGC hashtag after seeing the ad.
Another great way to share the video is to include it in an order confirmation email. Your customer is feeling excited about your brand since they just placed an order, so it’s the perfect time to ask them to share a post with your UGC hashtag.
Promote Brand Events
Whether it’s a webinar or a conference appearance, company events are typically promoted through a text-filled email. Businesses want to make sure that they’re clearly communicating the important event details and other newsletter information, so they rely on a long message to get the info across.
Conveying key event details is essential if you want customers to attend, but you also don’t want to scare away recipients with too much text.
To keep your customers engaged, it’s better to start your event announcement with visuals. Adding a GIF to start the message or linking out to a short videowill share the key info of the event in a fun visual way before diving into the nitty-gritty details. Try this template below to create your promotional video for your webinar or other company event.
To open this video and make your own edits, sign into a paid Vyond account or free trial and then click here to open this video template in your account.
While this video shouldn’t be loaded with information, you want to balance engaging visuals with enough key details so that your customers know how to attend the event. When customizing the template, here’s the information that you may want to include:
Logos to convey who’s hosting the event. For example, include a Facebook logo if you’re hosting a Facebook Live webinar or include a conference logo if you’re promoting your attendance at the event. Including these images is a quick way to communicate the event you’re promoting so customers stay engaged.
Keep it mostly visual with minimal text. You don’t want your video to be the equivalent of a long email—keep it engaging by sticking mostly to visuals. It’s best to include some text, though, to convey the essential details of the event: the time, date, and location.
Including this video at the top of a promotional email for the event is a great way to quickly attract customers and urge them to click through instead of losing their attention to a large body of text.
Highlight Testimonials
Many companies will include testimonials from customers on their About Us page as text quotations. These statements always paint the business in a favorable light, but they can only convey so much. Without seeing the expression or hearing the voice of the speaker, it’s hard to appreciate how positively they feel about a business.
Adding video testimonials to your site fully expresses the emotions of your customers. Hearing and watching these speakers, other potential customers are going to find the testimonials more believable than if they had read them as text.
Use this template to showcase various testimonials.
To open this video and make your own edits, sign into a paid Vyond account or free trial and then click here to open this video in your account. Voice audio from the video above will not be included in the template.
Animated video is especially great when you only have written testimonials on hand. Without live-action footage, you can still make the testimonials come to life with animated expressions and a voice-over audio clip.
With the template, here are a few strategies for creating a powerful, convincing testimonial video:
Start with live footage, if you have it. An easy, yet engaging way to vary the visuals of your testimonial video is to start with live footage of the customer speaking, and then fade into the animated version of the same customer. Or, use animation as “b-roll” to visualize the main points and keep your viewers engaged.
No need for text bubbles with audio. Usually, if you have audio of the customer speaking, a text bubble is just distracting—they are, however, quite useful if you want to showcase a quick statement from the customer without audio.
Ask customers to send you an audio file. If your customers are happy to provide a testimonial, but there’s no way for you to get them on camera, ask them to send you a recorded testimonial from their phones. Add them to this template and swap out the character for one that looks like your customer.
These animated testimonials can be featured on your company’s site, on YouTube, as advertisements, and in email campaigns along with other success stories. Your subscribers have already expressed interest in your brand, so they’re going to be receptive and interested in videos about others who have enjoyed your company’s work.
Announce a Product Launch
Product launch announcements are an exciting moment for both you and your customers. Already loyal to your brand, your customers are thrilled when they hear you’re releasing another product.
Your announcement has to reflect this positive energy to drive customers to participate in your launch and buy your new product. Videos are especially great at sustaining that energy. The movement in the video with the addition of bright, fun visuals keeps your customers engaged and excited about the release of your new product.
Whether a video or not, product launch announcements need to give customers just enough information so that they’re excited to learn more about the product at the launch. Here are a few tips for what to include in your announcement video to attract customers to the launch:
Clearly state where and when the product launch is happening. Customers need to save the date if they’re going to attend the launch and buy your new product.
Share just enough remaining details to build suspense. Some companies will leave their announcement as vague as “we have big news.” Consider how much information you want to share to keep customers engaged and curious.
Your product launch announcement video should be distributed by email and through social media, especially if the launch is happening through a social media platform.
Create Compelling Campaigns with Video Templates
Video is often the missing link that makes a campaign click for customers. Unlike a static ad or a long, text-heavy email, a video can feature changing scenery, audio, and human behavior. With this combination of elements, videos drive emotional responses from customers that leave them remembering and loving your brand and products.
Any marketing team can add a powerful video to their campaigns today. Templates make it even easier. With design elements already in place, you only need to spend a few minutes editing the template to create your video. Try out the Vyond templates in this guide, and you’ll be set to create captivating videos for your campaigns.
How to Use These Video Templates
The five templates in this post are free to try with a paid account or free trial of Vyond. Customers can download and share.
Follow these steps to access the templates:
Log into your free trial or Vyond account.
Click one of these links:
Highlight a sale
Encourage UGC
Promote events
Highlight testimonials
Make an announcement
The selected video project will open in your account for you to customize.
Customers can download and share. Everyone else will have the ability to modify templates on a free trial and share a link to a watermarked video.
About Vyond
GoAnimate is now Vyond. Learn more about the changes.
Vyond allows people of all skill levels in all industries and job roles to create dynamic and powerful media. With features that go beyond moving text and images, you can build character-driven stories or compelling data visualizations that engage audiences and deliver results.
Start making your own videos today. Sign up for a free trial and attend our bi-weekly tour of the Vyond Studio.
#### 5 Video Templates for Valentine’s Day Marketing
Valentine’s Day is a unique opportunity to connect with your audience and leverage a holiday theme in your marketing. In order to stand out in a crowded landscape, you’re going to need a unique way to earn attention in a sea of companies with similar goals.
Video is the missing link that can turn a good campaign into a great one. Video-based campaigns have the highest average click-through-rate among all advertising mediums. When done right, it’s the best way to engage an audience and stand out amongst the competition. Even if you’re a last-minute marketer, or you’ve never made a video before, there are still plenty of ways to pull it off.
Here are five ideas and video templates to get you started on a Valentine’s Day video marketing campaign.
Use Animation
Animation conveys messages in powerful ways. Watch how Michael Kors, Bank of Queensland, Turkish Airlines, and Chipotle executed these successful love-focused animation campaigns. Here’s one of our favorites, a short story from Heinz:
The average marketer doesn’t have the resources for this level of production, but that doesn’t mean the medium is exclusive to big brands. Any business, small or large, can enjoy the benefits of animated video.
This simple, text-based animated video template is the easiest place to start. Script out your message, change the colors and fonts, swap in an image of your product, and you’ll have a complete video.Sign into your Vyond account or free trial and click here to open this video in your account.
Love Your Customers
People like to feel appreciated, and a simple thank you goes a long way. Send an animated Valentine or “thank you” GIF to your customers. Remind them you exist and that you’re working hard for their business. You’ll likely see some direct ROI from the effort.
Feel free to swipe this GIF and use it as-is in your own email marketing or social campaigns.
Host a Love Story Contest
Ask your community to share their love stories with you for a chance to win something special. It could be your product or service, or something else entirely. Free coffee for a year, a gym membership for two, a fun night out, or a discount on wedding photography, for example.
Watch how Dunkin Donuts featured a customer love story in their Valentine’s Day contest:
And this call for stories from Doublemint Gum:
Scene templates like these can help you run your own version of this idea with an animated video. Sign into your Vyond account or free trial and click here to use these scenes in your account.
Promote a Valentine’s Day Discount
Discounts are a great way to drive holiday revenue, and promoting them with GIFs will grab attention in email campaigns, on landing pages, and on social media. It will only take a few minutes to modify this template to reflect your brand and coupon code.
Sign into a Vyond account or free trial and click this link to customize it in your account. Vyond Professional and Enterprise customers can export and share videos as animated GIFs.
Celebrate Heart Health
February is also heart health month. At Vyond, we celebrate with a “Fit February” contest and encourage our customers to hold their own competitions along with us. Use our video to do the same at your company. Or, modify the template for other heart-healthy purposes. Try inviting your customers to join you in a virtual Valentine’s Day workout or promote your health-conscious business practices.
How to Use These Video Templates
The five templates in this post are free to try with a paid account or free trial of Vyond. The GIF above is free to anyone. Customers can download and share videos. Professional and Enterprise customers have the ability to export videos as GIFs.
Follow these steps to access the templates:
Log into your free trial or Vyond account.
Click these links:
Animated text video
Thank you GIF (right click on the GIF above and select “save image as” to download)
Love story scenes
Sale coupon GIF
Fit February
The selected video project will open in your account for you to customize.
Customers can download and share.
About Vyond
GoAnimate is now Vyond. Learn more about the changes.
Vyond allows people of all skill levels in all industries and job roles to create dynamic and powerful media. With features that go beyond moving text and images, you can build character-driven stories or compelling data visualizations that engage audiences and deliver results.
Start making your own videos today. Sign up for a free trial and attend our weekly tour of the Vyond Studio.
#### 5 Ways to Use Video to Improve Your Webinars
Along with the rest of the world, the workplace is constantly adapting and changing. A big part of this revolves around the way we use technology. The use of AI and CMS software has made an incredible difference in our daily lives.
Many companies are now also seeing the increased advantage of using videos to spruce up office life and boost customer engagement.
And with the popularity of videos having shot up this year, it’s no surprise. Believe it or not, in April 2020, it’s thought that 300 million people were using Zoom every day. With numbers that high, it makes sense to be a part of something that has a lot of engagement and easy accessibility.
Yet it isn’t just candidate interviews and morning meetings where video tech comes in handy. Video meetings can play a big role in webinars too. Not only do videos and webinars change up the boring old routine, but they keep people engaged and take a company out into the world.
Why Use Videos with Webinars?
A webinar is a web-based conference that is often live. It is used to talk to people about specialist topics and allows individuals from all over the world to talk at the same time. Audience sizes can vary from small to huge.
Using a video as part of a webinar gives it a new and exciting element. There is the option to change the webinar from a talk to a discussion. Or even to add in a pre-recorded video to give an example of your point. You can even use video to promote your webinar, like in this Vyond video template:
Already making videos in Vyond? You can open this template in Vyond Studio to create a custom webinar promo video!
Virtual office services, such as videos, are the perfect way to adapt to a changing future. And the great thing about them is you can use them in any part of your job, including as part of webinars.
So, to make sure you don’t get left behind, here are 5 ways to use video to improve your webinars.
Source: Easel.ly
1. Be Flexible
The good thing about adding a video into a webinar is that it can be a pre-recorded piece. This lets you take things to the next level by being both prepared and flexible.
It means that even if your internet cut out, in having a video prepped, your audience would have something to occupy them. So instead of them twiddling their thumbs waiting for you to come back, they could watch it and discuss any points when you were back online.
It also means there is no more pressure for the whole team to come into the office for a meeting. If you can pre-prepare a video as part of a webinar, your staff can have flexibility in where they work. Sanjay can work from home and look after the kids. Maria can work from the office and get some quiet. And even though Jamie works part-time, he can catch up when he gets the chance.
Flexible working is thought to increase job satisfaction and improve work/life balance, so it makes sense to create videos that staff can access no matter where they are.
2. Collaboration
If you decide to do a live video as part of a webinar, it’s an excellent opportunity for some collaboration. Instead of using webinars as a chance to talk AT your team, why not use videos as a chance to talk WITH them?
It could be that you are discussing browse abandonment rates and marketing has ideas on solutions. Or perhaps the creative team has an input on the landing page. Whatever it is, using video in this way is a great chance to share ideas, increase productivity, and show respect for your employees.
Encouraging your team to collaborate through video is also great in the modern age of working. Because it doesn’t matter if you are hosting from a hotel in Hawaii or a conference room in Paris, you can communicate with your team anytime, anywhere.
What’s more, it doesn’t matter if you are working with permanent, freelance, or remote staff – everyone can feel involved.
Another way to use videos to collaborate is to record meetings. Then you can either re-visit any videos or add to ideas before setting up a webinar. Or you can use clips of videos as examples within your webinar.
Recording meetings often works better than discussing points over email, because it’s hard for everyone to be heard when using written communication. Discussing ideas over a video, however, gives everyone a chance to contribute.
Remember when getting staff involved in video meetings that they may need a bit of training on using new features. This will ensure that everyone is on the same page when it comes to using the equipment.
Source: Giant Partners
3. Saving Money
The great thing about webinars and online videos is that people can talk live, no matter where in the world the various parties are based. This means that companies can save money on travel, hosting events, and hiring venues.
As a result, you have more money to spend on other things within your company. And, when it comes to improving webinars, you have more money to spend on that too. It could be that you invest in navigating cybersecurity metrics to keep an audience safe. Or maybe you can put more money into your marketing team to make sure the videos and webinars you make are attracting bigger audiences.
With webinars and videos being the future of office tech, investing in this space results in higher interest among your company.
You could be doing a webinar on an all-in-one desktop app. Or making a video conference about new tech statistics. Whatever it is, using video saves money. This is money you can pump back into your firm to improve your audience’s overall webinar experience.
4. Remote Working
A massive 99% of people say they want to work from home at some point during their careers. And as the trend toward working remotely grows, so does the need for communication technology.
Video calls and webinars are an excellent way to talk to remote employees. They mean you can keep your staff happy while also sharing work information. So, if you want to talk to a staff member about a project management task, you can have the same conversation over video that you would in the office.
And the great thing is that, like in the office, you can have a fantastic working culture even if your staff are 100% remote. Use video conferencing to talk to your employees, check up on them, and even have an online get together as a way to stay connected. This will raise spirits and let people know they have support when they need it.
What this also means is if you do have staff that work remotely, you are again saving money on overheads. By making the world aware you have webinar and video capabilities, you will be able to attract the best candidates from around the world. Who you will be able to interview via webcam?
One thing to remember with live video is that internet issues can cause delays. And when the screen freezes, it can be hard to read tones and facial features. All this takes is a little bit of patience to avoid any misunderstandings.
Source: Indy Displays
5. Be Creative
Webinars tend to be a little serious. And it’s understandable: customer engagement is a serious topic. But to make sure your audience is kept engaged, you can incorporate videos throughout your webinar.
It could be that you create a mini animation as part of a quiz. Or maybe you could add in a demonstration of the product you are talking about. Perhaps you could even incorporate a clip from YouTube as an example.
Webinars are also a great way to train staff. Again, training webinars can be stale. So adding a fun and creative video into a training session will help people to remember vital points and learn in a new and different way.
Using a video within a webinar gives you a chance to think outside the box and shake up traditional webinar formats. Doing something creative like that also gives you and your brand some personality. You could be discussing digital marketing for small businesses. Or giving health and safety training. Regardless, videos will keep your webinars fun and interesting.
Source: Canadian Payroll Services
The Takeaway
Videos and webinars help businesses to reach global audiences and are a great way of connecting with a range of people. They are a guaranteed way of taking firms into the future and from saving money to boosting sales, they have numerous benefits.
When making a video of any sort, be sure to use the correct equipment and film in a room with the right lighting and background. It’s always good to check the sound and plan out your thoughts before you start filming too. Or better yet; create your own animated video without the fuss and cost of live-action filming with Vyond Studio.
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About the Author
Zofia Bobrowicz Cohn is an EMEA Product Marketing Manager at RingCentral, a leader in cloud communication and cloud PBX software provider. As a strong believer in digital transformation, she thrives by helping organizations find the right technology that supports their business processes.
#### 6 Tricks To Make Your Videos More Relatable With Character Expressions
Emotion is the key to getting your audience to connect and engage with your video. Studies discovered universal expressions of seven emotions: surprise, joy, disgust, sadness, anger, contempt, and fear. These results mean any viewer will likely associate your character’s facial expressions—like a smile—with given feelings—like joy.
The issue is that viewers can misunderstand your video’s message if the emotions your character conveys are ambiguous.
For example; psychiatrists have linked crossed arms to defensiveness. So, if your character performs this action with a big smile, your viewers might be unsure about the emotion you convey: Are they hiding something? Are they happy? Are they uncomfortable? It’s unclear.
Luckily, adding the correct expressions at the right time to convey the desired emotion is easy using the following six techniques.
1. Change their facial expression
Facial expressions are a huge part of how humans perceive emotion and make their emotions known to others.
Like in real life, the characters from your animation should change their facial expressions as they go through your video’s events.
For example; if your character just heard surprising news, take him from a Neutral to a Shocked or Surprised facial expression depending on whether the information was positive or negative.
You can change your character’s facial expressions in Vyond Studio by clicking on them and selecting the Expression icon at the top right corner. From there, you can pick between the expression that better resembles your character’s feelings at that particular scene.
2. Change their actions
Body language—like vocal tone and gestures—allows humans to interpret other people’s emotions just as their facial expressions do.
Psychologists like Albert Mehrabian argue body language transmits as much as 93% of a message. While people have criticized Mehrabian’s study, it’s clear that it’s harder to convey emotion without body language. Or when body language doesn’t match facial expressions.
For example; our “Too noisy” pose covers a character’s ears and adds two bolts of lightning next to them. This pose is perfect to symbolize a noisy environment. Therefore, adding an expression of joy on the character’s face wouldn’t make any sense, while one of frustration does.
You can change your character’s actions by selecting a character and clicking on the Action menu at the top right corner. From there, pick an action that amplifies the emotion that your character’s facial expression is trying to convey.
3. Add facial expressions to your characters before adding audio
The character expression you add before adding audio (lip-syncing) influences how your character looks before, during, and after saying your lines.
For example; you can add a “smiling” facial expression to your character if the voice line is exciting or positive. This addition won’t make your character smile while talking. But it’ll add a smile before and after the character says any sentence, thus projecting happiness.
Like before, select your character and add a facial expression at the top right corner. You can then click on your character once more to add a Dialog in the mic icon from your toolbar.
The Dialog menu allows you to record from your microphone, upload an audio file, or use our text-to-speech feature to assign an audio track to your character. You can pick the recording option that better suits your needs.
4. Include music to emphasize your character’s emotions
The music you use emphasizes your character’s feelings while also helping the viewer feel these emotions.
For example; studies found sad music—think Mozart’s Requiem—can amplify people’s feelings of sorrow and melancholy. Therefore, playing sad music while your character goes through an unfortunate situation will magnify the scene’s gloomy atmosphere.
On the flip side, play upbeat music as the character smiles, and your video will convey positivity.
You can add music to your project by clicking on Audio at the top left side of the toolbar. From there, you can either choose between dozens of our music tracks or upload an audio track.
5. Use camera movements
Camera movements can direct the viewers’ attention to the action or facial expression your character is performing.
A zoom—when you give the illusion that the camera is closer or further from the subject than it is—is an easy movement you can incorporate into any video.
For example; you can zoom in to a character’s face so that the viewer can focus, say, on the frustration or joy in the character’s face. Then, you can zoom out after a few seconds to re-establish the entire frame as the area worth watching.
You can zoom in or zoom out easily with Vyond by first adding a Camera Movement from the Camera icon at the top right corner. Then, change the placement of the triangles based on how you want to zoom.
To zoom in, place the light orange rectangle on top of your character’s face and make it smaller than the dark rectangle. To zoom out, interchange the rectangle’s sizes.
Zooms are one of seven camera movements you can use to emphasize your character’s expressions and actions. You can learn more about these camera movements here.
6. Utilize the Continue Scene feature
Characters can only have one expression per scene. So to switch their face before changing the props and scenario, we need to use the Continue Scene feature.
Vyond’s Continue Scene feature allows you to continue a scene from a previous scene’s endpoint.
This feature is useful for scenes where you want to keep the same props, characters, and environment while changing a character’s expressions or actions.
For example; let’s say you create a scene where the company’s CEO shows the company’s annual performance to his team members. The scene could consist of two shots:
One before the CEO shows the results
One after the CEO shows the results
In the first shot, the employees could have a neutral facial expressions. However, you could use the Continue Scene feature during scene B to keep the elements of the first shot while changing the employees’ facial expressions to either surprised, sad, or happy, depending on the CEO’s report.
You can use the Continue Scene feature by right-clicking on a scene from your timeline and selecting Continue Scene. These steps will create a new scene on your timeline with the same props, characters, and setup that the previous one had.
You can read this article to learn six use cases for our Continue Scene feature.
Add emotions to your Vyond characters in minutes
Vyond allows you to create characters from every age group in just a few minutes. Once they are ready, you can brainstorm the emotions that your script’s lines and video should convey.
You can then use this data to pick between dozens of facial expressions and hundreds of character actions in just a few clicks.
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#### 6 Animation Sound Effect Tips To Make Any Video More Memorable
Sound cues notify us that an event or action is happening or about to happen. The microwave’s beep indicates our lunch is ready, the washing machine’s tune informs us that we can hang our clothes, and the bump sound we listen to while parking tells us we should take a deep breath.
Sound effects (SFX) and foley—sound effects that imitate everyday, natural sounds—also contribute to how immersed the viewer is in our story. A study by the Empirical Musicology Review on the influence of sound design on videos found that nearly all people that watched a video with music and sound effects felt more immersion and suspense than those who watched soundless videos.
You can apply the following six tips to make your video more realistic and memorable with sound effects.
1. Limit the number of sound effects you add
Viewers can lose track of what’s happening if too many sound effects are playing simultaneously. You should add a few well-selected sound effects so that viewers can listen to each audio clip and keep track of your scenes’ events.
A good practice to avoid overusing sound effects is to never play more than one at a time. This limitation helps you emphasize one action or event without overwhelming the viewer with conflicting sounds.
As you create more videos, you can experiment with overlapping sound effects. Unique effects that viewers can only associate with your brand help you stand out from competitors.
2. Use sound effects to humanize your brand
Humanizing your brand means communicating with customers as you would to a friend—using casual language and referencing elements of pop culture.
You can use sound effects to add relatable sounds to show leads that you understand them, build a more profound bond with prospects, and raise their likeliness to pick your brand over one they don’t trust.
CEO of Taco Bell, Mark King, appeared as a talking potato to announce the return of potatoes to the Taco Bell menu. The video uses sound effects like a chime and a DJ airhorn, reminiscent of video game montages, to strengthen the youthful and personal vibe of the video.
You can check your audience research documents to discover the sound effects that prospects and customers recognize. If you can’t access this data, type words related to your customers’ interests on Reddit or forums to find communities filled with your target audience.
By scouting these communities, you can add sounds from pop culture that you can later drag and drop into Vyond’s timeline to make your video more relatable.
3. Use sound effects to evoke emotions
Sound can influence viewers to feel specific emotions.
A sad tune like Chopin’s Prelude in B minor paired with a thunder sound effect can cause viewers to feel sad or even sob, depending on what’s happening on screen. In contrast, play an upbeat tune with the sound of drums and fireworks, and you’ll transmit excitement to the viewer.
You can discuss the emotions your video should transmit with colleagues before adding a sound effect. You can base the decisions on the feelings you want people to associate with your brand, how you want viewers to feel after watching your video, or the emotions you are trying to recreate during a scene. Then, pick a sound effect from Vyond’s Sound Effect library that helps you emphasize a feeling.
4. Vary your audio levels
You can use background music, ambient tracks, and sound effects to create scenes that intrigue viewers and establish a mood as long as each track’s audio level varies. When audio levels vary, viewers can distinguish one clip from another and follow your video’s events.
There are three types of audio clips: background music, ambiance tracks, and sound effects.
Background music is an audio clip that plays throughout most of the video. These clips are typically the quieter ones, as their goal is to set the overall mood of the scene.
Ambiance tracks are short audio clips that set the scene for areas, like birds at a park or airplanes landing at an airport. You can set them at a higher volume than background music to highlight sounds that only happen at a specific location.
Finally, set sound effects or foley sounds as the loudest clips to ensure viewers hear them despite their short length.
You can balance audio levels in Vyond by right-clicking on an audio clip from the timeline, choosing Settings, and then increasing or reducing a clip’s volume.
5. Duplicate repeated sound effects
It’s common to reuse one or two sound effects across the video, like those used to emphasize transitions. You can duplicate these effects in your multimedia timeline so that you save time. Instead of spending minutes sourcing sound effect libraries, you use them to animate or refine your story.
You can duplicate repetitive sound effects in Vyond by right-clicking the audio clip in the timeline, copying it, and pasting it at the second where you want it to play. For a more precise placement method, paste the clip and then drag and drop it across the timeline.
6. Attach a sound effect to your brand
When you repetitively play a sound effect as branding elements show on the screen, you prime viewers to associate that sound with your brand. As a result of the connection, viewers will recall your brand quicker, even when listening to a similar sound.
Scott Winstead, a blended learning expert, says, “When you popped in Sonic the Hedgehog, the first screen that comes up is the SEGA logo with a short jingle singing the word SEGA real quick. Then you move on to the game title screen. Subtle and to the point. And some 20 years later, I still can hear it in my head.”
You can attach a sound effect when your logo appears on the screen or when you mention what your brand does. For example, it can be a swoosh, whip, whoosh, or jingle sound. Once you choose them, add them to every video you produce so that viewers can associate your brand with visual and sound cues.
Enhance your video with animation sound effects
You can use sound effects to create engaging videos that evoke evident emotions and communicate a clear message.
With Vyond Studio’s intuitive animation tools, you can add sound effects from your favorite licensed, royalty-free sound effects marketplaces or choose between more than 300 built-in ones inside Vyond’s library—without the need for attribution. You can also pair these effects with 154 background tunes and edit each clip’s audio levels to ensure your scenes achieve the mood you want without overwhelming viewers with many indistinguishable sounds.
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#### 6 Best and Free Banner Maker Tools
Banners are an integral part of the web as we know it, and there may be times when you need to design a header or promotional banner ad for your website. Luckily, you don’t need to hire a professional – or even be a professional – to create one. Try one of these best free banner maker tools below.
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1. GIMP
GIMP, which stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program, is free image editing software for Windows and Mac. GIMP is expandable with plug-ins and extensions for almost everything. It can be used for retouching and enhancements, simple drawing, converting and processing images, and yes, creating banners.
The GIMP menu includes pencils, airbrushing, cloning, gradient and blending tools. The advanced path tool includes transformable paths and bezier and polygonal selections. Another handy feature is that GIMP’s undo and redo capabilities are limited only by diskspace.
You can create your own custom brushes and patterns, work with multiple layers, and save animations in a frame-as-layer format. Supported file formats include bmp, gif, jpeg, mng, pcx, pdf, png, ps, psd, svg, tiff, tga, xpm, and many others.
Each task lends itself to a different working environment and GIMP allows you to customize the layout and colors to your liking. Full screen mode can be useful when you want to work closely on details and make the most of your display.
2. Creatopy
Creatopy is an easy-to-use online app compatible with AOL, Google, the IAB, OpenX, and Yahoo’s RightMedia designed specifically for creating web banners.
There’s no coding required – just upload your image or images (jpg or png only) into the editor.
3. My Banner Maker
My Banner Maker offers a simple online wizard that walks you through five steps in order to create a basic banner that can be used for Facebook, Myspace, or downloaded to your computer.
Choose your desired size from the wide selection of leaderboards, skyscrapers, rectangles, buttons and more, then fill it with a color or upload an image (jpg, png, gif or bmp) of your own. Add text, a border, or special effects (though the range is limited), then save. Banners are generated with an automatic watermark, which can be removed if you sign up for a paid account.
4. Bannernow
Bannernow is a web-based Flash banner maker tool with a host of features.
Start by choosing from the list of common banner sizes, or build a banner with custom dimensions instead. You’ll then be taken to the full editing screen, where you can add slides, colors and backgrounds, special effects, buttons, icons and fonts from the vast library or import your own. Each individual slide is fully customizable, down to the positioning of every element within the slide.
You can then download the complete swf file to use.
5. EximiousSoft Banner Maker
ExemiousSoft Banner Maker’s layout will be familiar to Microsoft Office users. It’s designed for making gif banner ads, buttons, headers and other web graphics.
Banner Maker comes with 200+ templates, thousands of icons and symbols, several gradients and visual effects including drop shadows, glows, 3D bevels and more. It combines both vector-based drawing tools and image painting tools if you want to draw your own, and also supports layer editing.
You’ll need to download the software to your computer before using it. There’s a free trial, but the unregistered version will save your banners with a watermark.
6. Banner Designer Pro
Banner Designer Pro bears more resemblance to Paint and is a comprehensive suite of tools for making web banners. It’s also Google Adwords compatible.
Select from 17 banner sizes (or make your own), dozen of special effects, hundreds of backgrounds and thousands of symbols. You can import Flash animated backgrounds or static ones, crop individual banner elements and edit aspects like their positioning, timing, brightness and contrast.
Banner Designer Pro supports 14 output formats, including gif, jpg, swf, avi, tiff and more. You can loop/rotate multiple banners in the same spot, or create transparent ones.
You’ll need to download the software to your computer in order to use it. There’s a free trial period, during which banners will be saved with a watermark.
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#### 6 Expert-Backed Tips to Improve Your Voice Over Skills
Imagine you have to record a voice over for an explainer video or branded animation. You’re not a voice actor, and you don’t have time to go through voice over training to learn voice over skills. You’re stressed. While your team knows you are inexperienced at voice-acting, they still want to amaze customers and colleagues with the video, placing even more pressure on you.
Contrary to what you may think, you don’t need to do exhaustive voice over training to improve your voice acting skills. Instead, you can learn how to improve your basic voice over skills by heeding the advice of some expert voice over artists.
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Improve your voice over skills without voice over training
Warm up your voice to sound clear: sleep, hydrate, hum
Jessica Doyle, a professor and vocal coach for experienced actors, singers, and public speakers, shares three tips to warm up your voice so it performs at its best during recording sessions.
Sleep
First, sleep well. You need to sleep seven to nine hours in the days leading up to the recording. Vocal folds, the producers of your voice, are muscles that need rest. Sleep deprivation doesn’t let your voice perform at its best. Instead, your sleep-deprived voice may sound croaky or rough.
Hydrate
Second, drink water four hours ahead of your voice over. Drinking water during the set isn’t enough to add life to your voice, as it takes four hours for the water you drink to hydrate your voice.
Hum
Third, Doyle suggests humming is a quick and effective way to warm up your voice. Hum through a regular drinking straw, sliding the voice in sirens (from the bottom of the range to the top) and then in smaller hills, slowly. Do this for two to three minutes for a clear, roughness-free voice.
Watch your posture while recording
Your head’s position affects how your voice sounds, so it’s crucial to maintain proper posture while recording. “The head is meant to balance on the spine at the atlanto-occipital joint,” says Jessica Doyle, “which is roughly between the ears.”
She goes on to say if your head placement is excessively forward—like a turtle—or pulled backward—like a wrestler—, your neck will create unnecessary tension in your voice. Neck stress affects vibration. And since the sound waves from voices result from vibration, our voice will tire more quickly.
Correct head placement falls at the middle of the forward and backward extremes. Think of an entirely forward head as a one and a fully pulled back one as a ten. Position your head at the middle, a four, five, or six. “It should feel like a bobblehead,” says Doyle, “where the head glides easily on the spine.”
Perform outside of your comfort zone
Douglas Liantonio, marketing analyst at Gravy and 15-year veteran of audio engineering and voice acting, encourages people to perform characters outside their comfort zone. You should be scared or reluctant to play your character, he says, because those performances help you break out of your shell and wear your emotions in the booth.
While delivering uncomfortable lines, add emotion to each sentence in a pre-recording take. For example, say “wowwee” several times before recording a line where you should sound excited. After doing these short emotion-centered practices, you’ll be primed for longer periods of voice over recording.
Find and emphasize each sentence’s power word
Power words are the portion of a sentence we consciously or unconsciously emphasize to add meaning or evoke emotion. Vanessa Cuddeford, a former TV news anchor and reporter, suggests looking for and emphasizing the power word of each sentence when recording.
“In everyday conversation,” says Cuddeford, “we use the correct stress without thinking about it. But when we read out loud, we often place stress in unnatural ways.” If you place stress in the wrong power word, your sentences’ message will change.
One of her examples shows the importance of being mindful of the word being emphasized. Read the following sentence seven times, stressing a different word each time—I hit a pothole on my bike. If you put stress on I, the sentence revolves around who hit the pothole. If you stress the word bike, the emphasis is the bike hit a pothole, not a car.
It’s easy to highlight the wrong power word when recording, especially if you haven’t gone through voice over training. To avoid this mistake, find the power word in your sentence before recording and underline it in your script so you remember to emphasize it.
Record your line in three voice tones to find the most energetic
It’s common to sound underpowered during your initial voice overs, so it’s crucial to find your voice’s most expressive side by recording your lines in three versions.
In the first, use a dull, expressionless voice. In the next, speak the same line with your usual energy and standard voice level. Finally, record one last version where you add as much energy as you can, up to the point of sounding crazy. “In most cases,” says Vanessa Cuddeford, you’ll find the “dull” and “normal” versions won’t sound very different from each other. And the “crazy” version won’t sound so crazy after all!”
If you do this exercise, remember your energy during each version and lean towards the crazier side of the spectrum: it’s not as crazy as you think.
Take a hot drink into your recording space to avoid a dry mouth
Martin Talbot, a voice over artist with over a decade of experience, advises taking a hot drink into the recording space. By sipping a hot drink, you’ll avoid missing syllables and rough sounds due to a dry throat and tongue. Hot drinks can maintain and recover your voice’s peak quality.
On one occasion, Martin noticed his voice started to dry out during a voice over for a long YouTube script, leading to coughing between takes. Coughs cause several issues: a rough-sounding voice, slower voice over recording, and extra workload during editing. “Taking a 2-minute break with a warm drink,” says Martin, “allowed me to deliver the last paragraph in one take, saving a lot of time.”
For additional quick tips, read these best practices from the Vyond team.
Improve your voice over skills without formal voice over training
Challenge yourself to implement these tips before and during your next voice over session. This expert-backed advice will improve your voice over skills, something you can apply in several situations: recording explainer videos, narrating case studies, or giving life to a fictional character inside Vyond.
In Vyond, an intuitive cloud-based animation software, anyone can create stories aligned with their brand or ideas. Our platform also lets you add self-recorded voice overs, so characters communicate with the viewer at a pace, tone, and style you like. See where your creativity can take you with a free trial of Vyond.
#### 6 Explainer Video Best Practices Backed By Experts
Explainer videos focus on presenting a problem that a group of people have and positioning a product as a solution. They feature anecdotes and stories that remind viewers of these problems’ downsides and then provide the steps to stop experiencing them.
But pointing out a problem and its solution isn’t enough to make viewers buy from you. Explainer videos need to be clear and engaging so that when readers watch multiple explainer videos, your product appears as the most helpful and coherent solution.
And with ninety-four percent of people watching explainer videos to learn about products and services, you can encourage most internet users to buy from you by following these six expert-backed explainer video best practices.
1. Define your target audience
Producing a video for a specific audience raises the chances of selling your product. These people experience the problems you solve, so they’ll know how impactful it would be to solve them.
“Rather than targeting everyone, focus on the ideal customer for your business,” says Hafiz Bajuri, marketing executive at video production studio Vicinity. This narrow focus helps your video reach people who know your product’s value.
You can define your audience by talking to colleagues, like your sales, social media, or customer support team members, who speak to customers. Ask about the demographics of potential customers and clients. First, learn their average age, nationality, stage of life, and income level, as this data helps you adapt your message to your audience. Then learn about their interests and pain points to see precisely why a person would use your product.
Look at commonalities and create a user profile based on average characteristics.
2. Use simple language and explanations
Experts often forget that not everyone has the same level of expertise as them. As a result, they can reference information that listeners don’t know, making it more difficult for viewers to understand the explanation.
While writing your script, remove jargon, examples, and explanations that only people involved with your industry or product would understand.
You can spot these confusing sections by asking people outside your department for feedback. “We always test our script on our customers before launching it, and it has worked like a charm,” says Paul Sherman, CMO at Olive. He also shows the script to people unfamiliar with their product. “If they can understand it,” he says, “it’s very clear.”
You can then use the feedback to tweak your script and share a clear message.
3. Tell a straightforward message
Video introductions tease why it’s important to do or learn what the video suggests. They also let viewers discover if the video solves their problem. The issue is that lengthy introductions can bore viewers and make them view a video that solves the same problem faster.
“Most people who click a video know the problem they are having,“ says the founder of Coffee Geek TV, Tim Sutton. So it’s crucial to get to the point as soon as possible. “Getting to the point and staying on the topic can show viewers that you have the solution and that they can receive it quickly and clearly,” he says. When Tim switched to a concise format, he saw more views and comments from his audience.
Stick to a brief three-step intro so you quickly address the video’s topic and don’t ramble.
First, mention the stakes of not solving the video title’s problem—this is a problem that your product or service solves. Then, tease how your video will show how to solve this problem. Finally, share your achievements or your job title to prove that it’s worth listening to you.
This video does a perfect job of succinctly explaining the problem, and then articulating how the product will solve that problem. Feeling inspired? You can edit this explainer video with a Vyond account to create your own.
Use this explainer video template
4. Produce videos shorter than 2 minutes
Research from Wistia found that viewers are less likely to watch videos longer than two minutes. So, to increase the chances of seeing a positive ROI from your explainer video, record videos shorter than 120 seconds.
You can keep your video below two minutes by setting a word-per-minute limit and discussing one idea per video.
Mike Grossman, CEO at GoodHire, says you shouldn’t say more than 150 to 200 words per minute. This rule means your script should be between 300 and 400 words long. During this time, mention how you tackle one problem, share an example of how you have done it, and then finish the video before losing the audience’s attention.
5. Avoid cluttering your video with visuals
Our brains can process a limited amount of information at a time. When videos show many graphics and animations simultaneously, they overload the viewer’s brain. This cognitive overload can cause viewers to forget vital information that they might need to accomplish your video’s goals, like the steps to buy from you.
“The animation should be simple,” says Hafiz, “so that viewers are not distracted and understand the concept.” Adding fewer visual elements to your video also means viewers can focus on what matters the most: your video’s message.
You can avoid cluttering your video with visuals by sticking to one or two graphics per scene, like in the example below. One graphic can contextualize what the speaker says, while the other emphasizes an event on screen.
If you’re a Vyond customer, you can use this example video as a template to create your own explainer video.
Use this explainer video template
6. Include subtitles
Research from Verizon shows that 80% of consumers are more likely to watch videos with captions.
According to Convincely’s Chief Experience Officer Gregory Yong, “Most internet users browse videos on mute, and will leave content they can’t watch without sound.” So when you caption your videos, you cater to mobile users—66% of site visitors—and have more chances of reaching your target audience.
Many video distribution platforms allow you to easily include captioning when you upload videos. Video creation platforms like Vyond can also make captioning easier by using AI to generate open and closed captions directly from within your workflow. This also gives you more control by allowing you to edit or make corrections directly to the VTT and SRT files before exporting the final video.
Another great technique? Adding dynamic text directly into your explainer video. The example above demonstrates how using text in your video makes it easy to get a message across, even without sound. You can open this video template in any Vyond account to customize your own explainer video.
Use this explainer video template
Animate a great explainer video using Vyond
Vyond is an intuitive animation that anyone without an animation background can use as their go-to explainer video software. These videos can use a variety of templates (such as contemporary, business-friendly, or whiteboard animation) to suit your marketing campaign’s video style.
Once you pick a style, you can produce animated explainer videos that follow experts’ best practices to grow your business. For example, MailLift embedded a Vyond-made video on their homepage as part of their video marketing efforts and increased conversion rates by 67%.
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#### 6 Holiday Video Templates
The holiday season is all about connection, and what better way to connect than with video?
Vyond’s Video Template Library is more stuffed than a stocking, with ready-made clips you can customize in minutes. Each video template is free to use with your Vyond subscription, making it easy to share high-quality holiday videos with your own characters, branding, and messaging.
The visual and dynamic nature of videos make them a great medium for spreading holiday cheer. Make an animated explainer to teach teammates about lesser-known traditions! Send your friends season’s greetings! No matter how you’re celebrating this year, have fun getting creative with these favorite festive videos from our template library.
Holiday Template Round-Up
1. Winter Solstice Festival
Winter Solstice is a significant holiday celebrated by millions of people from all over the world. Grab this template to introduce the significance and history of this festival in East Asian countries.
2. Season’s Greetings
Get in the holiday spirit by adding your custom characters to this video, created by Vyond’s own video experts, and brighten a loved one’s inbox with jaunty music and seasonal scenes.
3. Holiday Travel Tips
Travel reaches an all-time-high each year in December as people find their way home for the holidays. Help your people get there safely, smoothly, and prepared with this quick travel tip template.
4. Noche Buena
Get to know Noche Buena: the Christmas Eve tradition honored throughout Latin America! Use this template to teach your teammates about the shared meaning of diverse Latinx celebrations.
5. How to Play Dreidel
Hanukkah Sameach! Learn the rules of this classic Hanukkah game, and give this Jewish tradition a spin.
6. Happy Holidays (Christmas)
It wouldn’t be the holidays without an office party! Get the fun started with this Christmas-themed greeting, created in Vyond Studio using contemporary props and characters.
How to Use These Video Templates
The templates in this post are free to try with a paid account or free trial of Vyond. Customers can download and share videos. Professional and Enterprise customers have the ability to export videos as GIFs.
Follow these steps to access the templates:
Log into your free trial or Vyond account.
Pick a template:
Winter Solstice Festival
Vyond: Season’s Greetings
Holiday Travel Tips
Noche Buena
Happy Holidays (Christmas)
The selected video project will open in your account for you to customize.
Vyond customers can download and share.
About Vyond
Vyond allows people of all skill levels in all industries and job roles to create dynamic and powerful media. With features that go beyond moving text and images, you can build character-driven stories or compelling data visualizations that engage audiences and deliver results.
Start making your own videos today. Sign up for a free trial and attend our bi-weekly tour of Vyond Studio.
#### 6 Remote Work Culture Ideas To Build Productive Teams
It’s hard to meaningfully connect with colleagues when you only see their profile picture—the result of an old photoshoot.
A 2021 study on the pandemic’s impact on the workforce exposes this difficulty. It found that 36% of employees feel disconnected from colleagues. These employees tried to communicate with colleagues, but 34% found it hard to get a response through channels like email. This impact is felt even more heavily by remote organizations. In-office and hybrid workers can walk over to their coworkers’ desks when there’s a communication breakdown—an option not available to someone 500 miles away from their closest colleague.
Without a culture that emphasizes clear communication, employees face problems alone. This lack of collaboration leads to losses in productivity, increased stress, and a more frequent turnover of employees feeling like outsiders.
Remote organizations can apply seven ideas to overcome these challenges. Each helps you build a company culture where employees cooperate to achieve the same goal in less time.
1. Create clear communication guidelines
Headphones during your workday? Deep work. Reading during lunchtime? No time for gossip. These are two unwritten rules of office work etiquette.
But rules are more ambiguous while working remotely, which can cause unintentional offenses or stress for employees.
A survey of almost 2,000 workers found that 70% experience unclear communication with colleagues at least once a month. When messages aren’t precise, employees waste time trying to crack what their colleague wants or executing the wrong directions. As a result, employees waste four hours per week on average trying to solve these communication problems.
The same survey found that 75% of employees sense a lack of communication within their companies. If team members often take a while to respond only to send ambiguous answers, employees are less motivated to seek support and more likely to try to solve the problem on their own. Instead of staring at the computer for an answer, they’ll devise their own solution, even if someone else knows a more efficient path.
Source: HBR
You can attach norms of each channel you use to communicate internally to provide efficient and pleasant communications. Your list of norms should explain when using a channel is appropriate, the best messaging frequency, and tips to clearly convey a message.
For example; motivate employees to use live video to discuss sensitive information like performance reviews or promotions. This format lets you clarify the listener’s doubts in real-time, avoiding unintentional offenses from ambiguous messages. In your list of norms, tell participants to turn on their cameras. Seeing your speaker allows viewers to see their body language and trust their words.
2. Turn leaders into remote work advocates
Employees look up to leaders for guidance on how to behave. A leader’s values, work habits, and tools affect employees’ views of remote work.
Suppose the head of a team constantly says they miss working from an office because of in-person relationships. Employees may develop a similar sentiment after hearing about the downsides of remote work day in and day out. They can spot flaws in remote methods of building relationships and networking events, thinking they can’t replicate face-to-face events. With this mindset, building relationships becomes almost impossible.
Fortunately, the opposite attitude from your leader positively influences employees. A leader capable of articulating the benefits of a remote work tool, a new asynchronous workflow, or an upcoming virtual event reminds employees how effective remote work is.
To build a team that enjoys working remotely and is eager to collaborate with others, have your leaders exhibit the beliefs you want in your culture. If you value internal friendships, have leaders schedule a weekly call to meet someone from the company. Calls can be as short as 15 minutes, or they can spend an hour getting to know each other. The primary goal is to show leaders promoting an active approach to meeting colleagues.
3. Encourage cross-team collaboration
It’s common for remote employees to collaborate less with other company divisions than non-remote ones. There are no lunches, hallways, or elevators to meet people outside their departments. Infrequent cross-team collaboration and support can lead to unhappy and unproductive employees.
A survey of over 1,000 US employees in different industries found that workers that don’t share knowledge spend over five hours redoing work that another employee once did. At times, they don’t redo work but follow an inefficient process that another team optimized long ago.
These unnecessary time investments delay projects as workers figure out how to tackle a challenge by themselves. You wouldn’t face these issues with a cross-team collaboration culture. For example; if a content writer had a question about the best hiring practices, they would schedule a 30-minute interview with HR rather than reading about this topic for hours. Frequent cooperation accelerates workflows, giving employees more time to focus on high-impact projects.
Create a document sharing guidelines on how employees should support each other. Pledges share actionable steps people can take to overcome a challenge or commit to a mission. Thanks to it, employees know exactly how to improve a situation and its benefits.
Source: LinkedIn
At the beginning of COVID-19, the CEO of IBM wrote a pledge based on colleagues’ conversations and challenges. It contained the commitments he would make to ease the lives of employees who were forced to work from home. Like IBM’s CEO, write a pledge with actions to make working remotely easier.
Uncover your company’s collaboration challenges using surveys and 1-to-1 conversations with employees. Hurdles inform your pledge’s steps. If one team works later hours than most others at the company, you could pledge to spend one day each week working those hours so you could interact with them more. Adding this item encourages teams to get to know each other rather than avoid contact.
4. Build a team based on their time zones
Remote companies can hire talent from anywhere. But hiring people in dispersed time zones can slow down projects and spark division among employees.
Asynchronous communication channels like email and Slack are the go-to collaboration option for teams spread across the world. While convenient to message someone quickly, these channels aren’t efficient at facilitating camaraderie. Employees would have to chit-chat over 10-hour + time frames to get to know each other, making both parties lose interest.
Another issue with building a team in vastly different time zones is finding a meeting time that works for everyone. If half of your team is in the US and the other half in Western Europe, you can find a time that’s not too early or late. But what if half of your team is in Mexico and the other half in Hong Kong? In this scenario, one group would have to stay up late or wake up early, which can tire employees.
You could host two sessions at the same meeting. But suppose members of two time zones never see each other. In that case, it’s unlikely they’ll build friendships and a sense of camaraderie between each other.
One solution to a disbanded global team is hiring talent within a seven-hour time difference. So if your team is mainly in America, and you can’t find talent on this continent, look for candidates in Europe. This overlap gives workers at least one hour to partake in casual events and video meetings, where they can build rapport with colleagues.
5. Use videos to introduce new team members
It’s normal for new employees to feel awkward at work during the first days. Reaching out to a stranger can feel daunting, making even casual interactions stressful. Since there are no areas for casual encounters, remote workers can feel more stressed and lonely in their new job than office workers.
At best, these workers will join a Slack channel or companywide meeting filled with faces and names they don’t know. Unless you host an event to get to know new team members, they won’t have an opportunity to meet people on a personal level. Employees that don’t have anyone to interact with have a more challenging time sharing innovative ideas or collaborating with others.
You can ask new hires to record or animate a video sharing their hobbies, expectations, background, and quirky facts. Their colleagues can watch this video before a new employee’s first day to think about talking points to make new hires’ onboarding more pleasant.
At Vyond, every new hire animates a video introducing themselves during their first days. For example; look at Asia’s, which summarizes her life. It also shows she’s funny and a talented professional. Colleagues can watch the video to get to know her and find common interests to chat about on Asia’s first day. These videos have improved team relationships and our product development initiatives.
6. Recreate team-bonding activities online
Happy hour drinks, birthdays, and milestone celebrations are events where employees can build relationships with each other. These moments allow employees to see each other’s personalities rather than thinking solely of work, building a cohesive team and a fun work environment. However, these events aren’t always available to remote employees. It’s hard for the team to play mini-golf together when they’re spread across the world. You can create virtual spaces where people can interact to spark internal friendships.
Any company can host casual events to facilitate internal friendships. For example; Alibaba hosted a virtual quilt-making event after not hosting their yearly in-person event, AliDay. The event promoted teamwork and the company’s values, developing a unified team culture.
With so many unified communication tools available, it’s easy to recreate almost any in-person event. You can host crafting, music, or reading sessions on video conference software. These events let people connect with those with similar interests.
For a 1-to-1 friendship-building experience, use a water cooler software that randomly pairs employees each week. Share some icebreakers to make knowing others a laid-back experience rather than a competition for who talks about the weather first.
Use Vyond to strengthen your remote work culture
Vyond is an animation tool remote teams can use in their team-building activities and efforts. Thanks to our dozens of free templates, leaders can create impactful training on remote tools, remote communication etiquette, and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) lessons without previous animation experience. You can also use props, environments, and characters to show everyday situations where biases or beliefs affect employees’ chances of working together and becoming friends.
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#### 6 Steps To Make Promotional Videos That Increase Sales
Promotional videos are the secret ingredient in every high-performing sales professional’s recipe for success. According to Vidyard’s 2021 State of Virtual Selling Report, sales professionals using video in their sales cycle close 50% more deals than those who don’t. Those using promo videos in emails also see higher open and response rates.
Every company should produce promotional videos consistently. Without them, they miss out on thousands of potential leads who prefer learning about products through videos rather than text or audio. You can follow these six simple steps to create the perfect promotional video to attract new clients and grow your business.
1. Set a specific goal
Set a concrete goal to determine the content most likely to achieve it. A precise goal gives you focus. It lets you filter out any information, sounds, or visual assets that are not aligned with your goal. If a finding is novel but unrelated to the problem your video solves, there’s no point in adding it to your script.
Broad goals like “increase sales” don’t give you that focus. If your goal is to “increase sales,” then a 1% increase in sales over the next 15 months means the project was successful—but it wasn’t.
You can set SMART goals to inform the content your script should have. SMART stands for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. For example, “Grow the number of bottom-of-the-funnel leads we receive by 15% before June 1.” Since the goal targets bottom-of-the-funnel leads, your scriptwriter will know that including basic concepts can bore viewers. Instead, they will add charts and statistics that convince viewers to buy products.
2. Write a 30-second script
Think with Google found viewers are more likely to watch 30-second ads than 15- and 120-second ones. Thirty-second ads are short enough to build a cohesive argument for why a product is worth buying but aren’t so long they become tedious.
Aim for between 50 to 70 words for your script—the average number of words a person can say in 30 seconds. Start your scripting process by creating a bullet point list of customer pain points. Then pair pain points with your product’s functionalities. Creating a connection between pain points and your offer helps you position your product as the best solution to their challenges.
With your audience’s pain points in mind, use a three-act story structure to build a cohesive narrative. The three acts for a 30-second story could look as follows:
Present one of the pain points.
Introduce your product.
Explain how your product helps overcome a challenge.
Finish the script with a clear CTA for the reader. A viewer who gets to the end of a video cares about your product. But if you don’t reveal how they can buy it quickly, they’ll be less likely to do so.
Your CTA should tell viewers exactly what to do. Tell viewers to “book a call,” not to “learn more.” Similarly, ask them to “start a free trial,” not to “be part of the change.” A clear buying process avoids losing interested prospects in the middle of the sales cycle.
3. Design a storyboard
A storyboard is a document where you can sketch your speaker’s appearance, their lines, and the video’s events. This document also shows stakeholders the charts, props, and visual assets you will use to convince viewers to buy your product.
Stakeholders can comment on what’s unclear, boring, or missing. For example, let’s say a speaker will be claiming that electric cars will become the standard. It’s a bold statement. Without an equally attention-grabbing visual, the statement can sound unimpressive.
A stakeholder can flag this concern and suggest ways to make your claims more convincing, like showing the rise in electric car sales. While short, their feedback raises the odds of producing a profitable video. Their intervention will also save you from animating a video that won’t accomplish your SMART goals.
To design your storyboard, sketch characters, props, and the scene’s location in the squares. Don’t focus on the quality of your drawing. Instead, focus on adding everything you plan to animate into the square.
Then write each scene’s script lines below each square and conclude by writing the sound effects you will use below these lines. Placing script lines, scenes, and sound effects nearby gives you the chance to verify if they pair well before animating.
4. Turn your storyboard into an animated video
Animation software gives you control over the environment, sounds, props, and characters that appear in the video. This freedom allows you to re-create any promotional video’s storyboard without increasing costs.
You can freely change your character’s body type, facial features, or outfit to signal a specific age group. With live footage, you would spend weeks finding the right actor for your video.
At the beginning of the project, you can choose between three visual styles in Vyond: contemporary, business-friendly, and whiteboard. Pick the style that best matches your brand. Click the Character menu in the top-left corner to choose a pre-designed character or create one from scratch. Create a character that looks like your target audience, so viewers can place themselves in the character’s shoes as it encounters obstacles.
Next, click the prop (top left) and background (top right) menus to decorate your scene. As with characters, making scenes relatable by adding common items and settings helps viewers remember the hurdles they go through.
Finally, animate your characters and props. Select characters and click the Action menu on the top right. There, you’ll find hundreds of actions to imitate real-life scenes. You can also add Motion Paths to both characters and props to make them move the frame.
5. Distribute your video
Social media and advertising platforms are distribution channels that you can use to reach customers. But to maximize your chances of seeing a positive ROI early on, it’s crucial to focus on the platforms your audience uses.
Most TikTok users are below 30-years old. So while a pension plan company can promote videos there, they would likely see a higher ROI on platforms with older users, like LinkedIn.
You can find the websites your audience uses the most by reviewing your audience profile documents. Once you know the platforms they use, create accounts there and study how other companies promote their posts. Are their captions long or short? Are they uploading videos natively or sharing a link?
Write promotional copy with a structure that’s similar to popular videos from the platform. By replicating their structure, you’ll reduce the chances of publishing a post that gets ignored or, worse, removed by moderators.
6. Measure your video’s impact
Check if your video’s performance matches your SMART goal’s forecast. By contrasting expected results with actual performance, you’ll be able to report on the ROI of your promotional video.
A successful video with known metrics also lets teams make educated guesses on a video’s strengths. If a specific promotional video receives more views than usual, your team can study it to replicate its success. Maybe it’s the fast-paced script or the use of animations. Whatever it is, you won’t even discover the video is performing above average unless you track its performance.
But what if the video doesn’t meet your SMART goal? In that case, you will have metrics to once again speculate on why it failed. For example, a video probably has an uninteresting hook if 90% of viewers quit the video after 10 seconds of watching. You can use this data to test different intro formats and improve upcoming videos.
Private hosting platforms like Wistia let you track how viewers interact with your video. The software will tell you the number of people who see, click, and watch videos hosted on Wistia or that you emailed. This data lets you track how videos are performing, speculate on potential problems with your video, and measure the success of the solutions you come up with.
Create high-quality promotional videos to cut your sales cycle
Whether they’re in emails, sales calls, or on landing pages, promotional videos can shorten sale cycles. They convince viewers to buy your product or, at the very least, book a demo to inquire about it.
You can use Vyond’s video-maker features to add promotional videos to your next sales or video marketing campaign. We have templates to create videos explaining your products, report results, and compare options. Using templates means you don’t have to ideate a cohesive narrative. Instead, you can build a story on top of them and launch your promotional videos faster.
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#### 6 Tips for Branding Your Videos
A brand is a combination of design elements and written tone that highlights the distinguishable qualities of a product or service. More importantly, a brand is a strategic theme that creates an emotional connection between your company and your audience, be it external prospects or your employees. It’s that emotional connection, that relatable visual narrative, that makes the art of branding so effective.
Video is one of the most compelling tools for creating meaningful engagement, which is why it’s no surprise that the demand for video is steadily increasing. Video is expected to be 82% of all mobile traffic by 2022. Do you need to brand your internal and external videos? Absolutely. Your videos are a promise to your viewers about what your brand has to offer. In order to be effective, your videos need to live up to the viewer’s expectations as well as your own brand standards.
A well-branded video focused on visual storytelling with a mission-driven narrative can do wonders for your company’s brand awareness and employee morale.
Before you wow your audience with rich animated videos, here are some guidelines to help you craft your own uniquely branded videos.
Six tips for branding your videos
1.) Be authentic
If you want to attract and retain loyal viewers with your videos, convey a sense of authenticity by using colors, fonts, textures, and animation styles that align with your brand promise. An unrelenting focus on your brand ethos will help you create a fruitful video that your viewers can both enjoy and absorb.
Incorporating your company’s logo and fonts and working from your brand color palette will help guide your storytelling style and maximize your brand impact. For example, in Vyond we have three styles of characters and props to choose from: Contemporary, Business Friendly, and Whiteboard Animation.
If your company is all about arts and crafts, Whiteboard Animation would be a great option. If your company is a pioneer of innovation, you’ll want to stick with a more contemporary style. And if you are a bank or legacy company, a more traditional style like Business Friendly style might be a good option for you.
Leverage your videos as a tool to shape your brand in the viewer’s mind and allow people to quickly connect with your company on an emotional level. As viewers begin to personally identify with your videos, your brand will live in their hearts and minds and they’ll feel a kinship with your company in a way that will guarantee loyalty.
At Vyond, we focus on concept-based branding in which an idea becomes the crucial ingredient of our videos, with an emotional approach to images and their symbolism.
2. Set the right tone
A video that is on-brand delivers the right message at the right time. In order to really connect with your audience, the viewer should be trusted to be smart enough to subconsciously grasp what your brand is supposed to mean to them.
In addition to your pre-existing brand colors, you can supplement your video with colors that help you to tell your story. Choose the kind of story you want to tell about your brand and let that lead your decision about what additional colors and fonts to incorporate.
Want to tell your audience that your company is trustworthy and stable? Use a broad palette of blues. Want to highlight a commitment to being environmentally friendly? Use earthy green and browns. And if your company is all about creativity, you’ll want to be sure to incorporate pinks and oranges which psychologically feel the most creative.
Thinking about how someone will feel when they watch your video is important to keep in mind. People may forget the specifics of the content of your video but they will never forget how your video made them feel.
Through branding, you will infuse your videos with your company’s unique voice.
3. Don’t just say it – show it
Branding is not just about getting your target audience to pay attention to you. It’s also about getting your viewers to see your company as the best fit for them. You want your video to be styled in a way that subconsciously drives home your company’s mission. This will help to create a positive outlook in the public’s eye and provide employees with direction and motivation.
Visually convey why your company is the best fit by evoking not just positive feelings, but the right kind of positive feelings. If your company offers exciting innovation, use inspirational colors such as teal, bright green, and yellow. If you are a leader in the financial industry, use the “money color” green. The same goes for textures. Trying to convey a peaceful vibe? Use soft textures and props with rounded edges.
The biggest mistake people make is putting all their emphasis on the script and neglecting to edit the visuals in a holistic way. It’s crucial to remember to pay close attention to the background and smaller props. The decision of what type of lamp to put in the background is just as important as styling the main character.
Every single element in your video should speak to your mission in a way that makes the viewer instantly understand your brand promise. This means strategically incorporating colors, sounds, and effects to help you get your message across. Making small customizations such as having the characters in your video wear clothing and accessories in your brand colors will help to visually pull your video together.
4. Be a curator
When brainstorming how to brand your videos, always think about your audience first. Your video will only get an average of two seconds to grab someone’s attention, especially with videos on social platforms.
In order to maximize the impact of your message, it’s important to mindfully curate and design your videos. Videos that share a common theme not only deliver engaging brand experiences, but also connect with your audience in an effortless way that integrates your brand into their lifestyle.
Does the video reflect the values that I want to portray to my customers and internal audience? Are my brand colors and fonts incorporated? Does the video accurately capture the heart and soul of my brand? What kind of emotions will the viewer feel when they see my video? Let these questions guide you while branding your video.
5. Don’t cut corners
Creating a high-quality video should always be your end goal. A viewer will respond much better to a short, well-branded video with a killer storyline than a longer video with more information but executed with less attention to detail.
Whether it’s thanks to a lack of mission in your narrative, mismatched fonts, or an off-brand color palette, viewers can tell if a video has been thoughtlessly thrown together. And that speaks volumes about your brand and the people who run it. Yes, branding your video can seem overwhelming or even tedious at times, but if you want the pay-off of a high-quality video, you’ll have to make brand recognition and visual consistency a priority, even internally. We promise the time commitment is well worth it.
Watch your finished video with a critical eye. Go back and tweak any areas of visual tension you discover, even if it seems small or insignificant. By doing this, you eliminate any awkwardness the viewer may subconsciously pick up on. When you only have a few seconds or minutes to create a positive connection with your viewer, the small details make all the difference.
Browse this on-demand webinar to learn how to improve the production quality of your animated videos with better scene transitions, camera movement, sound effects.
Access the template videos shared during this webinar here.
6. Produce like a pro
By cultivating your own video branding practices and pursuing viewer-focused opportunities, you will set yourself apart and make the investment in video worth it.
In order to take full advantage of the many benefits of branded videos, you want to make sure you are equipped with the right tools to feel confident in your work. A little bit of training and familiarization with your software will give you a huge leap forward in unlocking the potential of video for your brand.
What really separates generic videos from branded videos is strategy. Companies with well-branded videos enjoy a wide range of benefits from employee productivity to growth in market share to the development of new intellectual property.
Brand your videos in Vyond
Ready to create branded videos? Get started with a free trial of Vyond. Vyond lets you create branded videos easily with our library of templates, audio, props, characters, and so much more.
Watch this Vyond webinar to learn step-by-step how to import your logo, save a brand color palette, create custom characters, and more helpful branding tips for video:
Looking to learn more about branding your videos? Take a look at these resources:
20 color palettes for your brand design
How 10 companies use video for better storytelling
#### 6 Video Marketing Metrics & Why They Matter
You can spend countless hours making a video, and even more time editing every little detail, and then, finally, you can promote your video content to everyone on the internet. But if you’re not using video marketing metrics to track your video’s performance, you’re forgetting one of the most crucial steps to successful video marketing.
Digital marketing, especially video, takes a lot of time, money, and effort. The last thing you want is for those resources to be wasted. Knowing which video marketing metrics to track is key to repeatable success. Before diving into which metrics matter, let’s take a look at why metrics matter in the first place.
Why video marketing metrics matter
Numbers are just numbers unless you know how they affect your business and your goals. Video marketing metrics are essentially more numbers to throw into the mix—the difference here is that this data comes with meaning and useful context.
Video marketing, like any form of content marketing, requires extensive testing to get right. You need to ensure that your target audience is zeroed in, your content performs well on social media, your videos convert people into paying customers, and more. By measuring video marketing metrics, you’re setting a baseline against which you can compare all future efforts. And this is the only way you’ll know if your video efforts are performing better with each iteration.
For example, let’s say you’re looking at engagement metrics for a training video you created. You notice the video has good audience retention, but a lot of viewers drop off about two minutes into the video, right when your boring librarian character enters the scene. You can then experiment and adjust by making the librarian more fun to try and keep your audience. By tracking view count, you know your second effort was an improvement over the first, as far as view count goes. (This kind of iterative improvement, of course, is much easier when working with animation and not live-action footage.)
This kind of tracking allows you to learn from your successes and recreate them in future videos. In this case, you know animated videos might be the better choice for your audience moving forward.
6 video marketing metrics to track
Before you publish your next video online, there are a number of key performance indicators (KPIs) you can use to measure your campaign’s performance. Here, we share several of the most important metrics in video marketing and explain how they work:
1. View count
Every marketer dreams about millions (or billions) of people watching their latest video creation. Everyone wants their 15 minutes of fame, and for video marketers, that’s tons of video views for each piece they create.
The view count is a basic metric for how many times a video has been opened. But one view does not necessarily mean that the video was watched all the way through. Every video platform has its own way of measuring a view. For example, YouTube will consider a watch as a view after 30 seconds, in most cases, depending on the content length. That is why it’s also important to go beyond views and look at whether or not people completed the video.
After all, view count may not be the most important performance indicator for video depending on your business goals. If the objective of the video is to drive sales for enterprise accounts and that video results in one massive deal, you might consider it a success even despite a low view count.
Views stats can be skewed, too. Not all views come from unique visitors. However, there are filters that prevent users from intentionally inflating view stats, so people can’t rally all of their friends to hit Refresh hundreds of thousands of times for 10 million views.
Finding this metric: Your views can typically be found in the dashboard of your chosen platform. On YouTube, for example, views are available on the video itself, as well as in the Analytics tab of your YouTube Studio dashboard.
Image courtesy of How-to-Geek
If you’re not on YouTube, search for the platform-specific view count and you’ll likely find a guide on gathering this metric.
2. Click-through rate (CTR)
Views are great, but your video needs to do a little more than being seen. If you’re a web-based business, you also need people to click a link and head to your site.
Your click-through-rate (CTR) is a measurement of how frequently a visitor clicks a link or button. If a video’s only goal is to drive brand awareness, CTR is likely of little concern. But for everyone else, CTR indicates whether or not someone is acting upon the video.
CTR is calculated by the simple formula:
Clicks/Views = CTR
Basically, you take the number of clicks referred to your website from a link shared with your video and divide it by the number of views your video has. If you’ve added a link to your website in your video’s description box, and your site receives 1,000 new visits while your video gets 4,000 views, then your video has a 25% CTR. A higher CTR means higher engagement with your video and more traffic to your blog, website, or landing page. Check your specific industry to see what the average CTR is, because this number can vary greatly. On YouTube, 50% of channels have a CTR ranging from 2-10%.
A low CTR could indicate a number of things. First, it’s possible your video simply isn’t winning over your audience. Looking at whether or not people finished the video will help clue you in here. If people aren’t finishing the video, they probably aren’t engaged and aren’t going to click.
If people are finishing the video, and the CTR is low, maybe your link or button needs some sprucing up. Use heat mapping to see whether people mouse over the button at all after finishing the video. If they aren’t, the button or call to action (CTA) needs to be more prominent and possibly reworded.
Finding this metric: Some content management platforms have your CTR readily available. For example, YouTube has your CTR on the Analytics page of your YouTube Studio dashboard. If the number isn’t automatically displayed on your platform, use the simple formula: Clicks/Views = CTR.
3. Conversion rate
Conversions are any desired actions taken. These actions can include things like sales, email sign-ups, or account registrations. Depending on your KPIs, you probably want more than viewers or a high CTR. For example, if you sell a product or service, you’ll want your video to help generate more sales. Anyone who watches your video and goes on to purchase from you would be a conversion in this case.
You can optimize your conversion rate in a number of ways, all of which are dependent on the desired action. The important thing is to track and test your conversions. By doing so, you’ll be able to A/B test different approaches and see what affects your conversion rate.
For example, let’s say you’re trying to get more email sign-ups by gating content. You start by gating an exclusive training video behind an email form. You then track the number of people in a month who put in their email address. You then spend the next month trying a different title, different language on the landing page, and a different eye-catching sign-up graphic. Over time, you note which element nets you the biggest spike in conversions and then determine how you can build on that success.
Take the example below from Truework, an employment-verification company. Their ebook is gated, requiring visitors to enter select information in order to download it. If they notice the conversion rate isn’t satisfactory, they can try swapping the image out, changing the text color, and more.
Finding this metric: Your conversion rate is rarely offered by a platform, so it must be calculated manually instead. Calculate your conversion rate using this formula:
Conversions ➗ Visitors
The number on the bottom isn’t always going to be visitors—it could also be ad impressions. For example, if you’re paying for Google ads, a conversion would be someone who clicked the ad, while the number you divide those conversions by would be the impressions the ad got.
4. Branding
Branding itself is a strange, ethereal metric. How does one measure brand? Well, you don’t, exactly. Branding is a collection of metrics that all play a role in the success of your brand.
Typically, branding metrics to include in your monitoring are social shares/likes/comments; number of viewers for live videos; total views on video content; brand mentions; and general attitude toward your business based on comments.
Branding metrics can vary from company to company. Ultimately, brand metrics should serve as a good indicator of how your brand is performing online. You have to measure how your video affects customer experiences in your other marketing channels and how it improves overall sales even if you do not receive many direct sales from your videos.
Great business videos foster more brand awareness. The video serves as a strong touchpoint for potential customers who are more likely to convert as they move further along the sales funnel. While branding isn’t always easy to quantify because it’s not as straightforward as views or conversions, it’s an important metric for all video marketers.
Finding this metric: As previously mentioned, this isn’t a single metric; that makes finding this metric difficult. Instead of looking for an individual number, use a document to organize your various branding metrics—social shares, likes, viewers of live videos, etc. Once you have these metrics gathered in one spot, consider this your branding metric.
5. Return on investment (ROI)
As a video marketer, you should always be thinking about your return on investment (ROI) for each video you create. ROI is calculated by using this formula:
Revenue – Costs = Return on Investment
In essence, ROI is how much money you make (as both a direct and indirect result of your video) after considering all costs for producing and promoting each video. ROI helps video marketers evaluate the actual value derived from their videos.
Video marketing can be costly and time-consuming. ROI makes it possible for you to quickly deem a video profitable or not. This can help you get buy-in from any stakeholders, influence the types of videos you make, and ultimately play a vital role in determining a video marketing campaign’s success.
ROI is particularly important when it comes to video ad metrics, as you’ll calculate revenue while having to cover both production and advertising costs.
Finding this metric: Your ROI won’t be readily available on a dashboard but will require that you manually find it. This is done using the formula above: Revenue – Costs.
6. Video engagement
Video engagement metrics are essential to gauging whether a video is making an impact with your audience. Video engagement is measured via several metrics:
Comments: Look at the number of times people commented and what the comments say to determine engagement.
Likes and dislikes: Any kind of rating, good or bad, on your YouTube videos can still show engagement.
Social sharing: See how many people have shared your videos across social media. A shared video is an engaging video.
Watch time: Check the total video play your content gets. If people are making it to the end of your video, that’s great. If not, gauge where the watch time seems to cut off, then test whether your video is too long or simply not engaging.
Engagement is one of the most important video performance metrics. A video that’s watched but not engaged with is probably doing a poor job of converting. Start measuring the engagement metrics above ASAP to ensure that you’re tracking whether videos are doing their job.
Finding this metric: Video engagement is a combination of factors, so this number typically requires some manual crunching and intuition. Look at the factors above, and collect them into a single doc, as with your branding metric data. Track this information over time, and note any areas your engagement seems to be shifting. Alternatively, tools like SocialBakers will use proprietary algorithms to assign a numerical value to your engagement.
Achieving your marketing goals with metrics
The success of your videos depends on what you learn from your previous efforts. Tracking the right video marketing metrics can mean the difference between learning from your experience and simply wasting time and effort.
Remember: Nobody knows your goals like you do. It’s a good idea to track the metrics mentioned in this article, but feel free to blaze your own trails and track additional metrics. With all that tracking will come a greater understanding of your audience and your content, along with an increased likelihood that you’ll knock your marketing goals out of the park.
#### 7 Best Animation Software for Beginners in 2026
Summary: In this guide, updated for 2026, you’ll learn everything you need to know about the best options for animation software that lets you quickly create videos that grab your audience’s attention and drive success at your organization.
Animation isn’t just for movies or shows. It’s a powerful tool you can use to create impactful video content for your business—whether for learning and development programs, social media, or empowering your sales team.
But with so many options on the market, where do you start?
We created a list of the best animation software for business users, particularly beginners, to help you decide which product is best suited for your needs. We made our list based on how intuitive each tool is, how many resources and tutorial materials are available to learn the software, and whether it requires beefy hardware (expensive graphics cards, CPUs, RAM, etc.). Let’s dive in.
The best animation software for beginners in 2026
Vyond: An all-in-one AI video creation platform with the most user-friendly and versatile animation tools on the market
Animaker: DIY video tool with high-res 2K and 4K downloads
Powtoon: Customizable templates and animations
Biteable: Simple-to-use animation software
Procreate: Animation for artists who love their Apple pencil
Blender: Open-source animation tool
Cinema 4D: Features photorealistic rendering and an ample toolkit
1. Vyond
Vyond is a beginner-friendly, Enterprise-grade, all-in-one video creation platform with the most powerful animated video capabilities on the market.Used by companies and teams of all sizes, Vyond makes it easy for anyone to create engaging animated videos for any business use case, including training, HR, internal communications, marketing, sales enablement and sales. Beyond animated videos, Vyond also helps teams create videos with live action footage, screen recordings, AI avatar hosts, stock photos and footage, and more.
Vyond’s platform features Vyond Go, an AI-powered script and “instant video” generator, thousands of animated video templates, and Vyond Studio, an effortless drag-and-drop interface that features a huge variety of video templates, style options, and a powerful brand management system.
With thousands of assets and customizable templates, dedicated customer support, and a robust Help Center with step-by-step tutorials, Vyond makes it easy for anyone at your company to create animated videos in a variety of business-friendly styles.
System requirements are very minimal. Regarding hardware, computers with at least 8 GB of memory running on either Windows 7 (SP1 or later) or Mac will support Vyond. For software, all you need is one of the following web browsers: Microsoft Edge, Google Chrome, or Mozilla Firefox (version 42 or later). Also, Vyond is the only video creation software that supports enterprise-level security requirements.
Vyond pros
Generates results quickly with AI: With Vyond Go, anyone can create polished videos about any topic in literally seconds. Users can also build an animated video using one of thousands of pre-built templates, or build from scratch in Vyond Studio.
Style versatility: Vyond’s all-in-one platform offers a wide range of popular animation styles, including Contemporary, Whiteboard Animation, and Business-Friendly as well as new AI-generated styles you can create with our Text to Image tool. The platform also features a wide variety of engaging non-character templates, a huge library of Shutterstock video and image assets, and allows you to upload all kinds of live footage and screen recordings and add animated elements to them.
Beloved by customers: Vyond’s Net Promoter Score of 63 is more than double the industry average of 30. The software also has a 4.8/5 rating on G2, the highest in the category.
Easy to translate into multiple languages: Professional and enterprise users can instantly translate video content into 95 languages.
Update content quickly: No need to create brand-new videos every time your organization experiences a change that requires a content tweak. Simply update your existing video with a few clicks.with our Text to Image tool. The platform also features a wide variety of engaging non-character templates, a huge library of Shutterstock video and image assets, and allows you to upload all kinds of live footage and screen recordings and add animated elements to them.
What to look out for with Vyond
No free version beyond the free trial
Some brand management features are available only at the Enterprise level
Key features of Vyond
One of Vyond’s key differentiators is its extreme ease of use: Vyond Go makes it possible to create short animated videos on any topic in less than a minute, no production experience required. And Vyond Studio’s drag-and-drop tools and giant template and asset library make creating video as easy as throwing together a PowerPoint.
Vyond pricing
Vyond offers a free trial and four pricing tiers beginning at $58 per month (billed annually at $699).
Final thoughts on Vyond
Vyond is both the most sophisticated and easiest-to-use animation software on the market. Trusted by businesses of all sizes, Vyond is used by 20,000 companies, including 65% of the Fortune 500. Vyond uses its cutting-edge AI-powered platform to make professional video creation easy for anyone, not just creatives and designers.
You can try Vyond for for free when you sign up for a free trial:
Try Vyond for Free
2. Animaker
Animaker is a DIY video tool that promises to help non-technical folks get started producing animated and live-action videos in minutes. The tool has applications in learning and development, marketing and sales, and internal communication, including courses, presentations, and explainers.
Animaker is easy to navigate and offers a library of templates, assets, music, and sound effects. Users who prefer more realism than 2D animation styles can also upload and edit their own live-action videos in the tool.
Additionally, Animaker works on Windows, Mac, and Linux operating systems and requires the basics of a modern computer to run, including a web browser (Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Safari, or Microsoft Edge), sufficient RAM, and a good processor for a smooth performance.
Animaker pros
High-resolution 2K and 4K downloads
Library of templates and video styles, including explainers, whiteboard presentations, and company communications
Robust resource section with tutorials, tips and hacks, and product updates
Animaker cons
Animation styles offer fewer character types, action options, and facial expressions than some competitors
Its AI features are far less advanced than competitors
Users on G2 complain about occasional glitches and lagging speeds
Free plan offers limited downloads, video lengths, and other features
Users must subscribe to a paid plan in order to access watermark-free videos
Key features of Animaker
Animaker offers video production for non-designers and non-technical folks. The tool is simple to understand and offers a variety of pricing plans. All but the lowest two tiers offer at least 2K resolution; enterprise users can create 4K resolution videos.
Animaker pricing
Animaker offers four paid plans starting at $12.50 per month (billed annually at $150) and a limited free plan with fewer features and watermarked videos. Pro and enterprise users can create 2K and 4K resolution videos and access a broader range of assets and features.
Final thoughts on Animaker
Business users who are just getting their feet wet in the world of AI-assisted video production will enjoy Animaker’s self-explanatory interface and sizable template library. However, the tool does offer more limited animation options than some of its competitors, and accessing advanced features will require a paid subscription.
3. Powtoon
Powtoon is a video animation platform that allows newbies to create professional-quality presentations, explainers, and educational videos. Choose from multiple templates in categories like Marketing & Sales, Internal Comms, Education, and HR, import assets and files, or use AI-powered script and production assistant tools to streamline your process.
This tool comes with a QuickStart Guide full of bite-size how-to videos, making it simple to pick up. Also, similar to Vyond and Animaker, it requires the basics of a modern computer to run (i.e., the latest version of your internet browser, a Windows, Mac, or Linux operating system, adequate RAM, and a good processor).
Powtoon pros
AI-powered script, text-to-speech, and video creator tools
Powtoon Capture tool allows video recording from webcam or screen
Convenient interface and easy-to-use tools
Powtoon cons
There are fewer character and expression options in animations than in some competitors
Features like text-to-speech, character and font customization, and reseller rights are only available with the highest-level package
Limited storage and video lengths at lower tiers
Key features of Powtoon
Powtoon offers a library of customizable templates and animations, plus the option to import assets from Photoshop and Powerpoint. The Powtoon Capture tool allows users to create presentations from their webcam or screen.
Powtoon pricing
Powtoon offers an extremely limited free version as well as three tiers of paid plans ranging from $15 per month (billed annually at $180) to $125 per month (billed annually at $1,500). All paid versions come with priority support, privacy control, and commercial use. The top tiers offer advanced AI tools and increased storage.
Final thoughts on Powtoon
Powtoon is easy to use and offers a good range of templates and options. However, some users may find animation options to be limited and experience slower speeds at longer video lengths.
4. Biteable
Biteable is a cloud-based video and animation software platform that offers more than 1,700 templates, 2.4 million stock footage clips, and a text-to-video AI tool, among other features.
For first-time users, Biteable offers several resources to help you get started, including a product demo, Quick Start Guide, and Help Center. It requires minimal hardware (a decent RAM and standard processor) and is a web-based application that runs on most browsers. Supported by Windows, Mac, and Linux operating systems.
Biteable pros
Straightforward and user-friendly interface
Well-organized library of templates and assets
Helpful resources, including a quick-start guide and product demo
Biteable cons
Only a 7-day free trial, shorter than the free trial tier offered by many competitors
Paid plans start at $49 per month (billed at $588 annually), which may be too steep for some SMBs and entrepreneurs
Limited customization options compared with competing applications
Key features of Biteable
Biteable’s most significant advantage is its streamlined interface. Biteable also offers an extensive template library, branding options, and AI tools like text-to-video.
Biteable pricing
Users can access a free 7-day trial. Paid plans start at $49 per year (billed annually at $588).
Final thoughts on Biteable
Biteable is a solid video tool and animation software package—as long as you have the budget for it. It’s user-friendly and offers various templates and customization options.
5. Procreate
Do you have a background in arts or design? If you can sketch on your iPad, you can use Procreate, which offers a robust app for drawing and rendering animated videos. Additionally, Procreate offers a handy Beginner Series of tutorial videos on their site to help you pick up the fundamentals.
The hardware and software requirements are unique compared to those of the previous tools on this list. Procreate is only supported on specific iPad models and, as of the time of publishing this article, needs iPadOS 15.4.1 or newer.
Procreate pros
Relatively simple to use with an efficient workflow
Timelapse workflow feature is convenient for creators who enjoy sharing their work progress
Ideal for illustrators
Only a one-time fee of $12.99 for the basic app
Procreate cons
iPad only (Procreate Pocket works on certain iPhone models)
Primarily for illustrators and artists
Not geared toward business-related training videos
Key features of Procreate
Procreate bills itself as the complete art studio and offers a suite of features including Quickshape, Animation Assist, and Streamline, as well as over 200 brushes.
Procreate pricing
In contrast with its competitors, Procreate offers one-time pricing. Procreate Pocket, the iPhone app, costs $5.99; Procreate for iPad costs $12.99; and Procreate Dreams, the enhanced animation tool, costs $19.99.
Final thoughts on Procreate
Procreate is firmly geared toward users with previous design experience and has limitations, including only being available on iPad and iPhone. However, some users may really enjoy the app’s flexibility, intuitive interface, and professional, artistic results.
6. Blender
Unlike the other tools on this list, Blender is a free, open-source 3D animation software package that works on Windows, Mac, and Linux and supports everything from video creation to game production. Popular users of this tool include game developers, VFX and 3D artists, and architects and designers.
If you have no prior 3D animation experience, be prepared—Blender will take some time to learn and even more time to master. However, it may be worth it if your organization would benefit from having someone in-house with an advanced 3D modeling skillset.
Blender’s current recommended system requirements include:
Processors: For Windows or Linux, 8 cores; for Mac, Apple Silicon.
Supported operating systems: Windows 10 or Windows 11, macOS 14 (Sonoma), or Linux distribution with glibc 2.28 or newer (64-bit).
RAM: 32 GB recommended
GPU: For Windows or Linux, 8 GB VRAM; for Mac, GPU with Metal 2.2.
Blender pros
Free for all users
Large community offering a wealth of resources and tutorials
Advanced rendering capabilities, including realistic lighting and global illumination
A variety of animation tools, including keyframe animation and inverse kinematics
Blender cons
The tool can be difficult to learn, especially for newbies
Complex interface
High system requirements
Due to the crowd-sourced nature of support documentation, it may be occasionally challenging to find answers to questions
Key features of Blender
Blender is well-known for the quality of its sculpting and simulation tools and customizable user interface. Plus, it’s free and open-source.
Blender pricing
As an open-source product, Blender is free.
Final thoughts on Blender
If you have some design experience and are a patient learner, you’ll likely enjoy Blender’s rendering, modeling, and video editing tools. Certainly, you can’t beat the price.
7. Cinema 4D
Cinema 4D is a professional 3D animation software developed by Maxon. Frequent users include motion graphics designers and 3D artists, and they typically use it to create graphics or visual effects for film, television, or advertising.
Beginners and experts alike find the interface pretty user-friendly, though the advanced features are more difficult for new users to learn—especially for those without design experience.
To run Cinema 4D (2024) on your computer, you’ll need:
Processors: For Windows, Intel 64-bit CPU or AMD 64-bit CPU with AVX2 support; for Mac, Intel-based Apple Macintosh with SSE4.2 support or Apple M1/M2-powered Mac. For Linux, 64-bit Linux distribution with glibc 2.17 or later.
Supported operating systems: Windows 10 Version 20H2 or higher, Windows 11, macOS 11.7.7+ (Big Sur), 12.6+ (Monterey) or 13.3+ (Ventura), or Linux distribution with glibc 2.28 or newer (64-bit).
RAM: 24 GB recommended
GPU: For Windows, any of the following as a minimum: NVIDIA Maxwell GPU, AMD Polaris (AMD GCN 4), or Intel Kaby Lake or newer supporting DirectX 12 with feature level 11.0. For Mac, Metal: v2 (Mac2) or higher or Apple 7 (M1) or higher.
Monitor resolution: 1920 x 1080 recommended minimum
Cinema 4D pros
High-quality graphics, toolset, and render engine
Clean, comfortable workspace
Supports third-party renderers like Arnold and OctaneRender
Cinema 4D cons
Steep learning curve for advanced features
Expensive compared to competitors
Relatively high system requirements
Key features of Cinema 4D
Cinema 4D helps even relatively new users create professional quality 3D graphics, animated videos, and VFX. The tool is also well known for its photorealistic rendering, substantial toolset, and easy-to-use interface.
Cinema 4D pricing
Maxon bundles Cinema 4D with Redshift, its rendering tool, for $81.91 per month (billed annually at $983.00). You can also access a free trial.
Final thoughts on Cinema 4D
Cinema 4D offers powerful tools and an intuitive interface, and users rave about the end results. However, it’s pricey compared with competitors and may be more advanced than some organizations need.
What is the best animation software for beginners?
With so many animation software options on the market, it can be hard to know which animation software is the best for your business, especially if you haven’t shopped for software like this before.
But for most companies looking to communicate and train more effectively, the best tool:
Features a wide range of styles, making it easier to appeal to a wide range of audiences
Requires minimal technical requirements
Is reasonably priced
And most importantly, is intuitive enough that anyone at your company—even total beginners—can easily use it
Want to see if Vyond’s AI-powered animated video platform is right for you? Try it for Free:
Try Vyond Today
#### 7 Best Training Video Software in 2026
Summary: In this guide, we’ll share the top training video software tools for 2026 based on our thorough research and customer reviews. We’ve also split them up by category (best overall, best screen-recorder, etc.), so stay tuned to see which tool may be the best fit for your organization.
Overview of the best training video software in 2026
Here’s a peek at the training video software we found to be the best:
Best overall: Vyond
Best for screen capturing: Camtasia
Best for interactive videos: Vimeo
Best for editing: Final Cut Pro
Best for mobile devices: iMovie
For animation only: Powtoon
For creating AI-powered talking head videos: Synthesia
Best training video software overall
1. Vyond
Vyond is the most comprehensive, user-friendly, and versatile training video software on the market. Ideal for business professionals with no previous video-making experience, it features a drag-and-drop video interface (Vyond Studio) and an AI-powered script and video generator (Vyond Go). Together, these tools help you create high-quality scripts and training videos much faster than traditional video production methods.
With Vyond, you can create training videos in a wide variety of popular styles, including animated, photorealistic, and mixed media, as well as videos that feature AI Avatars, screen recordings, or user-generated footage.
With Vyond Go, you can go from prompt to a complete, editable training video in seconds. And with Vyond Studio’s huge library of video templates, scenes, characters, styles, and new AI features, you can bring any video idea to life quickly — zero production experience required.
Vyond’s pros
Best all-in-one AI video creation platform
Editing and updating content is extremely easy
Allows beginners to jump in and start creating and editing videos with zero effort
Features a wide range of character styles and ethnicities
Offers more than 1,300 realistic, diverse AI avatar options to narrate and/or host your video content
Provides automatic lip-sync for AI-generated or pre-recorded audio
Supports 95 languages for easier localization
Features straightforward sharing capabilities; for example, you can upload content to learning management systems (LMS) like Articulate
Consistently enhances its products with new feature releases
What to look out for with Vyond
No free plan, but there’s a free trial to test before you buy
Key features of Vyond
What makes Vyond unique is its versatility, ease of use, and cutting-edge AI capabilities.
You can create content instantly with Vyond Go, a text-to-video generator, a library of AI Avatars, and other AI functionality like Text to Image and Video to Action. Or you can use Vyond Studio’s vast library of assets, industry-specific templates, characters, and styles and easy drag-and-drop interface to create highly targeted (and effective) video content for any business audience.
Vyond pricing
Vyond’s pricing includes four plan options: Starter at $699 annually (40% savings vs monthly), Professional at $1199 annually (50% savings vs monthly), Enterprise at $1649 annually (contact us for multi-seat pricing, not available monthly), and Agency at $1999 annually (includes unlimited rights transfer).
Try a Vyond free trial
Best training video software for screen capturing
2. Camtasia
Camtasia is a screen recording and video editing software for educators, instructional designers, tech marketers, and other business professionals. It’s ideal for creating software demos, tutorials, and presentations using Windows and Mac computers.
Camtasia ranks #2 because it’s easy to use and more affordable than other training video solutions, without compromising quality or much-needed screen capturing features.
Camtasia pros
Good price point for small businesses and startups
Self-explanatory for newbies and pros to jump in and start screen capturing
Provides an all-in-one solution for screen capturing, recording audio, and editing
Camtasia cons
Lacks the advanced features and versatility of other software, and doesn’t have an audio editor (must use Audiate)
Only has an annual offer, but has a 30-day money-back guarantee
Must pay for Audiate (text-based editor that removes “um’s” and “uh’s”) and assets library separately
Larger projects may have lagging performance, choppy playback, and slow timeline navigation
Key features of Camtasia
The core features of Camtasia cover the basics of screen capturing while making the process faster for users. It offers video annotations, including adding text, shapes, and subtitles. To edit videos and enhance audio quicker, users can upgrade to the plan with Audiate. There’s also a multi-track timeline that allows you to add an unlimited number of tracks from your files or Camtasia’s library (again, requires a plan upgrade to use its assets).
Camtasia pricing
Camtasia offers three plan options; all are annual subscriptions. The individual subscription is $179.88, Camtasia with Audiate is $329.87, and Camtasia with Assets and Audiate is $479.86.
Best training video software for interactive videos
3. Vimeo
Vimeo is another video training software with interactive features. It’s a great choice for those who need high-quality video hosting, streaming, and sharing capabilities. Since it’s a web-based platform, you can use it on any device with a browser.
Vimeo is an easy-to-use tool that creates professional-grade videos within minutes thanks to its AI-powered and drag-and-drop features.
Vimeo pros
Creates high-definition videos in 4K, 8K, HDR, and Dolby Vision
Allows you to trim clips, add music and effects, and build on top of pre-made templates
Simple to get started with its intuitive interface
Provides analytics to track completions and monitor progress
Vimeo cons
Customer support sometimes has slow responses and unhelpful resolutions
Free plan comes with significant limitations for storage, bandwidth, and privacy
Limited customization options for building tailored interactive training videos
Integration issues with tools like Salesforce, HubSpot, Marketo, and Eloqua
Key features of Vimeo
Vimeo is an affordable interactive training video platform powered by artificial intelligence and drag-and-drop capabilities. Its AI features allow you to generate video scripts using prompts. Plus, its AI can transcribe video content into text, and allows you to edit the video by editing the text. The automated captions improve accessibility and make your training materials searchable.
Vimeo pricing
Vimeo offers four plans: The Free plan is suitable for one user needing no more than 1 GB of storage. Then the paid options include Starter at $20 per month, Standard at $33 per month, and Advanced at $108 per month. Annual plans are also available at a 40% discount.
Best training video software for editing
4. Final Cut Pro
Final Cut Pro is Apple’s professional-grade video editing software solution. It offers many features, such as easy clip arrangement via magnetic timelines and high-performance editing on Apple devices.
Final Cut Pro is best for video editors, content creators, and editors looking for advanced video editing features. Unfortunately, this platform is only available for MacOS computers. However, it’s an excellent choice for those needing drag-and-drop features that create polished and ready-to-share videos with employees and clients.
Final Cut Pro pros
Offers professional-level video editing features for visual and audio elements
Allows beginners to get started right away, thanks to its user-friendly interface
Integrates with tools in Apple’s ecosystem, like Motion and Compressor
Provides a free trial to try before you buy
Final Cut Pro cons
Lacks consistent updates for improving current features and developing new features
Comes with a learning curve, especially for those familiar with other video editing platforms
Has limited audio editing capabilities and the inability to paste effects across multiple clips
Only available on Apple computers
Key features of Final Cut Pro
Final Cut Pro is an ideal software for training videos, thanks to its advanced video editing features, such as magnetic timelines that simplify snapping clips together. It also offers multicam editing for combining footage taken from different cameras, color grading to correct colors, and audio editing using pro-grade tools. The motion graphics and effects are handy for creating animations and visual effects.
Final Cut Pro pricing
Free trial for 90 days. Also, Final Cut Pro’s pricing is unique because it doesn’t require ongoing payments. Pay $299.99 once, and it’s yours forever.
Best training video software for mobile devices
5. iMovie
iMovie is a free video editing software that comes pre-installed on Mac computers. Plus, it’s available for download on iPhones and iPads. It has a user-friendly interface with drag-and-drop features, making it useful for beginners and intermediate users.
It allows users to quickly import and edit training videos for employees and customers. Exported content is polished and professional-looking, which you can import to a private YouTube channel or Windows Live.
iMovie pros
Overall user-friendly and intuitive video editing interface
Auto-save feature is appreciated by customers
Easy on the wallet, since it’s pre-installed on Mac devices
Video editing features, like trimming, splitting, and adding transitions and other basic effects
iMovie cons
Adding music isn’t as straightforward as with other features in the app
Performance issues when rendering videos, such as slow processing and lag while editing projects
Only supports two video tracks, which hinders more complex projects
Lacks cloud integration, which means eating up local drive space
Available to Apple device users only
Key features of iMovie
iMovie has multiple features users love, such as its green screen and picture-in-picture overlays. It also provides speed controls for slow motion and reverse playback. Then there are iMovie’s automatic features, like Magic Movie and Storyboards, which auto-create movies using selected media (from iCloud) and templates. The tool’s built-in file management makes organizing projects easier, and prevents loss of files.
iMovie pricing
iMovie is available for free to MacOS and iOS users.
Training video software for animation only
The best animated training video software is Vyond. However, we didn’t include it in this category, since it extends beyond animations to include other styles like photorealism (see the Best Overall Training Video Software category).
6. Powtoon
Powtoon is an online training video software that makes crafting animations easy. It’s a combination of PowerPoint and cartoon creation, making presentations and explainer videos fun to make and watch. It offers drag-and-drop functions and pre-animated assets, so it’s usefulfor beginners and intermediate users.
Since Powtoon is cloud-based, it’s accessible from any device using a web browser.
Powtoon pros
Easy to develop animated videos without experience, while still appealing to advanced design knowledge
Lots of professional template options
Creates professional-level animated videos fast
Powtoon cons
Asset library, AI functionality, and customization capabilities limited compared to competitors
Large projects become slow and error-prone, limiting users to small animations
Infrequent content updates for templates, assets, and features
Poor internet connection and speeds hurt the user experience
Some users may not find the interface to be very intuitive
Key features of Powtoon
Powtoon offers a user-friendly interface for users to jump in and create animations. It also has a vast assets library containing characters, props, backgrounds, and music. Then there are customizable characters and pre-made templates to add your branding. Powtoon also comes with interactive video features, such as quizzes, clickable links, and choose-your-own-adventure scenarios.
Powtoon pricing
Powtoon offers three plans with monthly and annual subscription options. Lite is $50 per month or $180 per year, Professional is $190 per month or $480 per year, and Business is $1,500 per year (no monthly option).
Training video software for creating AI-powered talking head videos
7. Synthesia
Synthesia is an AI-powered video creation platform that generates videos featuring human-like avatars with lip-syncing based on your manual or AI-generated scripts.
Compared to other AI video generators that allow for a wider range of training video formats (talking heads, animated scenarios with characters, mixed media, etc.) the overall value and impact of Synthesia’s videos may vary.
Synthesia pros
230+ avatars, plus the option to customize or create your own avatar
250+ example video templates created by designers
140+ languages and hundreds of voices and accents
Synthesia cons
AI avatars are limited to talking heads only, limiting the ways you can engage audiences
Limited customization options for AI avatars
Doesn’t allow for the diverse range of backgrounds and environments offered by vendors like Vyond
Some users claim AI voices sometimes have unnatural pronunciations or lack of emotional inflection, which negatively impacts engagement
Free plan is severely limited (36 min of video yearly, 6 AI avatars, 1 editor)
Key features of Synthesia
Synthesia offers AI avatars for businesses wanting to create talking-head videos without hiring actors. It also supports over 130 languages for script translation and uses text-to-speech tech to create voice overs. You can even transform documents, PDFs, and websites into videos using AI and pre-designed templates (300+ available).
Synthesia pricing
Synthesia offers a free plan and three paid options with monthly and annual billing options. The Starter plan is $29 per month or $264 per year, Creator plan is $89 per month or $804 per year, and Enterprise requires a call to get a quote.
What’s the best training video software?
The ideal training video software should be extremely easy to use, affordable, and versatile enough to let you bring any content idea to life in a wide range of visual styles.
While there are quite a few options that check some of these boxes, Vyond is the only solution that hits them all. Its cutting-edge generative AI makes it possible to create a first draft script and video in literally seconds with a simple text prompt. It’s competitively priced. And its deep library of assets, styles, and templates makes it easy to create content appropriate for any audience. Make animated videos, photorealistic videos, and everything in between all much faster than traditional video production.
Ready to give Vyond a test run? Sign up for a free trial today.
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Frequently asked questions
What makes a training video effective?
Effective training videos should be clear, compelling, and as targeted to your specific audience as possible. Using video production software that offers a variety of ways to engage audiences and functionality that makes customization easy can help.
What’s the best way to make a training video?
We recommend using Vyond because it offers two easy ways to create great training videos:
With Vyond Go, you can create an original script and video in seconds by simply typing in a text prompt and clicking a few buttons. You can also edit text and audio right in the platform.
Or, with Vyond Studio’s huge library of pre-made scenes, templates, characters, and styles, you can bring any video idea to life quickly by dragging and dropping content where you want it to go, as easily as building a PowerPoint deck.
What software should I use to create training videos?
The best software for training videos should make it easy for anyone on your team to bring their ideas to life. If you’re looking for something that’s simple, versatile, and already vouched for by millions of other training video makers, Vyond is likely your best bet.
#### 7 Best Types of YouTube Videos (According to Business YouTubers)
The demand for video content is rising. According to Wyzowl, 66% of people prefer learning about products or services by watching a short video rather than reading a blog post. YouTube users quintupled the amount of time they spent watching shopping-related videos—think of unboxings and product reviews—in 2018 as compared to 2016. But what types of YouTube videos should you be using?
We asked more than two dozen profitable YouTube channels why they started their channel and the types of YouTube videos that led to their success.
The following is a list of the seven popular types of YouTube videos that we heard the most. You can produce one or many of these formats to run a profitable YouTube channel for your business.
1. Company vlogs
Vlogs are a type of YouTube video where the subject(s) show clips of their day or discuss a topic in various locations while holding the camera.
Companies can use company vlogs to showcase exactly how you operate, how your employees think, and the informal dynamics that happen daily. When viewers see you share their beliefs and values, they are more likely to pick you over your competition—especially if they are between 18 and 54.
James Hayward-Browne, Marketing Manager at Rise At Seven, produces The Sauce. It’s a weekly vlog showing the company’s culture, employees, and cute dogs in spontaneous scenarios. So far, they’ve secured millions of pounds in revenue from it.
“We have found that the vlog pops up in conversation with clients, new leads, and within the industry; we are now known for it,” says Hayward-Browne.
Company vlogs also attract job candidates aligned with what you do, how you do it, and why: three components of team culture that determine an organization’s performance.
“We have become a workplace that many aspire to work in,” says Hayward-Browne. “We have had queues of applications mentioning The Sauce and it has really helped our employer brand.”
Since company vlogs are informal, you can record them using your phone or camera paired with a lavalier microphone or pair of headphones. These vlogs can show your employees’ workflows or rituals to make your viewer feel part of your day-to-day routine.
2. Review videos
Review videos evaluate a product or service to help viewers purchase something. People who look for review videos are at the consideration stage of the sales funnel, which means that a thorough review can result in a sale of your product or an affiliate product.
Cooper Mitchell, the owner of Garage Gym Reviews, started evaluating gym equipment after realizing existing reviews were sparse and unhelpful. So, he launched a channel to help people pick the best gym equipment for their needs, earning over 300,000 subscribers.
Cooper saw more brand awareness after posting on YouTube. “Unlike Google,” he says, “YouTube automatically recommends your stuff to people interested in your niche. This allowed me to build an audience much faster than I would have with a website alone.”
He’s also seen an increase in sales after publishing on YouTube. “Garage Gym Reviews operates on an affiliate model,” he says. “So, getting my reviews out in front of people naturally led to more [affiliate] sales.”
The first step to reviewing products is discovering what your audience wants to know more about. You can find this data on forums and Subreddits where people ask others about products they’re considering buying. You can also read your audience-defining documents, like buyer personas and jobs-to-be-done, to learn about products that your audience likes.
Once you discover their product interests, you can upload video reviews on YouTube that describe the advantages and disadvantages of picking each product.
3. Product videos
Product videos are a type of YouTube video that shows viewers the benefits and functionalities of your product. You can use them to highlight your product’s value propositions, solve doubts, and address common sales objections. Discussing these topics in a video encourages leads to buy your product and customers to remain as partners.
Jae Jun, the founder of Gorilla ROI, uses product videos to receive fewer support tickets or spend less time answering technical questions.
“We were answering a lot of the same questions via email and help tickets from our users and potential new customers,” says Jun. “We realized it would be better to create a detailed video of every feature and to include it into our product wiki page, documentation, and emails.”
As a result of these product videos, Gorilla ROI spends one-third less time on support and receives half the number of tickets. The onboarding time also decreased, as people can now watch videos at their own pace.
You can create product-centered videos by picking one functionality from your product and then describing the problem it solves. You should discuss one idea to avoid overwhelming viewers with too much data. For example; this video answers one question from clients and prospects: how do I make a Vyond character walk or run?
As you produce more videos, you can create an FAQ page or help center so that customers and leads can learn everything about your product from one place.
4. “Portfolio” types of YouTube videos
Portfolio videos introduce prospects and customers to projects you have done, giving you social proof. Social proof is a psychological event where people decide what to buy based on other people’s opinions of a product.
If you show successful projects and add feedback from your client, you’ll influence prospects to work with you. You can also record your portfolio videos to reveal the results for potential clients.
Arthur Prokopchyk, Business Development Manager at Code Inspiration, uses portfolio videos to raise brand awareness through SEO. The SEO benefits could come from the extra chance of showing on Google’s results page.
“While YT views are low, our videos are watched on ‘alternative aggregators,'” says Prokopchyk. “Among them are Google My Business profiles and BisVue. Additionally, native upload to socials increases the number of our videos in search results.”
You could follow a three-stage case study format to produce a portfolio video that encourages prospects to become customers. To do this, first look for records of your latest, most successful projects. You can then write the company’s background, reasons the prospect should reach out to you, and the expected results after your partnership.
You can then record yourself or animate a video that presents this data alongside clips of the product or service you delivered.
5. “Educational” types of YouTube videos
Educational content teaches viewers a skill, process, or concept.
You can use educational content to help viewers resolve a doubt or problem they commonly face. Resolving these doubts will position you as the expert in the topic you discuss, increasing the chances of viewers buying one of your solutions.
Educational content is the most accessible type of YouTube video to produce. All you need is your expertise, a problem or doubt to resolve, and a recording device facing you. To explain complex topics, use charts and metaphors that simplify ideas without reducing their importance.
As a result of their accessibility, you can use educational videos in many ways to get different results.
Establish yourself as an industry expert
Educational content can only position you as a reliable expert if the video doesn’t pitch products every second. When you bombard viewers with products instead of helpful information, viewers can think your tips are biased.
Jeff Moriarty, Marketing Manager at Moriarty’s Gem Art, used educational content to establish his brand as the go-to expert in the gem industry.
“No one was educating our audience without trying to sell them something,” says Moriarty. “We wanted to create videos with the sole goal of answering their questions, no strings attached.”
So, his team produced in-depth guides that taught topics like how to cut gemstones and how to polish quartz. Now, viewers email them to mention how helpful their videos are and recognize them at industry shows.
“We are no longer just a retailer, but an expert in our industry,” says Moriarty. “That means increased trust, which leads to more sales.”
Introduce viewers to a new value proposition
You can use educational content to help viewers experience a product or service that you offer as they learn a new skill. This use case is helpful for companies with a disruptive offer, as the content can turn skeptical leads into buyers.
Seb Evans, the co-founder of Banquist, records step-by-step cooking tutorials so that viewers can learn new recipes from Michelin-Star chefs. The videos also let viewers familiarize themselves with Banquist’s unique offer: they deliver ingredients to your door and then have a chef explain recipes through videos.
“By posting on YouTube,” says Evans, “we’re giving potential customers a glimpse into what to expect if they choose to purchase from us.”
As a result, potential clients clearly see the differences between Banquist and meal-kit delivery services and eventually become actual clients.
6. Opinion-based videos
You can use opinion-based videos to defend or challenge news about your industry or the status quo. By taking a stance, you will reveal your knowledge about the field and become a trustworthy advisor about anything related to it.
Regie, the host of Regie Collects, uses live streams and reaction videos to challenge book collectors’ beliefs and views. For example; he rejected the industry’s belief that there’s no wrong way to collect comics in a late 2021 live stream. The live format lets him address viewers’ counterpoints and prove why they should doubt their current worldview.
“My brand Regie Collects has grown into one that is respected by both the collectibles community and industry leaders,” says Regie, “including CGC Comics, BCW Supplies, GoCollect, and Shortboxed, among others.”
This recognition turned his YouTube channel and related products into a reliable source of income that he now uses to produce videos.
You can produce opinion-based content by brainstorming misconceptions or realities that you and colleagues from other departments don’t believe. The brainstorming session doesn’t have to be synchronous—you can survey them to save time and produce videos faster.
The survey can consist of three questions:
What’s a reality about our industry that you disagree with?
Why do you disagree with this reality?
How can our audience act differently?
These questions aren’t a silver bullet to intriguing opinion-based videos. Instead, they are questions to inspire you to build a coherent argument on why others should think as you do.
7. Docuseries
Documentaries are among the least common—but most popular—types of YouTube videos. Docuseries are series of videos that discuss a real-life event or teach the same topic from different angles. When people learn the same data over changing conditions, they are more likely to recall what they are learning.
Docuseries reinforce a message over multiple videos. Therefore, you can use them to continuously prove the value of your product or knowledge and influence them to partner with you.
Yi Mao, a Communication Specialist for Super Purposes, uses docuseries to entice leads about the value of partnering with the company to make job-seeking easier.
“The docuseries shows how our program affects real people on a weekly basis,” says Mao. “The success stories show how our former employees used their time with Super Purposes to forward their careers and find the job of their dreams.”
While the docuseries is a few months old, it has already helped Super Purposes to reach a market that mostly watches videos.
You can create a docuseries discussing clients’ experiences by contacting previous customers and asking for consent to record them. Depending on your budget, you can host the calls on Zoom or in person.
To avoid missing the opportunity of featuring an impactful partnership, offer benefits for the clients that help you, such as discounts or early access to new services.
Create all types of YouTube videos with Vyond.
Creating videos can seem overwhelming. Get started easily Vyond’s set of intuitive animation tools and templates to make all types of YouTube videos, whether you are a beginner or a seasoned animator. By producing animated videos, customers have seen a 21% increase in YouTube views and 375% more social media shares.
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#### 7 Industry-Leading Video Voice Over Examples & Why They Work
Voice acting isn’t new. For decades, voice actors have given life to characters and told compelling stories through radio and TV. But with the rise of voice-assisted tools, podcasts, audiobooks, eLearning, and marketing explainer videos, the voice over industry is experiencing exponential growth.
In a world where the options for voice talent are abundant and in high demand, teams without experience may find hiring the right voice artist and recording high-quality voice overs to be challenging. But this group of stellar video voice over examples can help you define your voice over needs. Share them with your team and study the elements that make each voice over project excellent, and then you can aim to replicate these successes in your upcoming project.
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George Clooney’s interview voice over for Nespresso
Actor and film director George Clooney recorded an interview-style voice over for Nespresso’s Reviving Origins program. The goal of the program is to boost coffee production in local economies in regions where conflicts, environmental catastrophes, and fiscal issues have stopped production.
Nespresso flew George Clooney to one of the coffee-growing areas. As a result, he wasn’t just a voice actor narrating a story—he was able to speak about the program from firsthand experience.
While he spoke, the video displayed b-roll shots of him walking the coffee trails to see the program’s impact. His involvement made the voice over sound natural—a trait that listeners often find appealing—as if he were having a conversation with a friend at a coffee shop. While he spoke, the video displayed b-roll shots of him walking the coffee trails.
For your next video, involve your voice artist in your project. For example, if the voice over artist will be explaining your product, send them a sample or show them a demo. Or, if it’s a video about your company culture, introduce them to your mission, values, and team. Your voice talent doesn’t need to be in your video, but when voice artists experience your company’s value proposition, they’re more likely to think of your project as more than just another script read.
Rob Paulsen’s cartoon voice acting for Vanity Fair
Rob Paulsen, an Emmy-award-winning voice actor, has been part of the voice over industry for more than two decades. During a video for Vanity Fair, Paulsen improvises voices for 12 cartoon characters. Note: some language in the video below is not safe for work.
The video shows Rob’s ability to voice characters without receiving a brand profile or detailed script. Instead, he chooses a convincing voice for characters by looking at their pictures, whether it’s for a yellow, tentacled creature or a distinguished older man. Because of his capacity to identify and interpret character traits, he’s capable of recording excellent voice overs for any project.
While amateurs and intermediate-level voice artists won’t likely perform with as little direction as Rob does, you can use his video voice over examples to set up your chosen voice actor for success. First, define your brand’s profile, including a series of qualities and emotions that your voice artist should convey. Then, use a professional search site or a voice talent agency to access the top voice talent your budget allows.
Jon Bailey as “Epic Voice Guy” for Screen Junkies
Jon Bailey is the voice narrator for Screen Junkies’ “Honest Trailers,” an Emmy-nominated YouTube series in which he and his team produce sarcastic movie reviews.
Bailey, known by fans as Epic Voice Guy, started recording for the series at the end of 2012 after one actor left for the military and two didn’t master the parody trailer format the company needed. Bailey did. Now, after 260 Honest Trailers, fans instantly associate Bailey’s voice with the series.
Your listeners will associate your brand with the voice actor you hire, especially if they work with you on multiple projects. So, it’s essential to find one with a style and tone that aligns with your brand.
To do this, write a set of voice characteristics your brand must have, such as a grave, polished voice or a young, cheerful one. Find video voice over examples to fit some of your descriptions and then, schedule auditions where in-house or external voice talent can read a few lines from your script. Finally, with your team, choose the voice over talent that best represents your brand’s voice style.
Brandon’s internal voice talent for Microsoft Enable
Brandon is a team member of Xbox. He recorded a voice over for this animated Vyond video to teach developers how to make their video games more accessible through Microsoft Enable’s products.
Brandon’s explanation is delivered in short lines, allowing developers and non-developers to follow the story even if they’ve never heard of Xbox’s accessibility principles. If Brandon used industry jargon and unclear sentences, the voice overs would be confusing the listeners.
When writing your voice over’s script, ask yourself, “could a novice follow my story or understand this explanation?” If the answer is no, your ideas are either too complex or too convoluted. So, add examples, use simpler words, and trim unnecessary paragraphs from your script.
Aaron Paul’s commercial voice over for Mazda
Aaron Paul, an actor best known for his role as Jesse Pinkman in Breaking Bad, has recorded a series of commercial voice overs for Mazda. In the following example, he is the voice for Aaa Driver’s Life, a commercial that shows how Mazda follows a man through his life’s most meaningful moments.
Aaron records as an omnipresent narrator, modifying his voice based on the milestones in the man’s life. For example, he raises his tone in excitement when the man has a BBQ with his college peers. Then he sounds more soothing when the man is on a road trip with his significant other.
Because of tone variations, the listener receives context of what the man felt during specific scenes, helping them connect with the actor.
A script alone can only go part of the way to convey emotions to your target audience. The right voice over artist can take it the rest of the way. To help your voice over artist hit the right emotional notes, underline scenes in your script where the voice actor should modify their voice to express a feeling. So, for example, if a product launch should excite listeners, tell your voice talent to transmit that excitement.
Nancy Cartwright’s voice acting for The Simpsons
Nancy Cartwright is a veteran voice actress, recording for well-known shows like The Simpsons, Animaniacs, and Rugrats. In the example below, she records lines for her seven Simpsons characters in under a minute.
For the show, Cartwright records the voices of six teenagers and a baby, which means the producers don’t have to hire or direct as many voice actors.
If your video requires multiple voices, say two, hire a voice actor capable of performing both voices (if possible). You’ll save time teaching two different voice actors about your brand and project while also experiencing shorter feedback sessions.
Use these video voice over examples to inspire your next video
You can increase your voice over’s overall quality by applying these video voice over examples and lessons from seasoned experts. Then, when you are ready to record, choose who will do it: your team or an external professional.
Once you receive your audio file, it’s time to either synchronize your audio and pre-produced video or create it from scratch. With Vyond, an intuitive animated video creation software, anyone can create stories aligned with their brand or ideas. Our platform also lets you add voice overs to communicate with your viewer at a pace, tone, and style you like. See where your creativity can take you with a free trial of Vyond.
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#### 7 Reasons Why You Should Use Animated Video
As content creators and digital natives, we’re surrounded and often bombarded by the latest trends, tips, tricks, bamboozles, and hoodwinks (okay, maybe not those last two).
One of the biggest trends in the digital space is the use of video.
In the past, we’ve blogged about important video marketing statistics, use cases for sales teams, and even shared examples of training videos. But we’re not going to re-hash those here. Instead, we’ll focus entirely on why you should use animated video.
Why animated video
Content is all about telling a story. Whether it’s a story about your product, your customers, or maybe even compliance changes, your main goal as a content crafter is to share a message that compels, persuades, and convinces your audience to take action.
But the story is only as good as its execution. Think about it. If you have a great story, but deliver it poorly, your audience is less likely to take action. That’s where animated video can help.
Animated video is a rich, engaging medium, that is cost-effective, easy to manage, and will help your key points pop. It offers all the benefits of a visual medium with much smaller resource requirements than you might expect.
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Benefits of using animated video
Here’s why animated video is a great medium for telling stories:
You can bring any concept to life
Animation allows you to slide scales and bend the laws of nature.
With animated videos, you’re free to do whatever you want. Let your imagination run wild!
It gives you the ability to bring any concept, no matter how complex or out of this world, to life with ease.
You can give context to your ideas
Imagine starting on a closeup of a person, then zooming out to show a crowd of people, then blasting up into the stratosphere for the truly BIG top view. And, to take it a step further you zoom out to show our entire galaxy.
It puts that one lonesome person you started with in perspective, doesn’t it?
That’s practically impossible in real life, but with animated video, it’s a snap!
Animated video is a great medium to give context to even your most far-fetched ideas.
You can strike the right tone
At times, your message can get muddled with the portrayal of real people, or can even fail to explain the topic at hand. For example, which option (shown below) would you use to address complex topics like sexual harassment training:
Option A
Option B
With animated video, you can take all those factors away and strike a wider range of emotional tones. This can help cover difficult subjects effectively, without causing your audience to put their defenses up.
You can visually represent abstract ideas
Perhaps one of the biggest benefits of using animated video is the ease with which you can visually capture abstract ideas.
Just ask yourself “Can I aim a camera at it?” If the answer is yes, then live-action may be more straightforward than animated video.
But what if you wanted to capture something very big (like global logistics), something very small (like the workings of a microprocessor), or maybe something abstract (like Bitcoin)? It gets a little more challenging, doesn’t it?
That’s where animated video has the advantage. With animated video, you can easily capture hard-to-represent ideas on a screen without constraints.
You can easily manage video production
If you have ever shot a live-action video, you’re probably aware it’s a complicated and sometimes frustrating process. You have to worry about the location, actors, props, equipment, sets… and that’s not even taking the weather into account!
With animated video, you’re not constrained by any of these factors.
You can switch backgrounds, move characters, and even add props with a simple click, drag-and-drop. This makes it easy to test different ways to communicate your message.
7 reasons why animated video is the best type of content
Now that we’ve covered some of the benefits of animated video, let’s talk about why it’s better than other types of content. Namely, why animated video is better than text, infographics, and live-action video content:
Animated Video vs. Text
1) Animated videos are more visual
The first and foremost reason for using animated video is that it is rich media. Videos, in general, are composed of pictures that make up rich media moments.
This visual medium appeals to the senses and offers an easy and effective way to communicate important messages. And the best part is that visuals are consumed a lot more easily than text, and leave a lasting impact on your audience:
90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual, and visuals are processed 60,000 times faster in the brain than text. – Source
Here’s a great video that takes advantage of this visual medium, created by GenieBelt:
2) Animated videos are psychologically appealing
One of our earliest (and possibly fondest) memories, as kids growing up, is watching cartoons. Cartoons are so captivating because they’re fun, engaging, and most of all colorful.
There’s something about moving images that appeals to the human brain, and this naturally extends to animated video. As Nicola Davies asserts in this post, “If you want people to emotionally connect with your content, animated video is an investment worth making.”
Here’s a great example from Fixed that shows you how to deal with the frustration of traffic tickets:
3) Animated videos cut through the digital “noise”
Content shock is real and a major challenge facing all organizations. But with the ever-increasing presence of “noise” in the digital space, content creators need to find a way to differentiate their content from everything else out there.
Animated video offers a great medium to do exactly that. For example, there’s a lot of “noise” surrounding content marketing, and a visual way to stand out from the crowd would be to create a whiteboard video like this one:
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Animated Video vs. Live-action Video
4) Animated videos are cost-effective
One of the biggest challenges most video producers face is the lack of a large budget:
41% of marketers cite a lack of budget as one of three main reasons why they hesitate to use video. – Source
Live-action video expenses usually include finding suitable actors, a location to shoot your video, equipment, and video production costs. Animated video, on the other hand, just needs a monthly subscription. Cloud-based solutions (like GoAnimate) make it easy to create videos online with simple drag-and-drop tools. Just sign up for a subscription and you’re ready to create professional animated videos.
Don’t believe us? Watch this video or read the case study to learn how animated videos helped MailLift improve conversions:
5) Animated videos scale with your business
A related challenge with video production is the need to create more content. As your business grows, so does the need for more engaging content.
Initially, you may need an explainer video about your product or service. Soon you begin to create gated assets that need supporting videos. Or, even more challenging, you need to create a tutorial series for your customers or a training video that helps your team adopt a new process.
Creating content is a challenge, and video adds to the complexity. But with animated video, churning out multiple videos is a very simple task. Just think about visuals, write the script, storyboard, and before you know it, you’re on your way to producing another video.
Here’s a great example by eDepoze, a cloud-based deposition software company. They used this video to drive audience participation with the help of a simple “audition”:
6) Animated videos are easy to update
Content creation has seen dramatic growth over the past few years, and rightfully so. But one of the challenges is updating all of your old content. Whether you’re a trainer updating compliance content, a salesperson revisiting old presentations, or a marketer restructuring your branding; updating content is a challenge!
Video content, however, poses an even bigger challenge. If you use live-action video, you simply can’t re-shoot scenes or update critical parts of your message without taking into account a large number of factors.
But that’s where animated video has the edge. Animated videos allow for more flexibility because they’re easier to update. You can go back and change text, edit animations or even do a complete overhaul of your entire video.
For example, TRAC a public service agency created this great video in English and subsequently released one in Mandarin as well:
Animated Video vs. Static Infographics
7) Animated videos upgrade your visual content
You’ve probably heard of infographics (If not, here are some examples). An even bigger trend than infographics is infographic fatigue. Many content creators adopted static infographics as a way to visualize data by turning dry stats into a visual feast. But lately, infographics have increasingly become text- or data-heavy and therefore visually cluttered (and headache-causing).
If you allow a reader to view a static infographic unsupervised, what happens? They race through it and probably miss a lot of the content. This is exacerbated if the infographic is overly cluttered i.e. text- or data-heavy.
That’s where animated infographics can help. Animated infographics provide a “guided tour” through the content, which offers two benefits:
You can control the viewer’s pace through the content
You can use rich media (movement, music, sound effects, visual elements, etc.) to highlight specific points
Just take a look at this example:
Wrapping it up
Animated video is a dynamic and versatile medium that can elevate your story to a new level.
It offers an engaging and fun alternative to text content, is not impeded by traditional constraints surrounding live-action video, and upgrades static infographics into a highly engaging “guided tour” through the content.
Upgrade your visual content and use the power of Vyond animated videos! Vyond is the premier tool for animated video creation for businesses. Our set of animation tools lets you include the characters, charts, and props necessary to prove why your product is the leading solution in the market.
Try Vyond for Free
#### 7 Strategies for Creating More Effective Technical Training Videos
Technical training is nothing new. But it’s becoming a development staple at a time when all of our roles — whether they’re considered “technical” or not — intersect with technology in some way, if only because of the systems and tools we use every day.
What is technical training?
First, let’s define what we mean by “technical training.” We like the definition from Training Industry:
“Teaching the skills needed to design, develop, implement, maintain, support or operate a particular technology or related application, product or service.”
So this might mean training on software or hardware — or other topics that are highly complex, where the specifics matter.
Why is technical training so important right now?
Evolving technology and market demands are changing the types of roles companies need and the skills required. In the next five years, 23% of global jobs will change because of how tech will transform industries, according to the World Economic Forum.
However, many industries — like manufacturing and tech — are struggling to find employees who can fill these new technical roles. So on-the-job technical training will be key for upskilling and reskilling employees to meet emerging needs.
Against this backdrop, Vyond customers and technical training experts Chaya Rao, Director of Training Development at Tanium, and Marco D’Abbraccio, Principal Trainer, DTS Learning Services at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, joined our recent webinar to share some of their key principles for developing technical training that sticks.
Watch the Replay
Strategies for better technical training programs
Chaya and Marco have learned a thing or two about good technical training from their experiences working in cybersecurity (Chaya) and healthcare (Marco). Here’s what they and their teams keep in mind as they’re building training programs for their internal and external audiences.
1. Never separate art from science and science from art.
Highly technical subject-matter experts may put more focus on accuracy and details (the science) than storytelling and learner experience (the art). But both matter in pursuit of our goal to create engaging learning experiences.
“It’s up to us as designers to keep them in balance for the learner’s benefit,” Chaya says.
2. Pay more attention to what the learner needs to learn than what the product can do.
When you’re creating training about a product or service, it’s easy to start and stay in a product-first mindset. But that’s a trap, Chaya says.
When learning is the goal, learners’ needs need to be front and center. This might mean simplifying experts’ language and using analogies to help explain complex concepts.
“As you’re working with technical subject-matter experts, be an advocate for your learners,” Chaya says.
3. Explain the “why,” the “what,” and the “when.”
Taking the last principle even further: helping the learner understand why they should care to learn about this topic — the “what’s in it for me?” — is just as important as the information you share.
Chaya has found that stories are a great way to set the context and show learners what’s in it for them. Before her training videos get into “how” a certain product or service works, she creates a story with characters who can illustrate what’s happening, why a certain product or workflow would be necessary, and when this capability would be relevant.
4. Give your videos a core visual identity you can draw from.
Good training materials are cohesive and have a consistent look and feel. You can boost learners’ recall and reinforce key concepts by reusing imagery and visuals you present in your videos.
Beyond training videos, Chaya says she and her team have found that Vyond makes it easy to create standardized visuals of Tanium product features and to animate simple explanations of complex, product-related processes.
5. Keep your content relevant, focused, short and sweet.
Marco keeps in mind that his audience in healthcare is time strapped: they rarely get time for lunch every day. He regularly produces training on familiar systems and tools, where his audience already understands the “why.” When you’re communicating “need to know” content to busy people like this, he says, get to the point.
“Remember that not every video needs scenarios — sometimes they add unnecessary bulk,” Marco says. Also, try to avoid interrupting workflow steps with scenario scenes, or you risk blocking the crucial information from really sinking in.
6. Use humor — but in small doses and only around contextual information.
Humor can engage learners when used strategically. But it can also derail a training when it’s overused or applied inappropriately.
“You’re not going for belly laughs here,” Marco says. “Just a chuckle or grin is a good goal, enough to keep learners engaged.”
Also, if you’re creating for a global audience, be mindful of how the humor may (or may not) land across cultures.
7. Design for longevity.
In a fast-changing world, Marco challenges us to think “evergreen” where possible with our content. Software user interfaces will change and require updating; that’s inevitable. But wherever else you can, avoid including elements in your video, like dates and cultural references, that’ll quickly mark your content as outdated.
For a deeper dive on Chaya and Marco’s principles, watch the full webinar replay.
And if you’re eager to try out these principles in Vyond, get into the platform now — for free or chat with us about getting a trial for your whole team.
#### 7 Tactics for Creating Successful Social Media Videos
Back in 2013, video was released for the first time on Instagram. Today, the platform—and every other social channel—is flooded with videos.
Exposed to so many videos today, social media users aren’t as easily impressed as they were when video was first released. A low-quality and boring video might have gotten a decent number of views and likes on social media a few years ago, but now that people are inundated with videos on social media, expectations have risen.
It’s not that people don’t love videos anymore—over 500 million people watch videos on Facebook every day. But with greater competition, companies have to work harder to make their videos engaging and memorable.
We’ve broken down the key areas to focus on when creating a social video. With these tips, tricks, and resources, you’ll be set to make videos that grab users’ interest even in the most cluttered feeds.
1. Assume there’s no sound.
Audio is a powerful way to add context and emotion to a video, but you can’t assume viewers will be listening on social media. Up to 85 percent of videos on social media are watched without sound.
Audio used to be automatically removed by Facebook and Instagram, which would instantly play videos without audio. But they recently switched to including audio with video if a user has the volume turned on. Even with this change, many users still prefer to switch their settings back to soundless videos for a less intrusive experience.
Given this trend, it’s better to assume your video will be played without audio. Create your social video so it can be appreciated without sound and you’ll be able to engage more users. Here are a few ways to create videos that are still compelling without sound:
Communicate your message with visuals. You want to make sure that imagery conveys the stories and ideas you want to get across, since users might not have audio.
Add captions. If you have a voice-over on your video, you should consider including captions. Visuals alone might not communicate everything you’re trying to get across, and captions can convey essential information to hearing-impaired viewers and other people watching your video without sound. Many social channels will auto-generate captions for you to modify. Or you can purchase a closed caption file from sites like 3 Play Media or Rev.com. You can also consider adding text to your video in a visually appealing way:
Include an audio clip. Sound adds another layer of emotion that visuals and text can’t always capture. Including audio is a powerful way to supplement your video’s content for viewers who do choose to listen. Use visuals and text to compel viewers to watch your video with sound.
2. Target your customers’ favorite channels.
Uploading a video is relatively easy, so why not share your video on every single platform? It seems like you’d get more traffic by posting your video widely. But that may not be true for your business. Social media video distribution is more powerful when it’s targeted and oriented toward quality. If you try to share on too many channels, you’ll be less able to refine each video and strategize sharing for each platform.
You’re better off saving your energy for strategizing on your customers’ favorite channels. Think about the qualities of your key buyers to guess which social media platforms they prefer. Here are a few qualities of popular channels to help you decide:
Facebook is the most popular social media platform and caters to a wide range of ages. If your audience is above 35, Facebook is probably the best platform for your videos. 60-90 second videos tend to be ideal, but short advertisements and longer stories can also be successful.
Instagram users skew young—73 percent are between ages 15 and 35. Videos on Instagram are limited to 60 seconds. Instagram Stories are limited to 15 seconds.
Snapchat‘s portion of young users is even greater, with 85 percent falling between the ages of 18 and 34.
YouTube is a good place to upload your how-to and informational videos. Although active YouTube subscribers tend to be younger, if you add the right keywords, descriptions, and tags, your audience will be able to locate your video from a Google search. YouTube audiences have a slightly longer attention span for videos between two and nine minutes.
LinkedIn is for a more professional business crowd. While LinkedIn rolls out new video features, most businesses will need to post a YouTube video link in order for a video to play in a LinkedIn feed.
Twitter audience demographics vary greatly by business but do skew younger. Videos on Twitter are limited to 140 seconds.
Targeting your customers’ favorite channels gives you more time and energy to strategically share your videos rather than wasting your efforts on multiple channels that are less popular for your business.
3. Pick the right shape and size.
Users are less likely to engage with your videos on social media if they can’t see them correctly. To make sure your video is being presented correctly, familiarize yourself with the different video spec guidelines for every social media platform. Check out iStock’s guide to make sure your videos are sized for every platform.
Beyond the required specs, think about which shapes are ideal for the viewing experience and the device you’re targeting.
Landscape videos can be uploaded and played on any platform, but the best one is YouTube because its player is optimized for horizontal videos.
Square videos are great for social media platforms (e.g., Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter) that are typically viewed on mobile.
Vertical videos are great for social media platforms that are exclusively mobile, like Snapchat, TikTok, Youtube Shorts, and Instagram Stories.
Because social media channels have different settings for appearance, you should aim to engage users by sizing and formatting your videos correctly.
4. Make your video the ideal length.
With more distractions than ever, the key to engagement is picking the right video length. When videos are more than a few minutes long, users typically lose focus and stop watching.
The ideal length depends on the platform since users have different watch-time expectations for each channel. Here is the ideal video length for each platform:
Instagram: 30 seconds
Twitter: 45 seconds
Facebook: 1 minute
YouTube: 2 minutes
Staying close to these suggested lengths, especially when you first get started, will make it easier to retain viewers’ attention with your videos.
5. Strive for professional quality.
Users expect polished videos—high quality has become a social media standard. All types of companies have produced professional videos for social media with today’s accessible tools.
There is so much budget-friendly software out there to build outstanding animated and live-action videos at a low cost. Here are a few tools to consider:
Vyond is a video creation platform that makes it possible to tell simple or complex stories with templates and animated characters that automatically lip-sync to your voice.
Shakr is a video maker for social media videos.
Soapbox by Wistia is a Chrome extension that seamlessly combines your webcam and screen recordings.
Animoto is a tool to quickly create photo slide shows with text.
Once viewers can rely on you to publish high-quality videos, they’ll keep coming back to your social media channels for more.
6. Focus on the beginning.
Carefully crafting the beginning of your video is essential. Instead of presenting a thumbnail image, most social media platforms will automatically start a video as a user scrolls past it. If your video doesn’t engage viewers in those first few seconds, they’ll scroll past and abandon it.
Here are a few tips to make the first few seconds of your video count:
Carefully pick the very first image. The first shot of your video is the initial impression users get of your video on platforms that don’t use thumbnails, so make sure it’s attention-grabbing.
Consider readability when choosing a color scheme. Make sure your background color contrasts with your text and main images so viewers know where to focus.
Get to the point. The faster you can convey your message, the more users you’ll be able to engage.
Make the beginning of your video worthwhile to viewers and they’ll be motivated to stick around and watch to the end.
7. Include a call to action.
A video on social media can be engaging, thoughtful, and well-made—but if viewers don’t know how they should act once it’s done playing, they probably won’t reengage with your business.
Show your viewers what you want them to do by including a CTA. By asking your audience to do something, your video will drive the results you want, whether that’s more subscribers or greater sales.
Here are a few tips for creating a powerful CTA:
Include both verbal and visual CTAs. Having both in your video will drive the request even more.
Design your CTA button to stand out. Use bold, contrasting colors and other design tricks to make the CTA pop.
Include your CTA earlier in the video. Don’t save your CTA for the end—add it to the beginning to make sure your viewers receive the message.
Adding a clear CTA to your video, whether it’s visual or verbal, will give your viewers the extra push they need to engage with your business.
Take the Time to Create a Standout Social Video
Videos are no longer novel on social media—every business is releasing videos as a part of their social strategy to boost user engagement. With so many videos on every feed, it takes a lot of planning and effort to create a social video that stands out. To boost engagement, make sure your video is visually appealing; has a clear, actionable message; and is targeted to your customers.
These tips for creating captivating social videos are just the starting point. Once you’ve published your videos on different platforms, monitor their performance so you can track which videos get the most engagement. From there, you can start to determine what aspects of your videos perform especially well with users and should be used again in the future.
About Vyond
Vyond allows people of all skill levels in all industries and job roles to create dynamic and powerful media. With features that go beyond moving text and images, you can build character-driven stories or compelling data visualizations that engage audiences and deliver results.
With Vyond, it’s easy to create videos for your social media marketing. Start a free trial.
#### 7 Timeless Ideas For a Next-Level Holiday Video Marketing Campaign
Christmas is the time when consumers spend the most, so it makes sense to get your brand’s name out there to beat the competition. In fact, when it comes to any holiday, whether Halloween, Easter, or Mother’s Day, brand competition is fierce.
Because of this, every brand out there is trying to make itself known. The result is that customers and users are constantly bombarded with new campaigns, and so experience email overload, mobile device fog, social media fatigue.
This means it could be time to consider a new approach when it comes to telling the world what you have to offer.
For something a little more fun and creative, consider investing in video marketing to stand out from the crowd. Animated explainer videos are not only eye-catching, but are a great way of getting information across without feeling like your message is too forced.
Animated marketing videos also allow you to engage with your target audience and drive sales because of this. All you need is a little imagination!
If you’re wondering where to begin, here are seven timeless ideas to get you started on your holiday video content.
1. Make The Most of Social Media
Millions of people use social media every day, which makes it the perfect platform to get your message across.
When we watch television ads, we are essentially watching promotional videos about products, aware businesses are trying to sell us something. The key to making a modern video on social media is to not overtly sell to customers. Instead, you want to entertain, inform, and innovate so you can engage your audience.
This is the perfect opportunity to think outside the box and use your unique selling points to make a fun promotional video. Then think about how you can link this to the holidays.
Maybe you could spend a day with your call center staff and ask them to talk about their favorite Christmas memory, all whilst dressed as elves. Or if, for example, you sell artisanal bath products, you could make an animation discussing facts about the festive ingredients you use.
Remember to include upbeat music and bright colors to catch people’s attention on social media.
Source: Growth Natives
2. Say Thank You
The end of the year is the perfect opportunity to say thank you to your customers. Why not make an animated marketing video that appreciates people, rather than pushes sales on them?
There’s no bad time to show people a little bit of love and let them know you’re grateful to have them on your side. Yet at Christmas, spirits are usually a little higher and love is all around. Okay, that is very cheesy. But use that cheese and give a big old cheddar-y thank you to people.
Even if you have been working remotely, there are ways to gather your team together to say thank you.
You can even collect statistics from the year and use that in the thank you video. For example, you could say: “This year, 300,000 people read our blogs. 2,000 people invested in our latest IVRs technology. And 75% of our users gave us 5-star reviews. So, to all our users, we say a massive THANK YOU!!”
Doing this is also a good way to plant seeds in people’s minds regarding the products you sell.
After you have made the online video, share it on your socials or send it to the customers on your email list. Don’t forget to make sure the online video is accessible on mobile devices, too!
3. Make A Video Card
Everybody loves receiving a card. Why not modernize this tradition and turn it into video content? You could make this as simple or elaborate as you want. As long as you are wishing your customers the best, the video content world is your oyster.
Keep in mind a video card is an opportunity to be happy and fun, so it’s okay to stick on a Santa hat and dance around with a stick of brussels sprouts singing Jingle Bells (if that’s what you want). Just don’t spend twenty minutes talking about product lifecycle management software or annual finance.
Making a card is an excellent way to get the team involved and show a bit of personality. It might also be what is needed to make your business stick in the customer’s head and drive sales. Remember though, that the point of a video card is to send positive vibes and give thanks to your customers. Just like you would if you were sending a card to family or friends.
Source: Youtube/ Red Spot Interactive Company Holiday Video
Of course, if you don’t have the means to shoot your own live-action video from scratch, you can always get started with a customizable holiday video template. You may be wondering, “how much does it cost to make a animated marketing video?” The truth is, with the right tools, not that much. This free template is available to Vyond customers, and is another good example of businesses spreading holiday cheer (without the cost of producing a video yourself). You can find others like it in Vyond’s Video Template Library.
4. Remember The Good Times
One of the best things about the holidays is taking a trip down memory lane. Do you remember sneaking into your sibling’s room at 4 AM, convinced you had just seen a reindeer? Or how about that time your best friend dressed up as a spider on Halloween but only had three arms? Once you get talking, you will soon realize there’s a lot to talk about.
Capture that nostalgia on video and make it into a fun short film to share with your customers.
It doesn’t matter how big your business is, with the right subject, you can still make an engaging promotional video. Again, this is a chance to think outside the box and show you are human. You could ask people’s favorite thing about the season. Or about a family tradition. There will be a guaranteed funny story and you may be surprised how much people have in common.
This is also an excellent chance to celebrate team diversity and explore the differences in the company that make the team great.
Talking about nostalgia on-camera bridges the gap between customer and company. It’s an excellent way of bringing people together and showing how similar we all are. This is also an opportunity for customers to comment on their favorite things too, which starts a dialogue and creates engagement with your company.
5. Create An Explainer Video
There is so much to do over Christmas that sometimes, no matter how exciting the season can be, it’s hectic too. That makes now a good time for you to sweep in and make an animated explainer video or “how-to” video, to save people hassle where possible.
And this type of short film isn’t just for the crafty companies out there. It doesn’t matter if you deal with contact center workforce optimization or make hand-made chocolates. With a bit of imagination, there is a how-to vid out there for everyone.
It could be that you make a “How to get the best discounts during Black Friday” video. Or “How to make five-minute chocolate truffles”. As long as it’s something that will benefit your customer, it will get engagement.
You could even make a point that these are secrets you wouldn’t normally give away, but as it’s occasion X, you want to give your customers a little treat. You want to save them time and money so they can enjoy the season.
It’s basically about being there for your customers so they will be there for you too.
Source: onderwijs
6. Make It Fun
When it comes to the holidays, people don’t want to be reminded of work or stress. They want to take it easy and have fun. The holidays are also a time of excitement and atmosphere. That’s what makes them so great. So make a video that reflects that.
This could mean creating a video where everyone dresses up and the background is decorated. It could mean making a fun animation or adding relevant graphics. Remember, making a video like this isn’t the same as making a TED talk about customer service technology. It’s an opportunity to let your hair down and be silly.
Sure, you might work overly hard 11.5 months of the year, but for two weeks, you are chilled out and fun. And a real person. Leave the automation workflow video for January and put your all into it then. But for now, go on… put on those weird elf shoes and sing along to Mariah Carey as loud as you can. Then film it and send it to your customers.
7. Set Up The Shot
Use that imagination and think like a real film-maker to make an authentic holiday video. If it’s Halloween, you could rent a smoke machine and dim the lights. Whilst if it is for Christmas, use greens and reds where you can and make more of a ‘warm’ atmosphere. It never hurts to throw in some fake snow too.
Use those project management skills to organize and think in-depth as to what will make your video pop with authenticity. Don’t forget to add in props and some post-production graphics too.
It’s these added extras that make your video stand out and show that you care about making your customers smile.
Source: Youtube/ Christmas Video 2017 | eDreams ODIGEO
Making an animated marketing video is meant to be exciting, so make sure that is reflected in the film and your customers will get that fun vibe too. This way, it won’t matter if your audience has had a good or bad year. They are guaranteed to smile and feel a little bit more connected to your brand.
Video messages are an engaging and modern way to capture the true spirit of your company. What are you waiting for? Let’s get out there and spread some video cheer!
Make Animated Marketing Videos for Your Business
Vyond’s animated video software makes it easy to professional-grade holiday videos without the expense of live-action video. Your subscription to Vyond includes templates and prebuilt scenes for speedy video making, including fun and festive holiday-themed videos like this animated explainer video of Noche Buena:
Start a free trial
About the Author
John Allen, Director, Global SEO at RingCentral, a global UCaaS and VoIP conferencing phone software provider. He has over 14 years of experience and an extensive background in building and optimizing digital marketing programs. He has written for websites such as Vyond and UserTesting.
#### 7 tips to develop an effective microlearning strategy
Microlearning holds a lot of value in today’s learning world. It involves breaking down learning into small bite-sized modules to make learning much easier to digest. Learning in this way closes knowledge gaps in a more efficient way and as a result, knowledge retention is higher than usual.
We asked the folks over at Near-Life™ for their top tips on creating an effective microlearning strategy. They’re specialists in scenario-based, immersive, interactive learning to boost engagement and knowledge retention.
Top microlearning tips from the creators of Near-Life™
Optimize, optimize, optimize!
After the pandemic, we’ve all become much more flexible. We work and learn from environments that coincide with our personal lives.
The beauty of microlearning means that your learners aren’t sitting in front of a screen for hours of the day. However, it’s still important that your content connects with your learners. And what better way to connect than being more convenient.
Ensure that your content is optimised for more than just a desktop and especially for a mobile phone. Mobile learning improves productivity by a huge 43%. If your learner can undertake their course on a device that suits them anywhere, anytime, they’ll naturally become more engaged with the content.
Use your data.
Data should become the best tool in your learning toolbox. Whether you use existing data or gather new data, your courses will become much more efficient over time.
By using data, you’ll cut out some of the hard work. It’ll help you to form the basis of your course by providing insights into the type of content you should include. You’ll have a much deeper understanding of how learners best retain knowledge and the level of learning they’re at.
If you don’t have any existing data you can easily collect it through pre-course quizzes or assessments. Doing this will allow you to see progress from undertaking the learning as well as being able to create more tailored content.
Make it fun.
Who said that learning can’t be fun? We most certainly believe that learning through text alone can become quite unappealing.
Adding different forms of media into your content will keep your learners on their toes. You can make use of video, quizzes and gamified elements. Additionally, platforms like Vyond Studio make it easy for you to create animations with their vast library of resources. You can create easy-to-watch videos that engage with any audience, wherever they are.
Before you add in different formats of media, you should consider your aims and objectives. Make sure the media you use can achieve your overall goals.
Go the extra mile.
As your modules are short it can be helpful to offer extra resources to support your online content. Though you should consider making it optional rather than compulsory so that your learners don’t feel pressured to do more.
The concept of microlearning is to obtain short modules that require no extra work. However, providing extra resources will ensure your learners always have the opportunity to expand their knowledge further.
You should aim to break down any barriers to learning and ensure our users don’t reach a dead-end on their learning journey.
Interact through experiences.
At Near-Life™ we focus on interactions as we believe that they boost engagement and knowledge retention. It’s also such an exciting and impactful way to learn.
Interactions involve individuals in the content. As your modules are short you can use interactions to quickly test your learners. Or, you can use them to tell a story by allowing your users to make decisions.
Any way you choose to use interactions will help in maximizing engagement by completely immersing learners into the content.
Tell a story.
Although your modules will be short it’s key that you provide realistic scenarios so that your learners are engaged from the very beginning.
Realistic stories provide familiarity for your learners. The content becomes more understanding, therefore, more engaging. Additionally, stories allow your learners to put the content into context. This should, as a result, allow them to easily transfer the knowledge learnt into real-life scenarios.
As the rule of microlearning goes, make sure you keep your stories short and sweet. Overcomplicating your scenarios may get in the way of your core objectives.
Quality first.
Amongst all of this, one thing we have mentioned plenty of times is to always keep your objectives at the forefront. Why’s this?
Interactions, multimedia, adventurous stories are all great. However, too many of these in one go can reduce the quality of actual learning content. Ensure your learners will be able to achieve not only their goals but your organization’s overall objectives.
A higher quality of learning will result in a higher quality of skills in the end.
Efficient, engaging learning for everyone.
With two complementary tools, you can create an effective microlearning strategy that will boost engagement and knowledge retention. More importantly, you’ll have the ability to create learning that is not only fun and immersive but also cost and time effective.
Why not give it a go for yourself? Create your animated stories with Vyond and gamify and track your interactions with Near-Life™ with a 30-day free trial.
#### 7 Types of Camera Movement and How to Create Them in Vyond Studio
Camera movement helps make your videos more engaging and compelling by adding intrigue, interest, and suspense to scenes in your story.
In this guide, we’ll teach you the seven types of camera movement, show you an example of each, and explain how to recreate each type in Vyond Studio. For a short introduction to camera movements in Vyond watch this tutorial in our help center and this video from Rued Riis on YouTube.
Jump to each type of camera movement to learn more:
Pan
Crane or Boom
Zolly or Zolly Zoom
Slide, Dolly, or Tracking
Zoom
Tilt
Push & Pull
Pan camera movement
A pan is a movement where you rotate your camera horizontally from a fixed position (like when a camera is attached to a tripod) to capture the scene from right to left or left to right.
During a scene from season 1 of Stranger Things, the series uses a pan to reveal more of the town’s streets as the narrator speaks.
How to pan in Vyond
Click the Camera icon on the top right of Vyond Studio, and then on “Add Camera” in the panel.
An orange rectangle will appear on the stage, representing the camera’s framing.
Reduce the rectangle’s size and position it at the right or left of your scene, depending on where you want your shot to start.
After scaling and positioning the orange rectangle, click on “add camera movement” in the camera panel. This will add a yellow rectangle to the stage, which indicates where your camera movement will end
If you want the camera to pan from left to right, place the orange rectangle on the left side of your scene and the yellow one to its right.
Hit preview and you’ll see your camera pan from left to right.
Try Vyond for Free
Slide (or Dolly or Tracking) shot
A slide (also known as a dolly or tracking shot) is where you move the physical camera from left to right or right to left. These shots allow you to direct the viewer’s attention to the movements of a specific character, object, or event. A slide is different from a pan in that a slide physically moves the camera and allows more motion to happen on the screen than a pan would. This creates a parallax effect, where objects closer to the camera appear to move faster than objects in the background.
Famous director, Wes Anderson, is especially known for using dolly shots in his movies. In this video below you can see dozens of examples from Wes Anderson movies over the years.
How to create a slide in Vyond
While it is not possible to physically move a camera like this in Vyond, by using the camera tool along with motion paths, this look can be easily achieved.
To pull off a slide in Vyond you must have at least a foreground and background; however, having a mid-ground will help sell the effect even more.
Add a Camera Movement to create the same movement as a pan.
To finish your slide, you must now add motion paths to your foreground and mid-ground, which will create the parallax effect. First, group all of your foreground assets together, and then group your mid-ground assets.
Once you have your foreground and mid-ground groups, add motion paths to both. If the camera is moving left to right, you’ll want your motion paths to go the opposite way. You’ll also want the motion paths to be short; a little bit of movement goes a long way. The foreground motion path should also be about twice as long as your mid-ground motion path, as objects closer to a moving camera will appear to move faster than objects further away. You can play with the length of the motion paths in conjunction with the camera movement to get the movement that feels right to you.
For additional inspiration, watch this example to see what you can create with camera movement and motion paths.
Tilt
A tilt is a movement where you rotate your camera vertically from a fixed position to capture the scene from top to bottom or bottom to top.
Like with a zoom, the camera position does not change, so, objects in the frame hold their same relative position to one another.
In this clip from the movie Little Miss Sunshine, the camera tilts up to show the family’s destination, then tilts back down to show where they’ve arrived.
How to create a Tilt camera movement in Vyond
Click the Camera icon and add a camera.
Make the camera’s orange rectangle smaller and position it at the top or bottom of the stage, depending on where you wish your shot to start.
Open the Camera panel to add a camera movement, and position the yellow rectangle at the desired end position.
If you want the camera to move from bottom to top, place the yellow rectangle higher than the orange one. Do the opposite for a top to bottom tilt.
Crane (or Boom) camera movement
A crane shot (also known as a boom shot) is where you move the camera up or down using a jib or crane to capture more elements in your frame. A crane also creates a parallax effect with the objects or people on screen and gives your scene more movement. These shots work best when there are foreground, midground, and background elements.
During this movement, your foreground and background appear to move at different speeds, once again, caused by the parallax effect. For example, if your camera goes up, your foreground would seem to move down faster than the background.
Overall, the boom shot’s purpose is to add style to your video as you reveal a subject or scene. Disney+ used a boom shot during a trailer from The Mandalorian to add more context to The Mandalorian’s surroundings.
How to perform a crane camera movement in Vyond
Add a tilt camera movement to your scene.
Group your foreground elements, then apply a Line Motion Path to move your foreground in the opposite direction of where your camera is heading.
If your camera is moving up, add a Line Motion Path to your foreground that goes down, to make the foreground move faster than the background.
If your camera is moving down, add a line motion path to your foreground that moves up.
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Zoom camera movement
A Zoom is when you adjust the camera’s focal length, which changes the visual depth of field – or visual distance between objects – to give the illusion of the subject being closer to or further from the camera than it is. For example, you can use a zoom-in effect to “crop out” elements you don’t want on the screen, emphasizing your subject. Or you can zoom-out to include more scenery in your frame.
In one of the last episodes of Breaking Bad, the camera zooms in to the main character’s face to emphasize the shock of what he had seen.
How to Zoom in Vyond
Click the Camera panel and add a camera.
Add Camera Movement. You should now have two rectangles on your screen. The orange rectangle is your starting position, and the yellow one is your ending position.
To zoom in, make the yellow rectangle smaller than the orange rectangle; do the opposite to zoom out.
Push & Pull
A push and pull, also known as a dolly in or out, physically decreases or increases (respectively) the distance between the camera and a subject. These camera movements are different from a zoom because they require you to physically move the camera without zooming the lens. A push moves the camera in, or forward; whereas a pull moves the camera out, or backward.
When you push the physical position of the camera forward it can tie characters together with other people, props, or places without the need for dialogue. A push is great for scene or character introductions and directs attention to what’s on the screen. It gives more importance to what’s on the screen compared to if the camera was static. When you pull the physical position of the camera backward it can signify the separation of characters from other people, props, or places, without the need for dialogue as well. It can invoke feelings of leaving, conclusion, or abandonment. A pull or a zoom-out can be a great way to end a video.
Pushes and pulls are a good alternative to zooming in or out and can add a higher level of production quality to your video. Additionally, these two movements separate foreground and background elements, causing a parallax effect, exactly like the slide camera move.
For the first four seconds of the trailer for The Trial of the Chicago 7, the film crew performs a push-in, moving the camera closer to the subject without zooming in.
How to Push or Pull in Vyond
To achieve a push or pull in Vyond you’ll need to have foreground and background elements in your scene, so add some components behind most subjects and others close to the camera.
Push
Add a camera and camera movement.
Create a zoom shot by making the secondary, yellow rectangle smaller than the orange one.
Select your foreground elements and group them so you can apply a Line Motion Path to slightly increase their size.
Make the length of the motion path the same duration as your camera movement.
By increasing the foreground size at the same rate as your camera zoom, you can imitate what happens if you push in the camera in real life: your foreground elements move past the camera faster than the background elements, appearing to also become larger as the camera moves toward them.
Pull
Add a camera and camera movement.
Create a camera move that zooms out by making the yellow rectangle larger than the orange one.
Decrease the size of the grouped foreground elements through a Line Motion Path.
This video demonstrates how to build a push camera movement in Vyond.
Zolly or Zolly zoom
A dolly zoom, also known as a zolly, is a camera movement where you do a standard zoom, either in or out, and then dolly or move the camera in the opposite direction. The idea behind a dolly zoom is to make it look as though the subject never changes in size while everything else in frame is changing size. So, while you zoom in, you dolly out to maintain the character’s relative size to the frame. And while you zoom out, you dolly in to preserve the character’s relative size to the frame.
Dolly zooms transmit unease, intrigue, tension, and claustrophobia, which explains their popularity across suspense and horror films.
The movie Jaws features a classic example of a dolly zoom, showing how the film crew zooms out from the subject while moving the camera towards him.
How to do a Dolly Zoom (or Zolly) in Vyond
Although you can’t dolly a camera in Vyond, using a motion path on your main subject in conjunction with a zoom camera movement is an easy way to create the dolly zoom effect!
Add a camera and camera movement to your scene.
Zolly out: position the cameras to zoom out, that is, making the yellow rectangle larger than the orange one.
Click on the character
Add a Line Motion Path.
Motion Paths let you choose a subject’s ending position. To complete your zolly out, make the character’s end position larger and try to match the framing as closely as possible from the start positions of both the camera and character. Since you are zooming out from the subject while increasing its size, it will seem as if the character remains the same size while the background appears to get wider.
To do a zolly in, that is making the background appear smaller while maintaining the character’s size, make the ending camera position smaller than the main one, and decrease the character’s end state with a Line Motion Path so that it shrinks in unison with the camera.
Make scenes engaging with camera movement
With Vyond, you can execute all your video ideas without worrying about camera angles or equipment. Our tools can help you vary your shots to tell more detail-rich stories, whether through easy-to-implement camera techniques like a Zolly to more well-known techniques like a Zoom.
See where your creativity can take you with a free trial of Vyond.
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#### 7 Video Trends Brands Must Follow for Profitable Videos
Most businesses promote their services by running marketing campaigns on Google, starting a blog, and posting on social media. These are standard practices among companies that research ways to attract customers. But everyone knows these mediums, which makes them insufficient to stand out in markets where everyone competes for consumers’ attention.
Modern brands know this reality. As a result, they lean on video trends to create content that today’s consumers want to see the most. Focusing on video formats lets brands attract more customers than competitors that produce videos just for the sake of doing it.
Learn about the following seven video trends for profitable videos that your company can use in your next marketing campaign. Leaning on these trends means fulfilling an existing demand for a specific video format instead of spending hours producing a type of video that viewers no longer want to watch or share.
1. Serialized content
Serialized content is a video format where you discuss one topic over many videos. Google found serialized content to be one of the top YouTube trends of 2021.
With this format, you expand on concepts viewers love instead of guessing what they like. For example, if viewers like a video explaining the benefits of a specific product, create a series of videos breaking down that product and its features in more detail.
After analyzing what millions of viewers watch, Google concluded that people seek content they are familiar with. It’s a time-conscious decision for the viewer. Every minute, brands and creators uploaded over 500 hours of video to YouTube as of 2020. People seek more of the same to avoid watching boring videos and wasting their time.
Google found serialized content to be one of the top YouTube trends of 2021.
Serialized content helps you strengthen the bond between you and your audience. When you expand on topics viewers want to know more about, you show them you care about their preferences. They’ll see you value their desires and are not trying to only profit from them. Hence, they’ll be happier to support your initiatives.
YouTube offers the most reach for your serialized videos. To use it, log into YouTube Creator Studio. Then click on the Analytics tab in the left sidebar to find which of your videos people watch most frequently and for the longest time. Look for a video with above-average views, comments, or viewing sessions. Next, ask yourself one question: Can I create a video on a different aspect of this topic? If you can, produce it to increase your odds of publishing a successful video.
2. Live streams
Remote work, lockdowns, and health restrictions reduced the number of interactions people had. Thus, viewers started watching live videos more often to interact with others, even if it was through a screen. According to Think with Google, 85% of people watched a live stream between May 2020 and May 2021.
Spectators could interact with creators while watching these videos. The immersive experience lets people connect more personally with creators as they can ask questions or make suggestions to video makers and get a reply immediately. The bond can make viewers pick your videos over those from companies they only vaguely know.
Live streams also let viewers strengthen their relationships with their social circle. In the same ThinkWithGoogle study, researchers found that 79% of viewers feel a more profound connection to live content when watching YouTube with others. When viewers enjoy the time they spend watching your videos, they are more likely to return for more.
85% of people watched a live stream between May 2020 and May 2021.
YouTube live streams are a great place to start as the platform is free and intuitive. To use it, verify your YouTube account to unlock the live stream tool.
The next step is to set up your equipment. Most built-in computer cameras and microphones produce blurry videos and distorted audio. So plug in a high-quality webcam to deliver an enjoyable viewing experience. You also want high-quality audio to go along with the high-quality video. Place your microphone between your sternum and chin for the best audio quality.
Next, click on Go Live in the top right corner of YouTube’s interface. Write a title that describes your live stream’s purpose, add a related thumbnail, and then go live.
3. Hyper-targeted video advertising
A survey of U.S. consumers found that 71% prefer ads based on their interests and shopping habits. Some consumers care even more about hyper-targeted advertising. According to Digital Journal, around 90% of consumers of digital marketing services value ads based on their search patterns.
No one wants to watch an ad presenting a product they have no use for, especially if the ad shows up every time they launch a social app. Irrelevant ads provide an impersonal shopping experience, which frustrates 71% of consumers. These ads also set you up for failure as you can’t sell a product to someone who doesn’t need it.
In contrast, creating targeted video-based ads makes viewers even more likely to watch them. Targeted videos are actually helpful for the viewer rather than nuisances to scroll past. These ads feature problems, data, and solutions relevant to the viewer. Therefore, the viewer will care about the content of the video in hopes they’ll find a solution to a problem they have.
Irrelevant ads provide an impersonal shopping experience, which frustrates 71% of consumers.
Consumer data-collecting tools make creating hyper-targeted video ads easy. Social media platforms track how long users look at an ad, and websites record where most visitors stop scrolling. Advertising networks collect or buy this data so you can segment your target audience by specific characteristics like job role, marital status, or income bracket.
You can use this data to target the people facing the exact problems you solve. But there’s a caveat. Use this data to know who to target but not as the entire foundation of your script. According to Harvard Business Review, knowing consumers’ preferences could drop an ad’s performance if it makes consumers concerned about their privacy. It’s okay to show dog leashes to dog owners. But it’s scary if your ad mentions the viewer’s dog’s breed, age, and health problems.
Your video ads shouldn’t mention sensitive information like finances, sex, and health, as that can offend people. Also, don’t infer information about customers and risk weakening the bond between you and them.
4. Visual podcasts
A 2022 study from Google found a rising demand for recorded audio content and multisensory experiences, like visual podcasts. When you record your team producing a podcast, your audience can see a more authentic side of them. The intimacy builds a deeper connection between viewers and brands that regular podcasts cannot create.
Viewers can feel like a part of your team when they see your crew in a laid-back setting. People invested in your success will happily support your projects, whether through sharing your video or buying the product it offers.
Google found a rising demand for recorded audio content and multisensory experiences, like visual podcasts.
Your visual podcast’s equipment depends on your podcast’s format. For example, if you record alone, use a front-facing camera and a tripod to capture clear, steady footage. This setup will also work if you are alone in a room but interviewing people over a video conferencing tool.
Set multiple cameras to capture each person’s gestures and reactions for podcasts with more than one host. Make sure to give each speaker a microphone to ensure the audio is free of echoes.
5. Short videos
Platforms specializing in short videos are booming. TikTok hit 1 billion active users in September 2021—a 45% increase since July 2020. Meanwhile, YouTube Shorts hit 15 billion daily views in 2021. These numbers show people value content they can watch in seconds, even if it takes brands less time and budget to create them.
Google found one shared trait among YouTube’s most popular Shorts: they were relatable. In regular-length videos, editors cut anything that sounds unprofessional to maximize the amount of information in the video. The result is a video that looks too put together and, at times, pretentious.
Shorts’ production value is lower than longer videos, often relying on smartphones and minor editing. Viewers perceive these videos as more authentic as if they or their friends could produce them. This informal trait makes brands seem more approachable, making people feel more open to sharing feedback and ideas.
People value content they can watch in seconds, even if it takes brands less time and budget to create them.
Brands can use short-form videos to cover subtle parts of their business that viewers want to learn about. For instance, you can record a 30-second video covering an unknown product use case that can improve customers’ lives. Similarly, you can film quick lessons about skills viewers want to learn. The short length makes your videos easy to consume and produce.
6. Shoppable videos
Deloitte found that almost four in 10 Americans have visited the website of a product they saw on social media. Also, 31% bought products using these platforms’ mobile payment options. Take advantage of the rising trend of in-app purchases by creating shoppable videos.
Shoppable videos have tags people can click to learn about a product or buy it. These videos include a “Buy Now” button viewers can tap to reach a landing page and order your product with just a few clicks. The fewer steps involved in buying your product, the more you’ll sell. Viewers are less likely to get distracted if they can quickly buy a product. And fewer steps means it’s less likely they’ll forget about buying your product after watching a video.
Almost four in 10 Americans have visited the website of a product they saw on social media.
You can use interactive video software focused on shoppable videos to let people buy products from home. Focus on one or two items so as to not overwhelm viewers with dozens of options.
The small offer also helps you include buttons that solve common objections to buying these products. Let’s say your video promotes a service people often find expensive. In that case, you can add a “Learn about our costs” button to explain your service’s worth.
7. Live video events
At the pandemic’s beginning, many companies faced a challenge: they relied on in-person events, and then they couldn’t host them. Instead of eliminating these events, 70% of U.S. event professionals moved at least portions of their face-to-face events online.
Online events are cheaper to host than in-person ones. You don’t need to hire dozens of staff members, sound systems, lights, or rent a place. For a few hundred dollars a year, you can get video conferencing to host as many webinars and events as you want. These tools come with polls, breakout rooms, booths, and other features to re-create the experience of attending an engaging in-person conference.
70% of the U.S. event professionals moved at least portions of their face-to-face events online.
Live video events are also more flexible than in-person ones. Speakers can present from anywhere as long as they have internet, which gives you access to a global pool of experts. As for attendees, they don’t have to invest in hotels or flights, so it’s easier for them to participate in your event.
Thanks to the tools’ features, you can check your event’s analytics once it is over to find areas for improvement. For example, you can see which speaker held the audience’s attention for the longest time and invite them to a future show. You can also check when people left the event to know which segments to remove from your presentation.
Apply these video trends using Vyond
Companies can use Vyond to apply these video marketing trends or create videos that support them. For example, you can add animations pointing to essential statistics in your presentations, making viewers more likely to see them. You can also include moving graphics for shoppable videos and visual podcasts to stand out from competitors.
Once you understand how animating works, which won’t take long because of Vyond’s intuitive software, you can create entire videos. This process doesn’t require previous animation experience, as our vast number of templates will help you turn ideas into videos in minutes.
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#### 7 Ways to Tell Your Story with Animated Video
Do you struggle with creating online video? Have you considered video animation? Video storytelling is a great way to generate engagement online and will ensure you stand out from the digital marketing crowd.
By 2020, 80% of online content will be video (according to a Cisco study), so there’s no time to wait to up-skill in video marketing whether you are a business owner, a marketer or a tutor.
At the Digital Training Institute, we use tools that benefit our business and we also use them as part of our client consultancy work. I began using GoAnimate over a year ago after doing some research on engaging video tools. It didn’t take me too long to teach myself how to use it and in fact, I now teach my students and clients how to use it — such is its value.
Help You Get Creative with Types of Video to Animate
1) Promotional Video
As a business owner I am constantly marketing my business. I dedicate lots of time to providing free digital marketing content to my online community. This allows me to showcase my knowledge and expertise. Therefore promotional videos have key marketing tactic for me.
I host a monthly webinar series and I use GoAnimate to create promotional videos explaining to people why they should attend my webinar. The videos are short – usually less than 30 seconds – as I want to share them on social media – Facebook, Twitter and Instagram where most of my online community network.
Within the video, I tell them what I am promoting, why they should attend, where the webinar takes place, when it is happening and how to register – all in a short animated video!
This video was used to promote my webinar: Is Your Staff Damaging your Brand Online?
2) Tutorial Video
Do you struggle with constantly developing engaging content for your audience? Are you afraid of committing death by PowerPoint?
I’m a trainer in social media and digital marketing, so producing engaging content is a large part of my work. It’s so important to produce content rich materials that keep your students interested, while communicating knowledge in a fun way.
My experience as a tutor is that video storytelling can be hugely impactful to illustrate particular marketing strategies. I also find that my students remember video content more than other content I’ve provided in a training course or workshop.
I produced this video for my course Digital PR – Merging Old Techniques and New Technologies and this video was one part of an eight-step digital PR strategy. The video communicates how to engage with journalists when you are pitching a news story to them.
The video clearly illustrates the working relationship between a journalist and a PR practitioner, the inside workings of a newsroom and how to position your online news release for publication.
3) Conference Video
I am asked to speak at conferences on a regular basis and so I spend lots of time preparing new content for new audiences. My time slots usually vary from 30-90 minutes and so I always ensure I incorporate video into my presentation.
Video serves a number of purposes not least to give attendees a rest from listening to me but also to help keep them engaged.
The video below was part of a series of animated videos I produced as part of a 90-minute workshop at the Big Data Retail Analytics Forum in London. The event focused on how to embed a data-centric culture into your business and the audience comprised mainly of data analysts.
4) How-to Video
I also use GoAnimate videos for my Take Two video series on my YouTube channel. These videos are short, sharp and to the point and give you some quick tips on a specific digital marketing or social media topic.
Did you know ‘how to’ is one of the most searched terms on Google and YouTube and so sharing how to tips can prove extremely valuable to attract organic traffic to your website.
What knowledge could you share online using the ‘how to’ format?
Here’s one I produced on how to grow your following on Twitter.
5) Re-purposing Content
We also use GoAnimate for our client consultancy work. Much of work companies is writing digital strategy and creating digital content.
A great way to re-purpose content is to compile the key messages into an animated video. Do you have a blog post, a presentation, a speaking script or an infographic that you produced for your company? Have you considered re-purposing it into an animated video?
In this animated video we re-purposed an infographic we designed as part of The Skeff’s Tag Team campaign. The campaign was aimed at university students encouraging them to plan how to get home after a night out.
So here’s the infographic.
Here’s the re-purposed animated video.
6) Informative Video
Animated video allows you to share lots of complex information in an easy to digest format and in a relatively short period of time.
Whatever industry you work in, there will be key information and statistics that are your stakeholders or customers should be aware of.
This video is for our client Bluebird Care, a homecare company, and they wanted to share the 10 early signs of Dementia with their online community.
7) Whiteboard Animation
I find that whiteboard animation is an excellent way to communicate in videos.
Research tells us that the average attention span is just 8 seconds, so the consistent drawing of shapes and figures in a whiteboard animation video will keep the mind from wandering, focusing on your core message.
Here’s a whiteboard animation I created to promote my webinar. You can see that I have created myself in this video too using the bespoke character feature.
Wrapping It Up
Video is the most pervasive content-type online and as marketers, educators or business owners we have no choice but to embrace video storytelling. With the Internet expected to grow by 500% by 2020, we need to understand how to stand out from the online crowd.
So will you GoAnimate? Go on, you will thank me, and the GoAnimate team for it!
Want to learn more about how it works? I recently included GoAnimate in an article for Social Media Examiner, which went viral – ‘6 video tools to ignite your social marketing’. I went into great detail on how to use the tool and to date the article has had over 6,300 shares!
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#### 8 Video Marketing Ideas for Small & Medium Businesses
With increasing accessibility in production tools, small businesses have every reason to boost their marketing with video. According to research, video is one of the most powerful ways to gauge people’s interest in your brand. Over 70% of customers would prefer to learn about a product or service through video, and 76% of businesses claim that video helped them increase sales.
Whatever type of business you have, start taking advantage of video’s benefits with this guide. We’ll break down how to craft marketing videos that spark customers’ interest, show them your strengths as a small business, and build their trust in your brand.
8 Video Marketing Ideas for small and medium businesses to Implement
As a small business, you may think you’re at a disadvantage with video marketing. Even if there are affordable, usable tools out there, your production quality will never match the videos of large corporations.
Here’s the catch—great video marketing is more than production quality. It’s about showing the emotional side of your business through the combination of visuals, movement, and sound that only video can achieve. Showing off the humanity of your brand through video is what gets buyers to trust your brand and eventually make a purchase.
So as a small business, you have an advantage in video marketing. Your practices, buyer relationships, and product offerings are more intimate and personal than a large corporation. Show this off to your viewers, from leads to loyal customers, with these eight video marketing ideas for small and medium businesses and you’ll be on your way to building stronger buyer relationships and greater sales.
1. Introduce yourself
Leads aren’t going to automatically love your brand—they need a reason to become interested in your company.
Quickly gain their attention with an introductory video to your business. Explain how your company solves their unique pain points, and they’ll know exactly why they should care about your brand and continue engaging.
There’s a pretty simple formula to these intro business videos—explain the problem that inspired the company’s creation and then show how the company aims to solve this problem. But as a small business, be sure to also charm viewers by highlighting the personal, small-scale ways you deliver your mission.
Nana Joes Granola, for example, showcases their handmaking process and local Bay Area focus. Both ideas highlight how Nana Joes prioritizes product quality and their customers rather than just profits.
These intro videos should be easy for customers to discover.
Your homepage, for example, is a great home for your intro video. This placement instantly gives new visitors a reason to engage further just as they enter your site.
YouTube is another ideal platform for your intro video. Users who search for, or happen to come across, your channel can quickly appreciate your brand after watching your intro video. Make it easy for them to find it by placing it as your main YouTube page video, and be sure to spend time crafting the title, description, and meta tags.
Make your intro video easy for newcomers to find, and you’ll generate plenty of interest from prospective buyers. People will understand how you personally solve their pain points as a small business, so they’ll be ready to engage further.
2. Customer testimonials
After new leads are introduced to your company and understand how you help to solve their problems, they’re going to be eager to dig into your brand more to see if it’s worth pursuing.
Build their confidence in your brand with testimonial videos. Seeing people rave about how much they love your business is more convincing than any ad you could release. You’re not just saying why buyers should embrace your brand—you’re showing them how much others love it to prove that it is worthwhile.
A basic testimonial video involves interviewing customers about the positive experiences they’ve had with your product. It could be straightforward by filming them directly, or it could feel a bit more organic and immersive by filming customers in their workplace environment.
Prompt customers with questions that highlight the positive customer experience of working with a small business. For example, customers might describe how you gave them plenty of attention and personalized service.
Once your testimonial video is complete, promote it through your social media account as organic content. In the text of the post, focus on the story and accomplishments of the customer to make it feel less promotional to followers.
You can also publish these testimonials on a landing page of your site. Many businesses name this section “What customers have to say.” Have a call-to-action on your homepage that links to this page so new visitors can watch the testimonials after the intro video and build more confidence in your brand.
Your buyer relationships are most likely more personal and meaningful as a small business. Showcase this through your testimonial videos, and you’ll build even more trust in your brand.
3. Demonstrate your expertise
People, both leads and returning buyers, are looking for expertise in your business. They want to buy products and services from skilled, high-quality brands, so they’re looking for signs of credibility before making a purchase.
Build their trust with videos that highlight your industry-specific expertise. Small businesses often specialize in specific areas at a more intimate level than bigger companies. Showcase your passion and knowledge for your niche by breaking down the complicated concepts of your specialty with visuals.
As a form of expert content, you could create a video based on a company blog post. On our own Vyond posts, we often pair videos with our writing to explain ideas visually. Watch this example blog video from PDT Global, a diversity and inclusion consulting firm. They developed this piece of expert content to help people understand the concept of Imposter Syndrome.
You could also create a tips-and-tricks video based on different industry-specific concerns. Orchard Supply Hardware, for example, creates a short video about each type of product they sell in their stores. The video series is intended for employee training, but they also double as helpful marketing content. This video illustrates three tips to keep in mind when buying a leaf blower.
These educational videos are helpful to both prospective buyers and returning customers, so you can distribute them via a wide variety of platforms.
To start, it’s best to post them on your own site, such as your blog, to give them a central hub. From there, you can create email campaigns or organic social posts that display the video and link back to the page. These channels are optimal for non-promotional content, so they’re great for sharing these valuable educational videos.
By distributing these learning videos, your business seems more credible to buyers and encourages their trust in your company.
4. Create bio videos for employees
As a small business, your team is most likely small, intimate, and focused on supporting customers. Highlight these personal, friendly qualities through bio videos that showcase your employees.
A video bio is simply a video that introduces someone. It should include a mix of professional details, such as their job title and expertise, as well as personal facts, such as where they’re from and what their hobbies are. Watching these videos make your business feel a bit more human and familiar to prospective buyers who are just learning about your business.
Video bios are particularly great if you have a sales department and want to introduce account managers. Customers often don’t have the chance to meet them in person, so video bios can be a great way to build that relationship and lead buyers to eventually completing sales.
For example, a sales rep could send their video bio in a follow-up email after a lead expresses interest. Alternatively, they could include their video bio in their email signature to leave a positive first impression on every lead they contact. Here’s how an account manager at TechSmith incorporated his bio into his email signature.
Alternatively, these video bios could work as promotional social media content if you’re encouraging people to contact your sales reps, as Brightcove does in the example below.
Taking the time to personally introduce your employees through video leaves a positive impression on prospective buyers. It shows them that you care about fostering a relationship and serving them well as customers.
5. Product tutorials or demonstrations
After making their first purchase, buyers need to be nurtured to retain their business.
Product tutorials are a great way to provide these customers ongoing value. They can highlight innovative uses of the product that customers might have missed but will appreciate.
Moreover, they’re an opportunity to showcase your dedication to customer service as a small business. Great customer support is a way for small businesses to distinguish themselves from large companies. Tutorial videos are the perfect way to demonstrate this helpfulness.
To provide value, your tutorial video should be thorough and detailed. Focus on a specific feature of your product or service—explain what it’s for, how it’s used, common issues, and other tips—and think about what aspects of video are optimal for explaining your product. For example, the e-commerce company Sellbrite offers software, so using screenshots in their tutorial with a voice-over is ideal for teaching users about their product.
At the end of your tutorial, be sure to clearly state how viewers can contact your support center if they have further questions. This message shows buyers that you’re willing to put in effort to solve their problems.
A great platform for your tutorial videos is YouTube, as it’s home to plenty of educational content. You can even create a playlist for your tutorials so followers can easily find the help video they need.
Along with YouTube, your tutorials should be posted on a landing page of your site, such as a help or resource center. Giving these videos a centralized hub makes it easy for customers to quickly find a solution to a product issue they’re experiencing.
Distributing these tutorials to customers is a powerful way to eliminate product friction. With this dynamic visual explanation, buyers will be more equipped to use your product and gain more value from it.
6. New product announcements
Even if your product offering is simple, you need to vary it occasionally to continuously provide value to customers. Otherwise, buyers will look to your competitors once they get tired of your products.
Keep people excited about your brand by promoting new products or features through video. Using a combination of stunning visuals, energizing audio, and more will pique viewers’ interest in your brand’s latest developments.
The content of your announcement video depends on whether it’s pre-launch or post-launch. If it’s pre-launch, include minimal details about the new product or feature to spark viewers’ curiosity. If it’s post-launch, use video to highlight the best aspects of the new product or feature to show viewers why they should purchase it.
As an example, here’s a video where Wistia explains the details of their Soapbox feature as an introduction to the tool.
You should also highlight how you hope to serve customers’ interests with new developments. You most likely have close connections with your buyers and a strong understanding of their specific needs and wants. Drive home how your new developments are responsive to these needs to show your dedication to personal attention.
Since these announcements are timely, they’re ideal for posting on news-heavy social media platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter. Instagram is less oriented around news, but posting announcements there could still work since it’s so visually oriented.
Email is another strong way to distribute these announcement videos since it lets you easily reach past customers through contact lists. Returning buyers are more likely than leads to be excited about new features or products, so it makes sense to target them with announcement video emails.
By sharing these announcement videos, you’ll be able to keep customers excited about your brand and encourage them to stay onboard.
7. Answer FAQs
Answering FAQs is a common, yet powerful, way for businesses to serve customers. By addressing common concerns upfront, you’re making it possible for buyers to gain more value from your products.
But text answers aren’t always optimal for resolving FAQs. Either words aren’t enough to answer complicated questions, or people don’t feel like reading through long answers. FAQ videos are the perfect supplement to text answers—they keep people engaged while still addressing their problems.
As a small business, you capture buyers’ attention by featuring your support team in the video. Being a small team, these support members will most likely be the ones resolving customers’ issues. Having them explain problems in the FAQ video is a compelling, personal way to answer issues.
To make your video easy to follow, include text captions to note each question and clearly identify other learning points. You can also give demonstrations when appropriate and break down ideas visually to make them more understandable.
The most accessible place to share these videos is on a landing page for FAQs. The label company Sticker Mule, for example, creates a page for each FAQ that often features a video.
You could also share a video for a particularly common FAQ through email. Many customers will appreciate you answering other buyers’ questions that they may also have.
8. Support a cause
Customers mainly care about how your product or service benefits them—but they also care about your company’s impact on others. Seventy percent of Americans believe companies have an obligation to improve issues, and 87% would buy a product from a company that supported an issue they care about.
If your company is supporting a cause, there’s no better way to highlight your charity than video. Hearing the voices of employees describe their passion for the cause and seeing visuals of the actual work creates a feeling of authenticity around your brand. With that personal connection, buyers are more attracted to your work and more likely to support your business.
This tip isn’t limited to global causes. As a small business, there’s a good chance you’ve done charity work in your community to make it a better place. Your local customers will value your business even more if they know you support communal causes.
Danform Shoes of Vermont, for example, donated nearly $15,000 worth of footwear to a local charity, Dress for Success Burlington.
The way you distribute your support-driven videos all depends on whether the effort is long term or short term. If your business continually supports a cause, you should create a landing page on your site to showcase a video explaining your partnership. This permanent place ensures that customers always have a way to learn about your charity.
For a short-term effort, use social media to quickly spread the news of your work to followers. A Facebook post is ideal for posting the video with a short description of how you’re supporting the cause. You could also post the video on Instagram, but you’ll have to shorten it to a minute for the platform. On either platform, be sure to post the video as organic content so that you are framing your charity in a natural, non-promotional way.
Using your business to support causes is a wonderful action that buyers appreciate. Celebrate your work as a small business with a video that builds customers’ appreciation of your brand.
Build Excitement Around Your Business with Video
The size of your company doesn’t exclude you from the video marketing game. There’s a wide range of tools out there today that have made production cheaper and easier than ever before. Video is an emotional medium, so it’s ideal for showing the human, personal aspects often found in small businesses. Showcase the intimate details of your company through video, and you’ll connect with buyers in a way that large corporations can’t.
About Vyond
Vyond allows people of all skill levels in all industries and job roles to create dynamic and powerful media. With features that go beyond moving text and images, you can build character-driven stories or compelling data visualizations that engage audiences and deliver results.
Start making your own videos today. Sign up for a free trial and attend our bi-weekly tour of the Vyond Studio.
#### 8 Ways to Use Animation to Elevate E-Commerce Site Design
With COVID-19 accelerating the shift to the digital world, e-commerce websites are enjoying a 40% increase in sales during the pandemic. Even as we move from working at home to hybrid work, our online buying has continued while brick and mortar stores remain closed across much of the world.
If your online business isn’t keeping up, you might want to look at your web design itself. Is it helping you convert visitors who have found their way to your website? If not, animations in your web design can help.
Animations are an effective sales tool and can help you convince customers to press the coveted ‘buy’ button and make a purchase.
With physical stores, there are lots of immersive ways to reel in customers like window displays, physical ads, merchandise, and salesmen. Online stores are limited by the absence of all of these. Animations can go some way to filling this gap and encourage conversions, if they are eye-catching, bringing your online store to life. Here are eight ways to elevate your website design and increase your sales using animation:
8 Ideas for Animation on E-Commerce Sites
1. Use GIFs.
If trends count for anything, we can expect to see more GIFs in e-commerce design. Animated GIFs (Graphics Interchange Format) are essentially a set of images stitched together to create a small film sequence. GIFs have a small file size, which means they load faster.
GIFs are typically limited to 256 colors, so they are not appropriate for animations that require smooth gradients and more colors. They also don’t include sound, but they are powerful additions to your web design due to the fact they catch the eye and grab the customer’s attention. GIFs are simple yet effective in keeping your customer engaged.
A good example here would be an e-commerce website that sells communications software. They could use a GIF to show a cartoon character frustrated with their olden times office telephone system. It would help get the message across in a hilarious yet simple manner.
Custom, animated GIFs can be used to engage buyers with special promotions, like sales.
2. Show different colors and variations of your product.
If you have an e-commerce business in the fashion retail sector, animations are your best friend. They have innumerable applications, like animating a single item to change color, showing the customer all their options. You can even create interactive videos like this one from Mango, allowing customers to shop through animated media:
Animations can also be used to make image galleries. Because the average attention span of human beings is eight seconds, your customer is likely to leave the website before they finish browsing. You can create an animation that quickly sifts through most of your inventory. Leverage gallery animations and show as many images as possible with no effort by the user.
3. Immerse your audience with animated videos.
Immersive videos are one of the most happening e-commerce trends, especially for websites that are concerned with real estate and hotel bookings. Visuals are processed 60,000 times faster in the brain than text. With 3D virtual reality videos you can explore a room or a house in a visual and interactive way, making for a sophisticated brand experience.
4. Set a background video.
A soundless video that plays in the background is a subtle but effective way to captivate potential customers. It draws them in and encourages browsing, without being too distracting. After all, too many flashing animations can disturb the browsing experience to the point where the customer exits the website. Having a background video is an excellent engagement tool that can be used to complement the content seamlessly.
Ambient movement is a great concept to experiment with when creating any kind of background animation, be it for your e-commerce website or as a virtual background for Zoom. The video below is a great example of a background video created with ambient movement. If you’re a Vyond customer, you can use this video as a template to customize the animation.
USE THIS VIDEO TEMPLATE
5. Tell a story with animation.
If your brainstorming session to tell the customer your brand’s story has resulted in a written page on your website, we assure you no one will read it. If you decide to make a small animated video about it, now that is something we’re willing to bet will make a major impact on your audience. Using animation as a storytelling tool is an idea as old as Mickey Mouse himself.
Scroll-triggered animations play as the user moves down the page and create an illusion of an unending page. It doesn’t involve clicks, there is minimal effort from the customer, and it gives them control. You can use the interactive and creative design of a scroll animation to show how a product is made.
For example, instead of writing about how your communications software business came to be, you can create an animation that demonstrates the process. You can show how products like your internet phone service and multi-level IVR were introduced, and how important they are for customers that use them.
6. Evoke emotion.
While animations serve a decorative purpose more often than not, they can also get used to enhance the emotional response to your website. You could use animation to create an emotional connection between the interface and the customer.
The point is to spark visual interest. Simple things like fireworks as soon the customer checks out their shopping cart can lend a celebratory feeling. One that they will remember and could trigger them to return to your website in future.
7. Make load time fun.
Forty percent of visitors will leave the website if the loading process takes more than three seconds. The more animations and videos your website has, the more likely it will take longer than three seconds to load. How do you keep your customers engaged while remaining elements are loading? With an animated loading page. Brighten up the wait and show that your website is, indeed, working.
8. Add hover effects and expanding content.
Animation, when used effectively, helps guide your website’s visitors through its interface. Simple animations like hover effects—where elements come to life when the mouse moves over them—can go a long way to create a strong user experience.
To make your webpages more navigable, you’ll need to reduce clutter. Expandable content is a great way to offer up all the right information, but only when the visitor is looking for it.
In the same way, animations can make confusing content—like a traditional purchase order—far more engaging
Add Animation to your E-Commerce Toolkit.
Website animations are necessary for every well-designed website. They make for a seamless design that can help with engagement. Ensure your animations aren’t jumpy, you don’t want to turn off a user. You want them to spend as long as possible on your website.
Animations need to enhance the content and not get in its way. The written word is important to make conversions, simply having cartoons, flashes and videos will do nothing to convince a customer to buy from you. Superb craftsmanship demands that content and images go hand in hand.
Animations can significantly alter the appeal and user-friendliness of your web design, if used wisely. While we have discussed the bigger picture of using animations in web design, the subtle use of animations can also give your website an incredibly sophisticated look. Perhaps a shadow, reflection, or a barely perceptible shimmer can make a difference. Deliver nuance by focusing on the details. The humble detail can go a long way.
Create animated elements that connect with your customer. Try creating your own animations with a free trial of Vyond Studio.
TRY MAKING YOUR OWN ANIMATIONS
About the Author
Sam O’Brien is the Director of Digital and Growth for EMEA at RingCentral, a Global VoIP, video conferencing and call center software provider. Sam has a passion for innovation and loves exploring ways to collaborate more with dispersed teams. He has written for websites such as G2 and Hubspot.
#### 9 Best AI Video Generators in 2026
Summary: In this survey article, updated for 2026, we look at the most important criteria for selecting an AI video creation platform that helps your business create professional, scalable video content quickly. We outline the most critical capabilities to look for, then compare the top platforms on the market in 2026 for use cases like training, internal communications, marketing, and sales.
Through detailed breakdowns of features, pricing, strengths, and limitations, this article helps readers identify the platform best suited to helping them communicate and educate better–and reach their business goals.
How to choose the best AI video generator in 2026
No matter what types of videos your team is looking to create, the best AI video generator should help you:
Create professional-quality videos 5-10x faster – no production experience required
Increased production speed is the most obvious benefit of AI video generators. The best tools make it possible for anyone, regardless of experience, to create high-quality first draft videos with either a text prompt, script, or a document as reference. Instead of taking hours to make a video from scratch, the best AI video generators help you create a professional, editable draft, on any topic, in literally less than a minute.
Make videos in a wide range of formats and styles, for any business use case Many AI video generators are essentially one-trick ponies: they let you make AI avatar videos or animated videos, and that’s it. The best AI video generators in 2026 make it possible to generate the perfect video, in any format or style, for any communication challenge, including mixed media videos, videos with stock photos or footage, screen recording tutorials, videos with AI avatar spokespeople, animated explainers and more. The more versatile the platform, the bigger the value.
Edit, update, and translate your content to your heart’s content
The knock against many AI content generation tools is that you don’t have control over the output. You have to use what you get. Or generate something new and cross your fingers. The best AI video generators solve that problem by making it easy to edit your content, add your company branding, and create audience-specific variations and translations.
The best AI video generators of 2026
Vyond: The most user-friendly and versatile Enterprise-grade AI video generator on the market
Colossyan: Customizable and easy to navigate
Runway: Ideal for creatives in filmmaking and the arts
DeepBrain AI: Easy for non-technical people to use
Synthesia: Realistic avatars or “talking heads”
Pictory: Useful for making short, branded content from long-form text
InVideo: Extensive stock footage library
Descript: Ideal for podcasts, YouTube, and TikTok
Peech: Automates the video editing process
Quick comparison of the best AI video generators
Maker
Key Features
Platforms
Pricing
Vyond
10 times faster than traditional video productionUse cases for any industry or job roleFeatures a wide variety of brand-friendly styles and formatsOffers a high level of creative control, including fully editable video outputsUnlimited updates save time and money
Web-based
Free trial Starter: $58 per month, billed yearly Professional: $100 per month, billed yearly Enterprise: $1649 annually, contact for multi-seat pricing Agency: $1999 annually
Colossyan
GPT-based script assistant
Prompt-to-video capabilities
AI image generation via DALL-E
Cloud, web-based, desktop (Mac, Windows, Linux), mobile (Android, iOS)
Free trial
Starter: From $27/month
Pro: From $87/month
Enterprise: Contact for pricing
Runway
Text-to-video
Video-to-video
Advanced video production features, including green screen, object replacement, and image section replacement
Web-based
Basic: Free
Standard: $12 per user per month
Pro: $28 per user per month
Unlimited: $76 per user per month
DeepBrain AI
Easy to use; has multiple presets
Integrates with ChatGPT, Google, Watson
Text-to-speech tools feature 100 voices in 95 languages
Web-based
Starter: $24 per month, billed yearly
Pro: $180 per month, billed yearly
Enterprise: Contact for pricing
Synthesia
Customizable AI avatars
Avatars have microexpression capability
Intuitive text-to-video technology
Web-based
Starter: $22 per month, billed yearly
Creator: $67 per month, billed yearly
Enterprise: Contact for pricing
Pictory
Generates short, branded content from longer-form documents
Includes libraries of templates, images, and music
Automatically adds subtitles and captions to video
Web-based
Free trial
Starter: $19 per month, billed yearly
Professional: $39 per month, billed yearly
Teams: $99 per month, billed yearly
InVideo
Straightforward prompt-based interface
You can make changes and additions to videos with additional text prompts
Select from preset AI avatars or build your own
Web-based
Free trial
Business: $15 per month
Unlimited: $30 per month
Descript
Edit video by editing a transcript
One-click imports from many apps
Intuitive interface
Windows and Mac (web-based for some features)
Free (limited features)
Creator: $12 per user, per month, billed yearly
Pro: $24 per user, per month, billed yearly
Enterprise: Contact for pricing
Peech
Automatically segment videos for promos
Generate daily videos from existing content
Features document-based editing similar to Vyond Go
Web-based (Chrome is preferred)
Free (limited use)
Creator: $99 per month
Enterprise: Contact for pricing
Overviews of the best AI video generators
Not all AI video generators are created equal. The best products on the market today are extremely easy to use, deliver high-quality, business-friendly outputs in minutes, and provide long-term cost savings for employers of every size.
1. Vyond
Vyond is the most versatile and useful AI video creation platform for business. More than 20,000 customers use Vyond to easily make videos for any business need, including training, internal communications, marketing, and sales enablement, without the need for specialized equipment or experience.
Vyond pros
Best G2 rating: Vyond has a 4.8/5 rating on G2, the highest in the AI video creation category. The company won badges in December of 2025 for Best Results (Enterprise), Most Likely to Recommend (Small Business), and dozens more.
Breadth of features and use cases: No matter your video challenge, Vyond has the tools to help you create an engaging, relevant video
Save time: Create rough-cut videos in seconds by entering a text prompt and ticking a few boxes
Save money: Bring video creation in-house and use those budget dollars elsewhere
Get exactly the product you want: Content is fully editable from start to finish
Build engagement: Vyond’s enterprise customers report seeing 130% or more increases in engagement rates
Match your video to your branding: Easy brand customization
MP4 output file format: Agnostic to any system and able to be used by any program, including LMS and Courseware Authoring tools
Use for any industry or job role: Purpose-built for making professional video content relevant to any business use case
No image copyright risk: Videos are generated from proprietary Vyond visual assets, eliminating the risks inherent in other AI-generated image and video tools
What to look out for with Vyond
Some advanced features are only available on higher-priced tiers
Features a free trial, but no free version
Key features of Vyond
Vyond’s uniquely versatile, all-in-one platform features:
A simple interface that makes it easy for video creators of all skill levels to bring any video idea quickly to life
Vyond Go, an instant script and video creator that creates videos from a simple prompt, script, or reference document
More than 1,300 best-in-class AI avatar options
40,000 animated assets and templates
3 million+ Shutterstock assets
Screen recording and webcam functionality
AI image generation
Instant video translation into 95 languages
Vyond pricing
Vyond offers users the following plans:
Vyond Starter Plan: $58 per month when billed annually. Includes access to AI avatars and tools, 650+ high-quality text to speech voices, screen and webcam recording, Text to video (Including Document, Script, and URL to video), 10,000 credits per user, per month.
Vyond Professional Plan: $100 per month when billed annually. Adds team collaboration tools, access to 4M+ Shutterstock assets, instant translation into 95 languages, generative avatars from a text prompt, with 20,000 credits per user, per month.
Vyond Enterprise Plan: $1649 annually. Adds 200+ ultra-high-quality text to speech voices, Brand Management Suite, advanced collaboration tools, Enterprise security features, and virtually unlimited credits.
Vyond Agency Plan: $1999 annually. Includes all Professional features, plus unlimited rights transfers, Brand Management Suite, advanced collaboration, and 400,000 credits per user, per month.
Final thoughts on Vyond
Vyond is the most user-friendly and versatile Enterprise-grade AI video generator on the market today. It serves the broadest range of use cases and has the most customization options in the generative AI space.
Whether you’re trying to train and retain employees, engage customers or prospects, or increase brand awareness, Vyond’s AI-powered features and storytelling tools can help you achieve the highest return on your investment.
Try It Free
2. Colossyan
Unlike some of its industry-agnostic competitors, Colossyan is narrowly focused on learning and development. Its primary use cases include corporate communication, employee onboarding, compliance, and sales enablement.
Colossyan users can generate videos from their own scripts using a library of templates, backgrounds, and avatars. The tool also offers automatic translations in 31 languages including English, Spanish, Chinese, French, German, and Portuguese.
The company offers a free trial and three packages for individuals, small teams, and enterprises. Some features such as full avatar customization, live collaboration, and unlimited auto-translations are available only to enterprise customers.
Colossyan pros
Easily make talking head videos from any script
Pricing plans for content creators, small businesses, and enterprise clients
Lots of customizable features including custom avatars, voice upload, and voice cloning
Free trial doesn’t require a signup or a credit card
Colossyan cons
Some features are restricted to enterprise clients, which can limit customization
Scenes have a similar structure regardless of template or avatar, which potentially limits engagement
Like many types of synthetic media, Colossyan avatars are close enough to being lifelike that they can give users a sense of having veered into the “uncanny valley”—the eerie sensation when interacting with an object that resembles a human being, but isn’t
Some users report unexpected errors, which can be resolved by refreshing
Key features of Colossyan
Colossyan offers integrated AI support tools including a GPT-based script assistant, prompt-to-video capabilities, and AI image generation via DALL-E. These tools make it easy to generate custom videos featuring one or two AI actors.
One of the key benefits of Colossyan is its ability to customize content. Users can create custom avatars, upload voices, and add custom pronunciation dictionaries. All packages offer at least three videos per month featuring avatar conversations, which can help cut down on the sense of being addressed by a talking head.
Lastly, Colossyan has intuitive UX, making it easy to use. Several G2 reviews mentioned that the tool was user-friendly even for those without video editing experience.
Colossyan pricing
Free Trial: Includes just five minutes of video, five max scenes per video, 95 languages and voices, and three auto-translations. Note that the free trial does not require a signup or credit card, but doesn’t allow you to remove the Colossyan watermark from your sample video.
Starter: From $27 per month. Includes up to 20 minutes of video per month, five max scenes per video, 95 languages and voices, and three auto-translations.
Pro: From $87 per month. Includes up to 90 minutes of video per month, three seats, 25 max scenes per video, 95 languages and voices, and ten auto-translations.
Enterprise: Contact for pricing. Includes unlimited video minutes, scenes, avatars, and auto-translations, as well as additional support features and branding options.
Final thoughts on Colossyan
Colossyan is a customizable, simple-to-navigate AI video generator tool with packages for users at multiple price points and needs. Focused on learning and development, this tool can help creators and companies build professional-looking videos even without extensive video editing experience.
However, some high-end features including branding options and API integration may be out of reach for all but enterprise clients. Plus, some users mention issues with voice syncing; combined with the near-lifelike avatars, this can contribute to a sense of unreality in the finished product.
3. Runway
Targeted at creatives and artists, this generative AI platform creates videos using text prompts, images, or clips.
In addition to generative AI tools, Runway offers video, image, and audio editing features, making it a potential competitor for video editing software like Adobe After Effects. However, unlike some other AI video generators, Runway does not offer text-to-speech tools or a stock library of customizable avatars. In addition, it can have a steep learning curve with it being best suited for creatives, not business people.
Runway pros
Advanced text-to-generative-video capabilities
You can create custom portraits from a series of images
Motion Brush allows you to “paint” over static images to animate those portions of the image
Continuously evolving toolset with new features released weekly
Runway cons
Video content isn’t editable in the traditional sense; you can either accept the output or enter a new prompt
There’s no way to make the output adhere to brand guidelines, making it not ideal for business
No text-to-speech capabilities
Targeted at filmmakers and other creatives; limited applications for business use
Steep learning curve, especially for folks who are new to video editing
Key features of Runway
Runway’s text-to-video tool, Gen-2, offers a relatively simple three-step process for generating videos from text prompts. Users can refine their products using the tool’s enhanced video resolution and transition features to create fluid videos.
Want to take your smartphone videos beyond the typical filter? Gen-1, Runway’s video-to-video tool can turn even the most ordinary clips into a cinematic fantasy world.
Other advanced video production features include green screen, object replacement, and image section replacement. Note that some features are more involved than others and may require you to experiment to get the results you want.
Runway pricing
Basic: Free. 125 credits total, limited access to Gen-1 and Gen-2 tools. Can’t remove watermarks or upscale resolution.
Standard: $12 per user per month. 625 credits per month and the ability to buy more as needed, ability to remove watermarks, increased access to AI tools, additional video editing tools.
Pro: $28 per user per month. 2,250 credits per month and the ability to buy more as needed, 500GB assets, even more video and image export tools.
Unlimited: $76 per user per month. 2,250 credits per month and the ability to buy more as needed, all Pro plan features plus unlimited video generations.
Enterprise: Contact for details.
Final thoughts on Runway
Runway offers a range of exciting features for creatives, including text-to-video and video-to-video generative AI tools, video editing capabilities, and image tools. However, its use cases are mostly confined to filmmaking and the arts—at least, so far. Business users may prefer AI video generators that are targeted to their needs and industries.
4. DeepBrain AI
DeepBrain AI offers conversational AI technology designed to provide chatbot services. Primarily a text-to-video generator, DeepBrain AI has use cases in finance, media, and education, as well as customer service. Examples of this chatbot functionality include an AI tutor, AI job interviewer, and an AI hotel concierge.
DeepBrain AI mixes and matches from the deepfake AI category (i.e., synthetic media that replaces a person’s likeness) and the AI video creator category. Its text-to-generative output capability is very similar to ChatGPT, and the tool offers PowerPoint-esque drag-and-drop creation. Users can customize avatars and utilize text-to-speech and text-to-video capabilities.
DeepBrain AI pros
Easy to generate professional quality text-to-video products, even if you don’t have video editing experience
Integration with ChatGPT means that it’s easy to generate a script and then turn that script into a video
100+ voice actors in 95 languages including English, Spanish, Hindi, and Chinese
DeepBrain AI cons
Avatars can seem robotic and uncanny
Some user reviews mention issues with support
Limited features compared to competitors
Key features of DeepBrain AI
One of DeepBrain AI’s biggest selling points is its ease of use—you don’t have to be an experienced user of video editing software in order to use the tool. With multiple presets and a variety of use cases ranging from education to HR, DeepBrain AI is an accessible way of creating professional videos.
Stuck on what to say? DeepBrain AI integrates with ChatGPT to generate scripts for your videos. The company’s product also integrates with Google Gemini and IBM Watson.
DeepBrain AI’s text-to-speech tools feature over 100 voices in 95 languages, making it easy to add voice-overs to video.
DeepBrain AI pricing
Starter: $24 per month, billed yearly. Ten minutes of video per month, ten minutes max per video, six scenes per video.
Pro: $180 per month, billed yearly. 90 minutes per month, 20 minutes max per video, 25 scenes per video.
Enterprise: Contact for pricing. 50 scenes per video, custom avatar.
Final thoughts on DeepBrain AI
DeepBrain AI offers accessible video generation for users without advanced video editing skills. Integration with ChatGPT and other large language models means that users can generate scripts as well as videos.
However, avatar selection is more limited than in competitors’ products and the final product can appear somewhat stilted and robotic.
5. Synthesia
Synthesia is an AI-based “talking head” video generator offering relatively photorealistic avatars. Input a script, then select one of 100+ AI avatars to deliver your script as if it were a real person speaking directly to the camera.
While it provides some customization options, the quality and realism of its avatars may vary—potentially limiting its effectiveness for certain professional use cases. Additionally, compared to other AI video generators that allow for a wider range of formats (talking heads, animated scenarios with characters, mixed media, etc.) the overall value and impact of Synthesia’s videos may vary.
Synthesia pros
230+ avatars, plus the option to customize or create your own avatar
250+ example templates created by designers
140+ languages and hundreds of voices and accents
Integrations with other software programs, including PowerPoint, WordPress, and various LMS software
Synthesia cons
All scenes are essentially the same—a person speaking into a camera—which limits your engagement options
Avatars are pretty realistic, but synthetic media can cause users to have trouble with the uncanny valley effect, causing distraction because it’s so close to being lifelike
Particularly when viewed on a large screen, the avatars can be less convincing
Key features of Synthesia
Synthesia’s primary differentiator is the quality of its video avatars. On its site, customers mentioned that they occasionally mistook these avatars for real, human talking heads. However, even the best AI avatars still have a touch of the uncanny about them, especially on larger presentation screens.
Avatars are also customizable. Users can add microexpressions like winks and nods or create their own avatars using their webcam or studio footage.
Lastly, if you’re looking for that presenter-style approach, Synthesia has a range of talking head video templates to choose from. Whether it’s a corporate presentation, a marketing campaign, or an educational video, Synthesia provides options that cater to various needs and industries.
Synthesia pricing
Starter: $22 per month, billed yearly. One editor, three guests, 120 minutes of video per year, 95 stock avatar options, and one custom avatar.
Creator: $67 per month, billed yearly. One editor, five guests, 360 minutes of video per year, 90+ stock avatars and one custom avatar, custom fonts, branded share page.
Enterprise: Contact for pricing. Customer number of editors and guests, unlimited minutes of video, 140+ stock avatars and three custom avatars, translation and voice cloning, additional support.
Final thoughts on Synthesia
Synthesia offers high-quality avatars, intuitive text-to-video technology, and flexible pricing plans, including add-ons at each level for an additional fee.
Keep in mind that the quality and realism of its avatars may vary, potentially limiting its effectiveness for certain professional use cases. Additionally, if you’re looking to make videos beyond a talking head format, Synthesia doesn’t currently have this functionality.
6. Pictory
If you’re looking for a simple AI video generator that produces branded content from your text, Pictory is an option to consider. Geared toward creators and businesses, Pictory has use cases in content marketing, learning and development, and education.
Users can create videos from any text, including scripts, blog posts, articles, whitepapers, and case studies, making Pictory a good choice for companies who want to get more use out of their content library.
Pictory pros
Geared toward non-technical users
Includes libraries of templates, images, and music
Automatically adds subtitles and captions to video
Pictory cons
No AI avatars
The voices may sound robotic to some users
Occasional issues with audio synchronization
Key features of Pictory
One of Pictory’s primary features is its intuitive interface, helping to make video creation easier for those with little to no video editing experience. Pictory’s drag-and-drop editor allows users to add text, images, and animations to their videos, while its library of pre-made assets and templates provides many creative options.
Pictory also excels in generating short, branded content from longer-form documents. If your company has an extensive library of articles, explainers, blog posts, and whitepapers, you can use Pictory to tap this resource and generate professional-quality promo videos.
Pictory pricing
Free trial: Create three video projects, ten minutes max per video.
Starter: $19 per month, billed yearly. One user, 30 videos per month, 600 transcription minutes per month, royalty-free videos and music, 34 AI voices in seven languages.
Professional: $39 per month, billed yearly. One user, 60 videos per month, 1,200 transcription minutes per month, more voice options, additional royalty-free images, and music tracks.
Teams: $99 per month, billed yearly. Three users, 90 videos per month, 1,200 transcription minutes per month, additional branding kits, sharing and collaboration capabilities, API access.
Final thoughts on Pictory
Pictory does not offer AI avatars or characters like many of its competitors. However, the tool may be a good choice for creators and professionals who want to turn long-form content into short, snappy videos without investing much time and effort.
7. InVideo
InVideo is a straightforward AI video generation platform designed to simplify video creation. The tool offers a library of ready-made templates organized into categories like business, social media, advertisement, and real estate.
The tool also features automated script-to-video capabilities, including scene generation and visual selection. You’ll find quick editing tools that allow non-technical users to easily and quickly trim, cut, rotate, compress, and convert files.
InVideo pros
User-friendly, prompt-based interface
You can make changes and additions to videos with additional text prompts
Select from preset AI avatars or build your own
InVideo cons
Essentially a stock footage finder and matcher (iStock, Shutterstock, Storyblocks)
Some users may find limitations in customizing templates
The extensive template library can be difficult to search
Other users cited issues getting through to customer service
Key features of InVideo
InVideo offers multiple workflows and automated text-to-video conversion that simplify the process of creating promotional videos. Video editors at a beginner or intermediate skill level will find the interface intuitive and easy to use.
Perhaps InVideo’s biggest selling point is its template library, which is organized into categories like business type, intro/outro, slideshow, and social media. However, users may find the vastness of the template library to be daunting.
InVideo pricing
Free: 15 minutes max per video; includes a watermark.
Business: $15 per month. Access to premium templates, 60 video exports per month, 40 minutes max per video, access to ten media assets from iStock library per month.
Unlimited: $30 per month. Access to premium templates, unlimited video exports per month, 40 minutes max per video, access to 120 media assets from iStock library per month.
Final thoughts on InVideo
InVideo simplifies the process of text-to-video AI generation with workflows, templates, and automated video production. It also offers AI avatars, script generation, and editing capabilities.
While InVideo can be relatively intuitive and has an extensive template library, you may encounter issues with template customization and customer service.
8. Descript
Descript is an audio and video editing tool that transcribes audio and video files into text for easy editing. It offers a range of editing tools and features, including multi-track editing and collaboration capabilities, making it a versatile solution for content creators (think podcasts, TikTok, and YouTube videos).
With use cases also in marketing, sales, and learning and development, Descript offers business people a way to edit videos without traditional editing tools.
Descript pros
Transcribe imported videos and then edit the script with a built-in feature
Removes all your “ums” with filler word removal features
Allows you to clone your own voice using AI
Descript cons
Primarily for podcasting, YouTube videos, and TikTok
Some users may run into bugs, including the app crashing in mid-edit
Like all transcription apps, Descript can produce occasional transcribing inaccuracies
Key features of Descript
Descript’s primary differentiator is its ability to edit video by editing a transcript. Users who are more accustomed to editing words than video will appreciate this chance to come at their projects from a new angle.
Multiple integrations including SquadCast, YouTube, and Restream enable one-click imports from many of your favorite apps. You can also easily publish from the app when your project is complete.
Many users on review sites noted that Descript saved them time thanks to its intuitive interface and text-based video editing.
Descript pricing
Free: 1 transcription hour per month, limited features including one watermark-free video export per month, and access to tools like filler voice removal, green screen, AI voices, and stock library.
Creator: $12 per user, per month, billed yearly. 10 transcription hours per month for each editor, unlimited watermark-free video exports per month, and increased access to tools.
Pro: $24 per user, per month, billed yearly. 30 transcription hours per month for each editor, unlimited access to most tools.
Enterprise: Contact for pricing. Everything in Pro package plus dedicated support and onboarding.
Final thoughts on Descript
Descript simplifies the video editing process by harnessing AI to turn video transcripts into editing tools. Users can easily and quickly produce professional quality AI videos and edit them as easily as they would a Google doc.
A game changer for podcasters and YouTubers, Descript is limited only by its fairly narrow application in this area.
9. Peech
Peech is a generative AI video solution for marketing teams. It lets you upload any talking head footage, and get a first draft in seconds. You can also personalize the automatic video editing process to your video goals, brand guidelines, and preferred animation style.
Users often like the ability to automatically create shorter, shareable content from longer videos. You can also use the tool to automate adding music and subtitles.
Peech pros
Lets you upload your own video, and quickly add other elements
Makes it easy to cut your video up into relevant segments via AI, and then add overlays and captions
Features document-based editing
Peech cons
Primarily aimed at advertising, marketing, and social media use cases
Limited video segmenting features
Automation can mean less ability to edit
Key features of Peech
Peech offers marketing teams an easy way to automatically segment videos and repurpose them for promotion. Users can calibrate the tool to their video goals and automatically generate daily videos based on existing content ranging from conferences to explainers to webinars.
Peech pricing
Free: Two edited video downloads (with watermark) per month; one user only
Creator: $99 per month. Ten edited video downloads (with watermark) per month, plus 60-minute upload max per video; one user only
Enterprise: Contact for pricing. Unlimited downloads (no watermark) per month. Everything in the Creator level, plus 90-minute upload max per video, and multiple users
Final thoughts on Peech
While Peech offers innovative AI video generation capabilities, it primarily targets advertising, marketing, and social media use cases, limiting its appeal to broader video production needs. Additionally, its video segmenting features are limited, and the high level of automation can restrict users’ ability to make detailed edits to their videos. These factors should be considered when evaluating Peech for video creation projects, as they may impact its suitability for certain applications and workflows.
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What’s the best AI video generator for business?
Vyond is considered to be the most versatile and useful AI video generator on the market, due to its speed, wide range of video styles, and Enterprise-ready branding and security features.
All the tools on this list can help video creators work faster, more efficiently, and more cost-effectively, but no other generative AI video platform provides businesses with the combination of speed, versatility, ease of use, and creative control that Vyond does.
Which AI video tools are best for the Enterprise companies?
Most AI video creation platforms offer an Enterprise-grade package, but Vyond’s Enterprise offering stands apart. Why? Vyond Enterprise offers more robust custom branding and brand management features than competitors like Synthesia, Powtoon, and Veed — and Vyond’s security standards and commitment to responsible use of AI are unmatched in the market.
Vyond is SOC 2 Type II certified and has achieved FedRAMP authorization, a designation that demonstrates that Vyond meets a holistic set of security controls designed to ensure confidentiality, integrity, and availability of government data.
How does Vyond compare to Synthesia?
Vyond and Synthesia are both leading AI video platforms, but Vyond offers broader creative control, visual versatility, and branding options, making it a preferred choice for many businesses.While Synthesia focuses primarily on talking head videos with AI avatars, Vyond provides a complete, all-in-one platform for creating AI avatar videos, and animated, photorealistic, mixed media, and other generative AI videos. This allows you to create everything from marketing explainers and training content to dynamic data-driven presentations — all in one place.
How does Vyond compare to Colossyan?
Vyond and Colossyan are both leading AI video platforms, but Vyond offers broader creative control, visual versatility, and branding options, making it a preferred choice for many businesses.Colossyan specializes in presenter-led videos, while Vyond’s platform spans animated, photorealistic, mixed media, and other generative AI styles. This gives you more creative freedom to make training modules, explainer videos, social campaigns, and data-driven presentations—all within one platform.
#### 9 Infographic Tips to Reach and Captivate Your Audience
Bad infographics: we have all seen them. They feature dozens of colors, graphics, and charts you didn’t know existed. But it’s confusing to follow them. They have so many elements that you end up with more questions than answers by the time you see it all.
Companies should apply the following nine best infographic tips. Without them, they risk producing an unclear infographic that doesn’t meet their business goals.
1. Invest in original research
Investing in original research helps position your infographics as a source of reliable industry expertise. Each time a competitor, partner, or member of your audience shares your infographic, they unconsciously tell leads that your brand is worth trusting.
You need to determine the type of data you want to know where to find it. If you want to include personal stories and people’s reasoning behind a stance, invest in qualitative research methods like focus groups or interviews. While quotes take more space in your infographic than statistics, readers find them more relatable.
Infographic by Adweek
If you want to add statistics to show trends or relationships between variables, invest in quantitative research methods like probability sampling or surveys. These results are more objective and measurable than those coming from qualitative research.
2. Confirm third-party data
When you use misleading or incorrect third-party data, you risk severing the trust between you and your customers. According to Edelman, 67% of consumers that bought products from reputable brands are willing to stop if they don’t trust them. Therefore, you should validate the veracity of third-party data before adding it to your infographics to maintain your brand’s reputation.
There are many ways to check the relevancy and integrity of third-party data.
First, check the study’s sample size. Small sample sizes don’t give an accurate view of a population because outliers can skew results. You can use SurveyMonkey’s sample size calculator to determine if your source’s sample size is big enough to provide accurate predictions.
Second, verify the source’s reputation. Personal blogs are a handy way of finding industry statistics. But they’ll never check the data with the same professionalism as a reputable database, as Statista would. If you can’t access databases, only add findings from primary sources to your infographics.
Third, understand the context behind the study. You risk making wrong assumptions when you don’t know the study’s background. Learn about its goals, research methodology, and audience. With this context, you will know if a finding is relevant to your infographic’s audience.
3. Create a brand style guide
A brand style guide is a document that defines the visual and written elements you should add to every company-made graphic. Adding the same elements helps viewers associate them with your brand and distinguish your infographics from your competitors’.
First, define your infographic’s color palette to build a brand style guide. The color scheme you use for your infographic affects how people perceive your brand. For example; infographics with blue as their primary color transmit seriousness and trust. Meanwhile, those mainly using green convey playfulness.
Second, write words and phrases you want people to associate with your brand into your brand style guide. Using a recognizable vocabulary helps viewers identify your infographics, even when someone else cuts off your logo by mistake or when viewers skim your infographic.
Third, make a note to include your company’s mascot or logo and its location. Should it be in the top left corner, or should it remain as a small watermark at the end of the infographic? Add the answer to your brand style guide so that if someone else creates an infographic, they can still include recognizable elements.
4. Target a specific audience
Viewers are more likely to share infographics discussing their specific needs and problems than ones targeting several audiences. When you include information that an audience finds valuable, you improve your chances of convincing them to buy your product or spread the word about it.
To target a specific audience, define the segment of your client base that you want to educate or persuade. Segmenting your audience will help you focus on a particular individual’s interests instead of trying to appeal to every customer. For example; if your product targets developers and writers, you can choose to only target developers in your infographic.
This Vyond-made infographic video uses language and shares information that the target audience—employees—understands.
Once you settle on an audience segment, revisit sales calls or customer profiles to discover this segment’s interests and challenges. You can then use this data to create an infographic that helps your audience solve their needs and problems.
5. Discuss a single topic
Infographics have limited space. Discussing a single topic gives you more space to cover the relevant problem in detail. You can use this space to add more examples, anecdotes, case studies, and statistics that back your topic’s overall claim or angle.
Too many topics can overwhelm the reader and make the infographic unhelpful. With so many things to focus on, there’s little time for viewers to process what they are reading.
You can center your infographic around one topic by defining your infographic’s goal and then filtering out any data that’s not supporting your goal.
BCG’s infographic revolves entirely around how companies can better decarbonize upstream oil and gas operations.
Let’s say your goal is to prove why your company is better than your average competitor. In that case, you would add awards that you have won and comparisons of your product versus your competitors’. But you would exclude information related to your industry—even if it’s valuable— that’s not helping position your brand as the better option.
6. Emphasize important information with visual cues
Pick your elements’ sizes, colors, shapes, and positions based on their importance. For example; if chart A is more important than chart B, it should be brighter or more prominent. Following this principle reduces the odds that viewers miss your infographic’s essential data.
Some infographics help expose your brand to new leads, while others position your brand as an expert. While arranging your infographic, think about the stats more likely to support these goals. Then, use visual cues to emphasize their presence.
This Vyond-made template uses a high-contrast background to emphasize the bar chart.
Let’s say your infographic’s goal is to position your brand as an expert in one topic. In that case, you could use a more prominent shape or position for your original research findings than for third-party data. Emphasizing your original data increases viewers’ possibility of seeing it and identifying you as a trustworthy source of industry insights.
7. Follow design principles to compose your infographic
Following design principles while creating your infographic will help you make an appealing image that clearly shows your findings. Infographics with poor font, bad element alignment, and little negative space don’t encourage readers to share them, as the information is unappealing and hard to process. Excellent design makes your data more trustworthy, as it shows you are professional enough to invest in how you present information.
You can follow the alignment principle to compose your infographic. It states that groups of elements should follow a shared horizontal or vertical axis. For example; let’s say your infographic has three headers. In that case, you could position them so that their bottom portion is on top of the same invisible horizontal line.
Aligning your infographic’s elements creates a visual composition that viewers can easily follow. Once you master horizontal and vertical alignment, you can use more complex composition methods like the Golden Ratio to organize your infographic’s elements.
Designmantic aligned every text box, list number, and icon box.
Another element to consider while composing your infographic is negative space, the area between and around your elements. The more elements in your infographic, the closer each graphic or text will be to each other. Infographics crammed with data are unappealing and unclear because viewers don’t know where to look. So, remove any visual element that isn’t 100% necessary to cover your topic.
8. Use metaphors to simplify complex information
Some statistics can be unrelatable or complex. You can add a visual or written metaphor next to these findings so that viewers can understand what you’re trying to say. Without a metaphor to visualize complex data, viewers will struggle to find value in your infographic.
To find confusing areas in your infographic, look through your third-party and original data and search for findings that your audience would have difficulty understanding. If you can’t find any, show the data you’ll use to a colleague outside your department. Their lack of familiarity with your work allows them to spot complex data.
Next, think of metaphors that could simplify this data. A character leaving a city through a train station to depict an employee’s departure? A ladder with labeled steps symbolizing your company’s progress toward a given goal? Adding visual metaphors will make your infographic more engaging without reducing the significance of your findings.
9. Measure your infographic’s impact
Tracking the impact and performance of your infographic enables you to see how readers are reacting to the information you are sharing. You can see the areas they skim, where they focus, and the part of the infographic readers see before they leave. Knowing this data allows you to improve existing or future infographics that better engage your target audience.
You can use website heatmap tools to see how readers interact with infographics from your website. Tools, like Hotjar’s, record website sessions to show where users are scrolling, clicking, or leaving.
You can use this data to A/B test various versions of your infographic. For example; suppose people are leaving before seeing a vital statistic. In this case, you can test how users respond to an infographic version where this statistic is larger, shown earlier, or uses a color that contrasts more.
Social media metrics also provide valuable data to make your infographics more helpful for viewers and profitable for your company. For example; an infographic with a low share count could mean that you are presenting it to the wrong audience. You could test this hypothesis by posting your infographic on a different platform and seeing if it performs better. If it does, you can modify your distribution strategy and raise your odds of attracting clients or a fan base.
Create a video infographic for your brand
Video infographics carry the same benefits as static ones. But they also benefit from using music, visual effects, and movement to engage viewers and drive their attention to essential data.
You can create video infographics using Vyond, a web-based animation software. Our template library has pre-designed stories, infographics, and charts that you can edit to present your data how you want, but without the need to start from scratch.
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#### 9 Insights on Communicating and Collaborating Better from the Spring 2023 Vyond Storytelling Masterclass
For our Spring 2023 Storytelling Masterclass, we brought together nationally renowned experts in behavioral science, improvisational comedy, and visual design to share their advice on how to create more emotionally engaging business content and become a better collaborator.
While the insights Dr. Jennifer Aaker, Second City’s Lele Mason and Jeannie Cahill Griggs, and Connie Malamed shared may be most relevant to people working in L&D, HR, marketing, or sales, their funny and enlightening presentations will be inspiring and useful to just about anyone.
We highly recommend watching (or rewatching) the session replays in full; you’ll find links to do that throughout. But in the meantime, here are a few of the big ideas that stuck with us the most.
To be a better leader, bring more story and humor to work
During a time of massive change, record-low levels of trust, and prevalent remote work, we’re seeking human connection more than ever, says Dr. Jennifer Aaker, professor at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business.
Today’s environment is changing what we want from leaders: once revered and mysterious, leaders now need to connect and be understood as authentic, fallible humans.
Stories and humor are powerful ways of building connection. And story gives meaning to the whopping 1/3 of our lives we spend at work.
Here are three lessons from Dr. Aaker’s session on the power of story and humor at work—and why they’re needed now more than ever.
Dr. Jennifer Aaker on why we need story now more than ever
1. Keys to a good story
As you bring more story into your work life—whether you’re explaining a new change to your team, building training courses, or creating business video content—it’s helpful to know what makes a good one.
Dr. Aaker shared a few characteristics of stories that land well with us on a neurological level.
There’s a goal: You have a reason for telling the story
There’s a hook: It captures the audience’s attention
It engages in an authentic way: It’s not overly contrived
There’s a call to action: At the end, the audience understands what they should think, feel or do
Keeping these four qualities in mind will help you develop stories to connect with your audience, whether they’re employees, prospects, or customers.
2. Humor has a place in business — and we need more of it
Humor has been shown to inspire confidence, build bonds, enhance creativity, and boost resilience. Dr. Aaker cited a study from Wayne Decker on managerial humor and subordinate satisfaction that found leaders with a sense of humor were rated as 27% more motivating.
Here’s the problem. We fall off a “humor cliff” in our lives right around the time we join the workforce, Dr. Aaker explains.
A 2013 Gallup survey asked 1.4 million people in 166 countries, “Did you smile or laugh a lot yesterday?” In younger years, “yes” levels were high. But starting at age 23, people start saying “no” – and it doesn’t increase again until about age 80.
And the poll found that when we do laugh, it tends to be on weekends, indicating it’s a problem related to work in particular.
3. Tips for bringing humor to work
Dr. Aaker insists that when it comes to humor at work, the bar is low: don’t think you need to bring in a full standup routine. She shared a few guidelines for bringing a little more levity to your workday:
Never ask yourself, “will this make me sound funny?” Instead ask, “how will this make others feel?” Start with moments of truth. Truth lies at the heart of all humor.
Then, create surprise and misdirection — a swerve from the expected can create delight.
Mine your life for truth – then exaggerate and compare/contrast.
It can also help to recognize your own and others’ “humor styles,” based on where our brand of humor falls on a spectrum of subtle to expressive and affiliative to aggressive. You can take the humor style quiz on Dr. Aaker’s book site, Humor, Seriously.
Watch Dr. Aaker’s full session for more insights on humor, connection, and the power of story.
Watch Dr. Aaker’s Session
Adopt a “Yes, and…” mindset for better communication and collaboration
Improvisational comedy, unlike stand-up comedy, is all about collaboration: team members build upon each other’s ideas to create scenes in the moment.
Good “improv” requires a few key ingredients: active listening; a willingness to consider, accept, and build on others’ ideas; validating and restating others’ needs; and delivering ideas with confidence. All these skills and behaviors are valuable in our work lives.
Chicago’s Second City is a world-famous training ground for improv comedy talent with alumni like Joan Rivers, Bill Murray, Tina Fey, and Stephen Colbert.
Lele Mason and Jeannie Cahill Griggs of The Second City Works (the theater’s corporate training and teambuilding arm) demonstrated improv’s lessons for our work lives through a series of short activities.
Here are our top three takeaways.
1. Listen to understand
How often do you find yourself able to block out distraction and listen intently to your coworkers (or customers)?
In improv, active listening is non-negotiable. “We treat listening like a muscle in our art form, because we’re making things up as we go,” says Jeannie. “If I’m completely not listening to Lele, I might not realize it at first — but the audience will realize it. They’re always our ‘tell’ and they’re always keeping us honest.”
At work, active listening means listening to understand instead of waiting to respond or push our agenda — whether we’re brainstorming ideas for our next eLearning course, mapping out marketing campaigns or getting Sales’ feedback on a new enablement asset.
When we listen to understand we’re living in the moment. This naturally generates empathy and allows us to better pick up on our conversation partner’s unspoken cues.
2. Embrace the power of a “yes, and” mindset
Collaboration is about exchanging and responding to ideas. And when we respond to others’ ideas, those responses tend to fall into three buckets. Each generates different energy.
“No, because”
This is your standard “no.” This closed mindset instantly snuffs an idea by burying it in challenges, not offering solutions, and failing to explore the approach behind the idea.
It can be easy and tempting to shut down ideas with a quick “no, because,” especially in busy times. And sometimes a “no” is justified, Lele says. But we should watch closely when and how we’re saying no.
When people hear “no” frequently, they may internalize it, feeling their teammates are saying no to them—not just their ideas. We risk losing out on good future ideas because these team members stop contributing.
“Yes, but”
This mindset comes across as “yes, with concerns” or a “polite no.”
“We call it ‘no in a tuxedo,’ says Lele, “Or as I like to say, ‘Beyoncé with a stop sign.’ It looks amazing but you’re not going anywhere.”
With a “yes, but” mindset, someone says yes to your idea—and then offers completely different suggestions that push their own agenda.
This mindset can sometimes be a way to gather more information about an idea. But when it’s us using it, we need to check in with ourselves to clarify, “am I really interested in saying yes? Or am I trying to further my own agenda?”
“Yes, and”
“Yes, and” is the philosophy that improv is built upon. It’s an open mindset that invites curiosity and reserves judgment about others’ ideas. It encourages team members to offer smaller contributions toward a greater whole, rather than steamrolling with one fully formed idea.
“At Second City we say ‘bring a brick, not a cathedral,’” says Lele. “If we’re talking about building stories and working together, ‘yes and’ is a great place to start. And then, if we need to scale it back, we can get to the ‘yes, buts’ and ‘no, becauses’.”
A “yes, and” mindset is a key to building a more collaborative culture.
Lele Mason sums up an activity about the “yes, and” mindset and why it’s a key ingredient for successful collaboration.
3. Speak with confidence
Improv requires acting like an expert and selling a concept, even when you have no idea what you’re talking about. The key to believability? Confidence.
Applied to the workplace, this doesn’t mean you should try to be a know-it-all on unfamiliar topics. But when it comes to a subject you know – own it. That conviction has an influence on your audience, whether they’re customers, employees, or project stakeholders.
“You know what you know. It’s okay to not know something and say that, but when you know something, say it with confidence,” says Lele. “If you believe it, your audience believes it.”
Watch The Second City Works’ session replay to learn more about how bringing improv skills to the workplace can improve collaboration and communication.
Watch The Second City Works’ Session
For more effective visual communication, reduce your audience’s cognitive load
Learning is a high bar to achieve. It’s about much more than getting a message in front of an audience and making sure they remember it, says Connie Malamed, author of Visual Design Solutions and Visual Language for Designers.
To foster successful learning, L&D pros need to gain and sustain learners’ attention, make sure learners comprehend, understand, and remember new information, and are able to apply and transfer that knowledge in new situations.
What gets in the way?
One of the biggest challenges with communicating visually for L&D teams – and professionals across all disciplines – is the constant strain on our audience’s working memory.
We’re flooded with sensory information. And for any information to have a chance of getting stored long term, it has to make its way through our limited, temporary working memory.
As visual communicators, anything we can do to help ease this “cognitive load” for our audience around the information we’re presenting gives them a better chance to grasp and retain it, Connie says.
Here are a few pieces of advice Connie shared for reducing cognitive load in presentations and videos.
1. Make the graphics and text easy to process
Overly intricate font styles and text with low contrast (like gray text on white background) put more strain on a viewer’s cognitive load.
In one study, researchers showed a group of people a writeup about a stretching exercise in a difficult-to-read typeface. Participants said, “I don’t think I can do this.” But when other participants were shown the same writeup in an easy-to-read font, they said they were confident they could do the exercise successfully.
Another study found that when people were shown two true statements in either low-contrast font or high-contrast font, they were more likely to believe the statements that were easy to read: those in high-contrast font.
The lesson: readability matters.
Using simple fonts with high contrast makes information easier to process, reduces the demands on working memory, and creates a positive affect in the viewer. Whenever the viewer has a positive affect, it’s motivating, and they’re more likely to learn, Connie says.
2. Remove visual distractions
Visuals either help or hurt our message, by either increasing meaning and understanding for viewers, or distracting them. Connie shared a few quick ideas for toning down visual noise:
Avoid placing a logo on every slide
Remove irrelevant text, like dates and slide numbers
Remove cutesy but irrelevant graphics
Avoid putting text on busy backgrounds
In a nutshell: “To reduce cognitive load, focus on the critical part of your message. Then remove extraneous elements,” Connie says.
3. Reduce realism in your graphics
There’s a misperception that ultra-realistic imagery is always best to support learning, Connie says. But research shows that often, reducing the realism of a graphic can help people learn more quickly.
Depending on the subject matter, an illustration, icon, or symbol can sometimes convey information more effectively than a photo or 3D rendering.
“An increase in the amount of realistic detail contained in an illustration will not produce a corresponding increase in the amount of information a student will assimilate from it.”
–Francis Dwyer
Connie Malamed outlines why reducing realism in graphics can help improve the audience’s understanding
Reducing realism can remove distractions, decrease the time it takes the viewer to visually scan, and minimize load on the viewer’s working memory.
Watch Connie’s session for more tips on reducing distractions and increasing meaning in your visual communication.
Watch Connie’s Session
With a live audience topping 3,000, speakers got more questions than they could answer in the moment. We got a few more minutes each with Dr. Jennifer Aaker and Connie Malamed to get answers to your overflow questions. Watch bonus material from the Spring 2023 Masterclass.
#### 9 Steps for a Profitable YouTube Sponsored Video Ad Campaign
You can market your product using only free content, but it can take months or years before it ranks in the first spot on Google or YouTube. While you can wait, investors, employees, and costs can’t. Instead, you can rely on videos and Google Ads to find short-term leads. This will help you attract potential customers as soon as your YouTube video ad campaign is live.
Hawaiian Airlines created 15- and 30-second video ads to promote trips to the Aloha State. Its videos targeted people thinking about visiting the archipelago—for example, those searching for airplane tickets—by using a straightforward and action-oriented CTA: “See fares.” At the end of the campaign, flight bookings increased by 185%, and the cost of finding a customer dropped by 69%.
Even if your video ad is appealing, it’s unlikely to get clicks or turn viewers into customers if you don’t set up your YouTube campaign correctly. Using the wrong video ad objective or format can lead to an unprofitable campaign, even if your video is engaging. Because of this reality, you should set up ads with the same level of detail you use to storyboard, write your script, and produce your video.
1. Set up a Google Analytics account
Google Analytics tracks how people interact with your videos. You’ll know the ads people click on the most and the ones viewers watch for the longest time. With this data, you can make future campaigns more specific to the people most likely to buy your product. For example, if Google Analytics tells you one ad is significantly more profitable than the others, you can bid your entire budget on it and pause the rest of your campaigns.
Create a Google Analytics account with the same Gmail account your YouTube channel uses to let Analytics gather data from every sponsored video, then make sure it tracks everything correctly. Luckily, Google makes it a breeze to set everything up with a simple three-step process.
1. Account setup
First, you need to name your Analytics account. Then go to the Account Data Sharing Settings and choose what Google can do with the information your analytics account collects. The permissions you provide do not affect the Analytics or campaign features you can use, but they help Google improve its advertising hub and make your campaigns more profitable. So, if your company’s data collection policy allows it, tick all the boxes.
2. Property setup
The property is the name of the source of user behavior data that Google will track, like YouTube for your YouTube-based ads. Name your property, so you know what platform it’s on. For example, you should name your YouTube property something like “[Company Name] Data — YouTube.” This distinguishes it from other places where you advertise your product, like apps.
3. Business information
Google Analytics suggests features based on your business’s industry and size, so share this data to enhance your experience. A personalized experience helps you discover profitable features that you may not have found otherwise. If you can’t find your industry in the dropdown menu, pick the one closest to your core business.
Google also adjusts your experience based on your reason for using Analytics. Goals like increasing conversions work for most companies, but you can also find more specific ones, like measuring app installs. Check all the goals that apply to you and click Create.
2. Link your Google Ads account to your YouTube channel
Linking your Google Ads account to your YouTube channel gives Google information about your videos. It will see your channel’s views, the data from the people who watch them, and engagement metrics. With this data, Google can show ads to people who like your content and turn them into subscribers.
Giving Google access to your channel’s data also lets you check how people interact with your channel after watching your ads. Without this information, you can’t gauge the impact of your campaign. For example, you might turn off an ad because it’s not receiving many views despite it having the highest conversion rate across your campaign.
Log into YouTube Studio and click on Settings to link your channel to your Google Ads account. Click on Channel, then Advanced Settings, and finally on Link Account. There, a window will ask you for your Google Ads customer ID. You can find the ID by logging into Google Ads and selecting the help icon in the top-right corner. Copy the ID and paste it into the window on YouTube.
3. Set a precise objective in Google Ads’ Expert Mode
You can promote the same video using two different types of ads and see different results. Because of this, it’s essential to choose a type of ad that’s aligned with your business goals. Normally, you can only use two types of ads: in-feed video and in-stream. Google Ads’ Expert Mode allows you to choose from a lot more options.
Expert Mode lets you pick between seven campaign objectives, like in-store visits or app downloads, which tell Google what type of ad to use. Using these objectives makes Google more efficient at helping you achieve your business goals at the lowest cost, as the algorithm will focus on actions that will help you accomplish them.
You can access Expert Mode by launching Google Ads and scrolling to the bottom of the page. Out of all the objectives, Google recommends you aim for two with video: Product and brand consideration and brand awareness and reach. Both of these objectives use three types of video ads: in-stream, bumper, and in-feed:
In-stream ads play before, during, or after a video session. They help you drive people to landing pages or present your brand to potential buyers.
In-feed video ads appear on YouTube’s website or the app’s homepage, search results, and related videos column. Because they appear next to related videos, they are perfect for attracting viewers interested in what you’re offering.
Bumper ads are video ads that last six seconds or less. Companies can use them to deliver a memorable bite-sized message about their brand with minimal interruption of the viewer’s video.
Product and brand consideration
This type of campaign aims to capture the attention of potential customers and turn them into leads. It has two campaign subtypes, commonly known as ad formats.
First, there are ad sequences. These use in-stream ads, bumper ads, or a mix of both to tell a story across a series. An ad sequence is helpful for campaigns where you have many videos or assets. In a Google and Ipsos Lab Experiment study, video ad sequences were 74% more memorable than a single 30-second skippable in-stream ad.
The second campaign subtype is influence consideration. It uses a single skippable in-stream ad or in-feed video ad to persuade viewers to buy your product.
When using this campaign, strive for video ads longer than 20 seconds. According to internal data from Google, ads of this length are better at making viewers consider products.
Brand awareness and reach
This campaign focuses on driving the most attention to your brand, which is beneficial if you are breaking into a market or launching a brand-new product.
You can use an ad sequence to tell a story that introduces viewers to your brand, as with product and brand consideration campaigns. But you also get access to two new campaign subtypes.
The video reach campaign subtype gets you the most reach possible for a given budget by using skippable in-stream ads, bumper ads, or both. Bumper ads are particularly useful for reaching people. Their short length lets you quickly expose viewers to your brand without annoying them.
Or, you can use the outstream campaign subtype. It shows your videos to people on mobile websites who are not YouTube. If you have a deep understanding of your target audience, this campaign can be very profitable. For example, if you know the type of website your audience likes the most, you can advertise on these sites. This will present your brand to readers with similar interests and challenges.
4. Choose your bidding strategy
Edit this Template Video
Your bidding strategy describes how much Google will charge you for trying to achieve a goal. The wrong bidding strategy can make Google spend an unnecessarily large part of your budget on just a few conversions or website visitors.
In contrast, choosing a bid strategy that aligns with your goals lowers your campaign’s cost and grows sales. For example, a solo immigration attorney ran an Enhanced CPC bidding strategy to attract clients. This type of campaign increases conversions for campaigns where you choose how much to bid for a click.
Solo attorney’s case study by Mockingbird
The cost of attracting each lead was originally $80. After switching to a smart bidding strategy, a model in which Google uses machine learning to optimize bidding strategies, the attorney’s cost per lead dropped to $17. A simple switch in the settings reduced the campaign’s cost by 79%.
Google Ads wins when you run profitable campaigns, so it’ll suggest bidding strategies to those using Expert Mode. The platform offers three bidding methods for those running video-based ad campaigns.
Target CPM
With target CPM (cost-per-thousand impressions), you tell Google Ads the average amount it should spend to show your ad a thousand times. The algorithm will then look for the people likely to watch your entire ad: website users with traits from your target audience.
Ad sequences and video reach campaigns focus on maximizing reach, so they pair perfectly with the target CPM. You can set this bidding strategy and quantify the cost of building product or brand awareness.
Viewable CPM
This bidding strategy is available for those using outstream ads. In it, you decide the most you’ll pay for a thousand people to view your ad outside of YouTube rather than simply being shown it.
Some websites autoplay videos, counting that as impressions even if visitors don’t see your video. With viewable CPM, Google only charges you if 50% of an ad appears on a reader’s screen for two seconds or longer. This time restriction makes viewable CPM an ideal bidding strategy for brand awareness and reach campaigns outside of YouTube, where you don’t control the conditions under which people will watch your ad.
Maximum CPV
Maximum CPV (cost-per-view) is a bidding strategy where you fix the top amount Google should pay for each view or interaction, like clicking your video’s thumbnail. If you optimize for views, Google will only charge you if someone watches 30 seconds of your video or the full video if it’s shorter than that. These time and budget restrictions ensure you never overspend or pay for a view from a person who is not interested in your product.
5. Use Google Ads tools to determine where your ads should play
Your ad’s placement influences its performance. A campaign targeting websites unrelated to your product won’t attract prospects. Instead, it will run until your budget hits zero without becoming profitable.
Use Google Ads keyword, topic, and placement features to place your ads on the websites your target customer visits. This specificity helps the algorithm make the most of your bidding strategy as most ad viewers will care about your product or industry.
Keywords
If you know the keywords your potential customers use to look for your product or the problem it solves, you can tell the algorithm to display ads on websites and YouTube videos using these words. This targeting method helps attract people already searching for a solution to their problem.
You can use the Google Ads keyword tool to find the best keywords and phrases for your product. There are two ways to do it.
The first method involves using a keyword research tool and adding a list of keywords to Google Ads. Lean on this method if you know how to use these tools and trust your ability to choose relevant keywords.
But if you haven’t built many campaigns, let Google find keywords for you. To do this, enter your website’s URL in the box below “get keyword ideas” to extract a list of keywords. You can find this search box in the Google Ads Content section. Scroll through the list, searching for the phrases most related to the product you want to sell. Finally, click the plus button to turn keywords into targets.
Topics
Targeting a topic places your ads on websites and videos discussing a subject related to that topic, exposing your product to an entire industry. Think of the topic as the parent category of keywords. If a keyword is “red silk scarf,” the topic would be “apparel.” The broad targeting puts your product at the top of a community’s mind and helps you attract prospects from an industry’s niche that you may have overlooked.
Google has a list of industries it can target, like real estate and finance. After choosing an industry to aim at, you can select a topic from the Topics dropdown menu in the Content tab. For example, the Reference category has a General Reference subcategory with its own subcategory: Educational Resources. This topic is more specific than General Reference but broad enough to capture the attention of an entire industry.
Placements
You can tell Google to only show your ads on specific websites from its ad network. If most of your customers visit a particular site, you can display ads on it to increase your odds of running a profitable campaign.
Placement targeting also works to reduce a competitor’s market share. For example, let’s say a competitor’s YouTube channel or website targets the same audience and solves the same problem as your product. In this case, you can show ads to your competitor’s audience to introduce them to a better alternative: your product.
You can use placement targeting to display ads on apps, app categories, websites, YouTube channels, or even specific videos. Go to the search bar in the Content section’s Placement tab and paste the URL or video ID of the website or video where you want YouTube ads to show.
It’s important to know Google can show ads outside of these locations if it thinks it can benefit you. You can run a profitable campaign even if you end up targeting the wrong websites or channels.
6. Define your audience segment with Google Ads
The audience segment section lets you define the interests, habits, and demographic information of the people your ads will target. Without these filters, your ads would target every internet user. With this broad focus, your ads would have a low conversion rate and a high cost-per-view, as only a fraction of the views would come from people who actually want your product.
Presenting your ads to a specific group of people helps the algorithm find the type of person who will look at your ad, click it, and consider buying your product. This narrow approach enhances your chances of running a profitable video ad campaign.
Launch your customer relationship management (CRM) software to find your audience’s data. Look for the demographic information, needs, and interests of prospects who became clients:
How do they spend their free time?
What is the size of their company?
What are they actively searching for?
For an even narrower approach, look for customer traits that led to the longest and most profitable contracts. By targeting these individuals, you’ll grow your business’s average contract value and recurring revenue. You will also reduce your churn rate.
Back in Google Ads, scroll to the Audience Segments section and click on Browse. You will see four menus where you can define your audience. Click each of these four dropdown menus and select the audience information that matches your customer base.
7. Write a compelling ad headline
As of 2022, there are over 2.4 billion YouTube users. But only 1% of them pay for YouTube Premium, a subscription that removes ads from the platform. If you want to capture the attention of ad viewers, you need to write a clear and compelling headline.
An ad with a dull or cliché headline is unlikely to receive clicks. Instead, it becomes “one more” in a mass of ads without standing out, wasting your ad budget. Meanwhile, a compelling headline stands out from the over 500 hours of content uploaded to YouTube every minute. It clearly conveys the benefit of clicking on the ad, making viewers more likely to watch it.
Your ad headline should be clear, not elegant or complex. If viewers can get the gist of your ad after reading your headline, then it’s clear. You can write clearly by asking yourself, “What am I trying to say?” and saying it using the simplest and shortest words. Then mention the attribute you want to highlight from your product, and move on. Don’t embellish it.
Once your headline is clear, rewrite it to make it compelling. Change the sentence’s words, order, and structure. For example, if your headline has a number or adverb, modify its position.
Often, clear but bland headlines result from sticking with the first option you came up with. Write many variations, ask colleagues which headline they are most likely to click, and pick the best.
8. Come up with a clear CTA
Offering a clear CTA prompts readers to take the next step. It actively moves readers along, increasing their chances of becoming paying customers. In contrast, if your CTA is vague, viewers might not know how to buy your product after watching the ad.
Companies reduce their ads’ conversion rates when they write overly complex calls to action. Thus, write clear CTAs with action words. These words tell viewers the precise action they must take to inquire about a product or solve a problem.
Wistia found CTAs with action words like “click,” “sign up,” or “download” had a higher conversion rate than those without. So, if you are selling accounting software, use “sign up for a free trial” as your CTA and not “experience the new age of accounting.”
Wistia’s chart shows the conversion rate difference for CTAs with different action words.
Google Ads lets you write a call to action of up to 10 words. According to Wistia’s study, CTAs with the word “sign up” outperformed those without it by a factor of three. Include this phrase in your CTA when possible. If your product doesn’t need people to sign up, use the action word that best describes what users must do to buy from you.
9. Write a persuasive description
Headlines alone can’t always influence viewers to click your ad. In these instances, descriptions can save the day, providing statistics, facts, and value propositions that make your product look more appealing. By highlighting your product’s strengths in your description, you increase the odds of turning viewers into page visitors and then into customers.
Generic descriptions like “buy now at XYZ.com” don’t persuade viewers, especially if your headline or CTA has already encouraged people to buy. Instead of these vague descriptions, highlight your competitive advantages. These differentiators prove to viewers your product is the most viable solution on the market. If competitors offer one round of revisions for a product, say you provide unlimited revisions. Or, if you offer free worldwide shipping and that’s uncommon in your market, add it to your description.
When writing descriptions, include power words to make your ad more persuasive. Power words cause emotional responses in readers. For example, “forbidden” sparks desire in the reader. Tapping into the viewer’s rational side with facts and their emotional side with power words makes your ad more alluring.
Launch your next YouTube video ad campaign
Upload your video ad and launch your campaign, but don’t celebrate yet, even if the campaign is profitable. Every YouTube advertising campaign has room to improve and grow its ROI by editing the campaign parameters based on viewers’ behaviors.
Connect your Google Ads and Analytics accounts to see the full customer journey. With this data, you’ll find your campaign’s weak spots. For example, a high bounce rate means people like your ad, but your landing page isn’t appealing enough to trigger a sale. You can pause your campaign, edit your landing page, then resume the ads to increase your campaign’s ROI.
Besides measuring results, you can prioritize animated video ads over live footage to better turn viewers into customers. Animated videos can grow YouTube views by 21% and social media shares by 375%. This extra reach places your brands and products in front of more potential customers. In Vyond, an intuitive animation tool, you can animate videos regardless of your previous animation experience.
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#### A Comprehensive Guide to Engaging and Effective Compliance Training Videos
Compliance training is more than a legal requirement: it’s a crucial aspect of running a successful and ethical organization. With training, employees are expected to understand and adhere to industry-specific regulations, legal requirements, and internal policies.
But compliance training is often seen as a chore, and employees may find it boring and unengaging. In this blog post, we’ll discuss how and why you should consider making compliance training fun and engaging.
Understanding compliance training
What is compliance training?
Compliance training is a structured educational program designed to teach employees about the laws, regulations, and internal policies that apply to their job roles. It’s a critical component of risk management and helps organizations avoid legal issues, financial penalties, and reputational damage. Compliance training can cover a wide range of topics, including data privacy, workplace safety, ethics, and more.
Why compliance training is important
Compliance training is not just a checkbox to be ticked; it’s an investment in an organization’s future. Here are some reasons why compliance training is important:
Legal compliance: Compliance training ensures that your organization complies with all relevant laws and regulations, reducing the risk of legal disputes and fines.
Ethical conduct: It promotes a culture of ethical behavior, reducing the likelihood of misconduct and scandals.
Risk mitigation: Compliance training helps identify and mitigate risks, protecting your organization from potential harm. Take for example one company’s 2017 data breach, when their failure to implement security updates to their systems and databases compromised their customer data and cost them a minimum of $575 million in fines and settlements.
Reputation management: It safeguards your organization’s reputation by demonstrating a commitment to responsible business practices.
Examples of compliance training
Cybersecurity training
This video on information security awareness aims to ensure that employees at all levels understand their role in maintaining data and cybersecurity compliance.
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Finance training
Animated videos can make financial compliance training topics like money laundering fun and engaging, increasing employees’ awareness and deterring illegal practices from taking place.
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Workplace training
The goal of workplace compliance training is to create a work environment that is legal, ethical, safe, and respectful for all employees. Besides instructing about laws and rules, compliance training can be beneficial in helping employees understand the resources available to them.
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Effective compliance training: why the stakes are getting higher
Recent developments have highlighted the need for effective compliance training that goes beyond the bare minimum. Headline-making fraud cases serve as reminders of the legal and reputational risks associated with noncompliance. And while many companies meet legal standards for training, employees often fail to apply what they learn.
The compliance training landscape is evolving to keep pace with strict data protection regulations like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the drumbeat of new laws worldwide. These regulations, on top of the hefty fines for noncompliance, have fundamentally changed the way organizations handle and safeguard sensitive data, making compliance training a staple of modern business operations.
Moreover, compliance training programs are shifting from mere “check the box” exercises to comprehensive educational initiatives. In the case of information security, more robust training modules not only inform employees about the intricacies of data protection but also instill a culture of data privacy throughout the organization that emphasizes that being vigilant is everyone’s job.
Check out Cargill’s compliance training success story
How to create more effective compliance training
The compliance landscape is changing while technology’s influence on the learning process grows. To make their training faster, more engaging, and more effective, companies are increasingly using eLearning platforms, gamification, and training-at-scale technologies.
Agility is also key in this space: the frequent updates and amendments to privacy laws demand a dynamic approach to compliance training. Organizations must be agile and continually update their training materials to ensure that employees are well-versed in the latest legal requirements.
To boost employees’ engagement with and understanding of your compliance training, here are a few tips:
Tell stories and use scenarios
Incorporating storytelling into compliance training by showing employees real-life scenarios they may encounter can capture employees’ attention and increase retention rates.
Video, and particularly animated video, is great for storytelling and scenario-based learning. Video helps simplify complex ideas and makes them easy to understand. It’s versatile and captivating, making it ideal for presenting abstract or complicated compliance messages effectively.
And unlike traditional methods of teaching and training, video provides a reference that employees can revisit as needed.
Keep it short — and make it interactive
Instead of lengthy training sessions, think about delivering compliance training in bite-sized videos. Microlearning with video accommodates learners who might forget compliance lessons quickly, allowing them to pause and replay content anytime for better understanding.
Consider enhancing your training with interactive eLearning platforms, videos, and webinars. Focus on easy-to-deliver formats, like video, which make the training content accessible on different devices for remote and on-the-go learning.
Lastly, try gamifying your training. Gamification turns your learning modules into a game with rewards and challenges.
Check for understanding
Include tests or quizzes to measure participants’ understanding and make sure they’ve retained important information.
Seek employee feedback
Don’t be afraid to ask for feedback on how to improve employee learning experiences. Ultimately, listening to employees will foster a positive environment that can allow compliance principles to become a part of the organizational culture.
Update regularly
Refresh your content whenever regulations change to ensure ongoing compliance. You might also change up the characters and scenarios or add references to current events.
Watch Karl share fresh insights on gamified training
Creating effective compliance training videos with Vyond
Vyond is a versatile tool that can be used for various types of compliance training. Its user-friendly interface and customizable templates make it an ideal choice for organizations looking to enhance their communication and L&D goals.
The benefits of compliance training with Vyond
Vyond offers several benefits when used for compliance training:
Helps you explain complex concepts: Vyond’s animation capabilities make it easy to explain complex compliance topics visually. And with Vyond Go, the AI-powered script and video generator, you can create rough-cut explainer videos in seconds.
Increases retention: Vyond videos are inherently more engaging than text-based content, helping learners better retain and apply information. When Shelter Insurance started using Vyond videos for cybersecurity training, they saw employee clicks on email phishing links drop by 50%.
Makes revisions painless: It’s easy to revise or refresh your videos as regulations change. Features like global editing let you make edits in one place and carry them throughout your video in a click.
Standardizes training: Vyond allows you to create standardized branded training videos that can be easily distributed and edited, ensuring consistency in messaging.
Saves money: Creating custom training videos with Vyond is more cost-effective than hiring a production team.
Makes your content more accessible: Training videos can be accessed anytime, anywhere, making it convenient for employees. Features like closed and open captioning help make the content accessible for all learners. And AI-powered features like instant translation let you reach learners in more languages and dialects.
Keeps viewers engaged: The visual and interactive elements in Vyond videos make compliance training more engaging. (One of our customers in financial services saw employee views on Vyond videos increase 73-fold compared to their previous PDF-newsletter format!)
Helps you scale training programs: Vyond allows you to scale your training efforts as your organization grows. And because Vyond is so easy to use, organizations like American Express say it has helped their teams overcome designer bandwidth constraints and get training content backlogs moving.
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Making compliance effectiveness a priority with Vyond videos
Good compliance training is critical for good business. It’s not just about following the law; compliance training is about fostering a culture of integrity and responsibility across your organization.
Vyond videos can help you take your compliance training from dull necessity to memorable learning experience. By understanding the importance of compliance training, exploring various types of compliance training, and leveraging Vyond’s features, you can create a compliance training program that not only meets legal requirements but also contributes to your organization’s success, strong reputation, and risk readiness.
See for yourself how Vyond can help take your compliance training from weak to wow! Let’s do a quick experiment:
Think about text-based training content you currently have— slides, a PDF — that could be more engaging as a video.
Start your Vyond free trial — you’ll be into the platform in a few clicks.
Once you’re in, select “Vyond Go” from the home screen.
In the topic box, copy and paste text from those materials, and choose your options on vibe/format/layout. Here are some Vyond Go tips and a “getting started” video.
Click “Create a video” and let Vyond Go create a custom script and rough cut video based on your existing content.
Make small changes right in Vyond Go with Quick Edit or bring your video into Vyond Studio to go deeper with your edits. (It really is this easy.)
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#### A Guide to Creating COVID Safety Training Videos
As companies around the world explore what a return to the office might look like, the importance of clear and accurate communication has been thrown into sharp focus.
Whether communicating hybrid work policies or advising on COVID-19 precautions to employees, internal communicators have a responsibility to ensure that they are getting their message across in a consumable, credible, and engaging way.
With today’s technology for creating your own animations, videos like the one above are a great tool to build into your COVID-19 communications strategy. In this guide, we’ll share some expert advice on how to create COVID safety training videos that are as effective as possible.
Click here to use the above video as a template with an existing Vyond account!
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What are the benefits of COVID training videos?
Training videos allow you to ensure that everyone on your team is working with the same information. With videos like the one below, you can quickly distribute up-to-date safety precautions to each and every person in your organization.
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Keep your employees safe.
At risk of overstating the obvious; COVID training videos are important because they can keep your employees safe. With videos, you can help you safely train your employees from a distance while limiting in-person interactions.
You can provide your employees with important safety information from a video that they can watch at any time, rather than bringing together groups of employees to train them. Taking this step prevents in-person gatherings and actively demonstrates how important safety is to your organization.
Then, when it is time to return to the office or gather again, you can protect your employees by equipping them with the information they need to take advised precautions, like wearing masks.
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Deliver information more efficiently.
Many of us have been stuck looking at screens for months, doom scrolling through noisy feeds filled with media that’s competing for our attention. It takes something visual to cut through that noise and captivate our audiences.
Our brains are wired for visual communication: when our eyes are open, two-thirds of the electrical impulses firing in our brains are related to visual information. To get audiences engaged with important COVID-19 communications, and for them to quickly understand complex concepts, you need to use visual media.
Share information quickly.
Public health and safety is, more often than not, a race against the clock. It’s important that your pandemic communications can work quickly to distribute new information as soon as possible.
While text-based messages may seem the simplest to produce, they often fall short at getting everybody engaged with the material. On the other end of the spectrum; live training sessions are difficult to organize on short notice.
Video and other visual media are great tools for quickly producing content that people will actually absorb. While video hasn’t always been quick or easy to produce, platforms like Vyond Studio make it accessible for anybody to create safety training videos quickly (and inexpensively, too).
How to make effective health communication videos
When it comes to pandemic communications, you have to get it right. It can, after all, be a matter of life or death. Here are some key concerns you should think about in order to make COVID-19 training videos that are as effective as possible.
Stay up to date on COVID research.
The last thing you want to do is give false information, which could compromise the safety of your employees and jeopardize your work. Information and guidance on this horrific pandemic are ever-changing (sometimes daily), so it’s important to give the most current information available.
There are many reputable sources for this, but you’ll have to keep close tabs on them. One of the most reliable websites for anyone in the United States is the CDC’s COVID-19 page, which features up-to-date safety information. It even includes recommendations for specific industries and occupations.
Even with this high-level knowledge, it’s important to check with your local health department for further safety standards. Your local departments should be able to further guide you in your plans for hygiene, personal protective equipment (PPE), and other methods of slowing the spread of the novel coronavirus.
Edit, iterate, and collaborate.
Keeping on top of the latest updates doesn’t do much good if you aren’t using that up-to-date information in your own communications.
When you create COVID safety training videos for the first time, think about how you’ll be able to edit those videos later. Rather than relying on video freelancers to manage your videos, bring ownership of those files in-house. By giving yourself and your teams the ability to quickly make adjustments to your existing videos, you can not only ensure continued relevance, but avoid distributing obsolete and potentially harmful information that has grown outdated.
By using team collaboration features in video platforms like Vyond Studio, you can make sure your videos remain as accurate as possible. Bring additional collaborators into the project from around the organization. The more hands on deck, the more likely you’ll be able to keep up with the rapid development of public health information.
Take advantage of the format.
Video works so well because it’s dynamic and engaging (rather than static and boring). Make the most of it! Include elements to move around the screen, fun visuals, clear charts, and graphs when you create a COVID-19 training video.
As with any story, build your video should have a beginning, a middle, and an end. One easy way to do this is to have a main character performing all the safety protocols that your employees will be doing.
Emphasize its importance immediately.
At the start of the video, you should make sure it’s clear that the employees must follow any policies it is setting forth. Facebook found that 45% of people who watch the first three seconds of a video will continue watching for 30 seconds, so capturing their attention immediately is key.
For a topic as crucial as this one, there should be no confusion over what’s expected of the employees. Use plain, simple language that leaves no room for error. Your employee shouldn’t come out of it with any questions.
One way to help your employees absorb the information in the video is to let them see themselves in the video. Tying the content into your specific industry, with examples that employees will understand, will further increase engagement.
Create your first COVID-19 safety training video with Vyond
Vyond enables you to create professional-quality training videos without having to enlist a designer or marketing team. With Vyond, you get a number of templates that can help you get started even faster. Plus, if COVID safety standards change, Vyond lets you change your video and export a new version within minutes. Click here for a free trial and start your first COVID training video today.
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#### A marketer’s guide to Pride campaigns
June is always a very strange month for me. It comes with my birthday, Father’s Day, and of course, the Pride campaigns
Pride campaigns have become increasingly commonplace during the month of June. Being a queer marketer, I’ve had a hard time articulating how I feel about the commercialization of Pride. It feels confusing, frustrating, and painful.
As a marketer, I understand how seasonal content is essential to cut through today’s noisy media landscape with relevant messages. I also respect that many marketers—of all experiences and identities—are seizing opportunities like Pride month and Juneteenth to use their platform for good.
As a queer person, I know how hard-earned pride is. I’ve felt the sting of rejection on the playground, walking around the block, and at my own wedding. I’ve been spat on, threatened at knifepoint, and had rainbow flags burned outside my apartment. And, along the way, I’ve found a profound sense of self, community, and pride.
Seeing a billboard about two men sharing a checking account does not, however, make me feel that same sense of pride. And every time a company rainbow washes their logo on LinkedIn, I find myself careening between anger and appreciation.
So, this year, I’m channeling my conflicted feelings into this quick resource for fellow well-intentioned marketers. Below, I’ll cover:
Pride campaigns: dos and don’ts
Ideas for Pride campaigns
Examples of Pride campaigns
I can only offer one perspective, but I hope it proves helpful as you figure out the most responsible way for your brand to engage with Pride month. Check out this guide from LinkedIn for additional viewpoints.
Pride campaigns: dos and don’ts
Who should create Pride campaigns
Do: Let LGBTQ+ voices lead the way.
It’s natural that a corporate Pride campaign would begin with your marketing team. After all; who else can tell a story like a marketer can? Just because your marketers are good at content creation, though, doesn’t mean they are qualified to speak about LGBTQ+ topics. Make space for LGBTQ+ voices on your team to lead the way in campaign brainstorming, creative direction, and execution.
Some of you might have read that and immediately thought of a few folks you could invite into the process. If you did, great! Just keep in mind that most people don’t want to be singled out at work for being queer. (They certainly don’t want to get extra tasks for it, either.) If this person has not come out to you explicitly, you might also put yourself in the awkward position of making an inaccurate assumption or outing somebody at work. Instead of asking a queer person to help, put out a general call inviting all employees—particularly those who identify as belonging to the LGBTQ+ community—to partner with your marketing team on Pride content.
Don’t: Rely on assumptions, second-hand experiences, and what you’ve heard.
It’s unreasonable to expect people who are straight and cisgendered to profoundly understand LGBTQ+ experiences. If you don’t have people with real lived experiences guiding your Pride campaigns—or any DEI-related content—you run the risk of putting out content that does more harm than good.
If you can’t find any queer folks at your office to contribute to your Pride campaigns, ask yourself why. Making your workplace more inclusive is probably a better use of your time than trodding over Pride month with your own agenda.
Using the Pride flag
Do: Use the Pride flag to create safe spaces.
The rainbow flag has gone mainstream as one of the most recognizable symbols of Pride month.
The Pride flag can be used by LGBTQ+ people as a sign of pride, community, and resistance. As a queer person, when I see the flag in public, it tells me that I will (A) find community there, or (B) be safe from physical assault—a reassurance I sorely need.
Allies who are flying the Pride flag should think about it in terms of creating a safe space. If you’re going to display it where it’s easy—like on your company’s LinkedIn profile—you should also display it where it’s difficult. What would happen if you used a rainbow-fied logo on your corporate invoices, or in presentations to your board of directors? Or, what would happen if you hung a Pride flag in the company office? Showing the flag where it is least welcome is an impactful way to transform unsafe spaces into safe ones.
Don’t: Co-opt the flag to signal diversity and inclusion.
I’ve seen a worrying trend of Pride campaigns using rainbow colors during Pride month to virtue signal diversity. The Pride flag does not represent diversity.
The colors of the original pride flag represented life, healing, the sun, nature, harmony, the soul, sexuality, and art . The new pride flag includes black, brown, and pink/white/blue, representing the foundational contributions made by black, brown, and trans people to LGBTQ+ advancement.
When you use the rainbow colors to say “hey, we’re inclusive,” you’re co-opting an already meaningful symbol to advance your own interests.
Themes for Pride campaigns
Do: Acknowledge themes of personhood, community, resilience, and activism.
LGBTQ+ lives are about a lot more than dating and marriage. We have work lives, financial lives, and social lives, too. We suffer disproportionately from homelessness, violence, and addiction.
Pride is a concept that goes beyond politics like equal marriage rights. Just take a look at the original Pride flag colors, and what they represented!
Pride campaigns that transcend surface-level topics and encourage a deeper conversation about self and solidarity are, in my eyes, the only ones worth producing.
Don’t: Make it about “loving who you love.”
I am married to somebody of the same sex. I grew up in a social environment where my right to marriage was debated openly in my classrooms, newspapers, on TV, and everywhere in between. As a result, I deeply appreciate the continuous activism necessary to defend marriage as a human right.
However, I’m tired of people and brands only speaking to me about who I love. It feels like a pinched-nose way of handling (and sanitizing) my life. I feel invisible as the other parts of my queer identity get shrunken by silence. It feels like I’m only worthy of dignity and respect if I fit my life into a heterosexual model of relationships, rather than being worthy of those things simply because I’m a human.
Creating content for Pride campaigns
Do: Support and amplify LGBTQ+ voices.
As with any seasonal campaigns, Pride month can sneak up on your average marketer. So, if you need to create content quickly, look to LGBTQ+ artists as a resource! While they are often underrepresented in professional circles, queer artists are abundantly available for hire to create authentic, meaningful, and impactful content on Pride themes.
Don’t: Rip off queer artists.
As with any artist or content creator you engage; be sure to pay them fairly for their work and/or intellectual property. It is inappropriate to offer mentions and exposure alone, unless the creator suggests it themselves.
It can be tempting—particularly on social channels—to find existing content you can re-share and repurpose. Directly asking the creators for permission to re-share the post on your social channels is a good practice to follow. When you do share content, make sure you re-share the post from the original creator rather than uploading it as a new post.
Even when you are creating content yourself, it’s important to think critically about where your ideas came from. LGBTQ+ people have been ripped off for decades, for everything from fashion to music palettes. Instead, try to remember where you’re pulling inspiration, and offer credit and payment where possible.
Ideas for Pride campaigns
Pride All Year
If you’re still scrambling to come up with ideas for your Pride campaign, consider celebrating Pride year-round.
Invite your teammates—of all identities—to share stories related to LGBTQ+ Pride, and slowly develop content around those stories. You can release a series of videos, graphics, and even podcasts throughout the year at your own pace. And, you can emphasize the point that queer people should be celebrated year-round.
Support LGBTQ+ nonprofits
If you have a large budget for seasonal campaigns, consider redirecting those resources toward nonprofits that serve LGBTQ+ communities. Don’t fuss about publicizing your gift—just give. Prioritize organizations that provide direct aid to LGBTQ+ communities that sit at intersections of injustice (racial, economic, legal, etc.):
SAGE: a national advocacy and services organization that’s been looking out for LGBTQ+ elders since 1978
The Okra Project: a collective that seeks to address the global crisis faced by Black Trans people by bringing home cooked, healthy, and culturally specific meals and resources
For the Gworls: a Black, trans-led collective that curates parties to fundraise money to help Black transgender people pay for their rent, gender-affirming surgeries, smaller co-pays for medicines/doctor’s visits, and travel assistance
Marsha P. Johnson Institute: protects and defends the human rights of BLACK transgender people
The Trevor Project: the world’s largest suicide prevention and crisis intervention organization for LGBTQ young people
LGBTQ Freedom Fund: pays bail to secure the safety and liberty of individuals in jail and immigration detention
National Center for Transgender Equality: advocates to change policies and society to increase understanding and acceptance of transgender people
An employee donation drive is another great way to honor Pride month by supporting non-profits. Get the word out with engaging videos, like the one below!
If you’re a Vyond customer, you can customize this video template in Vyond Studio.
Customize this video template
Do the Work
Certainly, Pride campaigns are hard to get right. After reading this far in the guide, you might be feeling worried about not having the right ideas, the right creative, or the right people behind your Pride campaign.
That is okay. And, that might be a sign to rethink your approach. Instead of creating a public-facing Pride campaign, consider an internally-focused one.
Think critically about what resources and perspectives are missing to make it so your brand can speak to LGBTQ+ topics. Is it a matter of resistance from executive management? Are you having trouble finding LGBTQ+ voices who can contribute to your campaign? Do you find yourself stammering over your words, unsure of the right language to use?
Unpack those challenges and greet them as opportunities to make your organization even more inclusive and diverse. An easy way to start is to create training resources like the video below to help educate your employees on LGBTQ+ topics. You can also partner with HR on internal marketing campaigns and employer branding to foster inclusion, diversity, and belonging.
The gender pronouns training video above can be customized by any Vyond customer.
Customize this training video
Examples of Pride campaigns
Levi’s: Respect All Pronouns (2021)
A San Francisco-born company, Levi’s is a leader when it comes to Pride campaigns. They haven’t waited for messages to be popular before amplifying them in major activations and advertisements.
For example, Levi’s met popular debate about gender and pronouns head-on last year. Their Respect All Pronouns campaign advocated for people who are gender non-conforming. The campaign features paid models who represent LGBTQ+ communities, highlighting how marketers can amplify and support queer folks.
Compared to other clothing brands, Levi’s does a great job of creating Pride apparel that centers the wearer, and creating apparel in collaboration with queer artists.
ADP: Pride training resources
My all-time favorite Pride campaign isn’t a campaign at all. ADP has, for quite some time now, committed to honoring Pride year-round.
Instead of creating splashy ads, ADP puts in the work to meaningfully advance LGBTQ+ topics at work. By creating a series of training videos with Vyond, they can educate employees on topics like gender pronouns to foster a more inclusive workplace for all.
Skittles: Give the Rainbow (2021)
In June 2021—just as rainbow products began hitting shelves—a particularly memorable rainbow disappeared. In honor of Pride, Skittles actually replaced its iconic multicolored packaging with a grayscale version, making the call that “only one rainbow matters during Pride month.”
While the move felt a little silly and trivial, it stands out as a remarkable example of resisting the impulse to center Pride around your product. This noticeable tactic called into question the commercialization of Pride. Rather than co-opting the Pride flag, Skittles honored that it belongs to the LGBTQ+ community.
Get ready for Pride month
Pride campaigns can feel like an important moment for your brand to raise its voice. It can also feel particularly daunting to well-intentioned marketers who want to get it right. The best way to get started is to share personal experiences, much like I’ve attempted to do in this guide. Invite your team to share stories about LGBTQ+ pride using tools like Vyond Studio.
Are you a non-profit organization dedicated to LGBTQ+ communities? I’d love to hear from you. Reach out to press@vyond.com to connect with our team about amplifying your work year-round.
Contact our team
#### Ace it with GIFs: Small Animations that Make a Big Impact
Our everyday lives are abuzz with calls, emails, pings, and rings. This fast-paced, digital world can make it difficult for anybody who’s trying to reach a distracted audience.
Going beyond the written word is an easy way to get your message across effectively and efficiently. (It can be pretty fun, too!) After all; rich media moments are the best way to engage audiences in today’s hyper-saturated landscape. Even in 2017, Hubspot found people pay more attention to video content and skim written content.
With Vyond Studio, you have the power of visual communication right at your fingertips. It’s easy to make media that moves, and even a GIF made in five minutes can have a long-lasting impact.
This year, we’re dealing you in to better ways of communication with a full deck of ideas for using Vyond. Here are four fun examples of how to make an animated GIF that can take your message to the next level:
Meeting Invitations
Automated Vacation Responder
Ambient Movement in Presentations
Marketing Your Training
4 ways to use GIFs in everyday communication
1. Meeting Invitations
Go beyond boring calendar notifications, and invite folks to your next meeting with a GIF!
By using Vyond’s Character Creator, you can personalize your invitation to show who’s invited, who’s coming, and who’s leading. You can also include other visual cues that are easy to digest at-a-glance.
You can send your invitation by email and share it across other platforms like Slack, Microsoft Teams, and community groups. In this example, Vyond’s own Shari Bryant enticed her teammates to join a new company book club.
If you already have an account in Vyond, you can import this invite as a template and customize it!
USE THIS INVITE TEMPLATE
2. Automated Vacation Responder
A text-based “Out of Office” message is a huge bummer. All it stands for is a slower response.
By animating your automatic reply, you can get closer to your contacts by showing what you’re up to. It’s also a more memorable way to update folks on when they can expect you to get their email.
Create your own vacation responder in Vyond Studio, starting with a generic GIF. You can then quickly customize it with new dates, scenes, and activities when you need it. They’re also a great way to send seasonal cheer during a regional holiday.
Sign into your Vyond account or free trial and click below to import this video template into your account.
USE THIS OOO TEMPLATE
3. Ambient Movement in Presentations
Static presentation slides can disengage audiences faster than you can launch PowerPoint. Adding GIFs to master slides is a superb way to draw viewers in.
Unlike the popular GIFs you see on social media, this animation features slow ambient movement that draws the eye to the most important information. By incorporating iconography, it also gets everybody on the same page—or slide—in a more accessible way.
In Vyond’s webinars, we apply this idea with scene templates like this one. By making the most of the enter effects and motion paths in Vyond Studio, we can engage audiences even while we’re still settling in.
Copy this scene template into your Vyond account by clicking the button below!
USE THIS SCENE TEMPLATE
4. Marketing Your Training
Your training might be fun, informative, and highly impactful, but that won’t matter if you can’t even engage your team to attend the session.
Apply a marketer’s mindset to “sell” your training! With something as quick and simple as a GIF, you can create a fun way for getting the word out.
Promote your courses with a GIF or animated marketing video that shows folks why they should attend rather than telling them. Make it fun, make ‘em laugh, and make it in minutes with Vyond Studio.
If you have a Vyond account, you can import this example as a video template and add your own custom characters.
USE THIS PROMO TEMPLATE
Create your own GIFs with Vyond Studio.
When it comes to how you communicate, play with a full deck of cards. Vyond Studio gives you the power of video, GIFs, and more with animations that you create. It’s quick to make rich media that engages your audience and captures their attention. Our resource library and help center make it easy by showing you exactly how to create your own GIF. Give it a try with our free trial, no credit card required.
TRY VYOND FREE
#### Advanced animation with Vyond and Adobe
Vyond’s built-in animation features allow professionals of all skill levels to create compelling videos. With a full library of customizable templates, it only takes a few minutes to begin creating engaging content. Professional creators can enhance their Vyond productions with advanced video animation tools like Adobe Photoshop and Adobe After Effects.
With these tools, you can make Vyond objects appear to move faster with motion blur, incorporate Vyond characters or props into your logo with masking, and create dynamic enter and exit effects that are sure to add more excitement to your videos — to name a few examples.
While we continue to research and build advanced animation techniques into Vyond Studio, here are a few ways to enhance your Vyond videos with Adobe products.
Try Vyond for Free
Motion blur
A standard Adobe After Effects setting, motion blur, is how our eyes perceive motion. Wave your hand back and forth in front of your eyes and notice how blurry it is. This blur is what allows us to smoothly perceive movement. If you think about it in frames per second, the motion blur blends the movement in each frame together, making the motion continuous and smooth. Movement appears more realistic when there’s a blur on fast-moving subjects.
Here’s a Vyond example with motion and camera movement, but no motion blur:
Here’s the same example with motion blur added with Adobe After Effects:
See the difference? The cars in the foreground appear more closely to how your eyes would see them in real life.
How to add motion blur to your Vyond videos with After Effects
This effect can be achieved by more experienced video creators familiar with Adobe Photoshop and After Effects.
Build your Vyond video (without the props you’ll add a motion blur to later) and export an HD version.
Screenshot your Vyond props on a solid color background.
Import your screenshot(s) into Photoshop (or another image editing application) and remove the background so the prop is now on a transparent layer.
Save as a .psd (or .png with transparencies enabled).
Import the transparent layered file and your Vyond video file into After Effects and add both to a new composition.
Give the prop a motion path by keyframing its position, enable motion blur for the prop’s layer, then enable motion blur for the composition.
If you’re not quite sure how to do all that, but would like to give it a try, check out these tutorials on YouTube:
Creating transparent backgrounds in Photoshop
Creating motion paths in After Effects
Creating motion blur in After Effects
Masking
Masking is also a common After Effects tool. It works similarly to the masking function in Vyond Studio, but with more control. Like in Vyond, a mask can be used to show or hide part of a character or prop. However, in After Effects, you can draw a mask in any shape you’d like, use keyframes to change that shape over time, feather the edges, and lots more. Using a mask and motion path in After Effects is how we get characters and props to move inside the letters of our logo.
Here’s what creating a mask looks like in After Effects:
For a YouTube tutorial on creating and using masks in After Effects, click here. And to learn a workaround for masking letters and logos in Vyond, click here.
Transition and enter effects for advanced animations
Adobe Animate is another helpful tool you can use to enhance what’s available in Vyond Studio. Our animation team created these examples to demonstrate how custom transitions and enter effects can impact storytelling. In the examples below, the Vyond-only animation is on the left and the example on the right was enhanced in Adobe.
Bounce effect
The first GIF has a default slide-up effect applied to it in Vyond. The second GIF has a custom bounce effect from Adobe. You can see that the house blocks look more alive because the animation adds anticipation and a sense of gravity.
Dynamic Transition
In this scene, the bouncing wall effect (right image) increases interaction between the two assets and creates a more cautious feeling when the shark slides into the little fish. The simple Vyond slide effect (left image) has less tension.
Follow through
When the chair drops (right image), its shakiness follows. This is called “follow through.” The follow through effect is more lively and realistic compared to a simple slide down effect (left image).
Here’s how these effects come together in one video:
Please note: While this video was created in Vyond, select props are not yet available to customers and several elements were enhanced with Adobe. We are not able to provide this video as a Vyond template.
The transition and enter effects above were inspired by the 12 principles of animation. Watch this video to learn more. Click here for an introductory tutorial on Adobe Animate.
Create advanced video animations with Vyond and Adobe
As you can see from the examples above, using Adobe Photoshop, Animate, and After Effects with Vyond can significantly enhance the quality of your videos. By incorporating these advanced video animation techniques, you can enhance your Vyond videos and drive engagement and enjoyment.
Make a video in Vyond
#### Agile for Content Creators: Webinar Recap
Last month, I hosted a Vyond webinar on Agile Development for Content Creators. Over the course of an hour, we took a cursory look at the agile movement that arose from software development. We also began to explore in practical terms how content creators of any discipline could apply those principles to their creative process.
An hour is hardly enough time to cover such a broad, diverse, and deep subject as the agile mindset, so—in the spirit of agility—I let the audience decide which topics we would explore in more detail. That’s right: even our webinar was agile!
I borrowed from an agile facilitation technique for agenda-free meetings to ask attendees what content they care about. (It turns out that, sometimes, building the right content really is as simple as asking people what they want.)
Today, I thought I’d recap some of the concepts we covered and link out to a few resources and bonus materials. Read on for a quick introduction to agile for content creators, and watch the full webinar recording on-demand here.
An Introduction to the Agile Mindset
Agile is a journey of continuous learning, and I was lucky enough to start mine at ICAgile: a prominent accreditation and certification body for agile training. I got to work on their marketing team for three and a half years prior to joining Vyond, and during that time, I got a really great foundation in the agile mindset.
The term “agile mindset” was coined by ICAgile co-founder Ahmed Sidky, who built upon Dr. Carol Dweck’s work to show how continuous learning is at the heart of business agility. This is an important distinction from popular discourse on Agile. It isn’t a way of doing things, it’s a way of being, grounded in a willingness to discover, change, experiment, and fail.
In preparation for our webinar, I hopped on the phone with Ahmed himself to talk about this idea. Our call was so great, we hopped into Vyond Studio to create an animated explainer video with kinetic type and imagery:
How to Create Content in an Agile Way
During our webinar, I employed a Lean Coffee approach to decide which topics were most valuable. I gave six pitches to the audience of topics we could explore further:
Agile Values
Agile Workflows
Agile Project Management
Promoting an Agile Culture
Roles on an Agile Team
Continuously Improving Your Content
After a quick poll, we settled on three of those topics to discuss in the webinar: Agile Workflows, Agile Project Management, and Continuously Improving Your Content. Read on to review some of the concepts we covered!
Agile Workflows
Transforming the way we create content sounds great and all, but how do we even begin with the daily onslaught of new work coming at us?
Content creation is really difficult to manage in a way that is similar to software development. We creators often suffer from “death by a million cuts,” constantly cranking out tiny tasks like correcting typos, drafting emails, and designing single-use graphics. We’re expected to simultaneously tackle larger projects with whatever advance notice we’re afforded, be it creating a short film, developing an employee training program, or implementing a rebrand.
Overburdening yourself with too much work in progress results in decreased focus, decreased productivity, and decreased follow-through. It also often means that your most valuable content never gets produced, all while simple low-value content gets cranked out.
To avoid that, agilists instead adopt a “pull” system of work. Aside from getting your work out more quickly, a pull system enables you to get out the *right* work more quickly. This all starts in the backlog.
The backlog is a space to collect new tasks and actively prioritize them according to their value (to the business, and to your audience). Even if your backlog is too long to ever empty out, the important thing is you know what’s most valuable. You then pull those most valuable tasks or content into progress, consciously reducing the amount of work you have in progress at any given time.
It’s important to visualize this pull system of work to develop a shared understanding across your team of what’s most important. It allows collaborators to help get your top priorities done, and collectively avoid too much work in progress (or WIP). Here’s a GIF I made in Vyond showing an example of how to visualize flow-based work with a Kanban-style task board:
Looking for a tool to visualize content workflows in an agile way? Check out Kanban Tool, Asana or Trello!
Agile Project Management
The authors of the Agile Manifesto built upon the four values of an agile mindset with twelve principles. A few of those principles have great insights for any content creator embarking on a larger project:
Welcome changing requirements, even late in development.
When you write a campaign brief or describe what you need from your contributors, how fixed are those requirements?
If you’re in the business of writing requirements for content that others will help create, it is in your best interest to write requirements that are focused on outcomes, open to creative interpretation, and flexible enough to adapt to new information. If you’re a writer or designer in the business of fulfilling such requirements, it’s in your best interest to be patient and open to change.
Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.
If you work on a team that produces content, keep an eye out for ideas that bring a sparkle to your teammate’s eyes. By being open to divergent ideas and even weird experiments with your content, you welcome the opportunity to discover a truly special way to reach your audiences.
Conversely, second-guess any projects nobody seems motivated to finish. Some important work is, of course, groan-worthy. But, if none of your creators find the content compelling enough to get excited about making it, it’s worth asking just how valuable that content will be to your audience.
The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.
When you’re kicking off a content project, don’t dole out assignments and requirements right off the bat. Instead, consider working with contributors to identify and organize the tasks that need to be performed. If you’re managing the project, you can instantly make it more agile by focusing your efforts on coordinating, and not defining, the work.
Start by giving contributors a prompt, and leave some room for contributors to create their own to-do lists and deadlines. They’ll be motivated and invested in the project, and your content will be stronger for it.
At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior.
How many of us content creators are guilty of finishing a project and then never talking about it again?
It’s (too) easy to move on from a major effort and to immediately shift focus to the next big project on the horizon. When you do that, though, you miss out on learnings that are essential to create your best content.
In the agile world, these meetings (or “ceremonies”) are called retrospectives. There are tons of great templates and resources out there for facilitating powerful retrospectives. No matter how you do it, though, the thing is to build the muscle to reflect on your work as a trusting, collaborative team. Ideally, your content team can have regular retrospectives (say, monthly). In the very least, you should schedule a debrief session after any major undertaking.
Continuously Improving Your Content
Agile content creation is predicated on a fundamental shift in our mindset. We’re moving on from printshop-era approaches where we perfect and push “finalized” content. Rather than forcing one-way conversations onto our audiences, we can learn from and even engage them in the creative process.
To take on this mindset shift, you need to establish a culture where failure is learning, experimentation is welcome, and feedback is a gift. Beyond building a learning culture, you’ll need to rethink how you organize your work to ensure it can be continuously optimized.
Instead of publishing a whole series or campaign at once, try releasing content incrementally. By releasing small bits of content gradually over time, you have a chance to learn what works (and what doesn’t). That learning can then be directly applied to subsequent pieces.
Instead of fanatically following “best practices” in SEO or other formulaic disciplines, emphasize the opportunity to experiment with your work. If your team can’t decide how something should be done, start small with your wildest idea. You’ll inevitably learn what works best, and also open yourself up to new possibilities.
Instead of constantly focusing on the next deadline, take time to look at what you’ve already created. Recycle (and upcycle) content frequently, and don’t be shy about revamping old content. Acknowledge the natural learning that comes with the passage of time, and invest in proactive learning with retrospectives.
Instead of letting the highest paid person in the room dictate what you create, build a creative team rooted in openness, creativity, empowerment, and listening. Your best ideas will come from the people with the dirtiest hands, and your best content will be produced by motivated contributors.
And, finally, instead of being protective with your work, open yourself up to early feedback and contributions from unexpected sources. Look for authoring tools like Vyond that allow edit access and permission controls so that you can share drafts of your content early in the creative process.
Make videos in an agile way.
Break away from the pain of traditional video production and start making videos in an agile way. With collaboration tools like Vyond Studio, you’re able to restore collaboration and experimentation in the creative process while still unleashing the power of rich media. Vyond is designed to empower team members so that they can share information with engaging content. Get familiar with Vyond Studio’s teamwork features and try Vyond for Free.
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#### Animation and Learning, an eLearning Profile
Rebecca Ogrady-Marshall of eLearn Hub shares her insights on animated video in eLearning, and discusses her experiences using GoAnimate
Rebecca is the Founder of eLearn Hub, the foremost resource for online learning. At eLearn Hub, Rebecca focuses on making online learning simple by developing programs based on the most innovative and integrative learning procedures. She describes herself as a bit of a geek who likes developing eLearning tools and enabling teams to work together in the workplace.
Q&A with eLearn Hub Founder, Rebecca Ogrady-Marshall
About Rebecca
How did you get started in eLearning?
I was working in international education in South East Asia where resources were difficult to get. I found myself relying on a lot of classroom brainstorming activities online, using classroom blogs, and basically online facilities and collaboration tools.
It’s incredible what you do using online tools in education. I went back (again) to university and studied post grad by distance to learn more about online education practices and learning.
What made you decide to set up your own blog, eLearn Hub?
I had so many friends and connections asking about how to create their own courses. People with skills who wanted to pass them on and also earn a residual income. I realized that there was a real need to present supportive information in a way that anyone can easily understand and apply it.
What excites you the most about learning online?
Connecting with people around the world over shared progressive and positive learning experiences. People can not only learn about a topic but also different perspectives and ways of working together.
eLearning & Animated Video
What is your primary goal when creating online learning experiences?
Online learning has got to be fun, easy to understand and follow otherwise people find something else to do with their time. The fun can come from the reward of learning something. For me, it’s all about creating a smooth, seamless and fun experience. This applies across the board including business or tertiary learning.
Why should eLearning professionals use animated video?
Animated video is a great way to incorporate storytelling scenarios, exaggerate points and bring a scene to life. It can be used to demonstrate an idea and also to take the learning into a ‘different world’. Animated video also gives the opportunity for the learner to watch before taking part in an activity.
What caused you to consider using animated videos?
There was no one ‘cause’, I’ve always used different types of video and encouraged learners to create their own videos as part of projects or assessments. Animated video can be a much more light-hearted way to express an idea.
What were you using before GoAnimate to create videos?
Various online tools. There are tools to pull still shots into video and put music over the top, there are ways to integrate homemade short videos into learning scenarios. But I have often found these time consuming and more difficult to get a point across.
What are some of the challenges and perks of using animation for eLearning?
GoAnimate is easy to use, which is a definite perk. I’ve tried other tools that take longer to learn and don’t deliver such a seamless animation. The biggest challenge is making sure the animation fits the learning outcome. I think that’s always something to be aware of.
Using GoAnimate
Why do you prefer GoAnimate / what lead you to select GoAnimate?
Another eLearning friend introduced me to GoAnimate. I had tried a few different tools that had come out around the same time, but GoAnimate seemed to have more visual appeal and a wider array of features.
How has GoAnimate helped you achieve your learning goals?
I use GoAnimate for different goals in learning. Sometimes I use the whiteboard feature to explain a concept, or to introduce the different learning points in a unit. I use a scenario to demonstrate something that might happen in the ‘real world’ and then follow up with an activity.
At the moment I’m going through some plans for using GoAnimate on an LMS as a kind of ‘choose your own adventure’ learning experience.
What tools do you use in conjunction with GoAnimate? Why?
I use GoAnimate on different LMS’, for example, Moodle and various wordpress LMS’s. I’m doing some work on courses for Udemy and I’m looking at GoAnimate for explanations.
I download the videos and integrate them with Articulate Storyline, where I can add hotspots for interactions and use various other interactive tools. Here’s an example of GoAnimate and Storyline.
What is your favorite GoAnimate feature or use case?
My favorite features change regularly depending on what I’m working on. At the moment I’m loving the ability to explain concepts through the whiteboard feature. I’m working on a quite heavy, serious module for a business case, and I can lighten up the learning with the whiteboard feature and by having a character demonstrate as the camera pans around the whiteboard.
What is your favorite video example?
I have shared a video example that is integrated with Articulate Storyline. I like this one because it represents people’s frustrations with learning online. I thought of all the things that can distract from learning, animals, children, noise, surroundings, etc. and displayed this in a short interactive video. I’ve taken to having the character look out at the audience at the end of a video as it brings the shot back onto the learner.
eLearning Tips & Tricks
What are some things to watch out for when using animation? For example, keeping the integrity of the learning piece.
It is really easy to become distracted by all the features in GoAnimate. This is a good way to discover features, but, you have to maintain the integrity of the piece and not distract the learner. I made a video a while ago where I was able to incorporate an elephant and chickens roosting, but, it was really just a fun piece. It’s good to make things a bit quirky!
What is the most concerning thing for eLearning professionals? Biggest trends?
The most concerning thing is keeping up with technology. Technology has GOT to be EASY. A learning professional should keep their mind on how the learner is going to best take the information in and apply in the real world.
Technology supports this and shouldn’t be the driver, education should be the driver. The easier the technology, the easier it is to integrate into the learning.
What is the first step an eLearning professional should take when considering animated video?
Look at the objective for the piece of learning and plan out a video scenario that meets the objective. If it doesn’t meet the criteria it is just surplus.
What tips can you share with fellow video makers?
The biggest tip is that it’s ok to make mistakes, that’s how you learn. Also, if you’re time sensitive (and who isn’t) plan out what you want to achieve. A plan can be simple or complicated, remember that plans often change.
GoAnimate is a cloud-based animated video creation platform. With GoAnimate you can create animated videos for your business using hundreds of props, assets, and characters, representing hundreds of industries. Create professional videos with simple drag-and-drop tools for a low monthly cost. Try the free trial today!
#### Answer Complex Qs with Videos for Finance & Operations
Videos for finance can bring boring content to life!
Video taps into visual thinking better than any other medium. As a result, abstract ideas become easy to understand.
All year long, Vyond has been dealing readers into better business communication with a full deck of 52 ideas for animated videos. And, today, we’re highlighting the toughest topics to turn interesting.
Short videos can be a powerful tool for answering complex questions like:
What are stock options?
What are the stages of money laundering?
How do I report expenses?
Moreover, video is a great way to take your presentations and reports to the next level. Read on for four fresh examples of videos for finance and operations!
Videos for Finance & Operations
What are stock options?
Stock options are a powerful way to let employees share in the success of a company. Therefore, it makes sense that startups often offer them. These benefits can be confusing for some new hires. So, creating a short video tailored to your company’s offer can go a long way!
This stock options explainer video is available to Vyond customers as an editable template.
EDIT THIS VIDEO
What are the three stages of money laundering?
The three stages of money laundering are placement, layering, and integration. Money laundering works by making dirty money untraceable. Then, that money can be re-introduced to the economy. Money laundering relies on moving money through lots of different companies. So, all organizations should train its employees to prevent money laundering.
Anti-money laundering training can be pretty confusing. So, it makes good sense to reach for video in order to engage employees.
This anti-money laundering video is available to Vyond customers as an editable template.
EDIT THIS VIDEO
How do I report expenses?
It’s important to get expense reporting right. But, for many employees, expensing remains confusing and unclear. Explainer videos are an opportunity to make these policies easy to understand.
Vyond makes it easy to edit your videos. So, you can ensure employees have up-to-date information.
Take presentations to the next level.
Have you ever suffered from death by PowerPoint? Indeed, static slides will kill even the most interesting presentations. But, a webcam recording isn’t always enough to bring presentations to life.
With Vyond, you can punctuate presentations with playful animation. Further, you can boost understanding of the material by illustrating key ideas in an illuminating way.
For example, watch the video above. Vyond’s marketing communications manager used GIFs to accentuate their presentation on social media video marketing.
Make your own videos for finance and operations.
Move over, marketing and sales! There’s a new cool kid in the office. To sum up, topics related to finance and operations don’t have to be boring. Certainly, they can be dynamic, distinct, and downright delightful. Vyond allows anybody to quickly create content with customizable video templates that represent hundreds of industries. Start making media that moves with a free trial of Vyond Studio.
TRY VYOND FREE
#### April 2021 Product Updates: Align and Distribute
Two New Tools: Align and Distribute
Introducing two new productivity enhancing tools – align and distribute.These tools ensure that your props and characters are quickly and perfectly spaced across your scene.
LEARN MORE
Motion Path Update
Next time you’re adding motion path to a scene, you’ll notice two timing options available in the settings. The default setting for a preset motion path will be ‘Auto Fit’. When a motion path has ‘Auto Fit’ selected, the timing will match the scene duration. If you wish to adjust the delay or duration of the motion path, you can choose ‘Custom’ to alter them as you like.
Healthcare and Pharma Pack
With the world’s eyes on healthcare to move us forward from the pandemic, we are adding a bumper pack of content related to the healthcare, biotech and pharma industries in Business Friendly style, including laboratory props, templates and actions.
USE THIS TEMPLATE
Newly Added Content:
9 templates
7 backgrounds
141 props
40 actions for Adults
2 actions for Kids
Character Creator items for Adults and Kids, including 1 Upper, 1 Lower, 1 Feet, 1 Hair, 1 Accessory
4 stock characters
#### April 2026 Vyond Newsletter
Watch the Video Now
Make “exactly right” videos with Photo to Avatar, Text to Video Clip, and our new expressive Gemini voices.
Watch How
Stop wasting time fixing the same tricky pronunciations. Use custom pronunciations instead.
Learn More
Get video tips, product updates, and more info about our all-new Vyond Community.
Join a May Learning Session Now
Read the video transcript below
When you’re making mission critical videos for your team, we know how important it is to get every detail exactly right. Luckily, Vyond is all about creative control, so you never have to settle for “close enough.” And now we have three new AI tools to help you ensure your videos are as relevant and effective as possible. For example, our new expressive and editable Google Gemini voices allow you to prompt a voice to sound exactly how you want it, not just “in the ballpark.”
With our new Text-to-Video Clip tool, you can create short, high quality video clips from simple text or images. That means more creative flexibility. And with our Photo-to-Avatar feature, you can turn any picture of a person or character into a dynamic host, so your video is as relevant and effective as possible. Tired of fixing the same text-to-speech mistakes over and over again?
Good news. We’ve upgraded our Text-to-Speech tool so you can now save custom pronunciations to your library. So whether it’s a brand name, technical jargon, or just a word that always trips up text-to-speech, you’re guaranteed to get the right audio read every time. Along with all of this creative control.
Vyond also delivers you world class support. Join one of our upcoming Vyond Community events to get product updates, video tips, and all of your burning questions answered by Vyond experts. And be on the lookout next week for an email invite to join the Vyond Community. So to recap, get more creative control — and more effective results — with Vyond’s new editable Google Gemini voices, our Text-to-Video Clip tool, Photo-to-Avatar, and custom pronunciations in text-to-speech.
And don’t forget to check out our May learning sessions for helpful tips and updates. What will you make in Vyond today?
More from Vyond
How to Make AI Videos in Minutes
Prompting AI: Getting the Best Results from Vyond Go
AI-Powered Instant Translation
#### Ask Me Anything with Karl Kapp, Instructional Technology Graduate Professor at Bloomsburg University
In this post, Karl’s answers to the first Vyond AMA (ask me anything), featuring crowdsourced questions from Vyond customers related to gamification, incorporating Vyond into eLearning applications, VR, and more.
Karl Kapp is an Instructional Technology Graduate Professor at Bloomsburg University in Bloomsburg, PA. Watch or read Karl’s responses to your instructional design questions below.
How can I learn more about gamification and how to develop eLearning using this methodology? If someone would like to know more about gamification and its implementation where should they start?
KK: I’ve developed a number of resources to help in that area. You might want to follow me on Twitter @kkapp, I regularly post articles about gamification, links to gamification resources, and provide information and statistics about what is happening in the field. So that’s a good place to start.
In addition, I’ve written three books that I think can be very helpful in learning about gamification for learning. The first is called “The Gamification of Learning and Instruction: Game-based Methods and Strategies for Training and Education.” It’s got a white cover and describes the elements of games and how they related to learning and provides the theoretical background to why gamification is effective for learning.
The second book I’ve written on the topic is “The Gamification of Learning and Instruction Fieldbook: Ideas into Practice.” This book has a black cover and the idea is that it takes the concepts from the first book and shows examples, provides worksheets of how to create gamified learning, and provides a high-level look at implementing the concepts from the first book. But It’s not step-by-step. If you want a step-by-step book, focused on creating learning games, the book I just co-authored with Sharon Boller called “Play to Learn: Everything You Need to Know About Designing Effective Learning Games” is a step-by-step nine-step process that walks you through the entire process.
If you don’t have the time to read or want to jump right into instruction. I have three courses on LinkedIn Learning that would be helpful. They are:
“Gamification of Learning”, which provides a nice overview of gamification and the elements of gamification.
“Gamification of Interactive Learning”, which provides a little more in-depth look at gamification and the types of gamification vendors are offering. And,
“Learning How to Increase Learner Engagement”, which is less about gamification and more about general engagement techniques.
Also, if you’d prefer to take a graduate course, I offer a course in Gamification at the graduate level. It’s a 15-week in-depth course that covers all aspects of gamification. And, at Bloomsburg, we’ve just launched an Instructional Game Design Certificate that consists of five courses that will provide a certificate in Instructional Game Design. Very excited about that certificate program.
How can I incorporate Vyond videos in eLearning applications such as Adobe Captivate to create interactive learning activities? If so, I would love to learn more about the setup of the learning application to accommodate Vyond’s format.
KK: One great thing about Vyond is that you can export videos in several different formats and one great thing about almost every authoring tool like Captivate, Storyline, and Lecture (to name a few) is that they all allow for the importation of videos. That means that moving a video out of Vyond and into an authoring tool is easy.
With most authoring tools all you need to do to import a video is to go to the “video import” button or icon, click on it and a dialogue box walks you through importing the video. It’s that easy in almost every authoring tool I’ve ever used. But to make it even easier for you, let me go to my whiteboard. Here is a link for the instructions to upload a video into Captivate and into Storyline. Take a look at the process, you’ll see it’s pretty simple and straightforward.
When do you think we might start seeing more of gamification and instructional design through Virtual Reality platforms?
KK: We are starting to see instructional design become a hot topic within Virtual Reality. It seems to be that every learning technology starts with a great deal of hype around the technology and the focus seems to be on the technology first and then the industry seems to start to focus on instructional design. And good instructional design doesn’t change based on technology, good instructional design first focuses on the learning need and then decides what technology is the most appropriate. I’ve written several articles on instructional design for virtual reality. Here are some links for you to check out::
Four Essentials for Effective Learning Using Virtual Reality
3 Instructional Design Strategies for Virtual Reality Learning
Principles for Creating a Successful Virtual Reality Learning Experience
Now, in terms of gamification and Virtual Reality, I think VR is a better-suited technology for game-based or scenario-based learning. So look for interactive game-based learning or scenario-based learning to be the killer app for VR as opposed to gamification. Because VR totally immerses the learner in the environment, you don’t need to use elements of games (which is gamification). Instead, you can use an entire game design paradigm for the VR learning event.
How do you best use whiteboard animation? In what context would you use whiteboard animation?
KK: Whiteboard video animation is great for conveying all kinds of instructional content. However, I think there are two areas where it is specifically powerful. Let me turn to the whiteboard to illustrate.
To illustrate a process or procedure. Whiteboard videos are great for visually showing the steps of a process, the order of the steps, and the relationship of each step to one another. Each step can be drawn individually, explained in context, and then shown in relation to the other steps in the process or procedure. This works really well to describe a linear process like the ADDIE model (Analysis, Design, Develop, Implement and Evaluate) But it can also be helpful for nonlinear processes like describing a nonlinear version of the instructional design model that is surrounded by a circle that includes planning and revision. The visual on the whiteboard really helps the learner visualize the model.
To describe a complex concept or relationship. Whiteboard or explainer videos are great for explaining how one thing relates to another. As an example, explaining the relationship between the three branches of the United States government. The Legislative, Executive, and Judicial branches are all separate but all connected to each other and all have inter-dependencies. For example, the Legislative branch can pass a law but the Executive Branch can veto the law and the Judicial branch can declare a law unconstitutional. It’s a non-linear relationship that is easier to explain with images and examples than text. That’s where whiteboard explainer videos can be so powerful. Those videos are a great way to show the complex relationships between the three branches of government. Many organizations have similar complex relationships among divisions for example and whiteboard videos are a great way to explain those relationships.
What kind of purpose could animations serve in a course scenario?
KK: One thing an animation does very well is to help tell a story. I’ve seen animation embedded into a scenario-based learning course where the scenario is introduced by animation and then once a learner makes a decision that is presented to him or her in the scenario, an animation plays out the consequences of the learner’s decision and I’ve even seen animations used to then show the epilogue or conclusion to the total actions the learner has taken.
Well-placed animations within a scenario course allow the learner to witness what happens when they choose a certain response and see the answer play out based on their answer. Animations in a video game, for example, help to advance the narrative of what is happening within the game, and animations in scenarios can serve the same purpose. I think there are lots of opportunities to use animations within scenario-based learning.
I’m working with a very large number of stakeholders who provide a lot of contradicting comments on the content. What should I do to keep my stakeholders happy yet stop discussing subjective views?
KK: The trick to helping to lessen the subjectivity of feedback from stakeholders is to hold them to specific, quantitative feedback and not ask open-ended questions. When we ask people for feedback, they feel compelled to do something so they look really hard to correct something and they end up wordsmithing content or providing subjective input (I don’t like the character’s green hair).
So, rather than ask for general feedback (“can I have feedback on this course by next Monday”), give them a checklist telling them exactly what they should comment on and what kind of feedback you specifically want from them. For example, ask them “Does this content accurately reflect the corporate safety policy on enclosed spaces?” Yes or No. If not, what is missing? Or ask, “Is this content factually correct?” Or “Does the instruction provide the right level of detail for a new employee to perform this procedure?”
You can even get more objective in the evaluation by asking “On a scale of 1 to 5, how clear is the description of the safety policy? If you rated it rated a 1 -3 on the poor end, what is missing or unclear, and please be specific. This allows them to show you that they’ve reviewed the content without them feeling they have to wordsmith the content to show you they conducted a review.
The more structured and formal you are in requesting feedback, the more on-topic and direct the feedback will be without subjective views. No, you won’t eliminate all subjective feedback this way, but you will greatly minimize the subjectivity.
How can you possibly duplicate the required sales soft skills training that you get when conducting ‘live’ training sessions by using animation and video?
Let’s not think of animation and video as replacing “live” training sessions, let’s think of them as augmenting live sessions. First, let’s talk about two things that cause difficulty with live sales training. One is that a great deal of live sales training centers on the process of conducting role plays. When doing a role-play only one or two people are actually applying the sales skills, the rest of the folks are observing, and if one person in the role-play is doing something wrong or incorrectly, then all the learners are observing the wrong behavior.
Say the behavior has to be corrected and tried again, but because of the large class size, the person who did it wrong doesn’t have a second chance. It’s someone else’s turn. Second, believe it or not, sometimes salespeople will “collude” with each other during the role-play and the role-play becomes so easy that a sale is guaranteed because the two people are working together. Or, the opposite, one person is so obstinate that a sale never happens. And actually, when you are performing a behavior such as in a role-play, it’s often difficult to correctly reflect on what you did during the role-play because you are so caught up in the role play you don’t realize what you are doing.
Don’t get me wrong, role plays can be great for applying skills but jumping into roleplays might not lead to the learning you want. So before the “live” sales training/role play, it might be good to provide videos or animations of the best way to have the desired sales conversation.
Video and animation can provide a perfect example of the exact behavior, body language, and demeanor you want from your salesperson. And, with a video, any part of the sales conversation can be frozen, rewound, or reviewed as many times as the salesperson in training needs to learn the process. A video of the sales process can be the perfect example of the best way to approach the sale.
And observing behavior, attitudes and body language is a great way to learn those skills, according to Albert Bandura (an educational theorist). There is something called social learning theory, which is where people learn by observing others’ behavior, attitudes, and outcomes of those behaviors. Video is perfect for this. In fact, video provides content and instruction at the learner’s own pace and allows for careful observation of what is happening in the “sales” process.
According to Bandura, most human behavior is learned observationally through modeling: from observing others, we form an idea of how new behaviors are performed, and on later occasions, this coded information serves as a guide for action. So use video and animations to model the ideal behavior and use the live sessions for practice.
What is the best way to begin the initial implementation of virtual/simulation software to enhance technical training for a fairly new training program with a limited training budget?
KK: The first step of any learning initiative is to make sure it is meeting an actual, measurable business need. Once you have done that step, you can inexpensively use PowerPoint to create a branching simulation of software. So what you do is storyboard the flow of the screens you want to simulate.
Then conduct screen captures of the software screens and then create links in PowerPoint to move the learner from one screen to another or make the links in the right place on the screen where the learner needs to click. You can create invisible links in PowerPoint so it doesn’t interfere with the look of your software screen. Here’s a link to some slides that help explain. You may also want to consider a branching tool like Twine to provide some assistance.
Where do you see the eLearning industry going and what are some key trends that are shaping it?
KK: Key trends shaping our industry are technological innovations. I think Virtual Reality is going to occupy center stage in our industry for the next five years and it will be closely followed by Augmented Reality which, I think, will have a bigger impact on eLearning than Virtual Reality.
People don’t really like to wear VR goggles, but when Augmented Reality becomes integrated with regular glasses, you’re going to see it used all over the place to assist people with work instructions, standard operating procedures, and assisting customers on a retail sales floor Augmented Reality is definitely something on the horizon that eLearning professionals should be paying attention to. Also, pay attention to adaptive learning and, of course, gamification. I think that the software interfaces we use today will morph in the next 10 years to be much more game-like.
During the instructional design process, how do you identify areas where gamification would drive the learning objectives? I’ve seen gamification in segments and as whole pieces. Which approach is best and when in your opinion?
This is the old “it depends” answer. I would rarely use gamification for everything and most likely use it in segments. Gamification can be really effective as pre-work for a course and as post-work to pull content through and help learners remember the content after the initial instructional event. In those two cases, it’s gamification as a segment. One segment before learning intervention and one segment after.
Gamification is especially effective for helping employees and students learn conceptual, declarative, or factual, knowledge. This is because of the repetitive nature of gamification and the typical question-and-answer construction used in many gamification tools.
Requiring learners to recall information helps to reinforce the information and makes recall faster and more efficient. Many topics can be covered using gamification. Gamification is often used in new employee orientation, or onboarding, to provide a motivating, interesting, and engaging method of introducing employees to a new company. Gamification is often used to teach salespeople new features and functionalities of products they’ll be selling, and it’s been used to reinforce leadership skills.
Having said all that, gamification can help set the stage. If you have a comprehensive subject or process, like teaching how to conduct an audit or design instruction, I might put the learner in a gamified experience and have them actually conduct a mock audit or develop instruction for a fictional client. So I think it depends on the content and what you are trying to teach whether or not to segment or us it for the entire design and delivery of the instruction. The key is to look at what you are teaching and determine what instructional strategy is best.
Our company is creating customized training and LOVES PPT. What are effective ways of using Vyond and incorporating my company’s slides or examples?
KK: Not sure what your company’s PowerPoint training slides look like but most are simply bulleted text. Unfortunately, bulleted text does not look so good in Vyond because you lose the visual element that is so compelling. So what I would do is use Vyond to animate your company examples so they can be easily understood. You can then export the Vyond videos and include them right in your PowerPoint slides. What I think you want to avoid is just making Vyond an animated PowerPoint deck.
Use PowerPoint for what it does best…show text on the screen in a linear fashion. Use Vyond to show relationships, illustrate stories (a great tool for conveying an instructional message), model appropriate behaviors, convey an instructional message, and show cause and effect. Choose the right tool for the right job.
Are there examples of how to use Vyond to build games?
KK: Vyond is not really a tool for developing games, there are lots of really good tools for game development such as a tool called Construct 2 (with Construct 3 In beta) and a tool called Twine which is a tool that lets you develop interactive stories that are kind of like Choose Your Own Adventure Books. If I was developing a game, I would not use Vyond, however, it is appropriate to use Vyond to create a video to set the scene or mood for the game as an opening video, as a video to help move the story along in the game, or to provide a tutorial on how to play the game. It’s important for instructional designers to use the right tool for the right job. So, for game development choose another tool, but for videos embedded in the game or a video to explain the game, Vyond would be a good choice.
I see articles where people mostly relate the usage of animated videos and game-based training programs with young learners and millennials. How much of this is true? What are the tips to develop these kinds of training programs for adult learners?
KK: Millennials and adults all learn the same way. There is no neurological difference found in research that indicates that young adults learn differently than older adults. So adults and millennials can both learn from game-based training programs and animated videos. I think the real issue is one of familiarity. It seems that millennials might be more familiar with video games and animated videos so they are more “open” to them.
However, I’ve seen plenty of “old folks” enjoy video games and animated videos. It’s not a learning thing, it is just a cultural thing. Our culture wants to believe that old people don’t learn from animation and game-based learning, but that’s not true. We all learn the same. So the question should be “what learning design is best for this content?” Sometimes animation is best, sometimes games are best, and sometimes text-based instructions are best. We need to focus on the design of the instruction, not the age of the learner.
What is the best way to support behavioral change processes?
KK: The best way to support behavioral change is to have continual reinforcement of the desired behavior. You can’t just teach behavior changes once and expect it to work. You need to continually reinforce the behavior change that you desire. Through training, incentives, and reinforcement of the correct or desired behavior, you can bring about that behavior change. Create job aides, reminders, and encourage managers to look for and reward specific desired behavior. It’s hard to do and needs to be a process but remember behavior change is not a one-time event, you need to work on it continuously.
For Healthcare training where is a good place to start with gamification?
KK: Gamification can be highly effective for teaching declarative knowledge, things that need to be memorized, so that’s a good place to start in Healthcare. Gamification is excellent for helping people learn terms, terminology, and acronyms. Conceptual knowledge can also be effectively conveyed via gamification, so I think that’s a natural second step: teaching concepts such as the mechanism of action or the concept of a certain class or drug, or treatment.
Outside of accumulating points and assigning badges, etc. – Could you speak to any specific examples of successful gaming approaches WITHIN eLearning courses? What have you found to have the most impact on learning?
KK: The one game element that everyone forgets about, but is far more powerful than points, badges, or leaderboard, is the freedom to fail. Games allow failure, encourage failure, and include failure as part of the process. In a game, usually, only one person can win and everyone else fails. However, because it’s framed within a game…the sting of failure is reduced.
And in fact, when you fail or lose in a game, you often want to play again because you think you can do better next time. This encourages non-linear, critical thinking, perseverance, and motivation. Compare that with most eLearning designs which punish failure, make you feel dumb if you aren’t successful, and force you to repeat content in exactly the same way you just experienced it.
Research is really clear that we learn so much more from failure than we do from success. So make your eLearning hard, encourage experimentation, and allow failure. In a game, failure is good because we usually start with three lives and expect to lose some. In eLearning, set the learner up to expect failure and then let them experience the eLearning environment, fail, reflect on that failure, and try again. That is a lesson from games we should all incorporate into our learning design. Points, badges, and leaderboards are not why people play games. Overcoming failure and doing better than you did last time are two reasons people play games, so let’s take the right things from games.
What tips would you give for developing online courses? What traps would you propose all eLearning creators should avoid?
KK: Here are my tips for developing an online course:
Start with a legitimate, verified organizational need. Not the whims of a manager or the random thoughts of an executive. Identify and measure the business objective driving the course.
Don’t make the course too easy. Too many eLearning courses are too easy and when a course is easy, people don’t think it’s valuable. You need to add some rigor to your eLearning courses.
encase your instructional message in a story. Stories drive learning, increase retention and provide models for learners to follow. So use stories in your instruction.
And here are my traps to avoid when developing your online course:
don’t start your eLearning module with a list of objectives. They are boring and are skipped by most learners. Instead, turn the objectives into questions. Don’t start with “You will learn three steps for closing a sale” because a good salesperson says “ha” I know four steps, stop wasting my time. Rather ask the question “Do you know three steps for successfully closing a sale?” Maybe the learner does and maybe she doesn’t but now she’ll pay attention to see if she knows the steps.
Avoid allowing an 80% pass rate on a quiz. Instead, do something like a question run. Tell the learner he needs to answer all five questions right and then he’s done. But if he misses even one, he’ll have to answer five more questions and tell this to the learner at the beginning. It’s amazing how people will pay attention because they don’t want to answer more questions than they need.
Treat the learner with respect. They have a certain degree of competence and knowledge or they wouldn’t be in the job, so don’t patronize or talk down to them. Instead, treat them as an adult and encourage thinking within the design of your eLearning module.
How do you tackle the people who discourage you?
KK: Well since I am not even six feet tall, I try not to tackle anyone. But joking aside, Carl Jung, a famous psychologist who established the discipline of analytical psychology once said “ The most intense conflicts, if overcome, leave behind a sense of security and calm that is not easily disturbed.”
Attempting to overcome doubters and those who have discouraged the use of games and gamification for learning has both focused my work and motivated my actions. I try to listen to what those who attempt to discourage me say and examine it to see if it has merit. That’s not always easy because critics and doubters are often cruel, but usually within any criticism, there is a hint of merit. Once somebody commented that if gamification was so great, why wasn’t I incorporating it into my presentations? At the time, that was a very valid critique. So now every one of my presentations about gamification is gamified.
I encourage anyone to look at their critics, doubters, and haters as stepping-stones to building a stronger, better position. These are people who, for free, test your assumptions and help you more strongly focus on your goals. Know you will always encounter obstacles and resistance if you are breaking new ground. You can’t plant new crops without disturbing the soil. So I don’t dwell on those who try to discourage me, I just work toward my own goals. Others can choose to come along or not.
#### Attribution Bias Video Templates
In this post, we share an example of an internal attribution bias training video, show you how we built it from scratch, give you the training video as a project template, and teach you the fastest way to make your own updates in Vyond.
Fundamental Attribution Bias Videos
As part of a growth mindset initiative in 2015, Vyond’s head of design wanted to train his team on attribution bias. Of course, he knows that breaking down complex topics is easier with animated video. So, in 2015, he created this:
Fast forward four years, and and we’re still using the video, but we wanted to make some updates. Here’s the new version in a completely different animation style, branded to Vyond, with a new voice over:
Ordinarily, updating a video years after the initial project would be an expensive and time-consuming endeavor, but that wasn’t the case here. We completely revamped this video in two days.
One of the greatest things about creating animated videos with Vyond is how easy it is to share, update, and repurpose video projects. Internal training can be adjusted for external marketing, a branded video template can be shared with the entire company, a recruiting video can become a holiday sale campaign, and more. We’ve done all of these things at Vyond, but our favorite way to repurpose our videos is to share them with you.
Video Templates
Take the attribution bias videos shared in this post and use them as-is at your company or make adjustments to create something entirely your own. You can also save individual scenes as templates to use later.
Version 1: Business Friendly
Sign into your Vyond account or free trial and CLICK HERE to open this video as a template project in your account.
Version 2: Contemporary
Sign into your Vyond account or free trial and CLICK HERE to open this video as a template project in your account.
How to Make Updates with Global Editing
To update this video we used the Global Editing feature, which makes it possible to make quick changes across your entire video. Customers with Professional or Enterprise plans now have access to this feature. Other plan levels provide the ability to swap assets individually, but not globally.
The video below is an example of how we used Global Editing to turn the first version of our video into the second. Watch a preview of the scenes to be updated and pay close attention to the desktop computer:
Creating Videos From Scratch
Updating complete videos, or using one of the thousands of scene templates available in Vyond, is surely the fastest way to make a video, but it isn’t the only way. Here’s what it would look like to create the last three scenes of this video from scratch:
About Vyond
Vyond allows people of all skill levels in all industries and job roles to create dynamic and powerful media. With features that go beyond moving text and images, you can build character-driven stories or compelling data visualizations that engage audiences and deliver results. With Vyond, it’s easy to create video for your training. Get started making your own videos today. Start a free trial today.
#### Augmenting Human Creativity with AI: Insights from Vyond’s Fall 2023 Storytelling Masterclass
Our Fall 2023 Storytelling Masterclass, special “AI and human creativity” edition, shared perspectives from a former Disney creativity and innovation leader, an AI-expert professor pushing boundaries, Vyond’s longtime-AI-advocate CEO, and a video producer extraordinaire. Here are a few of the big ideas we’re still thinking about. (While Duncan’s presentation is no longer available, you can still watch the session replays for Dr. Jules White, Vyond CEO Gary Lipkowitz, and Taylor Morgan. Check out the links below!)
Lean on AI as a “naive expert” to spark creativity and innovation
Even the most creative organizations on the planet face barriers to innovation. As employees and leaders, we’re often expected to think creatively without proper training in the skills we need to do so.
One of Duncan Wardle’s first missions in his role as Head of Creativity and Innovation at the Walt Disney Company was to uncover what those barriers to innovation were for the teams at Disney, Pixar, Lucas Films and Marvel. You may relate to the findings:
I don’t have time to think
We don’t have the resources
We say we’re consumer/client centric yet we’re measured by quarterly results, not our relationships with customers
Our ideas get stuck/diluted/killed as they move through approval processes
We all have very different definitions of creativity
He spent 30 years helping teams overcome those barriers. Based on that experience, here are a few of the simple tools Duncan shared to help break you and your team out of your same old “river of thinking”:
What if? Observe your industry or challenge without judgment and write down the written and unwritten “rules.” Then pick a few and ask, what if the rule didn’t apply? Be audacious. This is how industries get disrupted: think Blockbuster to Netflix and taxi cabs to Uber.
Where else? Look for where else in the world people may have already solved a similar challenge, perhaps for some other purpose.
Roll-on deodorant took its inspiration from ballpoint pens and paint rollers. Speedo studied nature’s shark-skin design for its Olympic-record-breaking men’s swimsuit (so successful it was later banned from competition).
Leverage AI as your “naive expert.” A naive expert is someone who doesn’t work in your industry. They’ll ask questions and propose wild ideas you wouldn’t come up with from the depths of your “river of thinking.”
AI tools like ChatGPT can serve as that naive expert, suggesting ideas drawn from insights across other industries to approach your challenge.
Design more personalized learning experiences with augmented — not artificial — intelligence
Dr. Jules White on how AI can help you design more engaging, personalized learning experiences
Dr. Jules White has picked up a thing or two about using AI tools from his work as director of the Vanderbilt Initiative on the Future of Learning & Generative AI and leading a ChatGPT prompt engineering course with Coursera.
He’s paving the way for L&D pros to make the most of AI tools for learning design and champions AI tools’ potential to provide personalized support for learners. Here are a few of his insights for L&D pros — and all of us as learners.
Think of AI prompts as conversations, not questions. The highest-quality output doesn’t come from a “one and done” question approach. Be ready for an exchange across a series of prompts that build on each other to help refine the responses you’re getting from ChatGPT.
Take advantage of “prompt patterns” as building blocks. Large language model tools, like ChatGPT for text output and Midjourney for images, respond especially well to established prompt patterns like the following:
For text generators
Persona pattern: “Act as [persona]. Whenever you produce an output, produce the outputs that [persona] would produce.”
Audience persona pattern. “Explain/write/tell x to/for [persona].”
For image generators
Describe the scene / medium / artistic style / color you expect. For example: “A neon highlighter drawing in a neoclassical style,” or “pop art painting of an alien stealing my lunch.”
Let’s rebrand AI to “augmented intelligence.” Augmented intelligence (AI+) puts humans at the center, rather than trying to replace human intelligence and creativity with “artificial” intelligence. AI+ is all about amplifying and enhancing human thought and capability.
Watch Jules White’s full session
We got more audience questions for Dr. White than he had time to answer during his session, so we caught up with him afterward. Watch the bonus Q&A video with Dr. White.
“Would Michelangelo take a hammer, hit a piece of stone once and say, ‘It doesn’t look like the Pietà—this is a terrible tool’? No. He’d use the hammer to chip away at the rock until he has something beautiful. It’s all about the skill of the person using the tool as well as the tool itself.”
– Dr. Jules White
Let Vyond bring the best of AI tools to you
Gary Lipkowitz: Vyond’s vision for AI means you don’t have to worry about keeping up with all the AI tools hitting the market.
As the AI landscape continues to evolve, keeping up can feel overwhelming. But Vyond CEO Gary Lipkowitz promises that soon you won’t have to. Vyond’s “applied AI” vision is to bring the most helpful AI tools to you, right in the platform.
Here’s a perfect example. Vyond’s 2023 Fall Release brings the launch of two new AI features to help you turn your vision into video:
Video to Action lets you animate any custom movement — yes, even that signature dance move! — by simply uploading an example video clip, and
Text to Prop allows you to generate any custom prop you want by describing it in a few words.
Advancements in generative AI mean that creating effective, engaging videos is getting ever easier and faster in Vyond — and even more closely delivering on your original vision, with assets that may or may not even exist yet!
Watch Gary’s full session
“My message to content creators: adapt, learn the tools, make them part of your skillset, and understand you’ll likely be expected to produce more and better content, faster.”
– Gary Lipkowitz
Take your video from first to final cut in Vyond Go and Vyond Studio
Taylor Morgan shows us how to create a first-draft video in Vyond Go.
In our closing session, Taylor Morgan of “Taylor Tinkers” fame demonstrates both ways you can use Vyond Go:
You can enter a general description of what you’re looking for and rely on AI to deliver a result based on its vast internet training data, or
If you’ve got specific details you’d like included in your video — say, talking points or steps in a procedure — you can paste those into your prompt, along with the general description of what you’re looking for.
A video producer by trade, Taylor shares some of his reflections on Vyond Go as he walks us through each option, including the following:
Beyond being a timesaver, Vyond Go also builds in effective video production techniques for you, like changing up the camera framing throughout your video, that help make it even more engaging.
Keep in mind that Vyond Go’s output is only a first draft (if you want it to be)! You can bring your first cut into Vyond Studio to customize anything and everything: characters, backgrounds, voiceover, language … you name it.
Asset view is your best friend for making instant, universal edits in Vyond Studio: select multiple scenes or assets to make updates across them all.
The best way to learn is to try it yourself! Once you’ve watched (or rewatched) Taylor’s session, log into Vyond and try making your own Vyond Go video. (Need a login? Play around in Vyond Go and Vyond Studio for free: get started now.)
Watch Taylor’s full session
*Note: Jump to 18:46 for Taylor’s portion of his joint session with Gary Lipkowitz.
“One of the best ways to create great videos fast is to make a quick first draft in Vyond Go and then polish it up: make a few changes or edit to your heart’s content in Vyond Studio.”
– Taylor Morgan
#### August 2026 Vyond Newsletter
Watch the Video Now
See six examples of what Vyond Turbo can do, hear how Vyond Community members get more from Vyond, and explore the updates in our most recent release.
Discover what our new agentic AI video platform, Vyond Turbo, can create from simple prompts and reference documents.
Watch the (Beta) Video Examples
Learn what these Vyond Community power users find most valuable about the platform.
Read Their Stories
See how you can edit images directly in Studio, bulk-edit Text to Speech faster, and expand your storytelling with new Storybook child characters.
Explore the Latest Release
Read the video transcript below
Lots of big things are happening this summer at Vyond. But the biggest has to be the introduction of a totally new way to make videos, Vyond Turbo, which is now in beta testing. Vyond Turbo turns your ideas and documents into vibrant professional videos, with AI handling the script, visuals, voiceover and production. Just describe what you want, ask for changes with a simple text prompt, and let Turbo do the rest, no editing needed. Click the link below to see six different video examples. Vyond Turbo is arriving this fall so be on the lookout for more details to come, or contact sales to learn more.
With our latest updates, Vyond keeps finding new ways to save you time and give you more creative control. With the addition of image generation model Nano Banana 2, you can now edit AI images directly in Vyond Studio. Generate images with a prompt or an uploaded reference, refine images, tweak context, or replace inconsistent backgrounds, all in the flow of work, saving you time. Our updated import and export text feature allows you to replace a whole text-to-speech script and audio, or to select which rows you want to replace, saving you time with a lot less manual work.
And now you can create Kids characters in our Storybook animated style, expanding your creative options to more effectively reach a wider range of audiences.
With insider tips, tricks, and thoughtful advice, Vyond Community is bringing members together to bond over all things Vyond. Now, members of Vyond Community are sharing the video tips and product features that help them create better content and keep them coming back. Click the link below to read their stories. And don’t forget to join our upcoming community event.
So to recap, Vyond Turbo is off to a strong start in beta, and look for more details to come. Vyond’s latest updates will help you edit AI images directly in Studio, streamline text-to-speech updates, and tell more relatable stories with new Storybook child characters. And as always, our Community is here to help you get even more out of Vyond. What will you make in Vyond today?
More from Vyond
How to Make AI Videos in Minutes
Prompting AI: Getting the Best Results from Vyond Go
AI-Powered Instant Translation
#### Be a Jack of All Trades with Vlogging
This year, Vyond is dealing you in with a full deck of 52 ideas for better business communication. Next up: vlogging!
Vlogging has come a long way since its inception during the early days of YouTube. Still not sold? Ask the 22,000 YouTubers with over a million followers!
No matter where you’re sharing video content, vlogging can teach us some invaluable lessons about building a personal connection with our audiences. When we share our own experiences and document compelling stories, we can engage viewers in impressively impactful ways.
Even if your goal isn’t to become a viral vlogger, you can co-opt the vlogging style with video content that tells a story. Businesses can learn a lot from vlogging in particular about creating serialized content and crafting consistent messages throughout their content. Even internally, vlogging can be an exciting medium for communicating with your team: from telling customer stories to sharing company updates.
With Vyond Studio, you can take your videos to the next level with dynamic animation and mixed styles. Here are four ideas to get started:
Travel Vlogging
LinkedIn Cover Stories
Food Vlogging
Animated Interviews
Ideas for Animated Vlogs
1. Travel Vlogging
Whether showing teammates where you went on vacation, or promoting a conference your company attended, travel vlogging is an excellent medium to use. By adopting a mixed-media approach, you can include all your images and videos with all the dynamism of animation.
The above video template is ready to use with any Vyond subscription.
USE THIS TRAVEL VLOG TEMPLATE
2. LinkedIn Cover Stories
Vlogging is a particularly powerful way to build your personal brand, and what better place to do that than LinkedIn? With their new Cover Stories feature, you can add a dynamic vertical video to your LinkedIn profile right where your avatar is displayed. Learn more in our comprehensive guide to LinkedIn Cover Stories!
Vyond customers can get a head start on creating their LinkedIn Cover Story by using the example above as a template.
USE THIS COVER STORY TEMPLATE
3. Food Vlogging
Food has a magical way of bringing people together. Why not use it to bring you closer to your audience? With themes of community, story, and pleasure, it’s no wonder that culinary content is among the most popular genres around the globe. Capitalize on the trend to build a personal connection with your viewers, even if you’re not a food expert.
In 2020, we created a series of food-related videos to help connect us to the broader Vyond community as part of a year-end promotional campaign. You can watch the full series here!
WATCH THE FULL SERIES
4. Animated Interviews
Interviews are fantastic storytelling vehicles—just look at podcasts! Starting a podcast has skyrocketed in popularity as a way to easily share powerful ideas in a more human way. By introducing animation to your recorded interviews, you can unlock that potential with dynamic, engaging visuals. With Vyond Studio, you can turn voice memos, phone calls, and Zoom calls into high quality animated interviews.
Vyond customers can open the above video in Vyond Studio to peek at the scenes we build with Vyond.
OPEN THIS VIDEO IN VYOND
Build personal connections with video.
Even if you’re not among the 30% of young people aspiring to become a professional YouTuber, vlogging can be a powerful tool for building meaningful connections. Those connections could be your teammates, future employers, and your customers. With authentic, personal, and visual storytelling, the possibilities are limitless. Get started with animated video with a free trial of Vyond Studio.
TRY VYOND STUDIO – NO CREDIT CARD REQUIRED
#### Best advanced Vyond tips of 2019
Once you’ve got the basics of Vyond Studio down, it’s time to transition to slightly more advanced Vyond tips to make content that wows your audience. Discover productivity tips to save you time and new ideas to spark your creativity from our best tips, tutorials, webinars, and resources of 2019.
Top 10 video resource posts of 2019
The future of work: reskilling employees with video
Netflix for learning: what streaming can teach L&D
Video translation 101
Onboarding videos for new hires
Cybersecurity training videos
6 tips for branding your videos
How to create videos to evoke emotion
Why our brains are wired for whiteboard animation
Kinetic typography in Vyond
Advanced animation with Vyond & Adobe
Best Vyond tutorials and webinars of 2019
Create your own animated video
#### Bring a Sixth Sense to your Customer Support with Video
This year, we’re dealing you in to better business communication with a full deck of ways to use Vyond Studio. Today, we’re sharing four of our favorite ideas for creating compelling customer support videos:
Self-Serve Help Center Videos
Agent Introductions
Annotated Screen Recordings
Personalized Follow-Up
As one of the most engaging mediums around, video enables you to forge meaningful connections with customers. Video also helps award-winning support teams create quality, on-demand content at scale. Key video metrics can tell you what content is most valued, which parts of each video are most helpful, and more.
Read on to find customer support video ideas for inspiration!
4 Ideas for Customer Support Videos
Self-Serve Help Center Videos
By bringing engaging, on-demand content into your help center, you can empower customers to solve their problems without creating a new ticket. This video from the Vyond Help Center offers bite-size customer education that is engaging, memorable, and rewarding to watch. By communicating with visuals and voice, too, you can communicate complex ideas in an easy-to-understand format.
Agent Introductions
Having a direct connection to the company can go a long way to build customer loyalty, giving you an opportunity to help the customer be as successful as possible while using your product. You can use video to nurture these kinds of relationships in a personal and approachable manner, putting a face to the name of your agents while deepening the customer’s connection to your company. Just look at the example above from a member of Vyond’s customer success team!
Annotated Screen Recordings
Translate complex processes into clear step-by-step videos using annotated screen recordings! By sharing a screen recording with your customers, you can easily show them how to navigate any interface as if you were standing over their shoulder. By adding animated annotations in Vyond Studio, you can highlight important elements and illustrate abstract ideas right on top of the recording.
The video above is a great example of how to embellish a screen recording effectively, and Vyond customers can use it as a customizable template to create their own annotated screen recordings.
USE THE TEMPLATE
Personalized Follow-Up
Did you know that videos you create in Vyond Studio can also be exported as GIFs? By putting content into an image format, you can easily share it via email, social media and beyond, taking customer education to a whole new level. You can also create a GIF like the one above for personalized follow-up, instilling a more human experience in automated processes like closing unresolved tickets.
Create your own customer support videos.
Once you add video to your customer support toolbox, a whole world of possibilities will unfold. From creating proactive content to training your agents, video can help you communicate more effectively while creating a consistent and delightful customer experience. Our online animation studio makes it easy for anybody to make media that moves. Give it a try for free!
TRY VYOND FREE
#### Celebrating Pride Month: LGBTQ+ Training Resources
For Pride Month, our Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion team has compiled a variety of LGBTQ+ training resources focused on the intersectionality of the Pride movement. Here’s a sampling of what we’re sharing internally to celebrate Pride.
Celebrating Pride Month
“June is Pride Month when the world’s LGBT[QIA+] communities come together and celebrate the freedom to be themselves.” While most Pride events are held in June, some cities celebrate at other times of the year. Today, celebrations include parades, picnics, parties, workshops, and concerts.
The original organizers of Pride chose this month to pay homage to the Stonewall uprising in June 1969 in New York City, which helped spark the modern gay rights movement.”
USE THIS TEMPLATE
Things to Know
What does LGBTQIA+ mean? What other terms should I know?
It is widely recognized by linguists that languages must evolve and adapt throughout time in order to survive. Language is an important way in which humans shape their identities, so it is important to continually learn and use terminology that accurately represents those diverse identities.
LGBTQIA+ is an acronym used to refer to people who identify as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Intersex, and Asexual. Gender and sexuality are generally understood as part of a spectrum, as such, there are many different ways in which people define them.
The LGBTQIA+ Resource Center at UC Davis has a comprehensive glossary of terms to help give a more thorough but not entirely comprehensive understanding of the significance of these terms.
the Pride flag
Before the now-iconic rainbow flag was created, there was no specific symbol for LGBTQIA+ rights. At the time, one of the more common symbols was a pink triangle, which had been reappropriated from its use by the Nazis who forced gay concentration camp prisoners to wear it.
In 1978, artist and designer Gilbert Baker was commissioned by San Francisco city supervisor Harvey Milk—one of the first openly gay elected officials in the US—to make a flag for the city’s upcoming Pride celebrations. Baker, a prominent gay rights activist, worked with Lynn Segerblom, his roommate and co-chair of the 1978 Gay Freedom Day decorations committee, to conceptualize the colorful rainbow design which gave a nod to the stripes of the American flag. While many have related the rainbow colors to the ideal of diversity, the original meaning of the Pride flag’s colors carried other symbolism as Baker used each color to represent central themes to queer experiences:
Life (red)
Healing (orange)
the Sun (yellow)
Nature (green)
Harmony (indigo)
the Soul (violet)
Baker’s original flag had eight stripes, including pink for sexuality and turquoise for art. While the six-stripe rainbow is the most common version of the flag, many have recently turned to another version which adds additional stripes. Brown and black stripes are increasingly included to pay homage to queer people of color who have advanced LGBTQIA+ culture and liberation. Recent years have also seen the inclusion of a tricolor triangle in pink, blue, and white to acknowledge the contributions of trans individuals.
The transgender flag is just one of a myriad of flags representing various identities across the spectrums of orientation and gender, such as bisexual, pansexual, and asexual. You can see the transgender flag at the very end of the video above.
To honor Gilbert’s memory a rainbow font was created in his memory. The Gilbert font in the video below is available for free.
U.S. Supreme Court on Discrimination
While there’s still much work to be done, many others before us have laid the groundwork for equal rights for LGBTQIA+ people under the law. In a historic victory for gay and transgender rights, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on June 15, 2020, that federal law prohibits employment discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity—discrimination currently allowed by laws in 27 states. That decision has yet to be cemented in legislation, with the most recent attempt being the pending Equality Act which would write gender and sexual orientation explicitly into anti-discrimination law.
Intersectionality: Pride and Black Identity
What is “Intersectionality”?
Intersectionality is a term coined in 1989 by professor Kimberlé Crenshaw to describe how race, class, gender, and other individual characteristics “intersect” with one another and overlap. Identity is inextricably intersectional because it is formed by these different individual characteristics.
Trailblazers You Should Know: Pride Edition
“LGBTQ and same gender loving African Americans have helped to shape the course of American history…In an interview with the Center for Black Equity, curator Aaron Bryant says, ‘It’s difficult to tell the story of African American history and culture without acknowledging the accomplishments and contributions of African Americans who cover a spectrum of identities and experiences, including gender identities and orientations. Our goal is to tell the story of America’s history through an African American lens, and so the museum embraces and celebrates the fact that black communities are diverse, as is American culture and history.'”
Read more about trailblazers to know and watch a few of their stories below:
The Deep Connections between Pride and Black Lives Matter
“On June 27, 1969, a police raid of the Stonewall Inn in New York City touched off a series of protests and militant actions that would come to be called the Stonewall Riots.
The uprising was sparked by constant police harassment and repression of the LGBTQIA+ community. From that moment on, Pride was about protest.
Now – 51 years later – people are once again in the streets, protesting police brutality. The fact that these Black Lives Matter protests are happening during LGBTQIA+ Pride month highlights the links between these two movements. Both are struggling for liberation.”
Black and Transgender: A National Crisis
In 2018, according to the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), 26 transgender people suffered violent deaths in the U.S., a majority of them were black trans women. So far in 2019, seven transgender people have been violently killed, according to the HRC. All the victims in 2019 were Black trans women. Additionally, trans women of color make up four out of five anti-trans homicides, the HRC said in a 2018 report.
Take Action: Be an LGBTQIA+ Ally
Interested in learning more about how to practice allyship?
Here is an APA style lgbtq+ training resource on bias-free writing for sex and gender.
UC Davis has created this list of tips for being an ally to the LGBTQIA+ community. Below are a few suggestions from their list for practicing allyship to trans, intersex, and asexual communities:
Recognize the diversity of trans and genderqueer lives. Remember that these identities are part of other identities, and intersect with race, class, size, sexual orientation, age, immigration status, etc.
Instead of saying someone was born a boy (or a girl), try saying they were assigned male at birth (or were assigned female). These terms recognize the difference between sex and gender, and emphasize the ways in which sex and gender are assigned to individuals at birth, rather than being innate, binary or immutable qualities. Ask yourself if it is necessary to even mention what sex someone was assigned at birth.
Always use the pronouns and name people want you to use. If you’re unsure, ASK! If you make a mistake, correct yourself – without being dismissive of its importance, without making excuses, & without making it a huge deal/over-apologizing/drawing attention to you. Politely (and subtly, if possible) correct others if they use the wrong pronoun. It helps to be explicit rather than hoping they pick it up.
Don’t confuse gender with sexual orientation. Trans people, like cisgender people, are straight, gay, bisexual, pansexual, asexual, etc.
Above all respect and support trans people in their lives and choices.
Also in June
Juneteenth
Speaking to the importance of intersectionality, it’s important to also recognize Juneteenth in the discussion of Pride month. Juneteenth, short for June nineteenth, is an annual holiday commemorating the end of slavery in the United States. Watch to learn more:
#### Content is King: Free Video Templates for Small Businesses
It’s no secret that—for nearly a decade—video content has been taking over the Internet. As a result, businesses of all kinds and sizes have scrambled to generate marketing videos. For small businesses and freelancers, though, the cost and time it takes to create their own videos. That’s where free video templates for small businesses come in.
Starting with a video template allows you to create content even more quickly by building upon pre-existing videos. With an animation tool like Vyond, you can easily adjust elements like colors, logos, and characters to match your brand.
Video makers who use Vyond Studio have access to a vast library of free video templates they can use. While Vyond requires a paid subscription, you can start a free trial here.
These four free video templates for small businesses offer up some fresh ideas and inspiration for agencies, freelancers, and entrepreneurs looking to up their video game:
Event Invitations
Video Resumes
Business Proposal Videos
Video Greeting Cards
Try Vyond for Free
Video Templates for Small Businesses, Agencies, and Freelancers
Free Video Template for Wedding Invitations
Being a freelancer or small business often means that you have to wear a million hats: from accountant, to graphic designer, to sales, and beyond. To stand out from the crowd, add video to your toolkit! Whether you work in weddings or welding, you can create custom videos for clients through Vyond’s agency and producer program.
You can use this video template for wedding invitations when you sign up for Vyond!
GET THIS VIDEO TEMPLATE
Free Video Template for Resumes
Want to land a new gig? You’ll need a great resume to cut through the noise. Today’s job market is especially volatile and crowded. So, video can be a fantastic way to catch the attention of a hiring manager. A video resume allows you to add a personal touch while telling your story way better than a Word document ever could.
You can use this video template for resumes when you sign up for Vyond!
GET THIS VIDEO TEMPLATE
Free Video Template for Agencies
Make a great first impression by introducing your agency’s services through animation. Explainer videos can be a clear and engaging way to communicate with clients from proposals, to onboarding, to billing.
You can use this video template for agencies when you sign up for Vyond!
GET THIS VIDEO TEMPLATE
Free Video Template for Greeting Card
Relationships are the key to entrepreneurial success. Foster a sense of connection with your network of customers, friends, and mentors with greeting cards for holidays, birthdays, and more.
You can use this video template for greeting cards when you sign up for Vyond!
GET THIS VIDEO TEMPLATE
Make videos for your small business.
Whether you’re an agency, entrepreneur, or freelancer; you don’t have to do everything on your own. Vyond makes it easy for you to get in on the video age with custom animations you design yourself. You can get a quick start with one of our templates, or build your vision from scratch. Give it a try for free, no credit card required.
TRY VYOND FREE
#### Creating Custom Animated Characters and AI Avatars in Vyond
Video content that features recognizable and relatable characters and “talking head” hosts engages audiences more effectively than generic, stock library alternatives.With Vyond’s powerful all-in-one video creation platform at your fingertips, creating custom animated characters and AI avatar narrators to reflect the roles, diversity, and real people in your workforce is easy.Let’s take a look at what’s possible in Vyond.
Create custom AI avatar hosts
Vyond’s library of more than 1,300 AI avatar options lets you add a narrator or company spokesperson, in a range of ethnicities and roles, to your videos with a simple text prompt and a click of a button.
But if you’d like to customize an AI avatar host to be more unique (or on brand) than what we have in our library, you can also:
Create a custom avatar based on a real person (here’s how) or
Use our new Text to Avatar tool to create instant avatars (and backgrounds) built to your exact specifications, with a detailed text prompt
Create custom avatars in Vyond
Create custom (and on brand) animated characters
Vyond’s huge asset library includes hundreds of stock animated characters representing hundreds of ethnicities, job roles, and activities in a wide variety of styles (Contemporary, Business Friendly, Whiteboard and more).
But you can also easily create custom animated characters or talking heads that fulfill your need for a specific style or look with the Character Creator tool in Vyond Studio.
Create custom characters in Vyond
Options include:
Characters with a wide range of facial features, hairstyles and clothing options
Characters dressed in a range of cultural and religious attire, including yarmulkes for male characters, burkas, hijabs, turbans, saris, and kurtas
Characters wearing work-specific outfits for many industries: healthcare, retail, manufacturing, financial, and many more
You can add logos to your characters’ clothing right in Vyond Studio – or ask our Product team to create one-of-a-kind branded characters for you.
Learn more about Custom Assets
What’s the fastest way to create customized characters for videos?
One of the easiest ways to create custom animated characters for videos is to use a user-friendly AI-powered video creation platform like Vyond which allows anyone – even people with zero video production experience – to make professional videos in a matter of minutes.Platforms like Vyond offer instant script and video creation (thanks, AI!), intuitive drag-and-drop tools, a character creator, and a text-to-avatar feature that lets you customize everything from facial features and clothing to accessories, backgrounds and poses. Just pick a style, personalize your character, and bring your story to life.
What kinds of custom assets can Vyond create beside characters and avatars?
Our Product team is also able to create custom backgrounds and scenes, based on company interiors and exteriors, custom brand suites to ensure your brand standards are being met, custom actions (like, say, a lifting motion for a work safety video), and custom props (think: tools, machinery and equipment.) For a quote, contact our sales team and they’ll happily walk you through the possibilities.
Is GoAnimate and Vyond the same thing?
If you came looking for GoAnimate and found Vyond, you’re still in the right place.
From 2007 to 2018, Vyond was called GoAnimate. But then the company rebranded to Vyond to better reflect its focus on professional business communication, eLearning, and marketing videos rather than just casual animations. In 2024, the company further evolved from a business-focused animated video creation platform to an all-in-one AI video creation platform that features a wide variety of video styles, including mixed media, screen recording, photorealistic, AI avatars, in addition to animation.
More from Vyond
Vyond’s AI avatars. Your professional spokesperson on demand.
AI tools for video creation.
Instant, effortless video. AnyStyle. Every audience.
#### Custom Text and Logo Animation in Vyond Studio
We get a lot of questions about how we created the Vyond logo animation you see in almost all of our videos. Here’s one variation you may have noticed:
The short answer is: we did not create this in Vyond. Our video producer created all of what you see above in Adobe After Effects, utilizing some assets from the Vyond Studio library (like the bird). But don’t fret, we’ll show you how you can create something very similar — with animals moving through the letters — in Vyond Studio.
Watch the video below and follow along to create your own version:
To sum up the process:
Use text or logos in individual layers.
Use shapes to cover up portions of text.
Incorporate an animated asset like a character, prop, or animal and have them move through the layers you’ve created.
When finished, use an entrance effect on your letters for some added flair.
Click here to open the “brand” animation example in your Vyond Studio account to explore and modify. Make sure to log into your Vyond free trial or paid account first.
#### Customer Spotlight: Addressing Serious Content in Your Videos
Making videos in GoAnimate is a fun process, but, quite often, the topics our customers address are more serious. We’re always impressed by how our customers use GoAnimate to make dry topics effective for their audience.
#### Customer Support Training Videos: Strategies and Examples
Thanks to automated technology like chatbots and CRM-generated messaging, customer service teams today can respond to customer issues quickly and efficiently. With this technology, responsiveness is no longer a differentiator. Instead, the businesses that stand out are the ones that offer a human touch. Companies with well-trained, helpful support teams are able to build authentic, long-lasting customer relationships.
How do you train a stellar support team? One effective option is to create your own training videos.
In this post, we’ll share customer support training video examples and templates. Then we’ll break down how to make customer support videos, from start to finish, so you’ll be ready and inspired to create content for your own team.
5 ideas for your customer support training videos
Before we dive into the mechanics of creating a video—it’s first important to decide what you want to create. To help you get started, we’ve gathered five customer service training ideas that are well-suited for video. Two of the examples below are also Vyond video templates.
1. Define customer service concepts
Customer support agents have a lot to remember in order to stay on top of their game. Use video to help explain customer service concepts and remind your team how to be successful in their jobs.
Use this video as a template or watch our team build it from scratch to learn how it was made in Vyond.
The video above explains how to be positive, effective, timely, and exceed expectations to ensure a positive customer experience.
With video, you can define a term with a story, using text, narration, sound, and visuals all at once. Instead of just reading a definition, team members will have a deeper understanding of the term by seeing the concept in action.
2. Software tips
Traditionally, employees would learn how to use software by reading instructions and then switching back and forth from the tool to the instructions to apply what they’ve learned. Using screen-recording videos is a much easier way to explain software. It allows you to show actual footage of a customer service tool as you describe how it works.
Here’s a useful example from Zendesk:
The video above explains how to process customer support tickets in Zendesk.
Hearing instructions and seeing the product at the same time makes it easy for team members to understand how to use the tool.
3. Share tips and techniques
You may notice that your team struggles with a particular area of customer support, such as writing emails or using proper phone etiquette. If you recognize a pattern, build their skills in that area with a video on tips for improvement.
This video example teaches customer service representatives several tips for running successful support calls.
Use this video as a template.
This next example was part of a Vyond support chat review exercise in a weekly meeting. The team reviewed several chats with above and below-average ratings, split into groups, and discussed them. These three tips emerged from the discussion:
Tip #1 – Ask questions to learn about the problem
Tip #2 – Use macros carefully!
Tip #3 – Team up with customers to solve the problem
After the meeting, our customer support manager created this video to share with the team in the following meeting to help reinforce what they learned.
Compared with a traditional PowerPoint presentation, video is a more engaging way to teach techniques. Your video will catch team members’ attention with movement, color, music, and more.
4. Play a scenario
In customer service training, simulations are one of the most effective teaching methods. Showing interactions between customers and reps teach team members how to behave when dealing with buyers.
A video is a powerful way to depict these scenarios because they are so detailed. Here’s an example of how to handle angry customers.
The medium can capture every aspect of a positive customer service interaction—vocal tone, facial expressions, body language—so team members know what to emulate when meeting with customers.
5. Review performance as a team
For your customer support team to improve in their roles, the group must review their current performance data to identify areas where they can grow. And if your team is doing well, be sure to celebrate their success and share it company-wide.
Rather than showing static graphs and charts in a slideshow, you can create an animated video to showcase your data. The movement of video doesn’t just make the data more engaging—it also makes the insights behind the data more clear.
The video above is a modified version of our customer support team year-end review video.
Sharing data through a video is an engaging way to communicate performance results in a memo or an email. The movement of the video can explain the meaning behind the data, just as a team member would during an in-person meeting.
How to create customer service training videos
You don’t need to have production experience to produce training videos for your customer support (CS) team—plenty of today’s production tools are designed for all experience levels. Preparation, not film expertise, is the key to juggling the moving parts of video creation.
To help you stay organized, we’ve broken down the key steps for creating CS training videos. Use this repeatable process to create videos for all types of training needs, whether you’re onboarding a new employee on the CS team or building a skills training program for existing employees.
Be clear about the purpose of your videos
Before anything else, define the objective of your video. This purpose is your guiding light throughout the production process. If you understand the “why” behind your training, you can evaluate your video content as you create it to decide what should be included and what should be excluded.
If you’re having trouble identifying your training goal, consider these common objectives:
Onboarding, the process of training new hires to use tools and understand your company’s expectations for supporting customers.
Skills maintenance, or refreshing employees’ knowledge and helping them strengthen their problem-solving and communication skills.
Emergency response, or crisis-based training. During a product recall, for example, a CS team may need last-minute training about how they should apologize to customers and win back their support.
Once you’ve picked a training goal, you can decide which video tool would be ideal for meeting your objective.
Choose a CS training video format that fits the topic
One type of video isn’t better than another—each has unique strengths that are suited to different training goals. Live video, for example, offers realistic details, while animation is especially great at expressing abstract ideas (though it can be used to represent any situation).
Review the details of each video format below to decide which type would be best for meeting your CS learning objectives.
Animation
Features: Animation platforms are affordable, quick to produce, and versatile. This format allows you to express virtually any idea, so it can be used to teach a wide variety of CS training concepts.
Suggested tool: Vyond
Live video
Features: Live video captures the realistic details of customer support, such as operating a call center. However, producing these videos tends to be expensive and time-intensive.
Suggested tools: B&H sells a wide selection of digital cameras, lighting, audio equipment, and other professional video equipment find more resources here.
Screen recordings
Features: Screen-recording videos are excellent for highlighting CS software that you want your team to adopt. You can show clips of the product being used while you also narrate instructions for using the tool.
Suggested tools: Quicktime, Soapbox, Vidyard, Camtasia, Cincopia, or Loom. You can also animate around your recording in Vyond.
With a chosen type, it’s time to visualize your training video and brainstorm what topics you want the content to cover.
Script, storyboard, then shoot
Writing a script and storyboarding is the best preparation for creating your CS training videos. You’ve planned how you want to express your ideas, so you’re less likely to run into hiccups once production begins.
Learn more about scriptwriting and storyboarding for your CS training video by checking out these Vyond resources:
How to script a successful microlearning video
How to storyboard your next video
You’ve planned the visuals and dialogue of your video, so now you’re ready to start creating. Check out the three resources below for creating each type of video covered in step two.
Animation: Everything you need to make a video in Vyond
Live video: The best way to shoot a video by yourself
Screen-recording video: How to get started with Soapbox
If the production phase seems daunting, don’t worry: Production tools are more accessible than ever before, so anyone today can create a professional-quality video. And with your preparation of storyboarding and scriptwriting, you’ll know exactly what you need to create your CS training video
Enlist the help of your team
Along with storyboarding and scriptwriting, asking for your coworkers’ help is another way to smooth out the production process.
As you create your training videos, your team members can act as a sounding board to make sure the content is useful. For example, they can flag parts of the video that are confusing, and they can make recommendations about what would be helpful to watch in the video. Coworkers may also be able to help with the filming process, whether they’re behind the scenes or in the video.
Boost the quality of your training video by collaborating with your coworkers:
Invite team members to narrate your video. Recording voiceovers from employees is faster and more cost-effective than using professional actors. Your coworkers may also enjoy the project as a fun break from their traditional work.
Ask coworkers to help with crew functions. If you’re creating a live video, you may need extra hands to manage pieces of equipment. For example, you may need someone to hold a mic or help arrange an area of your office for the shoot.
Show coworkers a rough cut of your video, and ask what they found confusing and what was helpful. Their feedback will guide your final edits and help you create a finished product that is useful for your team.
With multiple people on deck, you have the support you need to create a high-quality training video that improves the team’s customer service skills.
Form a distribution plan
It doesn’t matter how great your video is—if you don’t encourage employees to watch it, you won’t boost their customer service skills. Think critically about the most engaging, convenient way for your employees to view the training to ensure the videos are watched:
Sending video training by email or chat: This method is useful for sharing non-urgent training videos that refresh the team’s knowledge. You might, for example, email a training video that summarizes the key points of a CS team meeting.
Hosting in a Learning Management System (LMS): Employees tend to prefer self-led training. This method is best for official onboarding and organized training modules.
Playing video during an in-office training session: This method is useful for sharing training content that is timely and necessary to watch. You’ll be able to see that every team member watched the video, and you can build their knowledge with a discussion of the video after it has played.
Sharing training videos on an internal wiki: Use this method to share video training content that doesn’t need to be watched immediately but should be referenced regularly.
From goal-setting to distribution, these five steps will guide you toward creating and sharing training videos that help your CS team provide excellent customer service.
Teach your team to wow customers with training videos
The best CS teams never stop learning. Even the most experienced customer service reps need to continuously build their skills. Ensure that your team is always able to provide exceptional service with training videos. They’re easy and affordable to create with today’s accessible tools, so you can make training videos on an ongoing basis. After absorbing this content, your team will be ready to go the extra mile and provide outstanding customer experiences.
Create your own animated videos for customer support training:
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#### Data Visualization: 8 Tips + Ideas
In one of our favorite articles on the topic, content marketer Shelley Walsh offers eight ideas for communicating complex data with engaging and effective visuals:
Use data that is compelling.
Use data that fits the story.
Don’t overcomplicate it.
Choose the right graph style.
Focus on the point.
Use color thoughtfully.
Create a visual hierarchy.
Stick to your objective.
We wanted to share some tips for data visualization created with Vyond Studio, a platform for building your own animation that comes fully loaded with data visualization features. You can choose from several graph styles and thousands of props. And over the years, we’ve gotten to see some pretty cool ways to tell a story visually:
Podcast & Interview Videos
End-of-Year Reports
Event Recaps
Goal Progress Thermometers
Read on for inspiration and tips on how to create engaging animated data visualizations.
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4 Examples of Effective Data Visualization
Podcast & Interview Videos
Kinetic typography is one of the most powerful ways to translate dense audio into an engaging and accessible format. By creating a video, you can also add animated elements that further illustrate the concepts shared by the speaker.
Vyond customers can customize this video with their own audio, brand colors, and text.
CUSTOMIZE THIS VIDEO IN VYOND STUDIO
End-of-Year Reports
Celebrate the big wins and bring everybody up-to-date with engaging year-end reports. You can even create a character that uses your own voiceover to present the data, like in the example above!
If you have a Vyond plan, you can add your own data, characters, and branding to create your own video report.
CUSTOMIZE THIS VIDEO IN VYOND STUDIO
Event Recaps
Another good tip for data visualization: Visual note-taking is the new craze at conferences around the world, and with good reason! Translating your notes into a visual format helps you communicate the information. Meanwhile, it also aids sense-making as a synthesizing cognitive process. This example uses the format of an infinite canvas to help organize the information with a visual hierarchy.
If you’re a Vyond customer, you can open this video as a customizable template in Vyond Studio.
CUSTOMIZE THIS VIDEO IN VYOND STUDIO
Goal Progress Thermometers
Take your bulletin board goal trackers to the next level with an animated GIF! With graph styles that feature the prop of your choosing, you can show (and update) your team’s progress in a consumable format that works across email, Slack, and beyond.
Ready to make your own GIF? Use this example as a template with any Vyond plan.
CUSTOMIZE THIS VIDEO IN VYOND STUDIO
Data visualization tips to entice your audience
Excel isn’t enough to get everybody on the same page. Distribute information in an engaging way with animation. Vyond Studio makes it easy for anyone to create custom videos and animations, regardless of experience. Give it a try for free!
#### DEI Training: Gender Pronouns
Our understanding of gender—especially going beyond two binary options—has grown significantly over the last few years. Now, one in 250 adult Americans identifies as transgender, and the rich diversity of gender expression continues to emerge as we create safer places for people who are LGBTQIA+.
In the modern workplace, it’s crucial to foster a sense of inclusivity and belonging. And one crux of diversity, equity, and inclusivity (DEI) is ensuring you have current knowledge of gender identity and gender pronouns. Watch the video below from PDT Global to first understand non-binary identity:
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What are gender pronouns?
Gender pronouns signify how someone would like to be referred to with regards to their gender identity. Gender goes well beyond a few letters on a driver’s license or birth certificate, though — it is a core piece of a person’s identity.
There are a number of personal pronouns used for different groups and identities:
He/him/his: Male pronouns
She/her/hers: Female pronouns
They/them/theirs: Gender-neutral group pronouns and singular pronouns as well
Ze/zir/zirs: Neutral singular pronouns for those not wanting to use they/them/theirs
The list of pronouns is evolving, with the above representing some of the most common ones. Keep this in mind as there’s a chance you’ll encounter new neutral pronouns.
Why gender pronouns matter
Gender pronouns are an important part of one’s identity and carry personal and cultural context. Using the wrong pronoun can be offensive and put someone in a difficult or awkward situation, as you’re disrespecting their identity and denying them a big part of who they are.
It’s a common misconception that you can tell someone’s gender by looking at them. There are no physical constraints to gender, so judging someone by appearance is the wrong approach.
You can only be certain of someone’s gender pronoun when they’ve told you or made it clear in another manner. Because pronouns are a personal matter, using the correct pronoun shows someone you acknowledge and truly respect who they are. The personal pronoun resources below can help.
How to use personal pronouns correctly
As we previously touched on, the best way to ensure you use a pronoun correctly is to ask the person. The question itself needs to be handled properly, as improper phrasing can carry the wrong implications.
When asking someone what pronoun they use, use direct language like “What pronoun do you use?” Avoid asking which pronoun they “prefer,” as this implies it’s optional. One might prefer coffee but settle for tea. A pronoun is a core part of someone’s identity and how they want to be known.
You might fear an awkward conversation when asking someone about their pronoun use, but even a small amount of awkward tension is better than unintentionally devaluing someone’s identity. If you’re unsure about someone’s pronoun, the “they/their/them” pronoun is suitable for both singular and plural use.
4 strategies for pronoun training and usage in the workplace
The workplace is a great place to reinforce pronouns, but it’s also easy for them to fall by the wayside. There are several strategies you can put in place to create a workplace that creates a sense of belonging for all.
Avoid putting people on the spot
The temptation to go around in a circle and discuss pronouns is likely there. But wait! You’ll want to avoid putting people on the spot when discussing pronoun usage. Some people might be uncomfortable voicing their pronouns, while others may be in an exploratory part of their life and unsure of their personal pronoun.
If you want to include pronouns in an introductory setting, make it clear that it’s optional. Tell people they can introduce themselves by name, position, and pronoun if they like. This lets people know it isn’t necessary to voice their pronoun in a public setting.
Don’t make assumptions
Avoid making assumptions about a person’s gender or pronouns. Until someone has specifically stated their pronoun, use they/them/their or ask them directly and in private what pronoun they use. Assuming a pronoun and identifying someone in a manner they don’t wish to be identified strips them of their agency and sense of self.
Keep mass communications gender-neutral
There will be times you need to address your entire team or company. Use gender-neutral pronouns in communications and large addresses to ensure you’re not alienating anyone or making any assumptions.
When referencing a group of people, there are a number of gender-neutral ways you can address them: “Good morning team/colleagues/folks/y’all/everyone.” These greetings will keep things neutral and prevent anyone from feeling misidentified. “Ladies and gentlemen” or “guys and gals” can feel exclusionary. Similarly, “salespeople” or “sales team” is more representative than “sales guys.”
Include pronouns in email signatures
Explicitly listing gender pronouns in email signatures, on name tags, on a business card, or elsewhere is not just for non-binary people. It’s helpful for cisgender folks to list their pronouns because it creates space and safety for others to list theirs.
You can do this via a simple addition to your existing email signature, like:
John Smith
(He/him/his)
Hiring Manager
If you’re managing a team, you could encourage employees to include their gender pronouns in their email signatures if they feel comfortable doing so. It’s a good idea not to mandate pronouns in email signatures, but to simply suggest it as an option for those comfortable including it. Leading by example can go a long way, so feel free to start the movement by including your own pronouns in your email signature.
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Create employee gender pronouns training videos
Taking the previously mentioned proactive steps will help turn your office into a safe place for gender pronoun discussions. And traditional training can do a world of good in tandem with your efforts. Gender pronoun training videos allow you to convey information in a dynamic manner while catering to a wide variety of learning styles.
Pronoun video training is the perfect place for scenario-based training on how gender pronouns impact the well-being of others, and animation is a great place to start. By using animated characters, you can represent a diverse spectrum of gender expression beyond the live actors you have readily available, and circumvent visual biases around what gender looks like.
Have a look at this gender pronoun video explainer, which could be used in HR communications.
Use this video as a template
Animated videos also have the benefit of being easy to pair with an interactive course. This allows you to create an animated video that gives users the option to select conversation responses, take quizzes on gender pronouns, and more. For example, you can use Vyond to make an animation and then pair it with Articulate Storyline 360 to create interactive courses.
An added benefit of using interactive courses is that it gives you a chance to see if people are actually learning the material. When paired with a learning management system (LMS), you can track everyone’s progress, see if people are passing the courses, where they’re getting hung up, and how long the material’s taking to complete. This ensures you’re making training that’s effective, and that gender pronouns get proper acknowledgment in your workplace.
Vyond makes it easy to create effective gender-pronoun training using fun, inclusive animation. To see how easily you can make gender pronoun training material, give Vyond a try with a free trial.
Training for gender pronouns: the respect everyone deserves
Gender pronouns, along with our understanding, are ever-evolving. To champion gender pronouns is to champion respect and individuality. Learn more about personal pronouns:
MyPronouns.org
What’s your pronoun? Strategies for Inclusion in the Workplace
PronounsDay.com
APA Style: Bias-Free Communication
Make a video
#### Disney’s 12 Animation Principles and How to Apply Them with Vyond
Forty years ago, Disney animators Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston shared the 12 animation principles, which Disney Studios followed to create astonishing lifelike effects and animations. To this day, the principles are considered the foundation of animation.
With Vyond, you can apply these 12 animation principles with little effort to create exceptional animations on your own. Learn more about these foundational principles and how to achieve them in your next video.
1. Squash and Stretch
The squash-and-stretch principle describes how changing an object’s shape from a squashed to a stretched position can convey movement, speed, and volume. By morphing an element for a few frames, you can make an object appear less stiff and mimic real-life movement.
To illustrate this principle in action, we created two animations of a bouncing ball. The animation on the left side follows the squash and stretch principle, making it look realistic and vivid. In contrast, the one on the right ignores the principle, making the ball look flat and uninteresting.
Without flexibility, movement is dull and distant from how it works in real life. The next time you animate, analyze the movements that seem robotic or unnatural and apply the squash-and-stretch principle to make them look more exciting and realistic. To achieve this in Vyond, you’ll use the continue scene feature alongside motion path to adjust the size and position of the ball in each scene as it moves. Rued Riis goes into more detail on this principle in his “Go Beyond Vyond” course.
2. Anticipation
Anticipation allows you to build intrigue and curiosity in a vital element or scene. You don’t just present an action—instead, you create tension toward what’s coming, making the eventual payoff more effective. Adding an extra step or scene helps viewers understand the scene better, too. Since it teases what’s coming, viewers grasp what’s happening instead of struggling to connect the dots.
Think about a baseball player preparing to hit the ball. Before swinging the bat, they could wink an eye at the crowd, or, as seen below with our Vyond character, bend their knees just before the primary action: hitting the ball.
This anticipation principle builds tension for any activity that involves movement. In Vyond, anticipation is automatically built into many character actions (like this one), but next time you create a video, think about how your subject can prepare or tease the following action. While simple, this thought process means the difference between making a character fall and brilliantly delaying the action through a series of stumbles.
3. Staging
Avoiding confusion is the entire purpose of the staging principle. Its core message is that all elements and actions should have a clear intention or recognizable levels of importance.
In the book series Where’s Waldo?, every character on the page is competing for our attention. As a result, we struggle to find Waldo across the sea of random people, objects, and beings. Since confusing the reader is the books’ primary goal, this lack of character or action isolation is beneficial. However, in animation, simultaneously adding multiple characters, shapes, and stories will only increase the chances of overwhelming the viewer.
If we were to apply the staging principle to an animated version of Where’s Waldo?, we would outline Waldo’s body with a vibrant light while blurring the other characters to make our focus character instantly recognizable.
To properly implement the staging principle, ask yourself if your scene focuses on the main action and subject or if it’s suffering from undesired ambiguity that you can clarify.
4. Straight-Ahead and Pose-to-Pose
Straight-Ahead and Pose-to-Pose are two drawing techniques used in traditional animation where each frame is drawn to create a motion or action. In Pose-to-Pose, you draw the initial and last position of a moving element. Then, you start animating the transitional details between these extremes. In Straight-Ahead animation, you animate every frame until you finish the scene. Since the extremes don’t constrain you and you’re animating each frame, you can create more realistic and fluid animations than with Pose-to-Pose.
In Vyond, all of these actions and animations are already built-in, so you don’t even have to think about them. Instead of wondering if you should start with key poses or go straight into animating, you can click on any of our customizable characters and select from hundreds of ready-to-use actions.
We’ve placed each action into categories so that you can quickly find one based on the story you’re telling.
5. Follow-Through and Overlapping Action
Objects and living beings rarely go from movement to an utterly stiff position. After a subject stops moving, some parts follow through by bouncing or shifting positions—even though the object is mostly still. For example, while a horse can stop running after its jockey pulls on the reigns, it cannot prevent the saddle from bouncing forward after it stops moving.
Another principle based on the interaction between movements is the overlapping action principle. It points to how two moving actions can happen simultaneously but at different speeds or timing. For instance, if you were to animate a walking cat, you’d have to be mindful of the parts that would move: legs, ears, or tail. This animated prop from Vyond’s asset library shows how the tail and leg movement overlap.
Whenever you find yourself animating a moving character or object, remember that all its parts won’t move or stop at the same speed. Use the overlapping-action and follow-through principles to enhance the appeal of any scene where there’s motion. In Vyond, many character actions and animated props have this principle automatically applied.
6. Slow In and Slow Out (Easing)
Rockets, airplanes, and bullet trains don’t go from zero to hundreds of kilometers per hour in one second. Their movement is gradual—referred to as a slow in—and eventually accelerates to its peak. As they reach their destination, they reduce their speed—known as a slow out— to safely arrive at their target.
Let’s say you wanted to animate a car realistically. To do this, you’d first have to slow down its initial movement by increasing the number of drawings in the first frames. The process of reducing the acceleration speed is referred to as “slow in.” By adding more drawings, you are increasing the time it takes for the car to accelerate and reach a steady speed.
As the car gets closer to its target, you’d once again increase the number of drawings to extend the time it takes for the vehicle to stop. In this case, the process of reducing the stopping speed is what animators call a “slow out.”
Vyond simplifies this technique of slowing in and out with the option to add easing to a motion path. With “Ease In” you can slow a movement at the beginning of its path, and with “Ease Out” you can slow a motion at the end. With “Ease In Out” you can accomplish both at the same time.
Whether you are animating a jogger or a moving car, be mindful of the movement speed at the beginning and end of a motion to add realism to your work.
7. Arc
In real life, movement rarely happens in a straight line. Instead, the actions of objects and living beings follow an arc or a somewhat circular path. The arc principle is derived from this idea.
A bouncing ball, for example, won’t jump straight in or straight out across the floor. Instead, it will follow a circular path across the room until it stops moving.
Like the squash-and-stretch principle, arcs add expressiveness to what would otherwise be a robot-like motion. By looking critically at your animation, you can spot stiff actions and add a slight curve or arc—and life—to them.
Vyond offers various motion path presets to make achieving this principle a breeze. Some presets like “Bouncing Ball Horizontal” follow the arc principle and are a great way to show realistic movements.
8. Secondary Action
While a scene is often focused on a specific action, adding several minor secondary actions can add depth and interest to the primary one. Disney animators refer to this idea as the secondary-action principle.
The “Being Rejected” character action in Vyond’s library uses a withering flower as a secondary action to reinforce the act of being rejected. While the flower isn’t the center of attention, the scene wouldn’t be as intriguing without the falling petal. Similarly, the “Crossing Arms” action has a secondary action of shifting on the hip after the character folds her arms.
Many character actions in Vyond have Secondary Action built-in, but you can also add them on your own. With a bit of imagination, you can come up with visuals to enhance your main movement: A dumbbell falling into the floor is great, but it’s not nearly as effective as one that drops and raises the dust around it.
The GIF above was created with a combination of the “weightlifting-fail” character action and the “smoke” dust animation. The timing of the “smoke” dust is set to appear right when the dumbbell falls to the ground.
9. Timing
The timing in which you present an object or action influences how we perceive speed, emotion, and weight. The timing principle is nothing but a reminder for animators to be mindful of the pace and speed at which they present subjects.
An animation of a feather falling from the sky will have a consistently low speed. While predictable, it reminds us of the lightness of this object. Alternatively, a feather dropping to the ground at lightning speed will make us question (1) the weight of the feather and (2) if it was indeed a feather.
In Vyond Studio, you can control the speed of any moving object or character depending on the weight and emotion you’re trying to convey. For example, you can use our set of tools to create slow-motion scenes to highlight critical moments of your animation.
10. Exaggeration
While great animation feeds from real life, exceptional animations cross into the unrealistic and absurd to heighten visual storytelling. The potential to intrigue viewers with the unimaginable is why animators ditch commonalities. They might create characters with nonsensical anatomy or that end up flat after being hit by a rubber hammer.
You can use the Exaggeration principle to emphasize a point, too. For example, in scenes where characters are fighting, you can drastically exaggerate how that fight is playing out in a cartoon-like manner.
If realism causes an animation to seem relatable, exaggeration surprises the viewer and sparks questions around what they are watching. Therefore, take poses, emotions, and expressions and brainstorm formats that you can only achieve through animation.
11. Solid Drawings
Solid Drawings refer to the drawings animators sketch to give 3D illusion to 2D assets. By making your elements seem three-dimensional, viewers will have a much better sense of how the object looks and compares to others.
Vyond’s Business Friendly style provides elements that follow 3D principles so that you can benefit from the advantages of three-dimensional animation without spending years learning how to draw or animate.
In the GIF above you can see that the Business Friendly animation appears more 3D whereas the Contemporary style is more abstract without the Solid Drawings principle applied.
12. Appeal
An overly simplistic scene can go from boring to decent if you follow Disney’s animation principles while adding motion to still elements. However, few will remember an uninteresting character or object. Appeal means making characters and objects memorable by adding unusual, charming, and engaging traits or details that people can remember.
For example, you can add a neon-colored turbine to the back of a car or make a bouncing ball stretch more than usual when it hits the wall to add interest to the scene. Similarly, you can play with your characters’ physical traits or fashion styles to make them attractive and unforgettable.
With the custom character creator in Vyond, you can generate memorable characters for your animations.
Use Vyond and Disney’s Techniques to Create Expert-Level Animation
Nowadays, schools and events held by advanced animators refer to Disney’s 12 Animation Principles as the foundation of their craft. With Vyond, you don’t have to spend years in animation school to make dazzling animated videos. Regardless of experience or skill level, you can pair our tool with these principles to create realistic, engaging, and memorable animations.
#### Driving eLearning Engagement in a Remote Work Environment
To help you drive eLearning engagement in your own remote space, we spoke to Angeliki Bekyra, a customer success associate for TalentLMS, the training platform designed to help great teams grow
How remote work changes the rules of eLearning engagement
Many companies have been thrown into a learning lurch. COVID-19 has forced many companies to quickly switch to a remote model, leaving little time for business leaders to prepare. But even seasoned remote companies can often overlook the ways remote work changes engagement. Angeliki draws from her experience with TalentLMS clients to lay out two areas where the remote environment impacts engagement.
In-person training methods may no longer work
Simply put: Traditional in-person, face-to-face style training sessions don’t always integrate well into a remote environment. According to Angeliki, this has manifested in a few ways.
While companies going remote were moving their training online, their initial thought was to train users with video-conferencing tools such as Zoom, Google Meet, or Microsoft Teams. But companies soon realized that online training shouldn’t mimic the original on-site experience.
As a result, what started as video calls slowly turned into webinars and complete virtual training sessions. Instructors were now not only able to train learners but also assess their knowledge, monitor engagement, and check metrics that would help them understand what works and what doesn’t.
Rewards drive remote learning engagement
“Remote experiences require digital solutions. And digital solutions thrive when rewards are present,” Angeliki noted.
A rewarding experience is one that gives satisfaction and brings benefits. It’s something alive that you have to feed consistently. Luckily, in this digital world, you can easily set up the process.
You can create a rewarding learning experience through the gamification of courses or entire learning systems.
How L&D pros can create engaging training in a remote workplace
Traditional in-office training methods alone won’t work in a remote training environment. Couple this with the importance of a rewarding experience, and you’re left with quite the task: creating an engaging training environment in a remote workplace. Fortunately, Angeliki has the secret sauce.
Level-up training with gamification
One of the best ways to motivate your learners and increase eLearning engagement levels is to offer them “battle-tested” gamification techniques: points, badges, levels, leaderboards, and rewards. In fact, a survey from TalentLMS revealed that 89% of people feel they’re more productive when gamification is present.
“You set up gamification once and let it do the work for you. Users will receive congratulatory messages for logging in, badges for completing courses, leaderboard rankings to compare their performance to others, and so on,” Angeliki says.
Humanize eLearning with video
It’s easy to lose the human element when dealing with remote environments and eLearning. Angeliki says to use more video to add a human face and element to your training program. This could be in the form of a live-action video training course, animation, or a one-on-one follow-up session with your team.
Not only will videos make your eLearning experience more human, but videos also drive engagement. For example, Angeliki told us one client at TalentLMS used only presentations and traditional content in their learning hub. Their engagement was just shy of 12%. Earlier this year, they replaced their content with videos. The result? A 55% increase in engagement levels. This TalentLMS dashboard shows just how much the addition of videos can help with engagement
Here’s an example of a spy-themed scenario created for cybersecurity training:
This video is available as a template here.
Webinars are another type of content to consider here. Webinars allow you to do a deep dive on a topic while maintaining the human element. During a live webinar, it’s also possible to see your viewers and determine who’s engaged, who might be struggling, and who has questions. This gives webinars an agency traditional videos lack, making them an ideal format for complex topics.
Follow remote training best practices
According to Angeliki, there are several industry-standard remote training best practices to follow. For starters, initiate conversations with your audience either through your training platform or during a training session—training shouldn’t be a one-way road.
It’s also important to send reminders—or market your training— to keep the training spirit alive. Training (yes, and friendship) is like plants: If you don’t water them, they die.
Lastly, follow these additional best practices to ensure you’re creating eLearning content that your team engages with, and to keep from falling behind others in your niche.
Drive engagement with thoughtful LMS features
Companies and training providers should keep in mind that learners are human beings. And like all humans, they appreciate emotions like excitement and eagerness. The right LMS will empower you with the features you need to create and host powerful and engaging eLearning materials.
Angeliki points out that a feature-rich training platform can make use of emotional drivers like these in TalentLMS:
Videos: Instructors can search and use YouTube videos, upload their own material, or even shoot a video directly on the platform. This makes it a total cinch to incorporate video content.
Instructor-led training (ILT): ILT is a conventional training method where an instructor conducts the lesson in a virtual environment as though they were in a classroom. Learners are notified in advance about their upcoming session and attend without switching tools.
Notifications: “Notifications,” is one of the most commonly used TalentLMS features. Notifications makes it possible to track inactive users and send an email to re-engage them.
Interactivity: Sharable Content Object Reference Model (aka SCORM), cmi5, and xAPI are much cooler than they sound. Think of them as very interactive presentations, which include clickable links so users can navigate the course’s environment while listening to audio or even watching animations. If you just need completion tracking, If you just need completion tracking, you can export your video as a SCORM package from Vyond.
Gamification: Points, badges, levels, leaderboards, and rewards. You set them up once and let them do the work for you. Users will receive congratulation messages for logging in, badges for completing courses, leaderboard rankings to compare their performance to others, or even discounts when they reach certain points or badges.
Animate your courses and engage your audience
Remote work—voluntary or not—may have changed how we measure, track, and improve engagement, but that doesn’t have to be a bad thing. TalentLMS makes it easy to store your courses and serve them to your audience in a fast, reliable way. Pair TalentLMS with a powerful animation tool like Vyond to create videos and drive record engagement for your eLearning courses.
#### Educational Animation: Explaining Complex Ideas with Animation
For breaking down and explaining complex ideas, there’s no better medium than animation. With greater versatility than live video, animation enables you to easily explain complicated concepts through visuals in a short span of time.
That power is critical. Viewers today need active, dynamic content to stay engaged and ignore distractions. Emails, texts, and notifications flit onto viewers’ screens, making it tough for instructors to keep attention focused. Educational and marketing content alike have to deliver value immediately to captivate audiences.
Educational animation engages people quickly and powerfully. To help you improve your own video outcomes, we’ve outlined the advantages of animation and we’ll show you how to get started using animation styles, like whiteboard animation. Watch the video examples below to become familiar with how to explain complex ideas with animation, and how different visual styles can be used to communicate a message. Both videos below have the same script, but their animated visuals are different.
Why Educational Animation Works for Explaining Concepts
Both live video and animation are engaging mediums. But when it comes to explaining difficult concepts, animated videos stand out in a few key ways:
Your imagination is the limit. Animation lets you use video to illustrate any concept or analogy without requiring the ability to capture it on film. You have the ability to bring any concept, no matter how complex or out-of-this-world, to life with ease.
In the GIF below we start with a close-up and zoom out to show a crowd of people before blasting into space for perspective. This is difficult to create in real-life, but with animation, it’s easy.
You can break down ideas visually. One of the biggest benefits of animated video is the ease with which you can visually capture abstract ideas. Imagine trying to explain concepts like global logistics, the inner-workings of a microprocessor, or Bitcoin with a video camera. That’s where animation has its advantages – you can illustrate all of these concepts without restraint.
They’re easy to update. If info in your live video needs to be updated, you have to go through the extensive process of reshooting. With animation, you can use tools like Vyond to make changes and updates in minutes.
As a flexible medium, animation software gives you a variety of ways to visualize concepts quickly and powerfully. Understand the different ways you can utilize animation and you can take your video content to a new level.
How Whiteboard Animation Amplifies Learning
Of all the different animation styles, Whiteboard Animation is one of the most useful for learning content and explaining complex concepts.
Whiteboard has a minimalist style that’s ideal for focusing on complex concepts. The style illustrates concepts at a straightforward level with minimal extra details that could distract viewers.
The drawing motion of Whiteboard keeps viewers engaged. Whiteboard Animation typically features a drawing hand or pen that captures viewers’ attention. Viewers remain engaged, anticipating how the story will unfold.
Rand Fishkin of Moz.com brings this concept to life in his “Whiteboard Fridays” video series. Each week he breaks down complex marketing topics, like search engine optimization, by writing and drawing on a real-life whiteboard.
Learning and development expert, Keith Anderson, uses this same engaging movement to his advantage in animated video.
The black and white drawing and handwritten style get viewers in the mood for learning. While alternative colorful styles feel more cinematic, the Whiteboard style looks exactly like what it’s called—a whiteboard! Recalling this educational tool, the Whiteboard style feels more oriented towards learning than other styles, Keith describes.
Designed for simplifying concepts, the Whiteboard Animation style is ideal for creating all types of explanatory content. Let’s take a look at some ways you can use animation in your video content.
4 Ways to Explain Complex Ideas with Animation
As a versatile medium, animation can be used in a variety of ways to express ideas. Like a Saturday morning cartoon, concepts can be visualized through characters and scenarios. At the same time, animation can also incorporate icons or even photos to break down and explain ideas.
The key is deciding which visualizations suit your idea best throughout your animation. We’ll cover four ways to explain complex concepts with educational animation to help you choose between them and create your own engaging content.
Character Actions
As the saying goes, actions speak louder than words.
Actions are easily recognizable and carry meaning. Animate them with minimal details and your audience can quickly process the concepts you’re trying to convey.
Animating actions is particularly great for explaining step-by-step processes. Rather than writing out each step, you can show the character doing what you’re trying to teach.
Animating actions is also useful for explaining emotions in a concrete, understandable way. An HR manager, for example, might have to teach new employees about company culture. They could show the value of trust with an animated handshake and the value of teamwork with the action of cheering.
Animate characters with specific actions to quickly illustrate specific ideas in a concrete, understandable way.
How to animate actions in Vyond: To make a character perform an action, start by selecting the character. Then, click on the action icon in the top right of your toolbar to search and select the action you want to use. Watch more about character actions and animations in Vyond.
Icons
Like character actions, icons are internationally recognizable and easy to digest. Because an icon is static, it is typically used to represent a single idea.
For example, say you’re explaining how health benefits work at your company. To visualize the difference between visiting a primary care doctor versus a specialist, you could use the icon of a dollar bill to represent the value of money.
Or, you can use multiple icons together to illustrate the different components of an entire process. For example, you could use icons to teach people about the stages of keeping plants alive.
The drawing hand of the Whiteboard Animation style keeps viewers engaged as they anticipate each step being revealed.
By using single icons or a combination of icons, you can convey ideas to viewers quickly.
How to animate with icons in Vyond: The props collection in Vyond hosts hundreds of icons for representing various concepts. To access the props, follow these instructions from our Help Center. You can also find and download icons through nounproject.com, and then import the icons into your Vyond account.
Scenarios
Some concepts and principles are difficult to teach without providing context. Imagine trying to explain harassment in the workplace to employees without giving a few example situations.
To make ideas understandable, animate scenarios that are relatable and illustrate your concept well. By seeing the idea played out in a story-like format, viewers learn how to apply the concept in life. Animating a scenario lets viewers see the concept in action, which makes it much easier to understand.
How to animate scenarios in Vyond: You can quickly animate scenarios with Vyond’s templates, which are pre-made scenes designed for different industries and situations. To access these templates, click the plus-sign in your timeline.
From there, you can browse through templates by category and preview each one by hovering over it. For more details on choosing templates, check out this instructional video.
Real Images
When you want to make your material more relatable, consider adding photos to an animation. By using photos you add credibility to the ideas you want to teach through educational animation.
For example, say you created an animated onboarding video to teach new employees about your company culture. The value of work-life balance sounds unremarkable if you just describe it since most companies claim to offer it. But if you describe it while showing pictures of employees with their families, the value will seem a bit more authentic to viewers.
By complementing your animation with photos, you can help viewers connect more deeply with the idea you’re trying to teach.
How to animate with real images on Vyond: Add a photo to your video by clicking the Upload icon in the Asset Library. Then, click the Plus icon to select the photo from your computer files.
Selecting a photo will import it into your Asset Library. From there, you can add it to your video. For more detailed instructions on importing photos, visit this guide in our Help Center.
Improve Engagement and Retention with Educational Animation
Audiences today have come to expect more than tired PowerPoint slides and text descriptions. Animated videos, especially those using the whiteboard style, help your audience understand and connect to concepts more quickly and deeply.
The visual elements in this guide will give you plenty of ways to convey different types of complex ideas through animation. With varied visualizations, your animated learning content will make ideas exciting and more comprehensible for your audience. Get started today to make your video content more engaging and understandable.
About Vyond
Vyond allows people of all skill levels in all industries and job roles to create dynamic and powerful media. With features that go beyond moving text and images, you can build character-driven stories or compelling data visualizations that engage audiences and deliver results.
Start making your own videos today. Sign up for a free trial and check out our latest webinars on Vyond’s capabilities, use cases, and how to get the most out of Vyond.
#### eLearning Development Process: 10 Crucial Steps
The eLearning industry is growing at an incredible pace. Between 2015 and 2025 eLearning could grow 300%, meaning more and more companies will be investing in eLearning, and others will be expecting it to be offered.
With this high demand, learning professionals must know how to efficiently create high-quality online modules and courses. To do so, there needs to be a clear, repeatable eLearning development process. If you have a concrete set of steps to follow in your elearning development process, you’re always going to have a map for your creative process and be able to maintain your module output without sacrificing quality.
The following steps will guide you through the entire elearning module development process. They’ll push you to think deeply about the goals you’re hoping to achieve, the audience you’re targeting, and the ways you’re going to promote the eLearning module when it’s done. Essentially, these steps will guide you through the entire elearning development process, from beginning to end and beyond.
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How do you develop eLearning modules?
An eLearning module is a short lesson, generally 10-15 minutes long, that often includes text, quizzes, video, or interactive games. While eLearning modules can be part of a larger series or course, they can also be stand-alone lessons.
The University of Nebraska Medical Center has created a series of elearning modules that serve as great examples of what modules are capable of.
A key part of the elearning module development process is remembering that they’re bite-sized. We’ve broken down 10 steps to help you develop modules that convey information in a powerful, memorable way in a short time.
1. Create clear goals.
The last thing you want to do is be midway through creating a module and realize it isn’t delivering a cohesive message. Stay on track with your module creation by setting clear goals that align with your overall course goals.
To identify the objective of the module, consider the larger goal of the course that includes it. From there, identify a module goal that contributes to the larger purpose of the course.
For example, you could have the goal of teaching an audience how to become successful breadmakers. You could then have a module on making dough, another on how to score bread, and another on how to bake bread in a gas oven. Each module has its own objectives, but they’re all moving the learner toward the ultimate goal of becoming a proficient breadmaker.
For more information on setting learning goals, learnWorlds has an informative piece on setting goals.
2. Identify knowledge gaps.
Before you get into the actual module creation process, it’s important to understand what kind of knowledge gaps your audience has and how you can fill them in with your content. This information will guide the content of your modules, so take care of it as early as possible.
To figure out where the knowledge gaps are, you need to do a deep dive on your audience. Go to the places your audience congregates: forums, blogs, social media pages, etc. Note questions that are regularly asked about the topic you are teaching, and plan to answer them in your module.
If you’re creating an internal module for employee training, consider giving team members a survey to identify gaps in the skill you’re teaching. You can also talk to managers about where performance seems to be lacking within their teams to identify areas of improvement.
3. Set financial and time budgets.
You’ll want to set budgets for both your time and your finances ahead of time. Budgets will help you stay realistic about the scope of your eLearning module while still focusing on the quality of the lesson.
To come up with a budget, think about the goal of your module and what kind of elements you think it will need. Do you think you’ll need video, text, or narration? Think about the elements you foresee the module including and the time it could take to make this module happen. Then, come up with an estimated budget that you can run by your boss.
Be realistic about your budget for both time and money. It’s better to give yourself less leeway than you actually have to ensure that you’re able to fully create your module, as opposed to running out in the middle of development.
For even more information on developing an eLearning budget, read this helpful guide from the eLearning Industry.
4. Decide on a content format.
You know your audience and what their knowledge gaps are. Now, it’s time to determine how you can best fill those knowledge gaps using eLearning modules.
Your audience is likely experiencing a pain point or struggle related to the knowledge gap or gaps they have. The content you create for your eLearning modules will need to be the right fit for the type of knowledge your audience is seeking.
For example, if you have an abstract concept like dealing with anxiety, using a video that runs through a real-life scenario can be great for illustrating how to handle this problem.
On the other hand, if you have a more concrete concept skill to teach, like a formula or a programming language, a quiz that puts the user’s knowledge to the test can be an effective way to help the information stick.
A big selling point of modules is that they can utilize virtually any content format you want. This means you can teach a larger lesson through a mixture of videos, slides, interactive quizzes, and beyond. For a great example of this, see this Skilljar Academy course, which contains a number of modules using video created with Vyond.
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5. Pick a video creation platform.
If you plan on having a video in your module, and any future modules, you’ll need a flexible and affordable video creation platform. With your budget in hand, look for a video creation platform that fits your needs, but also lends itself to module development.
Find a video creation platform that’s flexible and capable of being customized to fit numerous subjects and audiences. Flexibility means looking for a platform with a high degree of customization, such as a wide variety of color options for modules and videos, a library of graphics and characters, and the ability to use custom icons.
You’ll also want a platform that is affordable. Full courses can require numerous modules, so any software that caps the number of videos you can create will be costly. Instead, find a tool with a flat monthly rate that lets you create videos as often as you like.
There are a number of video creation platforms available, many of them offering something different. Look at this list from Capterra to see which one fits your needs the best.
6. Keep things digestible with microlearning.
An eLearning module is meant to be quick and easily digestible. Even so, it’s still possible to overload your users with too much information within these short lessons.
To avoid cognitive overload, draw inspiration from the microlearning model of lesson creation. Microlearning is all about making small lessons that are:
Applicable: Make the lessons within your modules easy to grasp and applicable for a large audience.
Sticky: Ensure the information or lesson is sticky, and stays with learners. Short, fun videos are a great way to do this.
Accessible: Make sure modules are widely accessible on many devices and available when users want them.
Cumulative: Similar to the point about goals and objectives, your modules should be cumulative, building off of other knowledge to work toward a larger understanding.
Check out our full guide on microlearning is available here to learn additional tips on how you can avoid cognitive overload and ensure your modules are memorable.
7. Create a storyboard and script.
If you’re creating a video for your module, plan it out by creating a script and storyboard. A storyboard can act as a high-level guide for your video and help you spot any problem spots before animating or filming, while a script will keep the language concise and ensure it’s on-target with your audience.
When you’re creating a script, make sure the entire script is based on a singular objective. This objective should be the same or closely related to the one chosen for your module. Consider what kind of narrative you can frame around that objective and how you can tell a story that’s engaging and educational. Then, start writing! For an even deeper dive into script writing for modules and microlearning, be sure to read our full guide.
You’ll also want a storyboard for your video. A storyboard will outline each scene of the video, with brief descriptors about the points being covered in that scene. You’ll also want to point out any dialogue and action, like two characters interacting or moving about. You don’t have to be an artist for this process, as the storyboard isn’t meant to be a work of art, merely a guide for the video creation process. Be sure to read our fleshed-out guide on the storyboarding process for videos.
A script and storyboard are two integral parts of the video creation process. While they may feel like extra work at first, you’ll quickly find they help you avoid any costly mistakes during the actual production of the video or animation.
8. Review and implement feedback.
Once you’ve created your module, ask for feedback from co-workers—department heads, members of the HR team, or learning specialists—to find areas for improvement.
To keep input constructive and easy to digest, create a feedback form. Draft questions that help you gauge whether the module meets its learning objective, such as:
What skills or information did you learn by the end of the module?
Were any sections unclear? Why?
What questions did you have at the end of the module?
These kinds of questions will keep the feedback relevant and useful, allowing you to easily implement it to improve your module.
9. Promote your module.
Once your module has been tested and launched, it’s ready to be promoted.
If your module is internal at your company, you can promote via email, company chat channels, through HR, and at company meetings, for example. Remember that most learners will need to hear about the module more than once before completing your course.
For external eLearning modules, use your audience research from earlier steps to inform your marketing when using the following tactics to help your module find eager learners:
Paid search ad campaigns, such as a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign on Google, is a reliable way to boost awareness of your modules.
Create content marketing, such as blog posts or videos, to introduce your audience to the topic of your module. At the end of the content, you can encourage viewers to complete the module to learn more.
Use social media marketing to promote your modules, both organically and through paid posts. You can also post your modules in relevant groups on social media.
If you’re creating modules for employees, you’ll want to avoid the paid routes and instead promote them through internal communication channels.
Promotions can help your hard work pay off in the way of more viewers, more feedback, and even better courses down the road as a result.
10. Track the performance of your module
You worked hard to get this far and create a module. Tracking the lesson’s performance ensures that hard work pays off in the future when you develop other modules.
First off, if you’re not using a learning management system (LMS), you’ll need to implement one to get the most accurate performance tracking.
Next, track the performance of your courses and modules. Most LMS platforms will have an analytics dashboard that allows you to look at performance, while some will email you reports on-course performance. Talk to your IT team or contact support for the LMS you choose to make sure this is set up right out of the gate.
There are many metrics you can track, but the most important are:
Completion rate: You need to know if people are completing your modules and courses. The average completion rate of a large online eLearning courses is only 10%, so anything better than that is progress. If you’re making courses for employee use, the completion rate should be much higher, especially if it’s required. For more information on how to drive course completion rate, read efront’s in-depth guide.
Proficiency: An eLearning course is only effective if users are learning something, which is where proficiency comes in. Look at the scores for any tests or games in your courses and see if users generally pass or fail.
Course ratings: Users should have the ability to rate courses and leave feedback. Take this feedback seriously, as your course can only succeed if people are learning from it and enjoying their experience. Most LMS platforms should give users the ability to rate courses or answer surveys based on courses, so take advantage of this.
You put a lot of work into the modules you develop. Tracking their performance helps ensure that hard work isn’t wasted on courses that aren’t benefiting users and allowing people to learn the valuable skills you’re wanting to teach.
How long does it take to create eLearning courses?
You know what goes into the module development process, but how long does this process take? It varies from module to module, but as a benchmark, some eLearning developers estimate it can take as much as 184 hours of development for every hour of an eLearning course. An eLearning module is typically 10-15 minutes long, so it would take roughly 46 hours for a 15-minute module according to this research.
To reduce the time needed to create a course, take advantage of tools that can speed up content creation. For example, Vyond can reduce the time and money needed to create videos for modules with drag-and-drop templates. If multiple team members are writing the text for the module, use Google Docs to collaborate from any location.
The development time for courses and modules can vary greatly depending on the content, the team involved, and the tools being used. Plan ahead and think about the requirements of your module, and you can come up with an estimate that helps you get things done in a timely manner.
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How Can Vyond Make eLearning Effective?
Thinking about including videos in your module? Vyond makes it possible to create animated videos quickly and easily with a number of features.
Vyond uses a drag-and-drop process that makes it possible to create videos and scenes in minutes without any design or production experience.
Customizable characters allow you to quickly make modules that fit virtually any audience or subject.
Vyond’s affordable monthly cost supports the creation of any number of videos, meaning you can create as many modules as you want.
Integration with Articulate Storyline opens the door to interactive, branching storylines. This can make eLearning engaging, interactive, and fun for your learners.
The eLearning development process is long and involved. With Vyond, you can take solace in knowing your video and animation creation processes will be streamlined and simple.
Boost module production with our eLearning development process
The demand for eLearning content is growing and growing. You’ll need a process that allows you to meet that demand by creating numerous educational modules. By following the straightforward process outlined in this piece, you can have a smooth production process that’s consistent and doesn’t compromise on quality. As time goes on, this process will become second nature and you’ll only get faster.
Most importantly, you’ll realize that all of your hard work was worth it when you see that you have fostered a group of engaged learners that come to you for knowledge, time and again.
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#### End of Year Videos & Templates
‘Tis the season for spreading cheer ! Why not make an end of year video?
During the holidays, it’s more important than ever to cut through the noise. So, video is a great tool to reach for!
With Vyond Studio, you can create animated end of year videos for your customers, colleagues, and friends. Vyond makes it easy for anybody to quickly create animated videos—no stamps or mailing addresses required.
To celebrate the season, we’ve rounded of all our favorite end of year videos and templates below, including 14 never-before-seen Vyond templates.
End of Year Videos
Video Greeting Cards
Impact Report Whiteboard Video
Farewell, 2021!
Giving Back Campaign Video
Happy New Year to Customers
Employee Awards & Recognition
Corporate Holiday Video
Annual Report
Merry Christmas
Winter Sale
Happy Winter Solstice
Donation Drive Video
Support during the Holidays
Nonprofit Annual Report
Customized Holiday GIFs
Inclusive Diversity Training
Ugly Sweater Party
Diwali Explained
Christmas in the Tropics
Noche Buena
Happy New Year!
How to Play Dreidel
Happy Hanukkah
Winter Solstice Festival
Festivus
Ōmisoka
Happy Chrismukkah
Out of Office Holiday Vacation Responder
Ready to create your own? Vyond customers can customize these video templates! Try Vyond Studio for free.
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End of Year Videos & Templates
Impact Report End of Year Videos
The end of the year is an important time for nonprofits and private companies alike! For many, this is the time when budgets are decided, targets are hit, and new cash rolls in. Show your impact with an end-of-year video report—like this one for Big Brothers Big Sisters of New York City—using dynamic data visualization and custom infographics. Customize this template ➜
GET INVOLVED WITH BIG BROTHERS BIG SISTERS
3 Ways to Give Back During the Holidays
The end of the year is the season of giving. Encourage your audience to give back with a corporate gifting campaign video! Customize this template ➜
Virtual Employee Awards
Ready to get festive? Bring even more fun to your company’s holiday party with an employee awards video. Use photos of your team, or create custom look-a-like characters with Vyond’s Character Creator. Customize this template ➜
Annual Report Video Template
The key to a great presentation is to show, not tell. Bring your company’s performance to life with animated data visualizations and dynamic graphs. Customize this template ➜
Winter Sale Video Template
With the rise of Black Friday and Cyber Monday, end-of-year sales are here to stay! Promote your holiday sale with a branded animated video—no expensive camera equipment necessary. Customize this template ➜
Donation Drive Video
Showcase causes you care about with a donation drive video! Encourage teammates and friends to get involved. This colorful video about #TeamSeas—created by Vyond video producer Prakriti—is a great example of using mixed media and imported photos. Customize this template ➜
DONATE TO #TEAMSEAS
Supporting Employee Wellness at the End of the Year
Despite the carols that claim “it’s the most wonderful time of the year,” the holiday season can oftentimes be a time of unique hardship for employees. Milestones of grief, financial hardship, and distance are all stressors that can feel particularly present at the end of the year. Promote empathy and self-care with a video! Customize this template ➜
Nonprofit Annual Report
Nonprofit organizations like 48in48 rely on their supporters to continue making an impact. Show what your organization is doing with a video that recaps the year’s achievements while reporting on key metrics. Customize this template ➜
LEARN MORE ABOUT 48IN48
End of Year Video Greetings
Season’s Greetings (from a Distance)
The pandemic has made it trickier than ever to come together during the holidays. Spread cheer with a lighthearted video greeting! Customize this template ➜
Happy New Year to Customers
The end of the year is the perfect time to show your customers how much you appreciate their business. Wish customers a happy new year while sharing some key company highlights in a branded animated video! Customize this template ➜
Happy Holidays from Vyond
Send holiday greetings to your customers, even if you don’t have all their addresses. Unlike stuffy gift baskets, everybody loves a good video. Customize this template ➜
Custom Christmas Video
Turn your company Christmas card into a video to wish employees, customers, and partners a Merry Christmas! Customize this template ➜
Happy Winter Solstice
Animated video is flexible enough to work for just about any holiday—including Winter Solstice! Send seasonal greetings with a cheery video for any occasion. Customize this template ➜
Festive GIFs
Ugly Sweater Party
Even if your team isn’t able to gather in-person, there’s no reason your characters can’t. Bring the gang together for a festive holiday party with this animated GIF. Customize this template ➜
Christmas in the Tropics
Much of the world has grown accustomed to the holidays being associated with snowy winter scenes. But, for those in the tropics or southern hemisphere, this season is all about summertime fun. Surf’s up, Santa! Customize this template ➜
Happy New Year!
Cheers to the new year with this animated greeting! With Vyond Studio, you can create your own GIFs to share on social media, Slack, email, and more. Customize this template ➜
Happy Hanukkah!
Hanukkah 2021 starts Sunday, November 28th and ends Monday, December 6th. Send your own Hanukkah greetings with this customizable GIF. Customize this template ➜
Festivus GIF
Festivus was made popular by the hit TV show Seinfeld. But, the holiday has roots going back to the 1960s. Customize this template ➜
Ōmisoka: New Years in Japan
Ōmisoka is celebrated on the last day of the year by many in Japan, with traditions that emphasize cleaning out the old and greeting the new. For example, many who celebrate will deep clean the house, bathe, and decorate their front door. Customize this template ➜
Happy Chrismukkah
In many places around the world, Christmas remains a dominant fixture of the holiday season. Over time, members of the Jewish diaspora have found ways to blend those merry traditions with the celebration of Hanukkah. Create your own multicultural greeting with a GIF! Customize this template ➜
Out of Office Holiday GIF
For most folks, the end of the year means stepping away from our inboxes to be with the people we love. Bring the holiday spirit to your automated vacation responder with a delightful “out of office” GIF! Customize this template ➜
End of Year Video for DEI
Diwali Explained
This festival of lights from South Asia is celebrated around the world. Teach others about its significance with this easy explainer video! Customize this template ➜
About Noche Buena
Showcase underrepresented traditions, like Noche Buena! Noche Buena is a celebration practiced by people who are Latin American all around the world. Customize this template ➜
How to Play Dreidel
You may know “dreidel, dreidel, dreidel, / I made it out of clay.” But, do you know how to play? Learn how this popular Hannukah game works in this editable video template! Customize this template ➜
About Winter Solstice Festival
Diversity, equity, and inclusion goes a lot deeper than festivals and food. But, the holiday season can still be a great opportunity to spread awareness and represent diversity. Animated video is a fantastic medium for creating inclusive diversity training, as shown by this training video on Winter Solstice Festival. Customize this template ➜
Make your own end of year video.
Video is an engaging, dynamic, and delightful way to share your message. So, it’s a great idea to create an end of year video! Vyond Studio lets you animate own videos and GIFs. For example, you can create custom holiday greeting videos! Or, wish your customers a happy new year. Try Vyond free, and start making media that moves.
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#### Everything You Can Do With Fonts in Vyond Studio
The font you use is an extension of your brand. Your customers associate your brand with it, so you must use a font that communicates the style and values you want. But, of course, the font must be readable, too. So it’s vital to choose its placement carefully, considering design principles like visual hierarchy, contrast, and alignment.
In Vyond Studio, you can place and customize any font you want—in a few clicks.
You can pick a font based on your target audience
The font you use influences how your viewers react to your video. For example, statisticians may find informal fonts like Comic Sans immature, perhaps making them question if the video comes from a reliable source. But if your viewers are 10-year-olds, they won’t bat an eye after seeing this font.
Vyond Studio comes with 38 fonts you can use regardless of your account plan, from casual fonts like Caveat Brush to more traditional-looking ones like Vidaloka. To switch fonts, click on Text Settings on the right side of the toolbar and choose one of the 38 from the Font drop-down.
You can also import any font you’d like, whether it comes from Adobe Fonts, FontShop, or other font marketplaces if you have a Professional or Enterprise account.
The process takes a few steps. First, download your licensed font in a .otf or .ttf file format with a file size below 15MB. Next, click Import inside the Upload menu on the toolbar’s left side and pick your font. From now on, every time you log in to Vyond Studio, you’ll find your font in the Text Settings option.
You can add them to any project
You can use text to add context to a scene or attract the user’s attention to a specific portion of the screen. For example, in the video below, there is a billboard hinting at the driver’s destiny. It’s a subtle detail but makes the viewer curious about the upcoming events.
From Vyond Studio’s interface, click on Text on the toolbar’s left side and choose the text box style that aligns with your project’s needs.
You can customize your text box
The text needs to be readable and positioned deliberately so your viewer knows what information you’re trying to communicate.
Your subtitles, titles, and paragraphs should be different sizes and in different locations to communicate the difference between them. Generally, you should make your title twice as big as your paragraphs or subtitles. This jump between sizes is known as the Double Point Size rule. Its goal is to let your design guide the viewer into what they should read first.
If you’re just starting out with text layouts, the basic rule you should follow is to “justify type left,” which means to align text along the left edge of the screen or frame. You justify type left in Latin languages (English, Spanish, etc.) in particular because text is written from left to right. So our eye naturally falls to the left side of a frame, looking for the start of words.
Alternatively, if you are writing in a language that reads from right to left, justify your text to the right. Then, you can either copy and paste your text into a text box or type it directly. Either way, the text box will recognize the language and adjust the textbox to its content.
You can Auto Size fonts on Vyond Studio
The Auto Size feature modifies your font’s size based on the size of the text box.
There are two main ways in which Auto Size works. First, if you create a text box and Auto Size is on, your text’s size will automatically change to fit the box. So if you have one word, like “cow,” in a small font size inside a large text box, the font size will increase to fit in the box.
Second, if you have a text box with any amount of text in it and enlarge or shrink the text box, the text will enlarge or shrink according to the change.
The Auto Size feature is available to all Vyond users. First, select the text box you want to Auto Size to reveal the Text Settings menu in the top right portion of the toolbar. Then, tick the Auto Size box. Unless you turn Auto Size off, it will affect that specific text box for the rest of the project.
You can incorporate them into a style guide
A style guide is a document where you add the visual details your work should follow across the project, such as the font you’ll use, the size of headers, and the colors of the paragraphs.
In Vyond Studio, you can use the first scene as a style guide. You can add the text boxes for titles, paragraphs, and subtitles with the Text Settings you want. And then, when it’s time to create your animated project, copy-paste the text boxes from the first scene into the last one. This will maintain a cohesive style across the project.
You can make them move to engage the viewer
Text that moves is known as kinetic text. This type of text aims to attract the viewer’s attention to read what you wrote, which it achieves typically more successfully than static text.
Your text’s movement needs to be well-thought-out. Too much movement and you can confuse the reader. But too little, and your readers might miss the text you so carefully constructed.
So, to achieve a balance in the amount of kinetic text you add, highlight the most critical phrases from your finished script. These are the words you’ll want to animate. Once you know which words to emphasize, create or open a video project in Vyond.
From there, you’ll be able to use our Enter and Exit effects, Continue Last Scene feature, and Motion Paths to bring your sentences to life. You can read the step-by-step guide to do it here.
Use and customize any font you’d like in Vyond Studio
Your brand’s font is a communication channel. It enhances your storytelling by adding more details to your story. It communicates the characteristics of your brand, too. For example, a detail-rich font may convey your brand appreciates art, and a formal one may transmit you took video production seriously.
In Vyond Studio, you can pick any font you’d like, no matter the values, emotions, or brand qualities you want to convey.
Start a free trial
#### Everything You Need to Add Closed Captions to Vyond Videos
From both an accessibility and a strategic point of view, it’s essential to have captions on your videos. More than 5% of people around the globe have a hearing disability. So, for viewers with a hearing impairment or who speak English as a second language, closed captions can mean the difference between enjoying a video and having to skip it entirely. Similarly, many people watch videos on Facebook with the sound turned down, so captions are a must-have.
Many of our loyal customers ask whether they can add closed captions when creating a video in Vyond Studio. While it’s not advisable to do so in Vyond, that doesn’t mean captions aren’t necessary.
At Vyond, we save time by ordering closed captions with a single click through our video hosting platform, Wistia. For $2.50p/min, captions are added and made available for easy proofing and editing. For our long webinars, we upload the recording to Rev.com, purchase an SRT caption file for $1.25p/min, review it, and upload it to our Wistia account. More on this and other free captioning options below.
Let’s go through some best practices for creating captions that ultimately deliver the best, and most accessible, viewing experience possible for your audience.
Why you shouldn’t add closed captions in Vyond
There are two kinds of captions: open and closed. While the difference may seem subtle, this choice affects your viewers’ experience. Open captions are always in view—people watching your video can’t hit a button to turn them on and off and they can not be read by screen readers. Closed captions, on the other hand, are a separate layer that can be toggled on and off. And while you can leverage Vyond Studio for many aspects of video production adding captions isn’t what Vyond does best.
Currently, you can’t automatically add synchronized closed or open captions to videos you create in Vyond. To add open captions in Vyond, you can add a text box at the bottom of a scene and then type in the content.
While manually adding open captions this way is an option, it can become tricky and time-consuming, especially if you’re using camera movement. Your audience also won’t be able to toggle off your captions, creating a cluttered screen for viewers who don’t need captions.
This approach can make your videos look messy and unpolished. Paying attention to production value is critical when trying to train or sell with a video.
Why captions are still important
Just because it’s challenging to add closed captions from a video editing suite—Vyond included—that doesn’t mean you should forgo them altogether. Captions remain a vital part of the viewer experience. As we mentioned earlier, using captions increases accessibility for those who are hearing impaired, speak limited English, or have trouble parsing certain accents.
Adding captions or other stylized, moving text is crucial for style, emphasis, and engagement. Aside from their purposes in strategy and accessibility, the right captions will look great with your videos!
Try Vyond for Free
How to add closed captions to Vyond videos the right way
You can’t add captions natively in Vyond Studio (this is possible in other video creation platforms, but isn’t typically easy). Vyond videos export as MP4s, and closed captions must be added as a separate “layer” in your video hosting provider to make it possible for screen readers to understand. That said, you do still have several options. Here’s how you can add captions to the videos you’ve made with Vyond Studio.
Add captions separately
The most clear-cut approach to closed-captioning your Vyond Studio videos is to take advantage of the captioning features in other solutions. For instance, your preferred video-hosting tool may include an automatic closed-captioning feature. Or, if you’re producing your video for training purposes, your LMS may come equipped with an easy captioning feature. At Vyond, we mostly rely on Wistia’s captioning integration and also work directly with Rev.com, detailed below.
Choosing a separate hosting solution, like one of the options listed above, generally makes for relatively seamless and high-quality captioning.
Free captioning options
Of course, many of the solutions above will cost you a bit of money in fees. If you’re working with a tighter budget, or only hosting your videos on social media, there are workable options for free captioning as well.
Chief among those options are YouTube and Facebook, which both support manual and automated free captioning for videos uploaded to their servers. You may find the manual entry option more time-consuming, though. Having a hand-typed subtitle script is a lot better than low-quality auto-sync closed captions.
You can also add captions for free by creating an SRT file from a script. The SRT method can be efficient but involves time-consuming manual work to find exact time stamps and transcribe your script. It can thus be tricky to get synchronization exact between caption and scene.
Paid captioning options
Of course, paid options will be less-time consuming. The following paid captioning services can be useful for faster turnarounds, higher quality, or more of a “human touch.”
Rev.com: Rev offers a variety of package options, including a high-quality automated transcription service that runs at only $0.25 per minute of audio “for a verbatim or time-stamped transcript”, and a bespoke English language captioning service for $1.25 per minute. They also offer foreign-language subtitling. Turnaround times are frequently within 24 hours, but can sometimes take longer.
GoTranscript: GoTranscript offers a similarly high-quality service. Their one-day-turnaround price is $1.04 per minute, and and they also offer rush orders for when you need captions fast.
3Play Media: If your needs are more custom and likely to be recursive, 3Play Media might be your solution. They offer plans in up to 16 languages on their premier plan, and their pricing quotes are bespoke.
You can find more resources on paid captioning options here.
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Localizing your videos
Translated subtitles are often considered part of the captioning process. Several of the tools we’ve mentioned above, including Rev and GoTranscript, include translation and non-English subtitles as a critical part of their offering.
If you want to connect authentically with audiences abroad, put videos in viewers’ native languages. To achieve this, you might want to do more than take your existing script and translate it word for word. Instead, adapt your script for local idioms and expressions. For these reasons, localization is a vital means of making your videos more accessible.
There are three different approaches to explore.
Subtitles
With subtitling, you’re keeping your original video and sound but adding in closed captions in different languages. It’s the most cost-effective of these localization options and typically has a low lead time. That said, translated closed captions don’t make for an immersive viewer experience.
Audio
The next step up on the ladder of localization is to translate your video script and then have a fluent speaker record audio for it. You can then add the localized audio to your video—it is, of course, more effective to pair translated audio with appropriate closed captions, too.
Localizing your audio makes for a more seamless viewing experience, but it is more expensive and time-consuming, and also not entirely immersive.
Full localization
Full localization denotes a complete subtitle-and-audio translation of your video content, but it doesn’t stop there. Full localization mindfully translates cultural and verbal nuances that often differentiate the original and the new languages.
For example, suppose you were localizing a video made initially for English-speaking North Americans for a new audience in South Korea. In that case, you’d have to do more than just translate the closed captions and record new audio. That means rewriting your script entirely to be mindful of how people use English versus Korean to communicate.
Below, you can see a tremendous localization from Vyond customer Octo D. They adapted and localized a Vyond template in English to communicate important COVID-19 safety precautions.
Check out how we localized our Vyond explainer video and learn more about video localization.
Spelling it out
Given all the benefits in accessibility that come with adding text to your video, it’s natural that captioning is at the top of many producers’ to-do lists. It’s something that no video should be without.
But we don’t advise that you work closed captions into your video while editing it in Vyond Studio. The captions can be jarring to viewers, and more complicated to implement. Instead, make use of the wide range of captioning services, or even use your hosting platform’s options (it might be free!) for a high-end finish on your captions.
Those little words might not take up much space, but they’re a fundamental aspect of the viewer experience. It’s crucial to get captions right.
Make a video
#### Everything You Need to Make a Video in Vyond
You can use Vyond’s all-in-one AI video creation platform to easily create videos in a wide range of styles for any kind of business audience–zero experience required. This includes animated videos, videos with an AI avatar host, mixed media videos that use Shutterstock, live footage and text, screen recordings, and more.
To help you get started, we’ve bundled the savviest Vyond resources from our team to form a comprehensive guide to video-making in Vyond Studio. (Vyond Studio is a full-featured, drag-and-drop video editor; Vyond Go is an instant AI-powered script and video creator.)
In this post, we’ll cover everything you need to know to create a great Vyond video, from brainstorming ideas to adding advanced effects.
Click to jump to each section:
Step 1: Plan & outline your ideasStep 2: Turn your outline into a scriptStep 3: Start a free trial of VyondStep 4: Learn Vyond: tutorials, webinars, knowledge checks, customer support, showcase video examplesStep 5: Storyboard & finalize your script
Step 6: Create your charactersStep 7: Make your videoStep 8: Upgrade to a Vyond subscriptionStep 9: Practice and playStep 10: Take video to the next level: video authoring, video hosting, advance your skills
Follow this post as a guide and you’ll be making videos with Vyond (like this one below) in no time.
Start a free trial of Vyond.
Step 1: Plan and outline your ideas
Before you jump into Vyond’s platform, you have to start by planning your video. The more you think ahead, the smoother your actual video-making will be.
Here are four planning steps to create an outline of your video that details how it progresses:
Set goals. Identify the objective of your video for your organization and how you plan to measure success.
Identify the scope. Figure out your video length, budget, a timeline for making it, etc.
Pick the type of video. Will your video be completely animated or will it include some live-action parts? Consider your video goals and scope when making this decision.
Brainstorm and outline. Based on your video goals, scope, and type, think about what types of characters and storylines you will need for your film. Then, write out in bullet points how you envision the video progressing from start to finish.
With an outline ready, you have a clear framework for efficiently creating a video.
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Step 2: Turn your outline into a script
Once you’ve laid out your initial thoughts, you’re ready to start scripting. Scripting your video before you start a Vyond free trial will give you more time to explore our video maker. We also recommend that our customers have at least a basic script in mind before attempting to make a video in Vyond Studio.
Use your original outline as the basis of your script and begin to expand it into a video script.
Scripting for video, especially animated video, is different than writing for any other medium. With visuals and audio available to help you tell your story, not every word needs to be spoken. Try to think in pictures as you’re writing your script — this is an important exercise that many new video creators overlook. It’s also best to be brief and conversational. Generally, video will not be as formal as written text.
Here are some of the most important script elements for you to consider, from Vyond’s CEO, Gary Lipkowitz:
Setting: Where should your story take place? At home? At the office? At the airport? Where is the magnitude or urgency of the pain point at its highest?
Characters: Who should tell the story? A manager? An employee? A narrator?
Narrative Style: Are there characters? Should the characters speak to each other like they’re in a TV show? This dialog enhances storytelling but is often slower. Should there be a narrator, talking about the characters from a top view? This allows you to be more efficient and precise, but often at the expense of identification with the characters.
Structure: Should you start at the beginning? This is the most simple. Or should you start at the end, showing the good (or bad) outcome and tracing back to the start? This shifts focus toward the “how” and away from the result.
Metaphor: Metaphors can help bring difficult concepts to life, especially with animation. Metaphors help us understand new concepts by attaching them to concepts that we already know. A little boy using a leaky bucket to bring water back from a well can illustrate poor cost control or a faulty process. These metaphors can be spoken or visual.
Watch the video below, and read this detailed post for more scripting tips.
Here at Vyond, we use a simple Google Docs template to lay out our scripts. Visuals are detailed on the left side of the doc, while the dialogue is covered on the right. The format is simple and easy for anyone to fill out, regardless of their scriptwriting experience. Here’s one example of ours:
Once you’ve written your script, read it aloud. Then read it again, and again, and again. Edit as needed to make the language sound natural and conversational. Think about where you can cut out unnecessary words or turn them into animated visuals, or on-screen text that can be excluded from the voice-over.
With the first draft of your script ready and your video planned, it’s time to start using Vyond.
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Step 3: Start a free trial
We offer a free trial for anyone interested in trying Vyond before committing to a subscription.
Start a free trial of Vyond.
Once you’ve started your free trial, you can begin exploring the platform immediately. Click “Make a Video,” and choose from one of our three styles.
Contemporary has a modern feel with easy-to-brand design customization abilities.
Business Friendly has industry-specific templates to create videos for a wide variety of professional scenarios.
Whiteboard Animation draws out your video piece-by-piece, so viewers are eager to see what will be revealed next. They stay engaged while you break down the core ideas of your video.
After choosing a style, play around with templates. Their pre-set scenery, characters, and more make it easy to create a complete video in minutes.
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Step 4: Learn Vyond
People always ask us how long it should take to create their first video, or to become a pro at using Vyond. The honest answer is that it’s different for everyone. It’s easy enough to drag a few templates onto the timeline, make simple adjustments, and create your first video in less than a minute. Some of our customers are able to jump in their first time, teach themselves, and create an excellent custom video within their first few hours. Other people, the majority, take a few days, weeks, or months to become proficient Vyond video creators.
If you want to learn by teaching yourself, take a look at how Vyond Studio is laid out, follow the guided tour when you sign in for the first time, then explore all of our scene template options. If you want to learn from our team, watch our top resources for learning how to use the videomaker.
Video Tutorials
Our step-by-step tutorials are the perfect resources for learning technical Vyond skills. You can find a library of introductory tutorials with our Getting Started video tutorial page.
These introductory tutorials cover everything from animation styles to adding voice to your videos. Watch this video, and those linked below, with the Vyond Studio open to follow along.
Animation styles overview
Using Vyond scene templates
How to create a custom character
Character animation
Enter and exit effects
Scene transitions
Adding voice to your video
Advanced audio editing
Keyboard shortcuts
Webinars
Beyond tutorials, you can build your knowledge of video and Vyond with our webinars. These sessions are typically 45 minutes long (plus Q&A), so they cover a lot of ground on specific video topics. You can also check out our library of past webinars. This intermediate webinar, for example, will teach you how to take your videos from good to great by using scene transitions, camera movement, and sound effects.
Test your knowledge
Here are some exercises to complete in Vyond Studio to apply what you’ve learned. Search our help center if you get stuck.
Change your character’s action to “sit” and make the facial expression “confused.”
Make a pig fly from the bottom left corner all the way off the screen.
In one sequence, make your character walk, stand, and then jump.
Show the change of seasons by showing your character in a summer outfit, and then a winter outfit.
Import an image of your favorite place and have your character talk about why he/she loves it so much.
Use whiteboard animation to draw a monkey and a banana. Extra credit: erase the banana and replace it with a chocolate bar.
Create a chart that compares the popularity of your three favorite sports.
Find a template that allows you to insert a screenshot into a computer frame then slowly zoom in on that screen.
Vyond customer support
Have a question about Vyond? Our team of experts is here to help.
Vyond Help Center: Search through topics and explore Vyond resources to answer your questions.
Email customer support: You can reach our support team at support@vyond.com. We typically respond within 24 hours.
Call customer support: You can call our support team at (888) 360-9639. We are available Monday – Friday, midnight Pacific to 5:30 pm Pacific (excluding holidays).
Premium support: Vyond Starter, Professional, and Enterprise customers have access to live chat support. Vyond Professional and Enterprise members have a priority spot in our service queue.
Showcase
As a newbie, you can learn a lot from others’ Vyond creations. It’s helpful and motivating to see what’s possible in Vyond Studio with time and experience. That’s why we created the Vyond Customer Showcase and Templates Showcase pages where you can explore stand-out video examples from the Vyond team and our customers.
The videos are organized by different use cases—training, marketing, branding—so you can find examples that are the most helpful for your work.
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Start a free trial of Vyond.
Step 5: Storyboard and finalize your script
Now that you understand how Vyond works, you know what’s available to you visually and can start storyboarding. Storyboarding is critical because it speeds up production. By envisioning the entire video, you know exactly what to record (or animate) and focus on during the production stage.
The most common way to storyboard is drawing by hand. You don’t need to be a great artist, and the amount of detail you include can depend on how simple or complex your video will be. A storyboard needs at least enough information to give stakeholders a sense of what’s happening.
If you don’t feel comfortable drawing, Vyond is a great tool for quickly putting together storyboards. The characters, props, and settings are already designed—you only need to drag them to where you want them to create each frame.
Always make final modifications to your script during the storyboarding process. The more you can communicate through imagery, the more powerful your video will be.
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Step 6: Create your characters
Creating characters is one of the most exciting parts of using Vyond! Our characters are customizable from head to toe. Pick outfits to show off a character’s personality, and add different eye and mouth shapes to convey their emotions and expressions.
On the free trial, you will have access to our three animation styles and two character creators—Business Friendly and Whiteboard. If you choose to upgrade to a Vyond Professional plan, you will also have access to the Contemporary Character Creator that offers even more customization options, such as changing characters’ height.
We recommend creating your character first and then making the rest of your video. This order is more efficient than switching back and forth from the Character Creator to your scene in Vyond Studio.
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Step 7. Make your video
With your characters built, you’re ready to make the rest of your video in Vyond. With all your pre-production work set, making a video could be the easiest part.
Here are the basic elements you’ll need to make your video feel polished and complete:
Scenery and props: Find a template that’s pre-built with scenic elements and props to save you time.
Camera movement: The view of the camera guides viewers’ focus throughout your video, so they’re focusing on the most important elements. Check out this help article and this webinar on camera movement to learn more.
Voiceover and lip sync: You can either create audio narration through typing in text or by recording your own voiceover. We recommend using the text-to-speech voice while you work and then adding your own recording at the end, in case you need to make any dialogue adjustments. Vyond characters will automatically lip sync to your dialogue.
Music and sound effects: Both audio elements add emotion and realism to your videos, so audiences are more engaged. Check out this help article on adding music and sound effects to scenes.
Scene transitions: Watch this help article and this tutorial to learn how to add scene transitions.
Character movement: Add your characters back in and plot out motion paths for them to walk or run in your video. You can learn how to set character movements in this article.
All of these elements together create a full, sensory experience that engages your audience as they watch your video.
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Step 8. Upgrade to a Vyond subscription
From a free trial account, you are able to explore Vyond and create watermarked videos. However, you’re not able to download a video on a free trial account, and you’ll only be able to use Vyond. For regular access to Vyond with the option to download, you’ll need to upgrade to one of the following subscriptions.
Starter
Perfect for individuals, Vyond Starter offers core video creation features, plus:
Access to AI avatars and tools
600+ high-quality test to speech voices
Screen & webcam recording.
Includes 10,000 credits per user, per month
Professional
The Professional plan is perfect for businesses and 1-5 user teams. The plan includes all of the Starter features, plus:
Team collaboration tools
Access to 4M+ Shutterstock assets
Instant translation into 95 languages
Speech Enhancer (powered by Dolby.io)
Includes 20,000 credits per user, per month
Enterprise
Built for large teams with individualized needs. Includes all of the Professional features, plus:
100+ ultra-high-quality AI voices
Brand management tools
Advanced team collaboration
Enterprise security features
Virtually unlimited credits
Learn more about Vyond’s subscription plans.
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Step 9: Practice and play
Set yourself up with good, productive habits by learning from the resources in this post. You may be using Vyond for work, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be fun too! Play around and make fun videos for yourself, your family, or your co-workers. This is a great way to learn. Try out new ideas and don’t be too hard on yourself if your videos aren’t perfect right away. Keep at it and let us know if you need help.
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Step 10: Take your videos to the next level
Vyond makes it easy to make videos, but your video strategy will require more than that. Take your videos to the next level with these tips for sharing and improving your video distribution.
Video authoring and interactivity
Authoring your video with interactive elements transforms the video viewing experience. You can create a choose-your-own-adventure video, give your learners quizzes or skill checks, gamify your content, create clickable menus, and more.
Many Vyond customers use tools such as Articulate Storyline, Adobe Captivate, Trivantis (Lectora), iSpring, and others, to add interactivity to their Vyond videos.
Video hosting
Your videos need a place to live when you’re done with them. With a host, you have a secure place to store and share your videos.
Here are a few industry-specific video hosting suggestions.
eLearning and HR: You most likely want your videos to be private, so consider storing them on a learning management system (LMS), such as Litmos or Docebo. Or post your videos privately on your employee intranet portal, such as Unily.
Marketing: Most of your videos will be public, and you’ll want to distribute them as widely as possible. Wistia, Brightcove, Vidyard, and Vzaar are excellent options for marketers as they allow you to easily upload and embed videos, and they track viewer engagement.
Enterprise: Large organizations with specific video hosting requirements should consider Qumu, Kaltura, Panopto, and Brightcove.
Of course, Vimeo and YouTube has distribution benefits, and it’s free, but it’s also not the ideal service to use as your primary storage and distribution channel. YouTube gives you less control over the viewing experience, as users will see commercials and outside videos on their sidebar, but its affordability makes it a considerable choice.
Advance your video skills
Make the most of your Vyond subscription by continually building your video skills. Revisit the knowledge-building tips in Step 4 and check out video resources outside of Vyond. Our video production team recommends No Film School, and our marketing team has learned quite a bit from Wistia.
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Anyone Can Become a Vyond Pro
Vyond is meant for people with all levels of experience—from the novice to the film school grad. With this accessibility, it doesn’t take long to become a whiz at using Vyond. Follow these ten steps and you’ll quickly be on your way to making professional animated videos regularly for your organization.
Make a video
Do I need a storyboard to create an explainer video?
While a storyboard can be useful in many cases, you don’t have to. With AI-powered video creation tools, you can now jump from a rough idea to a first draft by entering instructions into an instant video creator, choosing a format and style, and then editing the draft. Some people use AI video tools to help generate ideas, some use the structure and content directly, some edit the results as needed.
Is using Vyond hard?
Users report Vyond being surprisingly easy to use. Reviewers on G2 and Capterra praise Vyond’s instant script and video generator Vyond Go for making it possible to create videos in a fraction of the time they used to. Vyond Studio’s drag‑and‑drop interface and deep template library also makes it possible for new users to create training videos or explainers with minimal ramp‑up time. Reviewers on G2 and Capterra report being able to build a polished 5-minute video in a couple of hours—what might take days in other tools. Other users with no graphics or animation skills say they created polished videos almost immediately after trying the tool.
What’s the best way to learn to use Vyond?
Vyond’s instant video creator makes it easy to create video drafts from a prompt in seconds, without any training. But Vyond also provides users with a number of resources to help them edit those videos, add effects, or create videos from templates in Vyond Studio, the platform’s full-featured interface. The best resources for getting the most out of Vyond can be found in Vyond’s Learning Center on vyond.com. Within the Learning Center, you can access:
Vyond Office Hours recordings, in which Vyond experts explain how to create all variety of videos and effects
Vyond Bootcamp Sessions–an eight-week instructional course offered twice a year
Getting Started with Vyond–a hitlist of steps to take when you first sign up
Additionally, there are a wide range of video tutorials and sample templates available on Vyond’s YouTube channel.
#### Experience VyondAI – And All of Our New Features!
For more information about our newest AI-Powered features, read Vyond’s Fall 2023 Release – Generative AI, Accessibility, and an infinite library blog post.
We’re excited to announce a huge number of new features – and the all-new VyondAI.
Be the first to experience Vyond’s new machine-learning enhanced features – powered by VyondAI. Produce great videos faster than ever with natural-sounding text to speech, photos that transform into props or scene backgrounds, and automatic background noise removal for voiceovers.
Natural Sounding Text to Speech
Text-to-speech used to sound robotic. The new AI-powered text-to-speech sounds more natural because it’s derived from the voices of actual people. It’s still as easy to use as ever. Just type in your lines, choose a character and language — and listen to your script spoken in a realistic human voice!
Speech Enhancement
Don’t worry about your neighbor’s loud music or the lawnmower in the background. Strip out those competing sounds and let your voice shine through with our speech enhancement feature, powered by Dolby.io and VyondAI.
Media Library Panel
Don’t lose time hunting for your favorite characters and props. Access all of your props and characters – right when you need them – in one click! The new media library panel makes it easy to find props, characters, and scenes you’ve used in the past, and drop them into the video you’re working on now!
Try Vyond for Free
Vyond for Enterprise Features
These new features make life easier for large teams at Enterprise organizations. Interested in learning more about Vyond for Enterprise? Contact our sales support team.
Multi-subscription accounts
Do you have teams spread out throughout your organization? A decentralized budget structure? With multi-subscription accounts, you now have the flexibility to pay together or separately while still collaborating.
Enterprise Content Sharing and User Groups
Reduce onboarding, access rights management, and offboarding to a single click with our new collaboration management tools. Define set “collaboration zones” (shared spaces) and/or quickly share videos to ad hoc lists (user groups).
See These Features First on the Show Floor
Some of our coolest features have not been released yet – but we’ll be giving you a sneak peek at all that VyondAI has to offer.
Vyond Mobile
View and display your videos quickly and easily from your phone, with the upcoming Vyond Mobile! Upload recorded voices, pictures, and videos to Vyond for use in your videos — OR — use those uploads as a hint for Visual Content Search.
Visual Content Search
Scrolling to find the right prop is a thing of the past. With Visual Content Search, Vyond’s powerful AI will automatically select props that match your photo.
Automatic Background Removal
Upload any image, and watch as VyondAI removes the background – then use that image as prop in your video!
Color Picker
Want to select a color from a brand logo or another image? Upload any image and gain immediate access to the key colors in that image.
Try Vyond for Free
New Content
Our content team has been hard at work creating new content for your videos – based on themes from Earth Day to Chinese New Year. Take a look at some of the videos below to get inspiration for your own creations!
Lunar New Year & Valentine’s Day
World Wildlife Day
St Patrick’s Day
Easter
Earth Day
Try Vyond for Free
#### Fall 2023 Awards Roundup: Record-High 74 G2 Awards and 2 Training Magazine Network Wins
Reviews are an important reflection of how well Vyond is helping our customers communicate better.
So we’re thrilled to share news on a fresh set of accolades — the first following the launch of Vyond Go, the industry’s first AI-powered script and video creator. Vyond received 74 G2 awards — a new record — and earned top rankings in the 2023 Training Magazine Network Choice Awards program.
G2 Awards
Peer review site G2 compares the best business software and services based on user ratings and social data to help buyers find the right solutions for their business needs.
Vyond received 74 awards across Video Creation, Presentation, Content Creation, and Animation categories, and 18 first-place awards including:
#1 Leader for Enterprise in Content Creation
#1 Best Usability in Enterprise for Content Creation
#1 Leader in Enterprise for Animation (Americas Region)
#1 in Most Implementable in Enterprise for Content Creation
#1 in Easiest Setup in Enterprise for Content Creation
We were also recognized as a “Leader” and “Best” in class with awards in Animation and Content Creation for the Americas, EMEA, and Europe regions.
Training Magazine Network Choice Awards
The Training Magazine Network asks their 56,000-member Training and Learning and Development community to vote for the vendor partners they believe provide the most effective tools and solutions for their work. Vyond was honored with winning rankings in two of the six award categories:
Winner in Authoring Tools
Winner in Custom Content/Program Development
We are extremely proud and grateful for this recognition that comes directly from our users.
“Awesome product, excellent customer service”
Verified Vyond User
“Create professional and engaging videos in minutes”
Verified Vyond for Enterprise User
“We’re committed to exceeding our customers’ expectations as a business imperative, and a large part of that is engaging with our customers and getting feedback,” said Erin Champion, Vyond Director of Customer Success at Vyond.
“Being recognized with 74 G2 awards and top ranking from a well-respected industry organization is a rewarding validation that our customers love Vyond and are seeing a positive business impact – and that’s very exciting.”
Learn more details on our awards web page. Find more information about our Training Magazine Network awards here.
#### February 2026 Vyond Newsletter
Watch the Video Now
Transform “zombie content” into videos that get watched. Add branding to avatars quicker. Edit avatar scripts and voices right in Studio. And don’t miss our four all-new virtual events.
Drive results by transforming your half-dead docs into fresh videos – in seconds.
See How It Works
Brand Text-to-Avatar videos with a click. Waste less time tweaking scripts and voices.
Check Out These AI Timesavers
Get your Vyond questions answered, watch videos built live, and squeeze the most out of our AI.
Join a March Learning Session Now
Read the full video transcript
It’s only February, but it’s never too early for spring cleaning. Starting with your zombie content. You know, those unused PDFs, decks and docs, taking up space on your hard drive or the cloud. They’re technically alive and still accurate, but left for dead because they’re stale and unengaging.
But if they still hold valuable insights, you can turn your zombie docs into fresh, engaging videos with Vyond. And those new videos can help you ramp reps 5x faster, hit high production deadlines, and reduce risk by increasing compliance engagement. Now, it’s even easier to customize your content for your audience and brand. With Vyond’s text-to-avatar background swap enhancement, you can create the exact spokesperson to fit your brand, and you can adjust backgrounds with a click.
Connect with employees from any industry simply by switching up backgrounds. Create multiple versions of your content at scale. You can save time by editing stock avatars directly in Vyond Studio. So you can adjust scripts and voices right in the flow of your work.
It’s ideal when you’re making different versions of the same script. Or, if you’re working on a video with multiple stakeholders, it’s a nimble way to handle quick tweaks. Vyond Community has some really helpful sessions coming up. Join us for “Ask Vyond Anything,” our new live Q&A where our team answers your questions in real time shares tips, and helps you create with confidence.
And don’t miss, “Vyond Product Update,” introducing you to our latest features. Plus, “Vyond AI” will focus on making videos with avatars and Vyond Go. So, let’s recap. Revive your zombie docs as engaging videos.
Customize text-to-avatar backgrounds for any audience. Edit stock avatars directly in Vyond Studio. And Vyond Community is here with helpful tips and updates. What will you make in Vyond today?
#### Finding the Right Compliance Framework: AICC vs SCORM vs xAPI
When it comes to designing eLearning courses, you have a number of decisions to make: course length, types of media to include, and so on. But, before you begin designing your course, you need to think about what compliance standards it will follow to ensure it runs efficiently on your learning management system (LMS).
While you don’t have as many options to choose from as, say, characters for your next animated video, you do have choices. You might think your decision is limited to AICC vs. SCORM, which are the two most popular standards. But there is a third option: xAPI. To help you make the right choice, let’s take a look at each option, what it offers, and how you can make content that’s in line with each. This animated video helps overview the differences:
What is AICC?
AICC refers to the group that created it, known as the Aviation Industry Computer-Based Training Committee. The committee formed in 1988 to standardize training materials for airline workers. Five years later, they had created the first specifications to make sure eLearning content would function properly on learning management systems.
Despite the name and origin, AICC standards aren’t specific to the aviation industry. They simply exist to help creators keep costs down by ensuring that courses work when moving from one platform to another. As long as the eLearning course is AICC-compliant, it will work on any AICC-compliant LMS.
As the oldest of all the standards, AICC has been losing support since the committee disbanded in 2014. AICC also won’t receive any additional updates, which means it’s now considered outdated. But it’s been around for so long that many organizations still use it for legacy reasons, and most platforms can still accept AICC-compliant content.
Although considered outdated, AICC has one major advantage over newer standards: Many pros in the industry think it’s more secure.
To be considered AICC-compliant, your content needs to follow at least one of nine guidelines and recommendations. If you’re interested in learning more about AICC compliance, you can find the full guidelines here.
What is SCORM?
After AICC came SCORM, short for Sharable Content Object Reference Model. It’s an eLearning standard that L&D pros use to build and design online courses and LMS platforms.
Developed by the Advanced Distributed Learning Initiative in 1999, SCORM was meant to account for AICC’s deficiencies. At that time, AICC courses were largely shared via CDs or floppy discs, and the internet boom and the increase in digital media had created a compliance gap.
Like AICC, SCORM guidelines were meant to reduce the cost of eLearning courses by making them work with more learning management systems. Today, SCORM is the most commonly used technical specification within the eLearning community, which means if your courses are SCORM-compliant, they’re compatible with most LMSs.
For your course to be SCORM-compliant, it needs to be packaged into a special file called the “imsmanifest.xml.” That tells the LMS how to handle the content inside, providing instructions on what the courses are called, how they will open, etc. It also needs runtime communications to give the LMS commands, like “track the quiz score for this course,” to make sure the course is properly executed.
Until recently, SCORM required authoring tools to package files correctly. But now, with Vyond’s SCORM package export, you can seamlessly create, track, and deliver eLearning content within a single workflow.
There are several versions of SCORM, from SCORM 1.0 to SCORM 1.2 and SCORM 2004. But SCORM 1.2 is the most widely used. If you’re planning on following SCORM standards, stick to 1.2.
With Vyond, you can export your video as a SCORM package and upload it directly into your LMS, no special conversion tools or separate authoring tools required.
As part of the SCORM package download, you can also add completion criteria directly within Vyond. This is one of the most common metrics and it’s another way Vyond can help instructional designers simplify workflow.
Vyond supports both SCORM 1.2 and SCORM 2004.v4, and you can export the format you want to create the course tracking and analytics you need. To learn more about the differences between the two formats, check out this page.
What is the difference between AICC and SCORM?
On the surface, AICC and SCORM look fairly similar. Both are eLearning and LMS standards that aim to increase cross-platform compatibility. But there are a few key differences.
AICC
AICC uses HTTP to communicate with your LMS platform.
AICC can be more complicated to implement in an LMS, requiring numerous steps.
AICC has been sunset.
SCORM
SCORM uses JavaScript to communicate with your LMS.
SCORM can be simpler to load in an LMS, only requiring that the course and its files be packaged in a zip folder (along with the “imsmanifest.xml” file mentioned earlier).
SCORM is widely used.
The battle with AICC vs SCORM appears to be a clear victory for the latter, with AICC being phased out over time. But there’s also a third option: xAPI.
What is xAPI?
Released in 2013, xAPI — also known as Tin Can or Experience API — is one of the most modern standards for creating eLearning content and LMS platforms. It was developed to address the limitations of SCORM.
Unlike SCORM — or AICC — xAPI isn’t limited to capturing learning experiences inside an LMS. It can track a user’s activity in additional platforms, such as customer relationship management (CRM) tools or employee performance systems.
xAPI-compliant systems communicate through “noun, verb, object” statements. These statements track data about learning activities and tell the system what happened using a templated response, such as “User completed course 1.” That information is then sent to a Learning Record Store (LRS), which can share the information with another LMS or LRS, ensuring functionality across multiple systems.
xAPI is more flexible because it doesn’t require a constant internet connection, which allows learners to complete activities online or offline. It also doesn’t require a web browser, so creators can administer courses through mobile apps.
Comparing SCORM, xAPI, and AICC
When it comes to AICC vs. SCORM vs. xAPI, all have played a pivotal role in the history and development of eLearning and LMS platforms. But the three also have different pros and cons and represent different advances in technology.
AICC
Though still frequently used, AICC has become an outdated standard.
Pros
AICC is the second most used compliance standard for eLearning courses.
It is believed to be the most secure of the three because of HTPPS.
Cons
It’s a legacy standard that won’t be updated, and content creators are beginning to leave it behind.
It can’t be used to track progress offline.
SCORM
SCORM is the most popular standard, but it does have some technological disadvantages.
Pros
SCORM is the most widely used standard.
Because of SCORM’s popularity, courses that follow SCORM will be easier to sell because they’re more likely to work with LMS platforms.
SCORM is easy to follow, requiring only the xml doc and proper zip file format. All of this can be done with a simple authoring tool.
Vyond supports both SCORM 1.2 and SCORM 2004.v4
SCORM authoring tools are widely available.
Cons
SCORM does require an LMS, meaning it can’t be used in stand-alone apps like xAPI can.
It can’t be used to track progress offline.
xAPI
The newest kid on the block, xAPI offers modern advantages, but it isn’t widely supported.
Pros
xAPI can be used outside of LMS platforms, giving it a versatility the other two standards lack.
Courses can be used to track progress offline, while the others can’t.
It operates without a web browser.
xAPI is the only option capable of a native mobile learning experience.
Cons
Because xAPI is the newest option, it isn’t as widely supported as the other two, which means there are limited options for authoring tools and learning management systems.
It’s clear that AICC’s days are numbered because it’s no longer supported, and content creators are leaving it behind. This leaves you with two viable options for designing your eLearning courses: SCORM and xAPI. You can be up and running quickly with SCORM, or you can opt for the most up-to-date technology with xAPI. For help making the choice, read Near-Life’s comparison of xAPI and SCORM.
How to make videos compliant with SCORM and xAPI
Whichever compliance standard you choose, most eLearning courses can benefit from incorporating video content. Video evokes emotion, allows complex topics to be covered quickly, and makes them easier to understand.
Vyond’s online animation software allows you to create animated videos to add to your eLearning courses. Vyond is easy to use and is available at a monthly price, it saves you the cost of a dedicated design and animation team, and it can be customized to fit your brand.
And because animated video is a media type, it doesn’t have to follow compliance standards. You can simply include animated video in your xAPI course or bundle the mp4 file in with your SCORM course zip file.
See for yourself how Vyond can improve your eLearning courses by signing up for a free trial.
AICC vs SCORM vs xAPI: The choice is yours
Every eLearning standard brings something different to the table. While AICC is considered the most secure and is still widely used, it’s mostly around due to legacy reasons. The standard won’t be updated, which means it’s not necessarily worth the time investment to make your eLearning courses AICC-compliant.
On the other hand, SCORM and xAPI both have a lot to offer. SCORM is widely used and will work with most LMS platforms. And xAPI offers modern features and more flexibility but isn’t as widely supported. Before you choose, think about how you want to use your eLearning courses and speak with any stakeholders in your projects.
Make a video
#### Food Stories with Vyond: Recipes for a Great Video
Food has a magical way of bringing people together during the holidays. This year has made it especially clear what (and who) matters most, and here at Vyond, that’s you. The folks who make up the Vyond Community are part of our extended family, so we wanted to share with you some of our very favorite foods.
We hope you enjoy these stories about the recipes that bring our families together, while learning to make great food—and great videos—in the process.
Recipes for a Great Video
Watch and learn how to make some of this great food, then explore the Vyond features we used to create these stories.
“Dude, It’s So Easy” Latkes
If you’ve never made latkes before, don’t worry: it’s easy. In this step-by-step video, author Sarah Tang Steinmetz shows us a simple way to make perfect latkes and tells us the story behind her cookbook Dude, It’s So Easy.
Ingredients for Simple Latkes
6 medium potatoes
2 eggs
1/2 cup of flour
1 tsp salt
1 tsp baking powder
Dash of pepper
Canola oil
Cooking Instructions
Wash, peel, and grate the potatoes and onions
Drain excess moisture
Beat eggs
Mix ingredients
Shape latkes in a pan
Fry them in oil for 2 minutes on each side
Drain on paper bags
Top with sour cream and onion
Special Video Feature
At the beginning of this video, the editor (meet Sofala below) chose to use family photos as b-roll over Sarah’s interview. B-roll, or supplemental footage, helps keep viewers engaged during what might otherwise be a long and still scene. Sarah’s food story includes a mix of both animated and live-action b-roll footage.
Sofala is a big fan of these Polaroid-style photo scenes and has created many variations during her years at Vyond. You can access similar photo collage template scenes in Sofala’s HBCU and Women’s Suffrage template videos. Our Travel Vlog and Employee Appreciation Day video templates also have variations of this style.
Secret Family Ensaymadas
In this video story, Vyond designer Marco shows us how his mother turned a favorite Filipino pastry into a small business during the pandemic. While we can’t share this secret family recipe, you can learn more about the history of ensaymadas and then check to see if there’s a Filipino bakery you can support in your hometown!
Special Video Features
Marco’s interview with his mom was conducted via video call. The meeting recording isn’t the best quality, so he sized the video down, masked it into a shape to round the corners, and added it to a styled background in Vyond Studio. This background design was created by adding themed assets from the Contemporary style to the scene, changing them to one single color, and arranging them into a pattern.
Holiday Collard Greens
Even though Sofala couldn’t get home for her dad’s collard greens this year, she still managed to share a meal with him. Watch as Sofala learns to make her family’s signature dish.
Ingredients for Dad’s Greens
3 bunches of collard greens
2 garlic cloves
half an onion
1 tsp salt
1 tsp pepper
2 bay leaves
2 smoked turkey wings/legs
Substitute or add ingredients to your personal taste.
Cooking Instructions
Cut and wash your greens; soak for 15 minutes
Fill a large pot 1/4 of the way with water and bring it to a boil
Add onions, garlic, salt, pepper, bay leaves, and two smoked turkey legs to start seasoning the water
Stir and let simmer for 20 minutes
Add greens and cook for 20-30 minutes
Special Video Features
Sofala’s video is mostly live-action with animated elements sprinkled in. At :23 seconds she places a masked photo inside a heart shape, groups it with an animated phone asset, and layers it on top of her live-action video. She also has animated recipe instructions appear throughout the video. Both of these visuals were accomplished by exporting the animation out of Vyond and removing the background in Adobe Premiere. You could alternatively layer animation over your MP4 in Vyond Studio.
Grandma’s Cheesecake Cookies
Nothing beats grandma’s cookies. Bake along with Stacy in this video recipe:
Ingredients for Cherry Cheesecake Cookies
(2) 8oz. packages of cream cheese
3/4 cup granulated sugar
2 eggs
1 tbsp vanilla extract
1 can of cherry pie filling (or other fruit)
Package of Nilla wafers (or homemade crust)
Baking Instructions
Preheat oven to 350
Add cream cheese and sugar to your stand mixer and mix
Add eggs and vanilla and mix until whipped
Line your muffin tin with wafers or homemade crust
Fill your tins with a piping bag or spoon
Cook for 12 minutes
Top with cherries (or other fruit)
Special Video Features
The animated cookies at :39 seconds and the muffin tin at 1:32 are made entirely from shapes in Vyond. The video editor, Taylor, used mostly circles, triangles, and trapezoids grouped together to create the custom elements. Learn how to create animated props from shapes in this tutorial video.
Supporting Local Food Banks
As we celebrate the culture of sharing a good meal, we know that food insecurity reached an all-time high this year.
Everyone should be able to access nourishing meals during the holiday season, and food banks need our help now more than ever. This video highlights ways to give back to food banks during a time of unprecedented need.
Cooking Instructions
For now, swap food drives for virtual fundraisers.
Access this corporate giving campaign template and modify it to fit your company giving program.
Special Video Features
Video creators, Prakriti and Kevin, had a vision for an animated flat-lay food scene. Prakriti carefully chose food props from our contemporary style and created a nice tablescape. Vyond customers can access and use the table scene, or the entire video, as a template here. Note: the custom characters used in this template can only be accessed from within this video.
You’ll also notice that many characters in this video are wearing face masks. In Vyond Studio you can search “mask” to find stock characters with face masks. You can also add face masks to custom characters in the character creator. Note: the Contemporary style characters shown above can only be customized with Professional and Enterprise subscriptions.
Share your own stories with quality, engaging animation.
Start a free trial
#### Getting Started with Animation in Instructional Design
What do you think of when you hear the word “animation?” Did you say Disney? Most people do. We’ve all seen Disney movies on the big screen, video, DVD, Blu-ray, and streaming that showcase The Lion King, Snow White, or the Frozen princesses. The movies look slick, colorful, and even complicated.
Many years ago, when Disney first started, creating 2D Animation was indeed complicated and time-consuming. Illustrators physically drew each character by hand and created a new drawing for each movement every character made. Now that’s complicated!
Decades later, creating 2D animation characters is much easier, and at IDOL courses Academy, every one of my students can create beautiful explainer videos using Vyond by the end of their self-paced professional development journey.
Try Vyond for Free
Why 2D Animation?
If you look around, you can see examples of 2D Animation everywhere: at home and in training courses at work. During the pandemic, many companies reached for animated videos to train their employees remotely. As a result, CEOs and business owners turned to instructional designers, because they have the knowledge and talent to ensure two things result from 2D animation videos:
The end product meets business objectives.
The training itself engages learners with 2D Animation in Instructional design videos.
See why instructional designers are in high demand?! Everyone seems to want 2D animation videos in corporate training. As a result, much like you, many people consider a career in instructional design because of that high demand, lucrative pay, and remote work. Many—especially former and current teachers—are scrambling to learn 2D animation software programs like Vyond because employers look for it on resumes and digital portfolios.
How IDOL courses Academy Helps IDs Learn Animation
At IDOL courses Academy, we give new and developing instructional designers an advantage over other instructional design students by giving them a kickstart in Vyond, one of the most popular cloud-based animation programs for eLearning. The IDOL Movie Magic course takes learners through eight comprehensive modules to create 2D Animation assets for their portfolio. In addition, IDOL courses Academy provides you with a temporary subscription to the platform to create your explainer video. Current IDOL courses Academy student Maya Haritan, M.Ed., who is also a former teacher, explains:
“I’ve created a lot of iPhone videos for class – especially for the whole pandemic – and it took a lot of editing. I wish I knew about Vyond back then! What IDOL courses Academy helped me with was knowing all of the capabilities Vyond can do.”
IDOL courses Academy offers a detailed eight-module course showing students how to use all the features Vyond offers. The course is self-paced over 3+ hours, and like all IDOL Academy courses, provides mentoring and coach feedback from IDOL alumni and the founder (me!), Robin Sargent, Ph.D.. Many alumni work for corporations in the Fortune 500 like Wal-Mart, General Motors, Google, Amazon, and Uber.
Once you are an IDOL, you will have lifetime access to the IDOL courses Academy. Moreover, since we believe in continuous improvement, the IDOL Movie Magic course is updated regularly, just like all Academy courses. The eight modules you will cover and learn from in IDOL Movie Magic are:
Introduction to the Vyond dashboard, timeline, and slide set-up,
Scene creation, animations, and transitions,
Character categories, Animation, synching, movement, expressions, interactions, and consistency,
Adding, replacing, or animating assets (including cropping, motion paths, transitions, props, and masking),
Music and sound effects
Voice-over importing, editing, dialogue and synching,
Branding, including storyboarding, scene styling, color, font, sound, music, and logos, and
Sharing and exporting your final explainer video, including managing your video library and related copyrights.
Want to help people learn through engaging video creations? If so, earning an IDOL Movie Magic credential and digital badge through Credly may help prepare you for a lucrative instructional design career.
In our post-pandemic world, organizations are reshaping the way they do business and training. For example, human resources directors depend on their learning and development team to support their global, virtual workforce. Likewise, business owners and C-suite executives consider employee training as a critical contributor to overall company success.
Using Vyond to create engaging explainer videos helps engage employees who previously were bored to tears by the same ole’ training videos. Having a Credly badge on your resume for IDOL Movie Magic will ensure you stand out above other candidates when applying for jobs as it demonstrates your ability to create explainer videos using Vyond.
“I would not have learned the full scope of Vyond – like the scene transition meanings or the characters lip-synching with voiceovers – without IDOL’s detailed step-by-step instructions and interaction explanations. Nor would I have earned the Credly badge without knowing “why” we take each step when creating these videos – previous teachers (like me) want to know the “why” behind what we create for students and exactly how it will help our learners – IDOL’s material explained all of this information and more.”
– Maya Haritan, M.Ed., current IDOL student
Try Vyond for Free
Upskilling Advice for Instructional Designers
Enrolling in the IDOL courses Academy is the easy part. Earning the IDOL courses Academy badges (four) and creating your rockstar digital portfolio is the hard part, but you can do it because we will support you every step of the way.
Regardless of how you plan to level up your instructional design skills, here are the steps you’ll want to get started on today:
Step 1: Do your research.
We want to ensure the IDOL courses Academy is a good fit for you and your career goals. We know what the IDOL courses Academy offers and what current and previous IDOL courses Academy students have experienced. However, we don’t know your goals, so you’ll have to compare your goals to our offerings and student accomplishments.
Step 2: Familiarize yourself with what we call ID Rockstars.
You can find them on LinkedIn, speaking at conferences, writing books (look on Amazon), and appearing in your local ATD organizational events. Look at their portfolios and look at the portfolios of our former students.
Step 3: Get organized.
Think about how you organize yourself best. Do you use Trello? Your iPhone? A notebook and pen like the old days? You’ll want to create a system for learning, like your own personal toolbox.
Step 4: List your ideal clients.
Think of ten companies you would love to have as clients (if you were to freelance) or ten companies you would love to work for (if you want to be an ID employee). Write them down and include “why” you chose these companies. Save this information in your toolbox. If you enroll in the IDOL courses Academy, we’ll return to this information later.
Step 5: Take inventory of your skills.
What are you good at? What do people say is your Superpower? What do you want to learn more about? What do you need to improve on in terms of skills? Write these items down and place them in your toolbox. If you enroll in the IDOL courses Academy, we will come back to this information later.
Step 6: Review your budget.
How much can you afford to spend on upskilling? How much do you currently make working? How much do you want to make as an instructional designer? How much does PayScale.com say instructional designers make?
Step 7: Sleep on it.
Enrolling in the IDOL courses Academy is a big decision. So, like other significant, life-changing decisions, we want you to sleep on it before you make an informed decision about enrolling as an IDOL. If you have questions about the IDOL courses Academy or any facet of it, please email us.
Step 8: Enroll in the right course.
If you decide IDOL courses Academy is for you, we will be happy to see you and help coach you through the IDOL courses Academy and the IDOL Movie Magic course! Click here to enroll or get notified when enrollment opens!
Start Learning 2D Animation for Instructional design
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#### Highlights from Prakriti Rai’s Lessons on Storytelling
On November 3rd and 4th, 2021, the Content Marketing Institute hosted its annual Visual Storytelling Summit, a two-day event for content marketing leaders to share insightful information on how to entice audiences when words fall short. During the event, Vyond’s outstanding video producer, Prakriti Rai, shared her lessons on storytelling: what we can learn from movies and TV shows, and why we should apply those findings to content creation.
Prakriti was born in Kathmandu, Nepal. She is passionate about storytelling through the mediums of photography and video. She also has over five years of experience in all aspects of production. Her mission at Vyond is to create animated videos that explore unique ideas with strong aesthetics.
And, on this occasion, we revisit Prakriti’s hour-long presentation and share with you the main takeaways.
The power of movies and tv shows
Prakriti starts by explaining the impact Movies and TV shows have on us. The Little Mermaid and Kuch Kuch Hota Hai were the first movies she remembers watching, and that initial interaction with cinema was powerful enough to make her pursue a career in photography and video production.
Similarly, the love for TV shows & movies and their influence on our lives is observable in today’s cultural practices. From hanging posters on the wall to dressing up as your favorite character for Halloween, the passion for movies transcends the mere act of watching them.
But what is behind that frenzy and love? According to Prakriti, it is compelling storytelling.
Good storytelling requires an emotional component
Whether it is thrill, joy, or excitement, media has the power of eliciting emotions. And when it comes to movies & tv shows, they are particularly good at evoking empathy, the ability to put ourselves in the shoes of others.
As Prakriti explains, empathy has two components: relatability, and authenticity. When implemented correctly, content that evokes empathy will have an emotional payoff which creates a long-lasting impression that can lead to better brand recognition and trust. For that reason, brands and storytellers have to be mindful of incorporating them into their content.
Authenticity and Relatability
The content will be authentic if it is true to life. People experience adversity and good fortune. Moreover, the content will be relatable if it showcases real-life expressions of humanity, meaning people showcase vulnerability and a full spectrum of emotions representative of the human experience. Because of this display of emotions, the audience forms a special connection with the characters presented.
Good storytelling and design go hand in hand
Prakriti covered the intersection of design and storytelling, and how both improve content quality and brand recognition. There are several elements of design that can help create compelling stories, and in this opportunity, Prakriti shared three with the audience.
Composition:
Composition encompasses the arrangement of the elements within a scene. With effective composition, the content creator guides the viewers’ eyes with ease. Ultimately, composition helps enhance visual storytelling by facilitating the delivery of the message and making it appealing.
Prakriti’s example of outstanding composition was Wes Anderson. His peculiar use of symmetrical composition centers the main characters and balances the props and themes on both sides of the screen. The resulting aesthetic is alluring, easy to follow, and representative of the Wes Anderson style that most viewers can recognize.
Color
Secondly, we have the element of color. When implemented cohesively, color follows a theme and results in a positive response from the audience for they find the content aesthetically pleasant. And, as brands, we can use color pallets for improving brand recognition.
Prakriti shared with us the different color palettes Wes Anderson had used for his movies. From warm and earthy tones for Fantastic Mr. Fox to vibrant pinks and purples in The Grand Budapest Hotel, color brings his cinematography to life by providing a personality to each element within the scene and the movie itself.
Typography
Last but not least, the last element for enhancing storytelling Prakriti has shared with us is typography. Typography comprises the arrangement, placement, and style of texts. Similar to color, it can help set a tone and feel to the visuals presented, lead to brand recognition, and strengthen the personality of the visual storytelling.
Prakriti shared how Wes Anderson uses minimalist fonts like Futura, an elegant and modest style, to complement other elements in the scene. As a second example, Prakriti showed a few advertisement creatives from Apple. The company uses a single font (San Francisco) on every project. And this font has become indicative of their brand and their minimalism.
Animation is extremely effective for communicating or addressing difficult topics
Prakriti expresses video is one of the most powerful mediums for effective communication. And when it comes to communicating topics that are challenging, animations can help considerably.
“Disney-Pixar’s Wall-e conveys a strong message about consumerism and environmentalism. Similarly, Pixar’s Inside out delivers a touching message about mental health, emotions, and their intricate relationship with behavior.”
Why video animation for storytelling?
Live-action video requires actors, filming on location, the right equipment, and time for filming. All of those represent substantial financial investments and resources. On the other hand, animated video provides creative freedom at a lower cost.
Furthermore, animated video is ideal for evoking a familiarity with content that emulates real life. This content can even trigger nostalgia for we grew up watching and paying attention to cartoons. In addition, animations contribute to greater flexibility as the animator can use symbolism and metaphors for better communication. For example, one can create silhouettes of people without having to convey their identities.
From dynamic aesthetic customization to the ability to generate content that is immersive and relatable to the audience, the ease of storytelling with animated videos is evident.
Get started with video
Vyond Studio is a cloud-based platform for building your own animated videos. With our powerful, drag-and-drop tool, anybody can make media that moves. Learn how Vyond can help you scale your B2B video marketing, and sign up for a no-commitment free trial to start making media that moves.
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#### How 10 Companies Use Video for Better Brand Storytelling
A great product or service isn’t enough to fuel your business’ growth. To thrive, your company has to attract customers and build their trust with honest, unique messaging. Video for brand storytelling is a proven method for relating to your customers on a more personal level. When you tell your entire company story—your purpose, values, how you benefit others—people realize that they share the same beliefs and aspirations as your brand. With this connection, they’re eager to find out more about your product.
Brand storytelling can happen through a number of mediums, such as blog posts and photo ads. But in today’s world, video is the most powerful way to tell great brand stories. The combination of music, movement, visuals, and more in video engages people on a deeper level than other less dynamic mediums, such as audio or text alone.
We’ve collected ten examples of brand storytelling that showcase how great companies have used video to emotionally connect with their target audiences. Seeing their storytelling techniques, you’ll be inspired to tell your own brand stories through video.
Top 10 storytelling examples of brand storytelling through video
If you asked a person on the street “what is brand storytelling?”, they probably would guess that you’re talking about the history of a company.
A brand’s origin is just one part of their story. As these ten innovative companies show, there are many other types of great brand stories to share. You’re not just explaining how you began, but also why you work, who does your work, and who your work serves.
To show you how to share these details through video—with footage, music, effects, and more—here are 10 examples of fantastic brand storytelling through video. These videos all powerfully capture these companies’ brand stories by focusing on one of these factors:
Authenticity: The company uses the visuals of video to show viewers how their brand acts on its mission and values.
Philosophy: The values of the brand are reflected in the video subject, whether that’s a celebrity sponsor or a company-supported event.
Personality: The video highlights the fun, lighthearted side of the company to show viewers the human, approachable side of the brand.
Let’s dive in.
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1. Ben & Jerry’s: Company mission video
Brands build trust by showing customers the “why” of their story. Demonstrate your company’s good intentions and desire to make a positive impact. People will understand that your company wants to help others and, as a result, be more likely to buy into your product messaging.
As a socially conscious company, Ben and Jerry’s is exceptionally great at telling the story of their business. Instead of just writing a “Mission” page on their site, they created a video to explain how social consciousness drives every aspect of their business. By highlighting the company’s mission in action—family farms that Ben and Jerry’s sources from, the employees reporting on sustainability—the video shows viewers that their socially conscious focus is authentic.
Takeaway: Show viewers that your mission is authentic with imagery of how your brand acts on its philosophy.
2. Casper: product explainer video
Your product is the core of your brand story. It was created to fulfill your brand mission and its unique features set your company apart in a sea of other brands.
Tell the story of how your product helps others with an explainer video. It can show visuals, include voice-overs, and other details to explain the reasoning behind why you created your product and how it benefits your customers.
The mattress company Casper created an explainer video that powerfully justifies their product. Their design specialists explain in great detail how they created the Casper mattress based on consumer research and product engineering principles.
Despite being technical, the video makes the mattress’ value so easy to understand. The motion graphics of the product’s design are shown while you hear the designers explain their concepts, so it’s easy to connect the information and see what makes the mattress exceptional.
Takeaway: Combine the sensory details of video—voice-overs, visuals—to fully explain how your product works and show viewers why it’s genuinely valuable.
3. Tesla: testimonial
The part of your story that customers care most about is how you benefit others. Testimonials get right to the heart of that idea. In testimonials, customers explain what makes their product experience great, so viewers see how your company helps others.
Tesla created a testimonial video that is captivating with its cinematic, organic look. Instead of just watching the customer be filmed straight on, we get to experience his day-to-day life with his Tesla—we hear birds chirping in his neighborhood, we see him pull food out of the fridge with his kid in his arm. For viewers, these everyday details make his positive statements about Tesla feel believable.
Takeaway: Let your customer describe their positive product experience organically to make their support feel authentic.
4. Warby Parker: humor video
While higher values are important to show, your company’s brand storytelling doesn’t always need to be serious. Your brand also has to seem approachable to encourage people to connect with it.
Show the lighthearted, human side of your company with a humor video. While it could be about your product, the video could also just be a funny concept.
The Warby Parker team, for example, filmed their employees saying which word they like the least. It’s a simple concept that makes the brand feel more relatable. Seeing that Warby Parker employees are friendly and funny, viewers feel comfortable and eager to connect with the brand.
Takeaway: Remind customers that your brand is approachable by showing your funny personality through video.
5. GoPro: user-generated content
Customers are creating stories around your brand every day on social media. Get these personal stories out in front of your audience with user-generated content (UGC). These videos add authenticity to your brand by showing customers’ first-hand experiences with your product in their day-to-day lives.
GoPro is truly a pro at utilizing UGC to tell their brand story. Their Instagram is updated on a daily basis with photos and videos from their customers using GoPro cameras.
As an example, the company held a Million Dollar Challenge contest to capture users’ videos with the newest GoPro camera. The contest footage is authentic, high-quality, and speaks to the aspirations of GoPro’s target audience. Every video looks stunning in this montage of winning submissions, and they all capture the adventurous, outdoor-loving spirit of GoPro customers.
Takeaway: Share customers’ videos about your product to highlight how your brand benefits others in an authentic, unique way.
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6. Nike: Celebrity profile
Show how celebrities emulate your brand values and people will feel more invested in your company. Seeing how a celebrity is connected to your brand, viewers will be eager to bring your product into their lives, too.
The problem with most brands’ celebrity profiles is that they feel inauthentic. The celebrity just reads from a script about how great a company is, and viewers assume that they’re just saying the words because they were given a big paycheck.
Nike’s celebrity profile of Kyrie Irving is the opposite. Instead of scripting Kyrie to say that Nike is great, the company created a more compelling video by showing what their celebrity supporter has achieved with his father’s support. Seeing how Kyrie emulated Nike’s motto of “Just do it,” viewers leave the video wanting to connect with the inspiring brand.
Takeaway: If possible, highlight how celebrities embrace your brand values to gain their fans’ support.
7. Madewell: A day in the life video
In today’s social media-fueled world, people expect brands to tell their story with organic content. If you capture how customers authentically interact with your product, viewers will be able to imagine themselves using your product and feel more connected to your brand.
Madewell appeals to this interest with a “day in the life” video featuring three of their customers. Unlike a testimonial, the customers don’t talk during the video and Madewell isn’t mentioned. The video, instead, features brief snippets of the three women doing their jobs while wearing Madewell. Watching these three customers looking chic in their day-to-day lives, viewers can see how Madewell helps everyday people look fashionable.
Takeaway: Capture how different customers are using your product to show how your brand benefits everyday people.
8. Clif Bar: Events video
Brands show their personality today by promoting events outside of work, whether it’s International Women’s Day or a road race that their employees are running. Scrolling through a company’s social media page, people can tell what values the brand supports by the events that they post.
Clif Bar highlighted its brand values by filming a team of bikers on an eight-day biking journey from San Francisco to Alaska. Instead of featuring Clif products, the video features gorgeous footage of the winding highways and green forests on the trip, as well as the challenges and accomplishments of this athletic group. Clif’s target audience loves the outdoors and being active, so they feel connected to the brand knowing that they supported this event.
Takeaway: Promote events that reflect your brand values and you’ll attract your target audience.
9. Square: Use-case videos
Just like testimonials, use-case videos tell your brand story by showing who your company benefits. However, a use-case video shows these benefits more broadly than a testimonial by featuring an entire type of customer that uses your product, not just an individual. Seeing how your company helps others, viewers will feel more connected to your brand.
Square highlighted a use-case of their Terminal product with a video showing how a dry cleaner would use Terminal. The video captures how the product is not only portable but also a no-fee payment system. Seeing these details, viewers understand how Square helps make payments easier for small businesses.
Takeaway: Highlight how broad groups of people can use your product to show how your brand is helping its customers.
10. Headspace: company culture
Even in the age of Amazon, people still go to local mom-and-pop shops because they know and trust the store’s owners and employees. Likewise, you can build customers’ trust in your brand by introducing them to your team with a company culture video. Capture why employees feel motivated to work at your company, and viewers will believe in your brand, knowing that your employees are driven and passionate.
In most company culture videos, employees talk about the physical perks of the job—a ping-pong table, beer in the fridge, a snack pantry. The Headspace culture video is much more compelling by solely focusing on how employees feel about the company mission. Watching employees’ expressions, viewers can see that they are genuinely passionate about the brand’s desire to make the world healthier and happier through meditation. The video remains true to its brand by incorporating brand colors and unique brand elements throughout the video.
Takeaway: Film employees talking about what your company mission means to them to give viewers an authentic impression of your company culture.
Connect to customers with brand storytelling through video
Your brand story is not just your company history—it’s your product, your philosophy, your process, and more. Customers pick up pieces of this story and internalize them with every interaction that they have with your brand. To retain these customers and attract new ones, you have to craft and share content that tells your story creatively and authentically.
Video is the optimal medium for innovative brand storytelling. Combining visuals and audio, video captures the details of your brand stories and conveys them in memorable ways.
Use this guide to gain inspiration for your own video brand storytelling. Seeing how companies have connected with customers through video, you’ll form plenty of ideas for telling your own brand story.
Looking to learn more about branding your videos? Take a look at these resources:
20 color palettes for your brand design
Vyond’s Brand Management suite
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#### How 365 Data Science Creates Engaging Online Training
Training needs are changing. Today’s employees have multiple ways to stay on top of trends, tactics, and knowledge inside and outside their fields.
The acceleration of remote work as a norm has challenged companies to train their staff on valuable skills from a distance. Fortunately, remote training is a preference and not a burden for employees—51% report preferring self-led online training to other forms of training.
Nedko Krastev provides that online training with 365 Data Science, the online course platform he co-founded. The company’s goal is to help people of all levels grow in their careers as data scientists, data analysts, and business analysts without investing in an expensive degree. Instead, millions of students can pick between 38 high-quality online courses in their own time and expand their skill sets.
We interviewed Nedko to learn how 365 Data Science uses Vyond to create online courses for millions of people worldwide. You can apply these lessons to train your staff on the skills to keep your business relevant.
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How do you use video at 365 Data Science?
Nedko: Videos are at the center of our business—we are a company specializing in online course creation. We create, distribute, and deliver top-quality online courses to a global audience. Currently, we aim to establish our proprietary platform as one of the leading players in the data science and finance niches.
What are your steps to take a course from idea to finished project?
Nedko: A course creator on our team writes a script and creates a storyboard. Then, they hand the storyboard to a visual artist who recreates it in Vyond. Once the video is ready, we record a voiceover, add sound, and publish it on our platforms or YouTube if it’s marketing related.
More and more companies are entering the eLearning space; how do you make your videos stand out from your competitors’?
Nedko: I believe animation and engaging storytelling are the two secrets that allow us to create more engaging videos compared to other companies in our field. We put a lot of effort and time in order to do that, but it certainly pays off in terms of higher user engagement in the long run. One of the most important aspects of online education is to engage learners. We do that by leveraging storytelling and visual representation in our videos. Vyond is instrumental for both of these techniques—you have a very hard time telling a story with PowerPoint slides, for example. At the same time, After Effects isn’t a solution that allows us to create multi-hour courses. Vyond brings the best of both worlds.
What’s some of the feedback you have received around the course and the resources you offer?
Nedko: “As a former BI Data lead & IT Consultant (MIS/Comp Sci), the detailed subject materials, along with the infographic styled storied presentations, were extraordinarily well done.”
“I loved this course, and I was able to learn many new valuable ideas and techniques! The animations and explanation suited me, and I was able to understand concepts that used to confuse me!”
“I studied probability, statistics, and AI at university, which made it easier for me to grasp some concepts. And since I’m familiar with Java, it made it easier for me to learn Python and its packages. So we could say that some parts of the course were like refreshers, but the best part is that now I get to understand them and untangle a few knots in my head!”
Which video software other than Vyond have you tried so far?
Nedko: Prior to using Vyond, we used a software called VideoMakerFX. It provided certain templates that we could fill in, but it didn’t allow for storytelling, and videos created with it were mostly static. At the time, our videos felt like a podcast with some presentation text on the screen. Once we started using Vyond, we were able to greatly improve the storytelling used in our courses, which became a trademark of our business.
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What makes Vyond more useful to use than VideoMakerFX and other software?
Nedko: A large part of the visuals used in our videos are not from the library we have in Vyond. But the engine that Vyond provides for moving objects and creating a video is so much faster than other software such as After Effects. We almost always rely on Vyond for our course creation needs.
How long did it take your team to become Vyond experts?
Nedko: When we hire a new visual artist, they almost immediately start using Vyond. In less than two to three weeks, our visual artists can create amazing videos leveraging Vyond and the Adobe suite together. Creating quality videos takes some time, but in the long run, it is worth the investment.
What’s your next project?
Nedko: Our most important projects are the two platforms, 365datascience.com and 365financialanalyst.com. We want to do our best to engage users and deliver a great learning experience.
Create animated online courses for a global audience
Nedko: Like 365 Data Science, you can use Vyond’s intuitive interface and fast engine to take your courses from ideas to reality. Animated videos will help you keep your customers’ and employees’ attention throughout the course. The videos also teach them valuable skills to apply to their personal lives and work.
Thanks to our many templates, you can create videos faster regardless of the type of training you want to produce.
Animate your first module
#### How AI Video Turns Sales Enablement Content Into a Revenue Engine that Scales
Updated March 2026: This post explores how AI sales enablement tools — especially AI video platforms like Vyond — help teams create scalable, personalized sales enablement content that helps reps ramp faster; handle objections better; and speed up revenue velocity at every stage of the sales cycle. Featuring real-world examples from Salesloft and Vyond, this article outlines how AI video platforms can power sales enablement content strategies that generate effective onboarding, training, and outreach at scale, 5x faster than traditional tools.
Limited bandwidth and production bottlenecks make it hard for many sales enablement teams to deliver the content sellers need to show up informed, confident and ready to win.
And when enablement can’t keep pace with the speed of sales, revenue suffers: onboarding slows, deals stall, and messaging fragments across the customer journey.
That’s why AI-powered video tools and templates are becoming a huge advantage.
They allow sales enablement teams to move at the speed of revenue — equipping reps faster, reinforcing messaging consistently, and keeping pipeline moving.
In a recent webinar, leaders from Vyond and Salesloft (an AI revenue orchestration platform) shared how they’re using scalable, AI-powered video tools to create sales enablement content that’s more personalized, timely, and effective. In this article, you’ll find out their recipe for success.
Why engaging sales enablement at scale is so important
Sales enablement that isn’t helpful or timely doesn’t get the job done.
According to a survey from MarcomCentral, over half of sales teams surveyed say that, at least some of the time, they create their own versions of content instead of waiting for Marketing or Enablement to do it.
And too often, the content that is delivered falls flat — or is ignored. (Case in point, Forrester reports that 65% of sales and marketing assets go unused because they’re irrelevant.)
The antidote? A sales enablement content strategy that prioritizes speed, customization, and engagement. And that’s where AI video comes in.
How AI video benefits modern sales enablement teams
Video has long been one of the best formats for teaching reps quickly–and removing sales friction:
78% of buyers prefer short video to learn about a product (Wyzowl, 2025)
Product pages with video see a 46% lift in buying intent
And viewers retain 95% of a message via video, compared to 10% through text
Until recently, though, creating tailored videos that deliver value at scale wasn’t viable for most sales enablement teams: too time-consuming, too expensive.
But with the arrival of AI video tools, not only is a video-first sales enablement content strategy viable — it may be easier to pull off than what you’re doing right now.
Case in point: Salesloft.
How Salesloft uses AI video tools to create timely and effective sales enablement content
At Salesloft, Senior Director of Field Readiness Joel Fleet leads a lean team that’s laser-focused on driving positive business impact.
To manage requests, Joel’s team shares a “menu of offerings” that clarifies what level of enablement support is available — from micro-enablement to full change programs.
This structure ensures effort is focused where it matters most.
Speed and versatility are also why the team relies on AI-powered video platforms like Vyond.
Pre-built templates and Vyond Go make it easy to create engaging content quickly. Just add logos and relevant info to a template. Or generate a video draft from a prompt, or by sharing an existing doc (PPT, PDF, Google doc, URL) as reference.
The result? Without the usual production bottlenecks, sellers get exactly what they need, right on time.
Sales enablement videos Salesloft made in Vyond that drove results
Videos made in Vyond played a central role in two recent sales training initiatives at Salesloft.
In just a few weeks, Joel and his team (none of whom had video creation experience) created an introductory explainer video for a new product launch and a series of quick-hit videos for ongoing support.Explainer video: Democratizing AI Agents
For Salesloft’s AI agents launch, Joel used animated videos made in Vyond to simplify a complex concept into a memorable analogy.
The result? A polished, engaging video that helped reps communicate value clearly, reduce friction in buyer conversations and help deals move faster.
Quick-hit product intros: SalesSpark Series
The team also created short-form AI avatar videos to help sellers quickly absorb new messaging and features.
These videos reinforced execution — keeping reps aligned, preventing message drift, and ensuring customers hear a consistent story throughout the lifecycle. Here’s one example:
According to Joel, adoption was high and the content delivered results.
Sales enablement videos made with AI that support the full revenue journey
Sales enablement teams like Salesloft’s are using AI video to support the entire customer lifecycle — from first touch to renewal.
AI sales enablement video use cases
How these videos support rep readiness and deal velocity
Change management trainings
Accelerate adoption by aligning teams fast around new processes, policies and tools
Quick-hit explainers
Eliminate confusion and keep deals moving by simplifying complex concepts
Talk track breakdowns
Improve win rates by identifying the best practices of top reps
Meeting recaps
Build trust and drive next steps by showing you heard your prospect’s concerns
Personalized prospecting
Boost response rates with eye-catching tailored videos and GIFs
Product teasers & demos
Create excitement and shorten sales cycles by showing real product value–fast
Proposal walkthroughs
Increase stakeholder buy-in by making proposals easier to understand, circulate and approve
Quarterly business reviews
Support renewals by packaging results into a short, compelling recap
Executive summaries
Ensure alignment and unblock decisions with short video updates perfect for busy execs
Check out our Sales Enablement Quickstart page to see pre-built templates we’ve made for use cases like these.
Enable smarter, not harder, with AI videos created in Vyond
AI video tools like Vyond make it easy to create professional enablement content without production overhead. With Vyond, you can:
Turn existing decks and PDFs into instant videos
Create videos in many styles with a simple text prompt
Make tailored content at scale using pre-built templates
Plus, when messaging changes, updates are fast.
That agility matters. The fastest enablement teams aren’t the ones creating the most content — they’re the ones keeping reps aligned in the moments that drive revenue.
Pro tip: Pair video engagement analytics with your enablement platform to connect content directly to pipeline progression and renewal outcomes.
AI video is a sales enablement strategy built for revenue impact
Reps today need content that’s relevant, timely, and easy to digest. Enablement teams need tools that help them create quality content at scale, quickly.
AI video sits at the intersection of both.
As Joel Fleet says, having an AI video creation tool ensures your reps show up “fluent, competent, and confident.” And that keeps deals moving, and ensures your customers understand your value from first call to renewal.
That’s why adding AI video isn’t just a sales enablement content upgrade. It’s a proven revenue velocity strategy, too.
Ready to supercharge your sales enablement strategy with AI video?
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#### How B2B Marketers Can Bring in Leads With Video
Since the dawn of television, consumer-facing companies have used the emotional impact of video marketing to drive brand awareness and sales. While B2C companies primarily use video marketing, B2B brands are increasingly recognizing the power of video for bolstering their marketing and lead generation efforts. Just take a look at what customer relationship and engagement platform Zendesk is doing with this humorous, playful, and engaging overview of their service.
Video is useful for B2B marketing in that it’s quick, educational, professional, and entertaining. In a recent survey, Tubular Insights found that 73% of B2B marketers said video makes a positive impact on their marketing ROI.
The former Head of Marketing at Vyond and current CMO of Solutions by Text, Stacy Adams, discussed the power of video for B2B marketing in one of LinkedIn’s broadcasts at Content Marketing World. Stacy’s conversation with LinkedIn was full of B2B video marketing insights, so we thought we’d dedicate a post to sharing what we learned as listeners.
Why video is powerful for B2B Marketing
In B2B marketing, your customers are organizations. The decision-makers at these companies are busy, so they expect marketing that is fast to absorb, yet still informative and engaging. Here’s how video delivers on all of these fronts:
Video is quick to consume
Business leaders are busy, so they don’t have time to wade through a wealth of marketing materials. Even the prettiest PDF will get lost in the shuffle if it takes too long to read.
With video, marketers can get right to the point, delivering messages quickly in a manner that can be consumed anywhere. Unlike PowerPoints or lengthier written content, a well-crafted marketing video can pack a lot of information into a short time frame through the combined use of narration, graphs, and visual cues.
You may not have the budget to secure a big-time actor like Keanu Reeves, but that doesn’t mean you can’t follow website-building service Squarespace’s example and create a short piece that highlights the basics of using your product. Squarespace’s commercial shows Reeves walking viewers through building a site on their platform, from choosing a domain name to selecting an appropriate design template, all while clocking in at under two minutes.
Video is a powerful educational medium
B2B products are a significant investment, so companies want to learn how they work and why they can be beneficial to their bottom line. Video is an ideal platform for teaching them because it enables you to show your product in action. A real-time demonstration, complete with actual footage of a product, can help illustrate its features and how a company’s employees can use given tools to do their work more efficiently.
Making the most of video’s educational capabilities, marketing company Method created a “How-To” video for their product.
The video walks through all of the features and benefits Method’s tools offer, such as call logging and an easy dashboard for managing multiple support cases. It’s easy for viewers to remember what makes the product useful after watching the video’s engaging narrator, who voices pain points from his daily work life that Method relieves.
Creating educational content requires you to know your audience deeply. When crafting videos for educational purposes, always consider your buyer’s level of familiarity with the topic at hand.
Video is a professional Solution
B2B products are often a major investment. As a result, B2B buyers want to make sure that the products they’re evaluating seem credible and trustworthy.
Even with zero production experience, marketers today are able to create professional-grade videos with accessible tools. There are plenty of user-friendly programs today that meet high-quality production standards but are simple enough for beginners to use, such as:
Wistia’s Soapbox is a screen and video recorder that enables you to capture your screen and accompanying high-quality video from your computer in real-time.
Our own platform, Vyond Studio, enables anyone to create compelling animations with drag-and-drop editing and professionally-designed templates, characters, props, and more.
You’re not going to become Netflix overnight, but that doesn’t mean your content can’t feel professional on any budget.
Video is entertaining
B2B marketing should be professional—but that doesn’t mean it has to be boring. More and more B2B companies, like Expensify, are creating fun marketing videos to delight customers and make their content stand out from the countless messages that executives and employees encounter daily.
In this video, expense-management software Expensify takes a humorous approach to introduce their product with a few well-known celebrities. Expensify’s typical customers may not all be world-famous rappers, but the playful music video style is sure to grab the attention of, and get a laugh out of, the professionals considering the software.
The benefits of video marketing for B2B are clear, but now it’s time to get started actually creating content so you can start to reap the benefits of the format.
How to create a high-quality video on any budget
Video has a reputation for being expensive to create, but that is a myth. With planning and the right tools, B2B marketers can create excellent video marketing content on any budget.
Storyboard first
Before you even think about beginning production, create a storyboard—a visual representation of the different scenes you’re planning to capture. Planning in advance will help save time during production, as you know the scenes and content that you need to capture long before you hit “Record.”
Toyota Avalon Campaign Storyboards presented under Creative Commons
We’ve explored how to make a successful storyboard on our blog, but in essence, a storyboard should cover all of the details related to capturing and editing your content. Everything from 2D visual examples to planned narration should be included to help your marketers and production team make sure they’re entering the post-production process with all the footage and materials they need to create the video.
Utilize accessible, affordable video editing tools
Some professional video tools are limited to advanced filmmakers and are expensive to license and use—but that isn’t the case for every program.
Thankfully, there are plenty of accessible, affordable video editing tools to make even the most inexperienced marketers look like Hollywood creators.
Vyond’s Studio is complete with templates and transitions to help you craft B2B marketing videos that move leads down the funnel. This video offers a relatively short tutorial for Vyond users who are just getting up to speed with the product. We also offer a free trial version of the product for users who are just getting started.
Smartphone apps like FilmicPro unlock the full capabilities of your iPhone or Android camera. A film expert created this video to help new FilmicPro users make the most of the tool’s powerful settings and capabilities.
It may be tempting to try to use the same editing tools as big-time Hollywood production houses, but the simplicity of the above tools can help you focus on the valuable art of storytelling.
Invest in high-quality audio
Even visually stunning videos appear unprofessional when accompanied by scratchy or otherwise poor audio. To leave a positive impression on B2B customers, it’s essential to invest in high-quality audio. Here are some tips for capturing professional-grade recordings:
Consider investing in an external microphone, whether lavalier or shotgun (with accompanying boom) to capture the best audio possible.
When shooting live video, it’s difficult for camera operators to also manage the audio recording. Consider dedicating a separate team member to manage audio levels to ensure the quality is high.
If your video will feature narration, consider hiring a professional voice-over artist via freelancer marketplaces, such as Fiverr or Upwork.
Follow these tips, and you’ll be able to produce high-quality work that meets the professional expectations of your B2B buyers.
How to build a B2B video marketing strategy
Long before you start filming, you should form a strategy for how you want to create and distribute your video marketing. By investing time and energy in strategic thinking, you’ll be able to form a plan for creating videos that move B2B customers towards making a purchase.
Develop an editorial calendar
An editorial calendar can help you stay on top of every element of video production, from shooting to editing to eventual release. Filming and editing both take time, so it’s critical to develop a calendar that realistically maps out deadlines.
To manage your video production pipeline, create an effective editorial calendar with these tips:
Some videos, such as short-form social ads, will be faster to create than others, but in general, plan to release videos about two to three weeks after you’ve begun shooting.
Consider creating a series of videos for your blog or YouTube channel, rather than just single marketing videos. A series will push you to build a dedicated audience by publishing regularly and by establishing your brand’s expertise in a subject.
If you find yourself hard-pressed for content ideas, consider repurposing existing content, whether e-books, white-papers, or blog posts.
Video creation can require collaboration from a wide range of departments in your organization, so be sure to notify all stakeholders of your plans for release so they can all plan backward to make sure they’re not blocking any other elements of the production.
Build a Distribution plan
Ensure that your video marketing gets in front of your customers by strategically considering distribution channels. What social platforms does your target B2B audience use most frequently? Do they prefer to use email? Questions like these will help you decide the best methods for sharing your video marketing.
Here are a few tips to help you form an effective distribution plan for your video marketing.
Consider sharing your video marketing, whether it’s ads or video blogs, on LinkedIn. The platform has a professional focus, so it’s ideal for reaching B2B buyers.
Email is a particularly effective channel for video, as it can provide viewers with a refreshing break from the text-based content that makes up most email communications. Be sure to create an engaging subject line and visual preview and verify that your embedded video works across all popular email clients.
Check whether the social platform you’re posting on plays video without sound activated. If so, include text or captions to pull in viewers without them needing to listen to your content straight away. Consider using Rev’s transcription service for fast, accurate captioning.
An effective distribution strategy is essential for even the highest-quality videos, so be sure to consider the most effective channels and goals for performance before making your videos live.
Attract B2B customers with high-quality video marketing
Your B2B customers are busy, so they’re looking for digestible marketing materials that are both educational and entertaining. That’s why video is an ideal medium for B2B marketing. Video’s ease of production, educational possibilities, and entertaining nature make it a powerful solution for moving B2B purchasers down your buying funnel.
With the right knowledge and tools, you can start creating B2B marketing campaigns right away. Don’t buy into the myth that you need an expensive budget and a film crew to create high-quality video marketing. With a bit of foundational knowledge and accessible video tools like Vyond, you have everything you need to start creating compelling B2B video marketing content.
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#### How Better Visual Communication Can Help Your Company Win: Benefits, Tips, and Examples
In this article, we’ll explore how better visual communication can help you connect with employees, customers and prospects—and share expert tips on how your company can level up.
What is visual communication?
Visual communication is the art of using visual elements strategically to grab an audience’s attention, clearly convey important information in a way that sticks, and usually spark behavior change. Common components of visual communication, especially when used in digital communications, include text, images, data, and video content.
Here are some common examples of visual communication for business communications.
Visual communication examples
Animated videos
Animated videos are a rich multimedia format that can include visual elements like human and animal characters, kinetic (moving) text, and motion graphics.
Styles can vary widely, from a simple, black and white “whiteboard” look to colorful and detailed.
AI-generated videos
Today’s AI-powered video tools can now create videos for you in seconds based on text prompts or static images you provide.
GIFs
GIFs are looping images that often sometimes include a short tagline overlaid on the image. They’re often used to communicate funny content or as a reaction to something. They’re used regularly across social media channels, in email, and on internal communications platforms like Slack.
Screen recording
Screen recordings are videos showing your desktop or a software’s user interface, helpful for demonstrating workflows and processes.
Images
Images are visual representations of something, like a doodle, a photograph, or a diagram.
Infographics
Infographics are visual representations of information designed to make data easily understandable at a glance. They combine graphics, charts, and minimal text to convey complex information quickly and clearly.
Data visualizations
Data visualizations are graphical representations of information and data, meant to provide an accessible way to see and understand trends, outliers, and patterns. An infographic is a popular example of data visualization.
Stock footage
Stock footage refers to photorealistic images and videos that are broadly available for widespread use.
Webcam video
Webcam videos are recordings created using the camera built into your computer. They’re usually “talking head” style, and can capture one speaker or many (like a replay of a meeting).
Benefits of visual communication in business today
Business communication is ultimately about convincing an audience to take action or change behavior: watch out for phishing emails, learn a new skill, enroll in a new benefits program, sign up for a free trial — you get the idea. And the keys to success change with the times.
In recent years, our experience as online consumers has created expectations for visual communication that spill into our professional lives.
We expect communications to be relevant to us (what else should I watch? What do other people like me buy?).
We expect content to be engaging and entertaining, thanks in part to social media — if it doesn’t draw us in, we can easily scroll on to something that does.
And because so much of our online interactions take place on smartphones, we favor more compact, visual forms of communication that pack a meaningful punch: like emojis, memes, and especially videos.
The great news is, you can take advantage of these general visual communication preferences to more effectively change behavior and inspire action in any business audience — whether they’re employees, customers, partners, or prospects. It’s already catching on: About a third of global business leaders surveyed (32%) have an increased desire for communicating using visuals, according to Canva’s 2023 Visual Economy Report.
When we use visual communication well, we get two major benefits:
Better engagement
Good visual communication content catches our audiences’ eyes and draws them in for reflection, because it’s relevant to them.
Improved information retention
Good visual communication imprints information on our audience, so they can recall it and apply it later.
Both of these benefits make it more likely that our content will inspire action and change behavior.
So whether you’re creating content for external communications — like landing pages on your company’s website or assets for social media — or internal communications — presentations, training videos, and GIFs — thinking strategically about how you can apply good visual communication practices will help you deliver better results. Here are a few tips to keep in mind.
Tips for better visual communication
Tailor visuals to your audience
Audiences today expect content and communications to be relevant to them, and visuals are no exception: they want to see themselves and their interests reflected. With the power of AI, it has become easier than ever to segment and customize your content by audience.
The extra time you spend getting to know your audience — through research, surveys, conversations — and tailoring content for them is worth it for the positive impact on engagement. Here are a few examples.
L&D
L&D teams can create content specific to employees’ roles or departments. The L&D and change enablement teams at Whole Foods Market created templates tailored to each of the roles at their stores, down to the uniforms and terminology, so employees see themselves represented.
Including recognizable figures or references from your organization is another powerful way to boost engagement and relevance. At the Administrative Office of the Illinois Courts, training specialist Angie Kanak likes to include characters she created for each of the Illinois Supreme Court Justices that her audience instantly recognizes.
And finally, corporate branding isn’t just for external audiences. Officially branded training content signals to employees this is valuable content, created especially for them.
See how Vyond’s new Brand Management Suite makes it easy to create engaging, on-brand videos.
HR
HR pros can reinforce an inclusive company culture and make visuals more relevant by taking care to reflect the full diversity of your employee base in your content. Choose imagery that suits your geographic footprint, like your office sites and regional landmarks. Build in time and budget to translate, localize, and caption materials like videos.
Similar to the training examples above, ask yourself: where could you tailor content by role and department? Where could you include stories from recognizable employees or leaders to help bring policies and processes to life?
Marketing
In marketing, demonstrating you understand your audience is the whole point. At the brand level, it starts with asking what your competitors are doing visually — how can you stand apart?
On your website, tailoring your visuals could mean ensuring your “ideal customers” see themselves reflected in the imagery: solving problems they relate to, in settings they recognize, with your products or services.
In your email program, tailored visuals might show up as messages and email banners segmented by industry or job level, speaking to each audience’s real pain points.
From a channel perspective, it might mean you’re including captions on all of your social media video content to help ensure viewers scrolling by with sound off can read along and still grasp your message.
Sales
When you’re presenting to a customer or prospect, it’s already standard to include their company name and logo in your materials (triple-checked for accuracy, of course!). And if you’re not already, creating custom demos that address specific pain points your audience has mentioned, or you’ve found via research, can be especially effective.
Even before you get to the meeting, during outreach you can introduce yourself and showcase your product’s value proposition with a personalized overview video. Keep yourself top of mind after your conversation by sending a video message starring your own custom, self-voiced character to help prospects and customers remember and honor scheduled meeting times.
Reduce your audience’s cognitive load
No matter your department, one of the biggest challenges with communicating visually is the constant strain on our audience’s working memory, according to Connie Malamed, author of Visual Design Solutions and Visual Language for Designers.
We’re flooded with sensory information. All. Day. Long. For any information to make it into our long-term memory, it has to make its way through our limited, temporary working memory.
Anything we can do to help ease this “cognitive load” for our audience gives them a better chance to grasp and retain the information we’re presenting, Connie says.
Here are a few of Connie’s suggestions for reducing your audience’s cognitive load when you’re creating presentations, videos, website pages and more.
Make your graphics and text easy to process
Your content’s readability matters. Overly intricate font styles and text with low contrast (like gray text on white background) put more strain on a viewer’s cognitive load.
Using simple fonts with high contrast makes information easier to process, reduces demand on working memory, and creates a positive affect in the viewer.
Remove visual distractions
Visuals can either increase meaning and understanding for viewers or distract and confuse them. A few simple ways to dial down visual “noise” in business presentations or videos:
Avoid placing a logo on every slide and putting text on busy backgrounds
Remove irrelevant text, like dates and slide numbers
Remove cutesy but irrelevant graphics
Reduce realism in your graphics
There’s a misconception that photorealistic imagery is always best, especially in learning, Connie says.
But research shows that often, reducing the realism of a graphic can help people learn more quickly: by decreasing the time it takes the viewer to visually scan, it minimizes load on the viewer’s working memory.
This means that an illustration, icon, or symbol might convey information more effectively than a photo or 3D rendering.
This is one reason animated videos — which by nature reduce realism — are such a powerful form of business communication.
Don’t split your audience’s attention
When you force your audience to process two or more different sources of information at the same time, neither of which can be understood in isolation, you’re falling prey to the “split-attention effect.”
In HR, this might show up, say, in your benefits overview video: showing an explanation on one part of the screen and a visual, such as a diagram or animation, on another. Your viewer’s attention can’t be in both places at once.
Deliver information piecemeal and guide your audience along
According to Mona Chalabi, Pulitzer Prize–winning illustrator and data visualization expert, effective visual communication delivers information bit by bit and guides your audience along, from start to finish. Applied in different business areas, this lesson could mean creating content that builds gradually (think presentations that change on a click or interactive websites) to give audiences an opportunity to digest what they’re seeing and let insights build upon each other.
Get creative about visualizing data
Data can be an influential part of your business content, helping you tell a powerful, memorable story. But a wall of numbers isn’t helpful: it’s crucial to point out why your audience should care and put numbers in context.
Rather than writing out data and insights as text, get familiar with different types of charts and graph options available beyond the typical pie and bar.
Consider where you can use dynamic charts and graphs to bring your data to life and let your audience interact with it at their pace.
Take care to ensure you’re not misleading with data — even the most reputable sources have some data-viz lessons learned.
Per Mona‘s earlier advice, consider revealing data in steps, whether in slides you click through, or by adding clear visual markers that lead you through a static collection of information.
Bonus tip: Mona swears by the power of doodling when you’re ideating on how to communicate something — whether it’s a data set or a big idea. It doesn’t have to look good, she says: in the act of doodling something may come out — even if it’s just a more accessible title for your Excel chart or a different analogy for your presentation.
Refresh visuals regularly
In sales and marketing, it’s a common refrain that audiences need to hear the same message seven times before it starts sinking in. But on the flip side: if your content is forever static, it fades into the background. How can you get the best of both worlds, especially with content audiences may only see annually?
Try repeating the same message with different visuals and examples.
For L&D, eLearning expert and Bloomsburg University Professor Karl Kapp suggests annual compliance training is a perfect candidate for a regular visual refresh.
“The more pathways in our brain we have to a piece of content or information, the faster and more efficiently it will be retrieved,” Professor Kapp says. “By investing in changing your most important training on a regular basis, it makes that training more meaningful, more relevant, and sends a message that you care about this.”
In HR, you might think about this for benefits videos: what tweaks would help set them apart year over year? In marketing and sales, what go-to visual assets — like website images, ads, and social media assets — are your customers and prospects seeing regularly that you could update (or even A/B test) to stop them in their tracks?
How a visual communication platform can help
There are tons of helpful tools out there to help you act on these tips and step up your visual communication strategy. But many of them have a learning curve, even for beginners. Look for tools that are easy to use, but versatile and powerful enough that teams across your company can use them to deliver different formats and styles, all within your brand’s look and feel.
Vyond is beloved by 65% of the Fortune 500 for helping them communicate better visually and making a stronger business impact, while making their lives easier, whether they’re working in L&D, HR, marketing, or sales.
If you haven’t tried Vyond yet but want to see what the buzz is about, get your free trial. (The trial includes access to Vyond Studio and Vyond Go, our AI-powered script and video generator.)
#### How Catalina Marketing Achieved a 100% Pass Rate
Deliver the right message to your internal audience
The following case study showcases how Vyond videos allow Catalina Marketing to engage their employees in ways PowerPoint cannot, all while reducing onboarding time and increasing the productivity of their training team. With animated videos, Catalina Marketing has improved the learning of their 1,350+ employees around the world.
Summary of Success
1 hour Time it takes for the Catalina training team to produce some of their videos.
67% Reduction in onboarding time for one group of new employees.
100% Pass rate for a new training program on traditionally low-engagement topics.
The Challenge
On a boat trip to Catalina Island in 1983, Catalina Marketing’s founders conceived an electronic alternative to the waste of mass-reach coupons: using grocery-store scanners to deliver targeted coupons at checkout. Today, powered by the world’s largest shopper history database, Catalina helps top consumer product goods (CPG) brands deliver the right message to the right audience in the right environment.
The company also wants to deliver the right messages—in the form of training—to its internal audience of more than 1,350 employees spread around the world, and the only way to do that is through eLearning. As Erika Hebert, director of Catalina’s global operations training, explains, “As a company, we can’t do everything face-to-face anymore. We just don’t have the people or the time.”
The challenge was to create entertaining eLearning videos with limited staff, time, and budget. “The alternative was sharing 100-slide PowerPoint decks that employees would never read,” Hebert says.
The Solution
These challenges came to a head in 2014, when Tricia Manning, Catalina’s executive vice president of global operations, approached Hebert about creating interactive training to roll out a new process to about 100 employees in Catalina’s U.S. operations.
“The audiences who needed to understand this new process included employees at every level, from vice presidents to individual contributors,” says Hebert. “Our goal was to get people trained on the new process, on time, with as little rework or retraining as possible.”
Manning suggested using animation to turn the training slides for the project into something easier for employees to digest. While doing her due diligence, Hebert discovered Vyond during a Google search. Vyond’s ease of use sold her on the platform.
“I got the free trial and created an initial sample video,” says Hebert. “When I showed it to one executive, she actually became emotional. I didn’t want to tell her how easy it was. We’ve been [Vyond] fans ever since.”
Vyond’s ease of use also helped new members of the global operations training team get up to speed and become productive quickly. Emily Pfeiffer, who joined Hebert in 2015 as a curriculum development specialist, says she only needed about a day to start feeling comfortable with the software.
“I thought I was going to have to go out and get a lot of assets that [Vyond] didn’t provide, but it has visuals for different business lines,” said Pfeiffer. “That’s a time saver because I don’t have to search for all of these images and themes to get my point across. It’s already built-in.”
The Results
Hebert and her team used Vyond videos to kick off the training for the new process. “[Vyond] was a cool wrapper that helped us get excited about the project,” says Hebert. “It allowed us to meet our go-live date in June 2015 and to meet all of our objectives for educating these employees.”
As an added bonus, Catalina Marketing discovered that onboarding time for new employees who needed to follow the process decreased from six months to 60 days.
Today, Catalina Marketing uses Vyond in conjunction with Articulate, and has embedded Vyond videos within Articulate Storyline 1 and 2 eLearning courses. Because the solution works with video and HTML5, it gives content producers more flexibility in choosing the right delivery vehicle for their work.
“[Vyond’s] key differentiators include camera movement, character customization, multiple video styles, and templates,” says Pfeiffer. “I also like the zoom and transitions that make your videos look more professional than your average free system.”
Catalina Marketing primarily uses the Business Friendly style but has also used the Infographics theme. “We’ve named some of the out-of-the-box characters for people in the company,” explains Hebert. “And we’ve even created characters that look like employees. The personalization makes the training fun for our audience.”
For a group that has a tight budget, Vyond’s pricing works, according to Hebert. “The only other pieces of equipment we had to purchase for Vyond were microphones,” she says. “Other than the subscription price, we’ve only spent another $30 or $40 per trainer on equipment like the microphones.”
Catalina Marketing continues to see success in incorporating Vyond into training programs. For example, one of the company’s big 2015 initiatives was to increase the quality of the data collected from UPC codes. To make what could have been a dry topic more interesting, Hebert and Pfeiffer created an eLearning module that included several Vyond videos. More than 100 employees were required to complete and pass the course—and 100% did, according to Hebert.
The Bottom Line:
In addition to increasing the adoption and acceptance of eLearning, Vyond has also made the training team much more productive. “It honestly takes me less than half a day to make a video,” says Pfeiffer. “Once I have the content that I want, I write a quick script, and then I build the animations and put it all together. Sometimes it only takes me an hour.” Concludes Hebert: “It probably takes us longer to get the content from our subject matter experts than it does for us to produce the videos!”
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Create engaging learning videos
With Vyond, anybody can create compelling content that promotes learning. By giving yourself the power of video, you can teach in a more dynamic, engaging, and fun way. Vyond Studio is designed to empower all kinds of businesses to make media that moves, even if they don’t have any video experts on the team. All you need is a little imagination. Give it a try with a free trial of Vyond.
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#### How Cottingham and Butler Saved $600K with Vyond
Summary of success
Cottingham & Butler videos reduce the amount of time clients spend on-boarding new employees, while increasing employees’ understanding of their benefits and giving them access to information they might not get otherwise.
100% unprecedented sign-ups achieved during open enrollment across
500+ employees. 2,000 Non-productive meeting time hours saved by client teams since 2014
60 Hours of travel and time saved that would have been spent in meetings in 2015 alone
$600,000+ Potential production costs avoided by creating videos in-house
Watch one of their videos and learn about Cottingham & Butler’s success in creating onboarding training with animated video using Vyond below.
THE CHALLENGE
How do you deliver open enrollment information to a cross-country trucker? That was the challenge that Cottingham & Butler, one of the largest brokers and employee benefits consultants in the United States, wanted to solve for its clients. Founded in 1887, the company has a client roster that spans industries, with specific expertise in transportation, agribusiness, construction, and manufacturing.
Cottingham & Butler’s clients offer benefits to employee populations ranging from 50 to several thousand: many of whom are transient and hard to pin down for traditional meetings. Employee benefits is a complex topic, and without an office location or access to company email, employers can spend hundreds of hours trying to make sure employees have and understand the information they need.
“Sometimes the employee materials are 100- page documents from insurance carriers that are written in complex legal language,” says Ellen Lichtenstein, Communications Manager for Cottingham & Butler’s employee benefits division. “Our clients need help making sure all employees understand their benefits options, regardless of an employee’s location, job function, or level of education.”
In 2014, Cottingham & Butler brought in Lichtenstein, who has a decade of television, film, and radio production experience, to manage employee-facing communication and benefits education for its clients. However, the big issue still remained: how to reach employees all over the country and in a way that would engage them in their employer’s benefits.
Cottingham & Butler’s clients loved the idea of video (both live-action and animated) to help explain complex benefits concepts to their employees. What no one cared for was the price tag. Lichtenstein solicited quotes from local and national vendors and production companies, only to find that the custom videos would run upwards of $7,000 for five minutes of live-action or around $5,000 for the same length of animation. If she sacrificed the ability to customize videos and invested in a library of generic videos, the price would still be between $12,000 and $20,000 per year.
“We’re a medium-sized broker, and because we’re providing these videos to clients as part of our overall services, we can’t spend thousands of dollars on a single video,” says Lichtenstein. “That’s just not doable. Some of our videos run as long as 12 minutes, and we often make collections of videos for clients that exceed 25 minutes. An animated video could easily cost us $10,000 if we were paying someone to create it in After Effects.”
THE SOLUTION
Lichtenstein spent a few months researching various options, but once she found Vyond, the choice became a “no-brainer.” During the free trial and a subsequent one-month subscription, she made several sample videos to share Vyond’s capabilities with her team.
“Everyone was sold immediately,” she says. “I told them we wouldn’t find anything else at this price point that would allow us to customize the animation to our needs.”
Thanks to Vyond, Cottingham & Butler doesn’t have to travel to film clients on location or hire talent. Clients who choose to star in their own animations simply read a script provided by Lichtenstein and email her their recordings, which she then syncs with a character built to resemble the live person. For clients who want voiceover provided, Lichtenstein (who has a background in public radio) or other colleagues record in their on-site studio.
“Our only expense has been $350 to build our ‘recording studio.’ That covers a good-quality USB microphone, a sound isolation shield, and a microphone stand,” says Lichtenstein. “We use music and sound effects from the [Vyond] library or other free sources. In other words, we can make professional, customized videos on virtually no budget.”
When it comes to production, Lichtenstein was already fluent with video and audio editing solutions like Final Cut, Adobe Premiere, Adobe Audition, and Audacity. She says she found Vyond easy to use yet sophisticated and highly customizable.
“I found [Vyond] very intuitive,” she says. “Everything worked the way that I’d expect it to. It allows the end product to reflect the skills of its creator from simple to extremely complex.” One of Lichtenstein’s favorite Vyond features is that she can leave time-coded notes for herself within the video itself, rather than having to write them out by hand. She also likes the ability to insert “placeholder” voices using the text-to-speech functionality.
“With the number of times a script changes during production, it would be horrible if we had to keep re-recording perfect audio,” she explains. “With [Vyond], you don’t have to invest the time to get a great recording until the script is completely finalized.”
After a year of using Vyond in the benefits department, Cottingham & Butler upgraded to a Professional subscription and expanded the solution’s use to its health and wellness provider, HealthCheck360o, which uses Vyond to make videos for the members of its wellness programs, alerting them to health screenings and other initiatives.
THE RESULTS
Since June 2014, Lichtenstein estimates that she and her team have made more than 200 animated videos, totaling over 1,300 minutes. Vyond helped Cottingham & Butler reap the full benefits of using video, while avoiding an estimated $600,000 to $1.4 million in potential production costs, based on the quotes received from her external vendors. More importantly, Lichtenstein says, without Vyond Cottingham & Butler wouldn’t have been able to create videos at all, which would have made the company less competitive against brokers with larger budgets and more resources.
Vyond also saves Cottingham & Butler time and makes the company more efficient by allowing the team to create videos quickly: Lichtenstein says she can create a five-minute video in about five hours.
“Once I’ve built a template for a certain type of video, I can customize it for a client within a day if they need it that quickly,” says Lichtenstein. “Our clients are very happy with the end product and the turnaround times.”
Lichtenstein believes that Vyond has saved Cottingham & Butler’s internal team at least 60 hours of travel and time that would have been spent in meetings at client sites in 2015 alone!
Vyond also produces time savings for clients. Cottingham & Butler videos reduce the amount of time clients spend on-boarding new employees, while increasing employees’ understanding of their benefits and giving them access to information they might not get otherwise. Lichtenstein estimates that since implementing Vyond in 2014, they’ve saved their clients’ HR teams about 2,200 hours they would otherwise be spending in employee meetings.
“If our videos do a good job, the HR team fields fewer question,” says Lichtenstein. “They’re spending their time on more important things than answering the same benefits-related question over and over.”
And by any metric, the videos have been more than successful. “We’ve never had a client that isn’t just in love with their videos,” Lichtenstein says. “They rave about them. I get calls all the time about how much the employees loved them.”
For example, one Cottingham & Butler client used the videos in conjunction with direct mail to advertise open enrollment to its 500 employees. During the two-week open enrollment period, all 500 employees called in to sign up for their benefits—a 100% success rate that Cottingham & Butler had never seen before. Also, participation in several programs increased dramatically: For example, enrollment in short-term disability increased from 28% of employees to 70%. “
Plus, the [Vyond] customer support team is phenomenal,” says Lichtenstein. “We certainly have gotten way more than we pay for.” Click the screen above to see a sample video created by Cottingham & Butler.
Make a video
#### How Ellen Lichtenstein Uses Videos To Boost AgentSync’s Blogs’ ROI
Google Search is the first marketing channel for most companies. It’s free to use and an easy way to drive people to your website. However, promoting your product using only one channel, like Google Search, limits the number of potential customers who see your product and creates uncertainty.
There’s a near-infinite amount of written content and company blogs for Google to pull from. How do you differentiate yourself? How long will it take you to rank? When will you see a strong ROI?
Ellen Lichtenstein is a Sr. Content Specialist at AgentSync, a company that helps insurance agencies and carriers reduce their compliance risk and streamline operations. In the early stages of her career, Ellen worked as a producer and casting director in the world of unscripted television. In that field, communicating through videos was not optional. After transitioning to creating content for the insurance industry, Ellen has made a habit of adding video into the mix.
This habit made her test the impact of embedded videos on AgentSync’s organic search rankings. So far, creating a video for a blog post has resulted in higher rankings and blog engagement.
We interviewed Ellen, who has eight years of experience working in Vyond, to learn how AgentSync has been using Vyond for the past year to outrank competitors on Google. Apply her lessons to grow your content’s ROI and engagement.
What made you start using video content?
Some of the topics we cover can be a bit hard to understand. Including a video allows readers to absorb that information in another way. Video content is also known to perform quite well in organic searches. So when it makes sense, we increase our presence in the search results by including videos in our blog posts.
Not every video creation process is alike. What does yours look like?
Usually, my process begins with writing a script. Each line corresponds to a scene number in Vyond. I don’t always outline my ideas for the visuals. But I tend to do that if I’m creating a video for someone less familiar with my work or with video creation in general.
If I need to get sign-off on the visuals before I begin working in Vyond, I’ll create a table. One column contains the script lines (either voiceover or words on screen), and the other column contains a description of what will appear on the screen.
I’ll just write out the lines if it’s unnecessary to sign off on the visuals. After spending so much time working in Vyond, I usually find my lines correspond accurately with what will end up in that scene number. But there are always surprises when I get into Vyond where I need to change something up, like splitting a scene into multiple pieces or combining scenes into one.
What impact have you noticed since you began using video in your marketing efforts?
Our team tracks how much engagement the videos get on our social posts and how well the blog posts perform in organic search results that have videos embedded in them. So far, we’ve seen a pattern of increased and consistent growth in page views after adding a video to a blog that was previously published text-only.
Gradual increase in blog post page views since adding a video to a blog post
For example; we published a blog in July 2021 and charted its pageviews. You can see there wasn’t a lot of traffic at first, which is fine because it was new. We’d expect to see more traffic over time. Then we added a video in mid-September. You can see the monthly page views for September were a lot higher than the August page views when there was no video. And it’s continued to grow since then.
In another instance, we saw a blog post move up eight spots in ranking for a specific keyword after adding a video to that post.
We also publish videos on LinkedIn and Twitter to see additional engagement we might not otherwise experience with just the blog post without the video.
Tell us about a recent video that exceeded your expectations of what video can do.
Recently, AgentSync partnered with Senior Life Insurance Company. The goal was to create a customized producer onboarding portal that took Senior Life Insurance’s agent onboarding process from days to minutes.
We produced a video, including using Vyond for parts of it, and put some paid ad spend behind it. We wanted to tell this powerful story and show potential customers the improvement they could expect by adopting our technology and some customizations. We have been very impressed with the results.
This video has brought in a large number of qualified leads and contributed significantly to our sales pipeline. That’s proof of how the AgentSync/Senior Life Insurance story impacted our audience of potential customers when told through a short video.
You’ve been using Vyond for eight years. Which aspects of it do you like the most?
I find Vyond to be extremely user-friendly and intuitive. As someone who comes from a video production background, most of the features and functionalities of Vyond are intuitive to me. I’ve used Vyond across many companies and clients, in-house and as a contractor through my own company.
I’ve typically used Vyond for educational purposes for both internal and external audiences. For example; I’ve used it to educate employees about company culture and benefits and to teach potential customers about industry topics relevant to my clients and their products. I’ve even used Vyond as one of several tools in a large-scale public health initiative. In all cases, Vyond helps me convey complex information to audiences of different education levels in a way they can absorb and retain.
How long did it take to feel like you mastered Vyond?
It took me about six months to feel like I really knew Vyond. My skills have continued to grow over the years, and I’m sure there are features I don’t even utilize.
I credit my expertise in Vyond to a larger understanding of visual storytelling methods and experience creating content across various media and many use cases. Vyond was simple to learn and performs as I would expect it to.
What advice would you give a reader who wanted to try Vyond after reading this interview?
Just get into the platform and use it. You can definitely spend time watching training videos and participating in educational resources. Still, I think the best way to learn is by doing.
Beyond that, my advice is to get creative and experiment with the software. I’m always surprised by how much I can do when I explore different functions and combine them in unique ways.
Animate videos to increase your blog’s engagement and profit
With tools like Vyond, brands can access a professional suite of animation tools to adapt any blog content into a video and boost your page sessions.
Adding Vyond videos on their site has increased companies’ conversion rate by 67% and social media shares by 375%. Because of our templates, you can take advantage of these benefits regardless of your animation experience.
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#### How Employees Can “Manage Up” in Our New Remote Work Environment
Our new workplace reality: Conference call dial-in codes. Looking presentable on your morning team meeting that’s now on Zoom. Juggling kids who are home from school for the foreseeable future and begging for snacks. All this while emotionally absorbing the severity of what’s happening across the world.
As employees in the age of COVID-19, so many of us are struggling to navigate the challenges of remote work. And while we will return to our regular workplaces eventually, this abrupt transition to remote work will likely spark many organizations to consider the expansion or evolution of their work-from-home policies.
This “new normal” of remote team communication requires an entirely new way of functioning – especially when it comes to talking about sensitive, nuanced issues.
Think about asking for a promotion, needing to raise a performance issue, or talking to your manager about shifting your workday schedule to accommodate kids at home. How does all of this manifest in this remote workplace reality?
Here at Vyond, we recently teamed up with True Global Intelligence and asked 1,000 employees at large enterprises in the U.S. how comfortable they feel speaking up to managers, or “managing up”, the trait that helps us excel in our careers, but that no one ever explicitly teaches.
Our research identified a significant training gap: 42% of employees said they would be interested in receiving training on managing up, but only 28% of employees have received training on this topic. And as a generation, millennials are particularly craving guidance, with 50% expressing a desire for training on managing up.
Speaking with your manager about sensitive topics is hard enough – now, think about doing it over the phone or video chat. In our remote work environment, we’re now tasked with handling these conversations without being able to adequately gauge body language and facial cues to help guide the conversation. Plus, there’s an element of urgency to consider. These important conversations can’t and shouldn’t wait, especially when it comes to issues like performance and pay.
So what can you do now to help employees prepare? To start, consider offering remote training that specifically addresses how employees can navigate these tough talks in a virtual setting.
Managing Up – and Freeing Up Your Calendar
One situation where “managing up” training comes in handy is this: your schedule being overrun with meetings.
Have you ever asked yourself – why couldn’t this meeting have been an email? We may share memes on social media or complain to similarly beleaguered colleagues, but what if we could actually speak up about it to our managers – and ultimately make a difference?
Most respondents associated their workplaces with positive or neutral feelings
When we asked our survey respondents whether they feel comfortable talking to their superiors about changing the number of meetings on their calendars, we found that two-thirds (65%) of those with no direct reports have not tried to bring this issue up with their boss. Some groups are more likely than others to bring up the topic – for example, we found men are more likely to have successfully tried to change the number of meetings they have (33% of men vs. 21% of women), while women are more likely to not have tried at all (46% of women vs. 36% of men).
What Can Organizations Do About It?
Conversations with superiors, whether about promotions or reducing the number of meetings, are tricky for even the most seasoned employees to tackle. One way for leadership teams and HR to help employees feel prepared is through training. And now that so many of us are working from home, how this training is implemented matters more than ever. Our survey found the most preferred type of training among employees is self-led online training (51%), compared to instructor-led training and one-on-one coaching. This is heartening, as self-led eLearning is a critical component of training and managing a remote team.
Men are more likely than women to describe their workplace as flexible and professional
Videos are a valuable resource in conducting remote training and can be easily incorporated into your existing learning content. Creating your own videos with a tool like Vyond ensures they are branded for and tailored to your organization. Videos are extremely engaging, accessible, and adaptable and are a great way to arm your employees with the soft skills they need to confidently manage up.
We’ve made a video template in Vyond on how to have difficult conversations with your manager so you can quickly implement your own remote training, customized to your needs. Click here to access the template and for instructions on how to use it.
The transition from working in an office to spending your entire day at home is not an easy one. We encourage you to hang in there and do the best you can in this new remote work environment. Don’t forget to take care of yourself and not just your to-do list. Take time away from your work, incorporate healthy meals and movement if you can, and connect with your loved ones.
We’d love to continue this conversation on social media and hear how you’re adapting to your new remote life, or if you have other ideas for crucial training in this new world order, don’t hesitate to share. You can find us on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram.
#### How Idea Learning Gives Clients the Power of Video
Shannon McKenzie and Jillian Douglas founded Idea Learning with a mission to provide custom learning strategies to clients in a variety of industries.
That endeavor naturally led the Idea Learning team to experiment with creating their own animated videos to meet their clientele’s needs. The dynamic, story-driven nature of video makes it a highly effective medium for eLearning, a discipline that has historically been plagued by disinterest and disengagement among its audiences. It’s no surprise, then, 98% of enterprise organizations say video is valuable for improving communication and for training employees better and faster.
To create eLearning videos that were customized, learner-centric, and engaging, Shannon and Jillian reached for Vyond. Before long, the all-in-one AI video creation platform became a staple in the Idea Learning toolkit.
We interviewed Shannon and Jillian to learn more about why video works for eLearning, and how Idea Learning uses Vyond to deliver top-quality content to their clients.
Why Idea Learning uses Video for eLearning
What was the last video you created in Vyond?
Because we can’t celebrate in-person this year, we made a quick Happy Birthday video for our employee Katie using a Vyond template. We love being able to customize the characters! In this video we created super realistic representations of ourselves.
How did you find your way into eLearning?
As custom instructional designers, we’re always looking for the best delivery method for each client/project and sometimes eLearning is the right solution. Our experience as learners had left us with the impression that eLearning wasn’t an emotionally engaging learning experience. Later, when we started Idea Learning, our clients began to request eLearning. It was then that we knew we had to find a way to connect with learners’ hearts as well as their minds using eLearning platforms.
You wrote the book Let Them Choose: Cafeteria Style Learning for Adults. What is “Cafeteria Style Learning” all about?
As practitioners who design workplace learning experiences, we share a passion for transforming workplace learning to appeal to learner curiosity, influence behavior change, and generate meaningful, relevant experiences. Throughout our careers as learning professionals, we have observed a tendency toward resistance to learning among those who seemed skeptical about workplace training in general. Some of the assumptions we witnessed include training classes are a waste of time; the content is generic and doesn’t help with individual roles and responsibilities; and learners don’t feel engaged in training in a personally meaningful and productive way.
We developed Cafeteria Learning as an alternative or complement to traditional training. In practice, it’s an approach to learning that allows instructional designers (chefs) to apply content (ingredients) to a variety of interchangeable activities (recipes), resulting in an informal classroom workshop in which each learner builds a customized learning experience (meal).
Idea Learning is known for designing top-notch interactive training for its clients. How does video fit into that?
“If keeping someone’s attention in a lecture were a business it would have an 80% failure rate,” – John Medina, author of Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home and School
Storytelling is one technique we use to engage our learners and video is a great way to tell stories and keep learners’ attention. Video can complement in-person learning and also be embedded in eLearning. We also sometimes use video to introduce a topic or as a tool to reinforce learning. Prior to finding Vyond, creating video was time consuming and required technical expertise from outsourced video production crews and motion graphic designers. This sometimes created financial roadblocks for our clients. Vyond allows us to create videos internally, making it feasible to include video in more client projects.
Can you give me an example of a when you’ve used video for storytelling or to create an emotional connection with learners?
One of our clients is an international construction software company. We partnered with them to introduce new employees to the fundamentals of their industry. Through the use of Vyond videos, we were able to create vignettes that brought each concept to life with unique characters guiding learners through each module. Pairing the subject matter expert’s narration with the visual engagement of Vyond brought personality and authenticity to the course. The good news is learners loved it and we’re working on the next project with them, also using Vyond.
Build eLearning videos for your clients.
From your first video to your fiftieth, Vyond ’s all-in-one AI video creation platform makes it easy to create professional-grade eLearning deliverables. Vyond’s Agency and Producer Program is perfect for freelancers and teams who want to wow their clients with custom video solutions. Vyond partners like Idea Learning are able to earn affiliate income, transfer video rights, and get dedicated support from the Vyond’s partners team. Join the Agency and Producer Program today to start making dynamic and engaging eLearning videos for your clients.
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#### How Louis Ceaser IV Uses Vyond To Grow His Freelance Business
The number of unincorporated self-employed workers has been growing since late 2020. As of December 2021, there are 9.28 million self-employed workers in the U.S. alone.
There are many reasons for the rise of self-employed people, like the desire to explore creative interests and build passive income streams. But unfortunately, freelancing isn’t a stress-free route. Self-employed people still have to find clients and become trustworthy vendors.
After working in tech sales for 10 years, Louis Ceaser IV noticed he could solve both problems through animated videos. “In sales,” says Louis, “you tell stories that lead to trust and business outcomes.” He founded Launch Your Story in 2021 with this in mind.
The animation and content house helps entrepreneurs and freelancers tell their own stories. These stories show viewers that freelancers are also humans who experience growth and pain. When customers of Louis’s clients see these videos, they are more likely to support their businesses.
We interviewed Louis to discover how he uses Vyond to grow his and other people’s freelance business.
What does Launch Your Story do for your customers?
Louis Ceaser IV: I help entrepreneurs tell their stories in a way they’ve never told it before through animation storytelling. This video asset can be repurposed across their website and social media channels to give their current audience a behind-the-scenes look into their lives or used to attract new clients.
Typically, how involved are your clients in the creative process?
Louis: I like to take a hands-on approach when working with my clients through the creative process. My skillset is listening, writing, and interviewing. It’s about asking the right questions to draw the right answers to form a strong script. Once a solid script is in place with emotion and flow, the animations come alive.
Speaking of your creative process, what does your video creation process look like?
Louis: I have a seven-step process:
Virtual meeting: I like to have a brief conversation with my client to understand what they’re looking for and see if I can deliver that vision.
Record the message: If they don’t know what to say, I’m great at interviewing them and pulling out the answers. I then take the recording and produce a script.
Place the script in Google Docs: Make any revisions/edits as they see fit.
Storyboard before the script is finalized: I already have a good idea of the best-animated scenes available in my toolbox to help bring their story to life. I’m a visual learner, so combing their script and going line-by-line helps me with the imagination process.
Voiceover: I love doing voiceovers, but if they want to use their own voice, that’s cool, too.
Animate: Using my notes from storyboarding, I’ll go into Vyond and start creating the scenes, along with customizing the avatars, camera angles, and transitions. I also add in the voiceover audio and search for the best non-copyrighted music that matches the emotion of the video.
Approval: I send them a private link to view the video. If I get two thumbs up, they now have a video asset they can repurpose across any platform to help amplify their personal or business brand. I’ve had one person cry, a few who are super thankful, and some have walked me to the next referral. I’m humbled to use my gift to positively impact the world with animation and story.
What interesting opportunities have your videos led to?
Louis: I’ve been invited to the LinkedIn Creators Program, taken on LinkedIn influencers like Justin Welsh and String Nguyen as clients, and proactively done animated videos for Rachel Beck, Heather Monahan, and Lewis Howes. I’ve also had the pleasure of personally connecting with Vyond Rockstar Rued Riis for business advice.
It sounds like you have a great relationship with LinkedIn, which you’re also very active on. Why did you choose that platform?
Louis: I chose LinkedIn because this platform is kind to animated video and the potential organic reach your asset could experience. Also, my clients are entrepreneurs and small business owners, and, now more than ever, they are looking for innovative ways to share their personal stories on LinkedIn.
Why did you decide to use Vyond for your work out of all the animation tools?
Louis: As a Mac user, Vyond’s interface reminds me of iMovie; it’s easy to navigate around. Being able to record my voiceover, complete the animated scenes, and import music all in one user interface is a game-changer for me.
How long did it take you to become a Vyond expert? What’s the biggest takeaway from your experience so far?
Louis: It took me about nine months before feeling truly expert-level comfortable with the tool. I still have some growth to experience when it comes to scene transitions and understanding camera angles. However, the business-friendly avatars are my favorite. Vyond is so fun to use, and I love the new updates every month.
What advice would you give to folks who are new to Vyond?
Louis: Be confident in yourself and give yourself enough patience and grace while learning the tool; it’s not going to happen overnight. Also, play around with the tool and with the new features. You don’t need a fancy mic or recording studio to make professional videos. I used some simple headphones and recorded them in the car when I started. Don’t let perfection get in the way of your progress. Get started today!
What’s your next project?
Louis: I will be releasing the Launch Your Story animated podcast to encourage 1M+ to share their personal and career stories with the world. I’m also taking on new clients, so if you need to transform your story, book excerpt, or podcast soundbite into an animated video, we can work with you.
Create animated videos to grow your business
You can use Vyond’s set of intuitive animation tools to create engaging stories that tell your brand’s story. Like Louis, you can create an engaging story from scratch that amazes your peers, colleagues, and clients. Or you can use Vyond’s templates to build your story on top of a pre-animated one.
As a first video, you can share your company’s mission, the reason you founded it, and your values. You can eventually tell more complex stories as you become better at animating. Like Louis’s stories, these videos help you build trust with clients and attract new ones that value what you stand for.
Animate your first video
#### How Matt Moran uses Vyond to create engaging online courses
The popularity of online courses has grown enormously over the last decade, and it’s no surprise. Armed with some simple content creation tools, a modern educator can use the web to reach learners all around the globe with interactive, engaging lessons.
One such teacher is Matt Moran, a professional public speaking coach with over 20 years of experience working with Fortune 500 companies like Capital One and Dell. After honing his teaching skills with executives, Matt knew that he wanted to reach a broader audience. He decided to create Stand & Deliver, an online public speaking course, to share his lessons with students from all over the world.
Stand & Deliver is a blended-learning course that offers a combination of videos, worksheets, and coaching sessions. To create the videos, Matt used both Vyond animations and live-action footage to engage his audiences. The course was launched just this past April, and, already, 15 students are enrolled in the program.
We caught up with Matt to learn more about how he uses Vyond in his course and how he successfully built his brand as a training professional over the past 20 years.
You’ve been coaching professionals on public speaking for the last two decades. At what point did you start creating training videos with Vyond to teach public speaking skills? How has this video portion of your business grown over time?
Moran: I started using Vyond this past December, when creating my public speaking course videos. I launched the program in April. Since that time, I have been using the animations in my weekly “Tips and Tricks” videos on social media as well.
Did you have a background in video skills over time to grow this part of your business?
Moran: Well, I do actually have a degree in film, so when I began using Vyond, I already had a pretty solid grasp of how to tell a story on “film.”
Which of your courses and videos use Vyond?
Moran: I use Vyond all throughout my entire Stand & Deliver course, as well as in my social media ads and “Tips and Tricks” videos. They are great for adding humor (which is a fantastic learning tool), and for breaking up the monotony of me speaking to the camera. The title and graphics possibilities are almost endless, and it’s so incredibly easy to use. I’m pretty much in love with Vyond.
How many students have taken your Stand & Deliver course? Have any videos performed particularly well?
Moran: So far, about 15 students have taken my actual course. It sells at a fairly high price point, and Vyond actually helped me feel more comfortable with making that price point what it is. It helps my videos appear a lot more professional.
The videos that have performed the best are the ones where I combine live action with animation. I use the animated segments to demonstrate the concepts I am teaching, and my audience loves watching the characters live out their lives in fun and interesting ways.
You combine live video footage with Vyond animations for your training courses. How do you decide when to use live video versus animation?
Moran: It just depends on the concept that I’m teaching. If it’s something that’s more “big picture,” I will often use live action. But when I’m outlining a series of steps, I’ve found that Vyond works great.
One of my favorite things to do is to create characters who “live out” on screen the scenarios that I’m talking about in my teaching. Sometimes I’ll open a video with an animated scenario to truly draw my audience in. Other times, I’ll use it sporadically throughout my video. My audience often comments on how they can relate to one or more of the characters I’ve created, and they love seeing the animated version of me, dressed in the same clothes that I’m wearing in the live-action segments.
What tools do you use other than Vyond to create your training videos?
Moran: I shoot everything myself in my house, and I edit on Final Cut Pro X.
What is your advice for learning professionals who want to create a blended course like yours?
Moran: Great question. My advice to folks who are considering doing something like this would be, first, to really hone your script before diving into shooting or creating animations. Solid writing and organization of content are the keys to success. Secondly, be aware that making videos does take time, depending, of course, on the level of quality that you’re seeking. For me, 30 seconds of animation creation (including audio) takes about two to three hours to make, so it’s essential that I have a good script to work with from the start.
Also consider “piloting” your course in some way with friends or trusted colleagues so they can give you feedback on your material, worksheets, etc. While you don’t have to utilize all of their advice, it is essential to understand how your people are receiving the content.
You’ve built a successful brand as an educator. What advice would you give to training consultants who also want to build their brand? How have you built your brand through video?
Moran: Be consistent with the videos you put out on social media*. *It takes a while for an audience to get used to seeing you and your brand, but when they do, the work eventually starts flowing in. For me, releasing weekly “Tips and Tricks” videos has been critical to building my brand. Give your audience information that is useful to them, as opposed to just selling your product. When people realize that you’re providing information that they can use in their work and life, your brand builds itself.* *
What are your top three tips for successfully delivering presentations and public speaking?
Moran: First of all, instead of asking your colleagues, “How did I do?” after a presentation you’ve delivered, ask, “If you had to pick just one thing I could do better, what would it be?”
Secondly, video record yourself delivering presentations, and then go back over them with a fine-tooth comb. You won’t believe the things you will see and hear, and although it’s hard to watch yourself speaking on camera, it’s the only way to truly grow.
Finally, practice in front of a mirror five minutes a day, five days a week. Frequently practicing is what produces transformational results.
What advice would you give to a beginner making an animated video?
Moran: Watch as many of the Vyond tutorials as you can in order to learn how to keep things fresh and interesting. Watch YouTube tutorials from YouTube users, too, to learn new tips for making your videos more interesting. And then, just play around. And don’t be afraid to use humor in your videos. People love it.
What is the single biggest reason you would recommend Vyond?
Moran: Ease of use, and the endless options. It’s just so dang easy and so much fun!
Teaching an interactive online course with Vyond
With Stand & Deliver, Matt is no longer limited to coaching students in person. His course is online, so it’s available all over the world. Beyond being accessible, his interactive course engages and delights audiences. Matt has combined live video with Vyond animations to keep students visually captivated as he teaches various concepts.
If you’re a training professional, we highly recommend you visit Matt’s site to explore how he approaches blended-learning courses. The mix of video content, worksheets, and coaching sessions that he provides gives students a well-rounded learning experience and leaves them feeling prepared to deliver a presentation.
“This is hands down the best, most game-changing course I have EVER taken,” said sales executive Gary Krieg, one of Matt’s students.
Create your own animated video
#### How Mike Morrison used Vyond to transform science posters
Mike Morrison didn’t plan to revolutionize science-poster designs. But when he faced a health scare in graduate school, he was determined to find a way to speed up science discovery so that he’d have a better chance of being cured.
To start, Morrison thought about where doctors learn about cutting-edge medicine and technologies for patients: conferences. Professors and students go to these events to share critical research—often, information that could save lives.
Here is the problem that Morrison discovered: Most science posters at these conferences have a cluttered, info-heavy design, so it’s difficult for attendees who walk by to learn from the displays. Why, Morrison wondered, were most scientists using outdated designs to share their valuable knowledge?
Morrison saw an opportunity for improvement. Why not minimize and reorient the text on a poster board to help viewers absorb the information? He created a new poster design to make it easier for conference attendees to learn about studies at a glance. To share this idea, Morrisson used Vyond to create an animated video about how to redesign science posters.
A typical science poster design:
A #betterposter design template from Mike Morrison:
After the video was shared on YouTube and Twitter, it went viral. Morrison’s minimalist poster design resonated with professors and students, and they shared the video rampantly. Since being published in March, the video has been retweeted 3,200 times and has received nearly 300,000 views. Morrison’s poster design has received so much traction online and in conferences that even NPR and Forbes wrote stories about his video.
Well-versed in both psychology and design, Morrison has many valuable insights to share about using visuals to transfer knowledge. We caught up with him to learn more about how design can impact learning and how he used Vyond to create the viral video.
After you posted the video on Twitter, how did people respond?
Morrison: First, they shared it like crazy. It would hit a new field of science and go viral all over again. Then, one person decided to try the poster design at a conference. That person, the very first #betterposter presenter ever, won his conference’s Best Poster in Show award. Then, lots of people started trying it and posting poster selfies with the hashtag. Many of these people described how the poster design led to a better conference experience.
Congrats to @OfosuEugene for placing first in the 2019 Mental Health and Law Conference poster competition! Check back in a few weeks to see his award-winning #betterposter on OSF 🙂 pic.twitter.com/ZVqZmfBgrD
— Sally Xie (@xallysie) March 30, 2019
Had more meaningful conversations at this years #ESA2019 meeting thanks to the #betterposter format! (I’m also really digging the new aesthetic) @mikemorrison pic.twitter.com/dj6wpI8UFu
— Victoria Amaral (@VictoriaEAmaral) August 17, 2019
How has your video impacted the scientific community?
M: It started a conversation about how we should design scientific posters. And lots of people are trying it. It seems like 1% to 5% of posters in most scientific conferences are now #betterposters. Even if they don’t use the full design, many people are at least adding a prominent “takeaway statement,” which is a significant improvement.
Tried out the #betterposter suggested by @mikemorrison at the #ancr conference last week – and just see how excited my colleague @sandrulka got! ?? #success #biostatisticsresearch #multistate #relativesurvival #cancerepi #karolinskainstitutet pic.twitter.com/lNuW9tKeeV
— Caroline Weibull (@carolineweibull) September 6, 2019
Talk us through your process for making your Vyond video, from start to finish.
M: First, I created a rough draft of the video in Vyond. It took me only a week or two to get the main scenes laid out—big credit to Vyond’s user experience there. For narration, I mainly used Vyond’s text-to-speech feature as placeholder audio as I was figuring out what I wanted to say.
Then, for the final version, I needed a way to combine my Vyond work (especially the human characters I’d made) with the custom animations I’d done in Adobe After Effects and Illustrator. So I changed all my backgrounds in Vyond to green, like a green screen, downloaded my Vyond video, and then pulled it into Adobe After Effects and replaced the green background with my custom graphics and animations. Just like a green screen in a movie. I also recorded my own voice for narration instead of using the text-to-speech feature using Adobe Audition.
When making the Vyond video, did you apply any of the design principles you use for science posters? If so, how?
M: I tried to respect the cognitive load of the user by minimizing the amount of visual clutter in each frame. I also tried to ‘surprise and delight’ as often as possible. For example, instead of just describing the experience of seeing posters at a conference, I created a simulation for the video to show viewers what it’s like to walk by posters at these events.
I also wanted to emotionally guide viewers through the video. For example, I spend a lot of time at the beginning of the video telling jokes about poster sessions to bring out the emotions people feel towards traditional posters. Then, viewers are ready to hear my solution afterwards.
What tips do you have for others who want to transfer knowledge clearly and easily through a video?
M: Do not spend one second worrying about what your ‘expert’ colleagues think of you. Speak like you would to your closest friends, because that’s how everybody actually thinks. Also, failure isn’t ridicule. Nobody cares. Failure is designing something so couched and cautious and boring that people ignore it and feel nothing when they watch it.
What advice would you give to a beginner making an animated video?
M: Have fun, and make yourself laugh. And then, when you find yourself at all proud of it, show some people. Most people don’t realize that tools like Vyond exist and will think you are more skilled than you actually are, and that your video looks better than you think it does.
What is the single biggest reason why you would recommend Vyond?
M: The tool has an extremely short learning curve. Even if you don’t have any design skills, you can animate a video in five minutes. And if you DO have graphic design and motion graphics skills, you’ll love how quickly you can prototype your videos with Vyond’s large library of props and characters.
Rethinking how scientists communicate with Vyond
With his #betterposter movement, Morrison is making it easier for scientists to build their knowledge at conferences.
His Vyond video has inspired many professors and students to use his clear, minimal poster design at conferences.
And, as Morrison hoped, his poster design is helping medical professionals learn about the latest research in their field. Pulmonologist Dr. George Eapen, for example, recently commended a colleague who used the #betterposter:
This #betterposter format should be adopted. Meaningful information clearly transmitted in a manner that is easy to digest. Well done @jacepeabody. Maybe you should upload a short how-to tutorial and downloadable template to the education section of the @AAB_IP website.
— George Eapen MD (@GAEapenMD) August 16, 2019
The positive impact of Morrison’s video and poster design offers an important lesson: Critically thinking about how we share information has the potential to change the world.
Create your own animated video
#### How Personalized Video Boosts Online Engagement
Personalization marketing is more than just inserting a buyer’s name into an email. While this can be the start of building a connection, it’s not enough to pique significant interest in the customer.
To drive a purchase, personalization has to speak to who the customer actually is—their preferences, demographics, motivations, and more. Marketing that’s built around these factors shows buyers that the business can solve their unique pain points. They understand how the company can benefit them, so they’re motivated to engage further.
You can capture the power of this marketing with personalized videos—ones that focus on the concerns and interests of customers at each stage of the buyer journey. Watch this video for some quick tips, and keep reading to better understand personalization with video.
The Power of Mixing Video and Web Personalization
At any stage of the buyer journey, customers need a reason to stay on your site and continue engaging. Two tactics that continuously prove to capture people’s attention are video and personalization.
See for yourself with these stats on video engagement:
Video content on average leads to a 157% increase in organic traffic from search engines.
Social video creates 1,200% more engagement than text and video combined.
52% of marketing professionals say video content has the highest ROI.
Or personalization:
81% of people want brands to get to know them and understand when to approach them.
More than 78% of customers will only pursue offers if they’re customized to previous engagements with the brand.
93% of companies see greater conversion rates with website personalization.
Since both video and personalization have proven to boost engagement separately, it only makes sense to combine them.
Vidyard does an exceptional job at combining the powers of video and web personalization. The moment a visitor lands on their site they’re met with examples of how Vidyard can tailor any video to any prospect. Request a demo, and you will actually see this functionality in action in the form of a personalized video with your name in it.
Here at Vyond, using video that’s personalized for every stage of the buyer journey has brought incredible results. Engagement on our site has increased, and our bounce rate has decreased. Visitors are spending longer and more meaningful time on our site. By creating videos that are customized for your target buyers at different stages, you can boost engagement throughout the entire web experience.
How to Personalize Videos by Buyer Journey
Web personalization and video are relatively new marketing frontiers, so you might feel intimidated by the thought of combining them. To guide you through the process, we’ll cover different videos you can create at each stage of the buyer journey to offer a personalized experience for your target customers.
Stage 1: Build awareness
Imagine a visitor landing on your site who’s never heard of your brand. They’re only going to stay on your site if you quickly show them how your business can solve their unique pain points. To keep new visitors engaged, have a personalized video appear on your homepage that’s customized for your different target buyers’ unique problems. Seeing how your business is uniquely geared toward their pain points will motivate customers to engage further.
To begin, create several versions of a video for your homepage that address pain points for the industries of target buyers. Identify the specific problems that your company solves for each profession so visitors know exactly why they should care about your business.
On Vyond’s homepage, for example, we feature a video that clearly states our target buyers’ need for creating engaging video along with their challenge of dealing with difficult tools.
Stating these needs and challenges up front immediately lets our visitors know how Vyond is positioned to help them.
You want to create videos in this stage to address customer pain points. But here’s the issue with personalization at the early awareness stage: You don’t have any data on new visitors, so you don’t know which industry-specific video to present.
At Vyond, we use the data we already have available. Using form fills from past eBook downloads, event sign ups, or badge scans, we are able to better identify visitors landing on our site.
We combine this with our web personalization tool, Evergage. Evergage uses this data stored in our CRM to identify where visitors are coming from and their respective industry. Now they can be segmented accordingly and served a personalized experience on their next visit.
Another software company, Citrix, utilized a Clearbit Reveal to show different text on their homepage, based on the visitor’s industry. Health care industry visitors saw this version:
This personalized homepage builds an instant connection between new visitors and your business. These buyers understand the problems your business is solving, so they’re motivated to learn more and investigate how your product can benefit them.
Stage 2: Build interest
Once visitors have an introduction to your brand, they’ll be interested to know more about how, exactly, your business works.
To build trust, use demo videos to show buyers the specifics of how your product works. Learning about your products’ details will help leads get closer to deciding whether they want to purchase.
The spreadsheet tool Airtable, for example, features a demo video on their product page for leads who want to learn more about their business. The company skillfully turned the video preview into a GIF, so buyers are especially driven to click and watch.
Avoid displaying the same demo for all leads, though, as one video can’t address your different key buyers’ unique needs. It’s more engaging to create several demos for each of your target industries to appear for visitors on your product page.
With a customized demo, people clearly understand how your product helps them meet their specific professional goals. As in the awareness stage, you can use the tool Clearbit Reveal to detect which industry the site visitor belongs to and display the appropriate demo video for them.
For these personalized demos, show scenarios of how the product would be used in the specific professional setting. Airtable, for example, could create a demo for health care professionals that shows how their product can organize patient information.
Your video can also refer to the industry-specific motivations of buyers as you describe how your product works. Health care professionals, for example, value privacy in data storage, so Airtable could stress the security features of their product in that unique demo.
Beyond the video’s content, you want to strategically place this demo for leads to find after the intro homepage video. You can either place this product video further down on the homepage or create a “Learn more” CTA below the homepage video that leads to the demo.
Watching this personalized product video gives buyers even more reason to be interested in your business. They see not only what problems your business is solving but also how it tackles their unique industry-specific pain points. With that knowledge, they’re ready to consider making a purchase.
Stage 3: Encourage consideration
Once buyers have learned about the benefits of your business, they don’t need to hear more about your product details. To push them toward making a purchase, they need to see a variety of evidence that shows how great it is to work with you.
To take personalization a step further, have your sales team create unique “voicemail” videos and follow-up videos for specific clients. For example, the sales team at the marketing agency Bluleadz will encourage new leads to commit to a phone call by emailing a unique video voicemail.
The company will even create an individualized “Meet and Greet” video for clients just as they’re about to close a deal.
These customized videos may seem time-consuming, but they can be made quickly, within an hour, using tools like Vyond’s animated video platform, or Wistia’s Soapbox, a free Chrome extension for filming. On a larger scale, you can also utilize Vidyard’s personalization feature.
These individualized videos differentiate your company in the eyes of customers. Even if the quality isn’t perfect, these videos show your customers that you care enough to create a unique video for them. Feeling appreciated, buyers are more likely to commit to purchasing.
Stage 4: Retain your customers.
Once the buyer commits and makes a purchase, your work isn’t over. To win more sales from established customers, you have to stay in touch with them after they place orders. To make sure they don’t forget about your business and move on to a competitor, show your customers how your brand can still provide value.
Email is the best medium for consistent contact with customers, because you can’t guarantee they’ll visit your site. With these messages, you can send buyers personalized videos on new products and features based on their past orders with you. Seeing these customized product announcements will remind customers of how much they enjoyed their previous orders, so they’ll be happy to reconnect.
By now you’re probably wondering how in the world you get started with your own email personalization journey. Rest assured, it’s not as scary as it seems. Following along with the personalization basics matrix below will help get you up and running based on the marketing resources you have available.
Team Size
1-10
10-20
20+
Beginner
MailChimp
Emma
Emma
Intermediate
Emma
Pardot
Pardot
Advanced
Marketo
Marketo
Marketo
To send these personalized announcements, you’ll first want to separate your past customers’ email info by their past purchases. You can use a tool like Customer.io to create segments of contacts based on what buyers have ordered in the past. Once you have these different categories in your email list, you can choose which customers would get the most value out of your different product announcement videos and should be emailed.
By sending buyers personalized product announcements based on their previous business, you can consistently remind customers of your brand’s value and retain their business.
Keep Buyers On Board with a Personalized Video Journey
Turning a lead into a loyal customer takes more than a quick-fix hack. Keeping someone engaged on your site and continually invested in your business requires a personalized customer experience. You have to show buyers that you understand their specific needs and wants at every stage to drive them toward repeat purchases.
As one of the most engaging mediums, video is optimal for guiding leads through a personalized buyer journey. You can address specific customer needs in the most compelling ways: visuals, music, movement, and more. By serving customers’ interests through powerful communication, personalized video drives engagement and long-term retention.
The most important thing for anyone considering getting started with personalization is to start small. There are so many moving parts when it comes to personalization that it can seem overwhelming to a beginner. Start small with a few bits of personalization through email and then work your way up to personalized videos and homepage. You will probably find you are able to accomplish quite a bit with the tools you already have at hand. Once you have build your foundation adding on more tools or ways to personalize will feel like a no-brainer.
About Vyond
Vyond allows people of all skill levels in all industries and job roles to create dynamic and powerful media. With features that go beyond moving text and images, you can build character-driven stories or compelling data visualizations that engage audiences and deliver results.
With Vyond, it’s easy to create video for your training. Get started making your own videos today. Start a free trial and sign up for our weekly webinar.
#### How Peter Mercado at Cleveland Water & Power uses Vyond for awareness and education
You might not think of best practices in eLearning and public awareness when you think of public utilities. But that’s exactly what Cleveland Public Utilities should be known for thanks in part to the talents of Peter Mercado, a Desktop Publishing Specialist.
We were able to grab a few moments of Peter’s time to ask him a bit about his job and his journey to incorporate fun and informative video into public awareness campaigns for Cleveland Water, Cleveland Public Power, and Water Pollution Control.
How long have you been working with Cleveland Public Utilities and what is your role?
Mercado: I’ve been working for Cleveland Public Utilities for three years. My role is to create annual reports, brochures, internal signage and posters, flyers, and forms. I create social media images to support Cleveland Public Utilities’ Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter accounts. I also capture and edit video using a DSLR camera and Adobe Premiere Pro and create short animations for public awareness and education utilizing Vyond’s software.
How long have you been working with video?
Mercado: I have only been working with video for a year or so and am learning new techniques daily.
How do you use it in your role?
Mercado: I use it to educate and inform the public using Vyond for Cleveland Water, Cleveland Public Power, and Water Pollution Control. I’ve been creating monthly videos to be featured on Cleveland Water’s YouTube and Twitter.
What do you find useful about using video for public education?
Mercado: I find it easier to demonstrate complicated subject matters through animation. The retention levels are much greater in animation than the written word.
What types of learning tools are you using?
Mercado: Vyond, Illustrator, Photoshop, Premiere Pro, Adobe Audition, and InDesign
Have you seen an increase in learning with video?
Mercado: Yes, We’ve experienced a huge increase in Cleveland Water’s Web Portal enrollment since we started using Vyond.
Take us through your creation and publishing process.
Mercado: I usually receive a short script from a person who writes the subject matter of the desired animation. I create a storyboard and come up with the graphics and animation techniques utilizing Vyond Software. If Vyond does not have the stock art I’m looking for then I draw it in Illustrator and import it there. I usually type the script in Vyond and use the text to speech feature as a placeholder for my voiceovers. I then record my voiceover, edit it in Audition and import it into Vyond. I then add music and sound effects to support the animation. It then gets reviewed and changes are made as required. It is exported from Vyond and gets uploaded and posted to Cleveland Water’s YouTube page or Twitter.
Using video for public awareness and education
With his educational animated videos, Mercado is making it easier for people in Cleveland to prevent and fix common utility issues. His Vyond videos have helped thousands of locals to save precious time and resources.
Create your own animated video
#### How Robb Bingham helps Video Makers Get Started in Vyond
Our developers have worked hard to ensure that you can create your own video on your very first day in Vyond Studio. Truly mastering the art of video communication, however, takes a bit more time.
Luckily, the myth that mastery requires 10,000 hours turned out to be false, and practice isn’t the only way to get good at something. Nevertheless, experience goes a long way if you want to create masterful content. Vyond Studio is packed with advanced features to bring even the most complex ideas to life, but those capabilities may feel out of reach to new makers. That’s where Robb Bingham comes in.
As an experienced learning strategist, Robb works on the team Converging Solutions—one of our affiliates—to transform learning and development at medium and large businesses. Over several years of developing content for eLearning, marketing, and internal communications, he’s picked up expert-level mastery of telling a story with video.
He uses those skills to help new members of the Vyond Maker Community learn everything they need to know to get started quickly in Vyond Studio. We interviewed Robb to hear how he shares the power with even the most nervous novices.
Interview with Robb Bingham of Converging Solutions
At Converging Solutions, you offer a Vyond Quick Start workshop. How did you get your own start with Vyond?
Converging Solutions came to Vyond after using a more limited animated software program because we wanted Vyond’s more advanced capabilities like lip sync, motion paths, and a broad set of characters and templates.
We were impressed, and the jump for our team was pretty easy from some of those other tools. We found the Vyond Resource Library to be most helpful! We were also able to learn quickly (and frequently) in Vyond Studio from our own trial and error.
As we began to introduce new team members to Vyond, we realized that there was an easier way to get people up to speed quickly. Maybe “easier” isn’t the right word, because it’s pretty intense! (But it’s also a lot of fun!) We created an opportunity for them to learn by doing in a workshop experience. More on that later!
Your work spans learning, internal communications, marketing, and more. How does video fit into all that?
At its core—at least when it’s done well—an animated video tells a story.
That allows us to use Vyond for many of our client projects. Here’s a shortlist of some ways we’ve found animation to be incredibly helpful and sets our deliverables apart:
Learning
At the top of the course, instead of starting with a boring list of objectives, we start the course with a video like this one that illustrates the difference the course content will make in the learner’s life. (“What’s in it for me?”)
In the middle of the course, we use video to illustrate a case study and bring otherwise dry topics to life!
Communications
Instead of sending out a company card at Thanksgiving like every other company, we made a holiday video. It took a few more hours, but it also made an impactful impression of our company and highlighted our desire to make a positive difference for our clients.
Marketing
In the marketing space, your animated video should generally have a direct call to action. The story can really spell out a specific pain-point and help the viewer understand why they must take action now.
(This video was the first one completed by our newest team member.)
Other times, the call to action isn’t as glaringly obvious. For example, when we promote our Vyond Workshop, we provide a link to the sizzle reel below. The purpose here is primarily to validate credibility as an expert in the field. The call to action in this case is communicated in the marketing piece that contains the link instead of within the video itself.
What are some key themes you cover in the Vyond Quick Start workshop?
While storytelling isn’t the sole focus of our Vyond Quick Start workshop, it is a significant theme for the first segment. Why? Because no matter how good your development skills are in Vyond, if you aren’t telling a compelling story, you are missing the entire point!
It would be like trying to walk without a skeleton. You need those bones to provide structure and create leverage for muscles to work together to go anywhere! Similarly, the story is where you start from, and we start the workshop talking about an endless number of ways to start your story that can grab the viewer’s attention.
From that foundation, the workshop is mostly about getting up to speed developing in Vyond as quickly as possible. Attendees get hands-on right away with some guided activities and rapid-fire feedback from peers and developers. A lot of the workshop is spent in breakout rooms where attendees get to apply concepts just covered and get real-time support as they work. It’s been such a popular format, and people wrap up the day with a major jump-start on the idea they brought into the workshop.
How have attendees described the experience of participating in your Vyond Quick Start workshop?
Everyone who has gone through the workshop so far has described the session as one of the most efficient ways they’ve experienced to get up to speed quickly and start developing projects that they really feel proud to share with others. This very-full one-day workshop experience leaves the attendee:
Feeling like they’ve mastered the basics.
“I learned more in this one day than in a month on my own!”
Helping new Vyond developers learn what GOOD looks like.
“I learned so much from all the examples the instructors shared, as well as how to leverage, learn from, and repurpose the templates… what a booster-shot for rapid development!”
Outlining a specific list of next-step topics to finalize their project and continue the progress made along their rapid learning curve.
“I really feel like I can finish the project I’m working on now in a few more hours rather than days or weeks!”
Who should attend the Vyond Quick Start workshop?
I’d say there are three primary audiences that see the most benefit from our Vyond Quick Start workshop:
Newbie developers to Vyond who know they want to learn to animate videos, but have limited time because video development is not their “day job.”
Anyone that’s started to use Vyond and got bogged down with the basics or became intimidated by the limited progress they’ve made and want some mentorship to improve it.
eLearning, Communications, or Marketing specialists that really want to set their deliverables apart, and want to learn how to make their projects look as professional as possible as quickly as possible.
The bottom line is if you want to get up to speed making Vyond videos as quickly as possible, and get several pro-tips to chew on right away, then this workshop is a no-brainer! We’ve also offered it up to design teams as a virtual professional development day, which is a great way to build a sense of team, learn and laugh (a lot) together in the middle of our pandemic world events. We have 2-3 developers that co-lead the session so it really helps keep everyone interested and highly engaged!
With Vyond, you can make media that moves.
Vyond Studio gives you all the tools you need to master the art of video. When you give your team the power of Vyond, you’re also giving them access to a broad community of makers like Robb and a team of supportive video experts to guide them along. Give yourself a kick start with Converging Solutions, or take a look yourself with a free trial of Vyond.
START A FREE TRIAL OF VYOND
#### How Rued Teaches Business Owners to Improve Their Marketing with Vyond
Rued Riis wasn’t planning on building a career teaching online courses. The video animator and professional marketer just wanted to use Vyond’s online animation software to deliver marketing messages in simple, entertaining ways.
The 30-year-old from Copenhagen, Denmark, discovered Vyond as a student worker at an accounting software firm. He quickly saw the benefits of animated video for marketing and spent several years improving his animation and video production skills.
Meet Rued, working from home, creating new courses, solo-entrepreneuring it.
After founding his own video animation agency and working as the CMO and CPO of two startups, he decided to use his knowledge and experience to help small business owners leverage animated videos to improve their marketing and training. That’s when he created his first online course, aptly titled: Go Beyond Vyond: How to Make Animated Videos that Work.
It became a best-seller, with more than 11,000 students enrolled, and changed his career path. Rued closed his video agency to focus on teaching. He has since created free YouTube tutorials, launched his own course site on ruedriis.com, and is working on new courses around video production.
We sat down with Rued to talk about his online animation courses and personal experience using Vyond.
In your course, you teach others how to use Vyond to create animated videos. How did you discover Vyond?
Rued: I was a student worker at an accounting software firm, and a colleague from marketing was struggling with a video she was making in GoAnimate, the former name for Vyond. She asked if I could take over, and through my efforts in helping with that video, I learned the basics of the program.
What was it about Vyond that motivated you to sign up?
Rued: I’d always wanted to learn how to animate videos, but I never spent the time required to use traditional tools. Vyond was just my foot in the door. It allowed me to create cool explainer videos — 30-60 second videos that pitch a concept or a business using voice-over and visuals — in half the time.
How long did it take you to become a Vyond expert?
Rued: It takes less than 10 hours to get good. But after that, it took me two to three years to build up an expertise in not only Vyond but in video production in general.
I didn’t have much video experience—and knew nothing about animation—prior to using Vyond. I used to shoot talking-head iPhone videos of me talking about something. They weren’t too bad, but I “got the reps in” and slowly became more secure and comfortable on camera. I guess Vyond was my shortcut to not only be able to hit record on an iPhone but also to produce a great video.
In my Vyond course, I share the tips, tricks, and hacks I’ve found over the years, so new Vyond users don’t have to spend as much time as I did.
What was your first video? Or favorite video?
My first video was for e-conomic; the software company I worked for. It was a whiteboard animation highlighting the software we sold. Even though it wasn’t the best production, it was promoted heavily through paid advertising. It was very similar to this one.
One of my favorite videos is this up-tempo humoristic video I did for a union. It has no music, but it has a very elaborate sound effect backdrop with both self-recorded and generic sound effects. It also sticks to a nice color scheme from their design guide. All in all, it’s a fun but professional explainer video that we were quite proud of creating.
Why did you decide to create a course about how to use Vyond?
Rued: It’s actually a funny story. It was summer holidays, and my friend Mads, who’s an expert Vyond animator, and I were bored with the slow pace of vacation time. So we decided to create a course that teaches everything we’ve learned about Vyond and explainer videos the last couple of years.
We both love Vyond and wanted to pass on our insights about how to use the program to take videos to the next level. We had seen so many Vyond videos on YouTube and on Fiverr that were poorly made. We wanted to show the level of professionalism you can achieve with an online video maker like Vyond.
We used nothing but an iPhone and a small clip-on microphone and created the whole course in two weeks.
What makes your course different from other ways you can learn Vyond?
Rued: The Vyond team does a great job of creating feature-specific tutorials for the basic use of the program. We wanted to go beyond that and show the variety and qualities of videos you are able to make with the program.
My course is also different in the way that is a practitioner’s perspective on the possibilities of Vyond. It talks about time-saving, general animation principles, color theory, visual hierarchy, and all the other practical aspects of animated video that don’t relate directly to specific features in Vyond.
Who can benefit from taking your course?
Rued: My target audience is non-technical video creators looking to utilize video more in their marketing and training — non-designers who don’t want to spend the time and money acquiring Adobe After Effects skills sufficient enough to produce something worth sharing.
I’m a generalist myself, and I try to teach my course in a way where the generalist can quickly go from zero to something with Vyond. My goal is to provide the generalist with a tool they can utilize in their work.
A secondary target group is freelancers that want to build a business selling Vyond videos to clients. I get emails from people asking about this a lot, so I know that those who dream of ultimate freedom and location independence are taking my course as well.
What do people get when they sign up for your course?
Rued: When people sign up, they get 50+ lessons that take them from the most basic functionalities up to pro level. I’ve poured a good amount of energy and humor into the course, so you’ll most likely also have a good time watching the lessons.
Everyone who signs up also gets access to me and my experience. All students can ask questions and get answers within a couple of hours. I’ll also give feedback on specific videos and give my advice on the context a student is creating video for, whether that’s online marketing, internal training of staff, or something else.
Why use animated video for marketing?
Rued: Well, I love video because it’s the format with the most “richness.” It’s closer to face-to-face interaction than text or just audio. And animation is great at getting people to lower their guard and take in the information more immediately.
Why use Vyond?
Rued: Vyond makes animated video creation faster and easier than with a more traditional stack of Adobe tools. And, as opposed to other animation makers, Vyond is more professional and sleek, allowing for high-end video creation with better prop imports, character customizations, import of live video, and much more.
What is your number one tip for professionals who want to create videos but aren’t sure where to start?
Rued: Take my course, haha. No, my advice would be to learn the basics by throwing yourself into the program. Choose a specific project or video you like and try to recreate it.
I use a term called imitation learning, where the idea is that you learn faster if you imitate something that exists already instead of trying to make your own. So my number one tip is, start making some videos. That’s the only way to learn the skill.
What’s your next project?
Rued: My next project is the third of three courses on video creation, which is on the scriptwriting process. It’s called “Strong Scripts: How to Structure Videos that Work”, and here I share everything I’ve learned from creating more than 200 videos from scratch. And one of the main lessons is that it very much comes down to the script.
I made this course because I’d seen a lot of great Vyond-animators making beautiful videos… But with a structure that made it difficult to follow the story and understand the message. This course is my take on practical scriptwriting for animated video. Made to enable creators to have a solid ground to rest their video on.
Learn to make professional animated videos for your business
If you’re ready to learn how to create professional animated videos for your business, enroll in Rued’s step-by-step training program, Go Beyond Vyond, which includes more than 50+ lessons across six modules that take you from the basic functionalities to pro-level Vyond skills. Rued poured a great deal of energy and humor into the course, so you’ll most likely also have a good time watching his lessons. His students also gain access to his expertise and can expect answers to their direct questions.
Sign up for a free trial of Vyond to see how easy it is to start creating compelling videos today.
#### How Safer Edge Achieves Cultural Representation
In the entertainment industry, the movement for representation has reached a fever pitch in recent years, with Hollywood scrambling to meet the imperative by presenting diverse stories on screen. Animation, too, has been challenged to respect real-world differences, even in fictional settings.
Representation matters, even—if not especially—outside of entertainment. We all have a responsibility to include and amplify underrepresented perspectives in the content we produce, be it for training, recruitment, marketing, or something else altogether.
Vyond’s all-in-one AI video creation platform comes packed with features that empower makers to create customized characters (even robots!) in a variety of professional styles. While we’re proud of the platform’s growing capacity for representation, what matters most is how we use it.
We heard of one Vyond maker, Kelsey Hoppe, who was tackling the issue of representation head-on with training videos tailored to non-Western contexts. To learn more, we hopped on a call with Kelsey to ask her about how she depicts diversity with safeguarding and risk management training videos created in Vyond.
What Kelsey Hoppe Learned about Representation in Animation
Over the course of talking with Kelsey, we got some great insights on how Safer Edge tackles cultural contextualization with Vyond. Here are her ten tips for makers depicting diversity with animation:
1. Create your own characters.
“Vyond’s Character Creator is a brilliant feature. While building your own characters can get time consuming, it really can better contextualize the video within the culture you are representing. This includes all the background characters. Creating your own characters gives you so much more range than using stock characters. Character creation also enabled us to reach some of our goals in visual representation of disability and ethnic/religious minorities.”
2. Vary skin tones.
“Small things make such a big difference in making an animation feel authentically representative, but this is a big one. Since you can create all your own characters, and no one person on earth has the exact same skin tone as another, give each character their own skin tone.”
,3. Know your setting.
“It’s so important to know what a Kenyan refugee camp or rural Indonesian village or water pump in Mozambique actually looks like. We’re lucky because most of our staff have worked in these locations, but Google is also extremely helpful. We were constantly asking: ‘would this tree be in Indonesia?’ A little research gave us the ability to answer these questions accurately.”
4. Choose props thoughtfully.
“We didn’t want anything to be in a video that wouldn’t be in that context in the real world. This meant some creative use of props and asking the question, ‘would a bucket like this be in a refugee camp?’ or ‘what would a single mother living in a refugee camp have in her tent?’ It’s amazing what you can find with all the props available in Vyond, or what you can import using creative commons imagery.”
5. Be creative with your settings.
“This was one of our biggest challenges, as most ready-made backgrounds tend to depict developed-world scenes. For example; we really struggled with a video that was supposed to be set in rural Afghanistan. Then a member of our team said, ‘a room is a room is a room.’ How could we make this room look like an Afghan schoolroom? We altered our script so that a majority of the video could take place within a schoolroom rather than out in the amazing Afghan countryside, which we would have really struggled to recreate.”
6. Integrate familiar objects.
“We asked the client for pictures of their offices and what tools they use in their different locations, and then recreated them in PowerPoint to import into Vyond. This brings a sense of ‘realness’ as the audience would be able to recognize these items from their regular life.”
7. Use representative voiceover.
“Having real people record our voiceover with non-American/UK accents has been key for us. People who watch our videos—especially non-native English speakers—tend to comment on how helpful this is. ‘They speak English like we speak English’ is the kind of comment we receive. Even if the person isn’t brilliant at doing voiceover or the audio isn’t amazing quality, it’s always worth it to have a real person representing the audience.”
8. Activate gender and ethnic diversity.
“We have a huge number of things we require all our work to show or represent in order to represent ethnic and gender diversity. We always ensure that we give women or minorities active speaking, teaching, and leadership roles rather than having them be in passive audience/learner roles. We don’t feel that it’s enough for women or minorities to simply be present in the video when they need to be active and leading in the real world.”
9. Give covered women speaking and leadership roles.
“We can tend to think of women who choose to cover (or a myriad of other people – young people, disabled people, etc.) as being passive or having accepted a disempowered role in society. This couldn’t be further from reality, especially in countries where women who choose to cover are leading in politics and activism. Using animation can be a great way to disrupt our quiet biases about people by giving covered women speaking and leadership roles. Other ways to do this could be to show any group that we don’t tend to think of as ‘leaders’ in the main teaching/speaking roles.”
10. Simplify the language in the script.
“And then simplify it again. We thought we had done a pretty good job of removing idioms and culturally-laden terms, but we fell at the first hurdle (to use an idiom) when it was reviewed by a global group. Our language was still too conceptual and complicated for a non-native English speaking audience. We had to go back and do another round of simplification.”
Use animation for cultural representation.
Vyond combines the simplicity of our easy-to-use platform with the customizations necessary to represent a complex world. We’re continuously improving our versatile all-in-one video platform to meet the need for diverse representation in all video content. Get a head start on creating your own DEI training videos on topics like Juneteenth, gender & pronouns, and more with the Vyond Video Template Library. Give Kelsey’s advice a go by creating a custom video with Vyond’s free trial.
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#### How Scientific Games Brings Benefits to Life with Video
Scientific Games knows fun.
As one of the biggest suppliers of gaming and lottery products for the world’s best casinos, the 114-year old company specializes in having a good time. It’s not always so easy, however, to bring that same sense of fun to typically boring topics.
HR professionals around the world perpetually struggle to make dense and complex topics engaging for employees, and few subjects are as complicated as employee benefits. To make these important policies more accessible, Susie Fotheringham and her team at Scientific Games reached for video.
Read our interview with Susie to hear how enterprises like Scientific Games make employee benefits enrollment fun with effective videos created in Vyond Studio.
Q&A with Susie Fotheringham, Director of Employee Benefits at Scientific Games
How did the pandemic impact the work you and your team were doing?
A lot of the ways we communicate benefits are visual – whether it’s signage in offices, in-person conversation or onsite presentations. With the majority of our employees working from home, we lost that connection and visibility. We had to get creative. Our employees’ needs to get care and learn about care relied on virtual options. We had to adapt quickly.
Why did you choose to use video?
Let’s face it. How many Zoom meetings have you attended last year? PowerPoint animation isn’t as engaging as we’d like it to be, either.
We wanted to illustrate our message in a fun way that would capture the attention of our audience. We ourselves as a team found animation and video as a much easier way to digest complex benefits information.
Open Enrollment is our Superbowl; our main event each year. We wanted to explain our benefits and provide resources that you didn’t just have to read or listen to. Videos and animation provided a way to illustrate what we were trying to communicate. It was painting a picture with real paint, not just the audience’s imagination. We told a memorable story that resonated with people more than a flyer or bullet point on a slide ever could.
Why did you choose to create these videos yourself?
Truthfully, the cost to outsource it didn’t fit our budget. We had a vision of what we wanted to do and once we realized that it wasn’t very hard to do (i.e., I cannot draw a stick figure) the choice was made for us. It also helped that it was incredibly fun.
Did you find it challenging to make these videos yourself?
The initial challenge was believing we could create videos with absolutely no experience in this space. We honestly were surprised at how easy Vyond made the process.
We kept improving our output because we learned new techniques or because of a recent product release.
The art of doing a voiceover was and still is the biggest challenge. We learned it’s very common to be hypercritical of your own voice and it’s something that you have to get over. We gained so much appreciation and respect we have for people that create videos and animation. We learned so much about the process and started noticing the production value in commercials we saw on TV, videos other members of the Vyond Maker Community shared, and the template videos put out by Vyond.
How do you make content that’s typically boring more engaging?
Humor and human connection. Particularly in the last year, we all needed a laugh. It has more of an impact when it’s not expected, and trust me, getting someone to laugh about the importance of life insurance is a badge I’ll wear all decade.
We also made a human connection by introducing our benefits team with characters that looked like us.
How does making a human connection help HR professionals in this kind of work?
It is Human Resources, after all! Personal or human connection is literally embedded in every function of Human Resources – particularly benefits.
Benefits affect you, your family, wellbeing and more often than not, people don’t invest the time to learn about it until either they are sick or someone they love is sick. As HR/Benefits professionals we have an opportunity to advise people on the value of being proactive. Taking the time to invest in a multi-channel approach ensures that you engage more people and Vyond gave us the opportunity to do that and do it well.
Create engaging HR videos.
With Vyond, anybody can create compelling content that gets their message across. By giving yourself the power of video, you can communicate in a more dynamic, engaging, and fun way. Vyond Studio is designed to empower all kinds of businesses to make media that moves, even if they don’t have any video experts on the team. All you need is a little imagination. Give it a try with a free trial of Vyond.
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#### How Texas State Uses Video to Overcome Hiring Bias
Diversity, equity, and inclusion is a shared responsibility within an organization. The process of challenging biases, promoting psychological safety, and confronting inequitable practices requires a massive amount of learning (and unlearning). While it makes sense that learning design would fall on Learning & Development teams, it can be somewhat of a Sisyphean task to make sure these important concepts reach everybody at the organization.
At Vyond, we’re proud to have customers like Texas State who are tackling that challenge with video through interdepartmental partnerships and collaboration. Video is, after all, one of the most powerful communication tools we have today. As many as 98% of enterprise organizations believe video is valuable for improving communication and training employees more effectively. Vyond Studio makes it easy for anybody to create videos for internal communication.
Texas State’s Office of Human Resources and Talent Acquisition teams met the DEI call with a re-commitment to enabling diverse hiring practices. To create their Diversity Hiring Toolkit, the Organizational Development and Communications team reached for Vyond to get big ideas across in an engaging and visual way.
Using Video to Promote Diversity in Hiring
1. What is your team at the Office of Human Resources responsible for, and how does it support the larger mission of Texas State University?
The Organizational Development and Communications team goal is to empower learning, nurture growth, enhance performance, and strengthen leadership skills at Texas State. The team also focuses on creating HR communications that promote awareness and employee engagement. We provide support to the other five areas within HR, including Benefits, Compensation, Employee Relations, our Master Data Center, and Work Life.
Part of the university’s mission is to “embrace a diversity of people and ideas”. Our support for the university is visible through the partnerships we have across campus and our accomplishments in rolling out multiple projects and communications to support the mission and bolster our commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion. The Staff Diversity Toolkit project specifically targets that part of the mission by providing supervisors and hiring teams with the best practices and resources to recruit and interview inclusively.
We create content with our employee audience always in mind and make sure to find a way to meet their needs through either development or communications. We strive to always make sure our content is engaging, clear, and most of all accessible for our vibrant and diverse campus community.
One of our goals – to strengthen and empower leadership skills – aligns directly with the expectation of leaders to maintain ethical standards and inclusive practices that reflect Texas State’s mission, vision and values. As we are part of the Office of Human Resources, it is within our purview to set and maintain the example for an inclusive and healthy work environment and culture, and follow through with our ability to institute change and practice inclusive excellence through our communications, training and development function.
2. Tell us more about Texas State’s recent recommitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion. What role does your team play in meeting that priority?
Texas State University values a diversity of people and ideas, a spirit of inclusiveness, a global perspective and a sense of community as essential conditions for campus life. Our role in supporting that mission is through collaboration on projects such as this one.
The Staff Diversity Hiring Toolkit project aligns with Texas State University’s shared values of embracing a diversity of people and ideas, and of building a spirit of inclusiveness across campuses. This toolkit supports the culture of inclusion at Texas State by providing a comprehensive review for recruiting, screening, and hiring for diversity.
3. How did the Staff Diversity Toolkit come into being?
The Texas State Talent Acquisition team researched universities across the country to see how others implemented diversity hiring training and found that most higher education institutions had toolkits in place for promoting diverse recruiting best practices. The Talent Acquisition team then reached out to our OD & Communications team for ideas on how to roll out a Staff Diversity Hiring Toolkit to campus. Together we came up with the idea of using the research gathered to create two videos coupled with a best practices digital handbook. The goal was to make the content easy to digest and retain so the creation of these materials was the most practical solution for our audience. The process for implementation started in early January 2020 and launched to campus in May 2020.
4. How did your team discover Vyond, and why did you choose it to develop the Staff Diversity Toolkit?
In early 2019 we assigned our communications intern the task of researching the pros and cons of a few different animation platforms. After completing a free trial and playing with the tools in each, it was easy to see Vyond was going to be the best fit for our team given its features and design capabilities. We purchased Vyond that summer and the following semester our next communications intern was tasked with helping rollout the Staff Diversity Hiring Toolkit using Vyond. After learning a little more about the scope of this project and the details required to be included, we knew we wanted to make the content engaging to offset the jargon heavy policy verbiage.
5. What did you learn in the process of creating the Staff Diversity Toolkit? Any key results or insights?
Since this was our first time using a video software like this in our projects, it provided a lot of insight into the flexibility of visual communication and impact on engagement. We were excited to learn how much information we could share creatively in a short amount of time through video. We also learned a lot more about script writing for training purposes. We were very excited to try a friendlier approach to sharing information since often policies and other HR related topics are easy to overlook due to their length and jargon.
6. Describe your approach to creating these training videos.
At first, we started with a very lengthy and verbose word document which we quickly translated into a friendly training script. Once we had the script, we started storyboarding the scenes. After running all initial drafts through the project team, it was time to begin creating the templates in Vyond. We had multiple Vyond drafts until the final video was vetted and approved by all members of the team. Since this was the first project where we incorporated Vyond as the primary channel, our approach was very structured with detailed guidelines, multiple status updates, and deadlines in place.
Get big ideas across with video.
Whether you’re tackling inequity or introducing your team, video is one of the strongest tools in your internal communications toolkit. Vyond’s drag-and-drop animation studio gives everybody the power of video, no experience necessary. Create your own videos like Texas State and start making media that moves with Vyond’s free trial.
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#### How to Make AI Videos in Minutes: Tips from Vyond
Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have sparked a new category of AI-powered tools that make it really easy for anyone to create professional-quality videos. That’s great news for the folks who recognize how powerful video is for connecting with your audiences: no more fussing with live-action video projects and overly complex software.
There are lots of video types out there and even more tools. In this post, we’ll show you how to make three of the most in-demand types of AI videos. And we’ll focus on one all-in-one video creation platform, Vyond, where you can make these videos effortlessly with a simple text prompt.
How to create animated AI videos
AI makes it easy to create animated videos in a variety of styles with a simple prompt or even an exact script. And if we’re talking about Vyond Go in particular — Vyond’s AI-powered instant video maker — the output you’ll get is fully editable. Here’s how it works in Vyond Go.
Step 1: Enter your prompt
You have a few options here: you can enter a short description of a topic you want to cover; cut and paste specific content you want the script to pull from; or upload a document with your full script (in .doc, .ppt, .txt, or .pdf formats).
Step 2. Choose layout, vibe, format, and language
Next, pick the look, feel, and tone of your video in the interface. Then sit back for a few seconds while Vyond’s AI generates your one-of-a-kind video. Watch the output and be amazed!
Step 3. Edit video text, audio, and characters
Now you’ve got two options for making edits to your new video. Along the sidebar, within the Vyond Go video window, the Quick Edit panel lets you easily replace characters, change on-screen text, and adjust text-to-speech settings.
Or, take your video into Vyond Studio, Vyond’s robust video editor, to customize nearly every aspect of it. In Vyond Studio you’ll find even more AI tools.
For example, the Text to Image feature uses generative AI to create visuals and backgrounds from your text prompt, in six different style options. The Video to Action feature generates new actions for your animated characters based on a video clip sample of the action you upload (to demonstrate, say, a worker moving in a particular way on an assembly line).
Step 4. Export and share
Got your video exactly as you’d like it? Great! Download the file or get a shareable link to it from either Vyond Go or Vyond Studio.
If you prefer a blend of styles in your videos, you’ll like the mixed-media approach. Let’s get into that next.
How to create mixed media AI videos
When it comes to storytelling and reflecting diversity, animated videos can’t be beat. And they’re uniquely effective at conveying complex ideas in a simple, visual way. But in some contexts, you might want to take a mixed-media approach for your videos, incorporating photorealistic and other elements.
An AI video maker like Vyond Go can also help you create videos in a mixed-media style.
Let’s say you’ve got a data-filled PowerPoint deck explaining project results and you’d like to make it into an engaging video. Or maybe you’d like to turn your digital notes from a meeting into a video summary.
The process to create a mixed-media video in Vyond Go is similar to the steps above for creating an animated video, with a few key changes:
Step 1: Enter your prompt
Upload your existing .ppt, .doc, .txt, or .pdf document. If you’d like, add any additional directions in the prompt field about content from the document. For example, if you’re uploading a .ppt file but only certain slides are relevant, you might add, “Reference slides 5-7.”
Step 2. Choose the “Narration” layout and your display text preferences
Next, pick the Narration layout to see your mixed-media choices. Then, browse the “Optional settings” dropdown for any other settings you’d like to specify, like whether you want your video’s display text to be just the “Key phrases” or full “Dialogue.”
Now click “Create video” and grab yourself a snack (but make it quick!).
Step 3. Edit video text, audio, and characters
Once your video is created, use Vyond Go’s Quick Edit panel along the sidebar to easily change on-screen text and adjust text-to-speech settings. For changes like adding custom imagery, take your video into Vyond Studio.
Step 4. Export and share
Download the file or get a shareable link to it from either Vyond Go or Vyond Studio, and go circulate that project retro!
Finally, many videos benefit from having a human presenter to draw your viewers in. In some cases you might opt for actors or real people from your company, though that can become a stumbling block when you need to make updates.
AI avatars offer a flexible new way to feature a friendly face in your videos.
How to create AI avatar videos
AI avatar videos have been on the rise, thanks in part to how simple they can be to create at scale, and how much easier to translate and update.
Avatars are a good option for content where you want a personal touch beyond audio and text, but the specific messenger doesn’t matter as much. For example, you might include an AI avatar in your explainer video about a new user interface, but not for an all-company message from your CEO.
Here’s how you’d create an AI avatar video in Vyond:
Step 1: Pick an avatar
Choose an avatar from the library of 100+ options (as of launch), across a range of character options with different backgrounds and various layouts, like a “phone selfie” format.
Step 2: Enter your script and choose text-to-speech settings
Add text for what you’d like your avatar to say (within 1,000 character limit, at the time of writing). Then choose from over 2,700 voices and accents from 70+ countries and click “generate text to speech” to create your text-to-speech audio.
Tip: As with all text-to-speech tools, sometimes the AI pronounces words differently than expected. When that happens, spelling a word out phonetically can help (like “Ve-yond” for our company’s name).
Step 3: Generate your video
Once you’ve generated your text-to-speech audio, the “Create video” will light up. Click it to generate your AI avatar video. It may take a few minutes.
As with any video style, AI avatar videos are most effective when they feature a diverse mix of media, like screen sharing, photorealistic backgrounds, and animated elements. And the rules of good video editing definitely apply: your content will be most engaging when it includes a range of layouts, formats, and camera techniques.
For example, in a tutorial you might take an AI avatar from a full-screen, “talking head” view into a scene where the avatar appears in a small inset window, alongside a screenshare video of a software interface. (In other words: endless “talking head” videos still don’t cut it!)
Simplify your video creation with AI
Advances in AI have brought many benefits, and video creation is a big one for great business communication.
Like all tech, the world of AI videos is moving fast. Rather than try to cobble multiple one-off video tools into a tech stack, consider exploring an all-in-one video creation tool like Vyond, with AI capabilities that can help you make videos in any style you need — like animated, mixed-media, AI avatar or anything in between — easily and instantly.
What’s the easiest way to make animated explainer videos?
The easiest way to make explainer videos is to use an online AI video creation platform with either an instant video creator or ready-made templates and drag-and-drop tools. Platforms like Vyond offer both. Here’s a quick workflow for both approaches:For instant animated explainer videos: Enter either a prompt for the topic you want, notes, a reference document (PDF, PowerPoint) or an actual script into the platform. Pick the format, style, and tone you want. Generate a draft in under a minute, complete with a script, edited scenes, AI voiceovers and onscreen text. Edit elements as needed and export. (Total time: under 5 minutes.)For animated explainer videos made from templates: Start with a script (keep it short and clear, focusing on the key problem and solution). Choose a template that fits your topic. Drag in your text, swap characters, add brand colors, and edit for pacing. Either use AI voiceovers or record a simple voiceover, then add background music pulled from the platform’s library. Export and share–either as an mp4 file, or uploaded to YouTube, LinkedIn, and other video platforms.
What are some ways to make mixed animation or mixed media videos?
The easiest way to create a mixed animation or mixed media video is to use an all-in-one video creation tool that makes it easy to combine a broad variety of styles (animated, photorealistic, stock images, screen recordings, live action footage) all in a single platform. Vyond and Powtoon are two options used by both beginners and experienced video creators, but Vyond has a significantly higher customer satisfaction rating on G2 and Capterra.
If you need full control over mixed animation with pro-level polish but still want speed, Camtasia or Adobe After Effects with Motion Array templates are good options.
What are the best uses for AI video avatars?
Companies most often use AI video avatars as a host or “talking head” in videos when they 1) need to create a high volume of content on a limited budget, 2) want the ability to easily edit or update content without having to rerecord, and 3) need to translate their video content into multiple languages. As a rule they’re best used in tandem with other onscreen elements, not as the only element in a video–and they are available in most all-in-one AI video creation platforms.
AI avatars are most commonly used in videos for training and eLearning (explainer videos and information sharing), HR and internal communications (announcements, updates), and customer support (tutorials featuring on-screen recordings).
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#### How to Add Animation to Your Articulate Storyline Courses with Vyond
Learning & Development pros use animation to liven up commonplace or dry concepts in unique and fun ways that keep learners entertained.
To help you create captivating, interactive courses, we’ll walk through how you can create and add animated GIFs, characters, and videos created in Vyond to Articulate Storyline.
Watch this on-demand webinar and read on for our recommendations.
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3 ways to add animation to your Articulate Storyline courses
We’ve picked out three methods to integrate Vyond videos into your Storyline courses that vary in complexity, so you can find one that fits your needs and level of technical experience in both tools.
1. Basic: Ambient video with GIFs
Ambient video (looping background GIFs) draws learners’ attention without distracting from the core message
Here’s an example you could include in an email to learners or as the first thing they see at the beginning of their course. Subtle motion is all you need. This scene template is available in Vyond Studio.
Here’s an example GIF, using our logo. Click here for an advanced tutorial on how to make animations move through letters in Vyond.
2. Intermediate: Animated characters
Animated characters help humanize your topic and encourage learners to build an emotional connection. A character can guide a learner through a difficult topic, act out a scenario, or illustrate a specific example.
You can incorporate Vyond characters into courses as still images, GIFs—or videos with simple animations—or complete video scenarios.
How to create Characters in Vyond
Vyond comes stocked with thousands of characters and creating your own custom character is simple:
As of 2024, all license levels have access to Whiteboard, Contemporary, Business Friendly styles and the Photo-to-Character feature.
Pro-tip: Be intentional with every detail. From clothing items to hairstyles, attributes should convey your characters’ personalities and fit with your course material. For example, the character above is wearing a suit jacket because the course is about workplace scenarios.
3. Advanced: Branching scenarios with video
One of the main benefits of using Storyline to create eLearning courses is the ability to add branching scenarios — different paths your learners can take depending on their actions within the course.
With video, each choice the learner takes can build into a complete story.
Step 1: Plan AND FINALIZE YOUR IDEA
Any project, whether it’s for an eLearning course or a Hollywood production, benefits from planning. Don’t start making your video until you’ve decided on the complete contents of your course. Getting consensus at an early stage minimizes costly last-minute changes to your project during the production phase.
Outline your content, decide what your branches will be, determine how many videos you’ll need, and then storyboard each one.
If you sort out the details of your video prior to creating it, the production process will progress smoothly and efficiently.
Step 2: Map out your course in Storyline
The details of your course should be set before you begin creating your videos. What paths are you creating for your learners? What questions will you ask, and how do you want the course to branch based on learners’ answers? Think about these things while mapping out your course.
Step 3: Create your video in Vyond.
Once you have a course mapped out and know the videos you’ll have to create, it’s time to start creating your videos.
Creating an animated video may sound intimidating, but it’s easy with Vyond. Watch a how to video below and click here to start a free trial.
Once you grasp the basics, you can learn intermediate to advanced tactics with webinars and other resources.
Step 4: Add Your videos to Storyline.
You’ve planned and created your animated videos. Now it’s time for the easy part—exporting the video and adding it to Storyline.
Once you’ve finished creating your video, download it from Vyond by clicking the download icon in the top right corner of Vyond Studio to download the .mp4.
With your downloaded file, simply import the video into Storyline by clicking the insert tab and selecting video from file.
Congratulations! You’ve successfully planned, created, and added a video to your Storyline course. With an animated video in your lesson, learners will be more likely to connect with your course and understand each of its concepts.
Upgrade your Articulate Storyline eLearning courses with animation
Adding animation to your Storyline courses is a simple process that can seriously upgrade your learning material. With its unique styles and use of movement, animation makes courses more engaging and informative. Use this guide to quickly create animations–characters, GIFs, videos–that make your Storyline courses both useful and captivating.
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#### How To Add High Quality Voiceovers to your Video
You’ve spent a lot of time perfecting every detail in your video. You have gone through every transition, effect, animation, and a variety of other visual components to ensure brand authenticity and delivery of the right message.
But what about the voiceover? If the script is what you say in the video, then the voiceover is how you say it. It helps determine the pace and tone of your video.
So how do you ensure that your video has a suitable voiceover to augment the visuals? And how do you bring all the various parts of your production together to create a compelling story?
Here are some best practices for recording voiceovers:
Best Practices for Recording Voiceovers
There are generally two recommended approaches for recording a voiceover: hiring a professional voice actor and recording it yourself.
In this post, we’ll look at best practices for both of them.
1) Hire a Voice Actor
The ideal option when recording voiceovers is to have a professional do it i.e. a voice actor.
Voice actors are experts that can provide high-quality voiceovers for your video. They’re affordable and most often deliver very quickly.
On average, voice actors can deliver a recording within a day’s time (assuming you have a finished script), and it usually costs around $150-$250 for one page of script or two minutes of audio.
In fact, most voice actors will give you a quote based on the length of your script. And some even offer editing services to help improve the language of your script and make it sound better.
There are plenty of voiceover websites to choose from, which let you put up jobs and help you find the right talent for your video. Here are a few that Vyond partners with:
BuyVO
VoiceBunny
Voices.com
Note: You can pick one of these voice partners at any time from the right-hand side in Vyond Studio itself.
Things To Keep In Mind
Now that you’ve started looking for the right voiceover talent, let’s go over some guidelines you should keep in mind throughout the process:
Share detailed information about your video.
Lets face it, the voice actor you choose may have worked with companies in your industry in the past. But chances are they aren’t completely familiar with your industry, audience, or company. So it’s your job to educate them.
When you reach out to a voice actor, be sure to share as much relevant information as possible.
If you want your voiceover to sound professional and conversational, let the voice actor know. Want industry-specific jargon to sound natural in the voiceover? Make sure the voice actor is aware of any relevant industry terms in your script. Share information on how to pronounce the terms and what they mean (technically and in plain-English).
Annotate your script.
Want the voice actor to pause between specific phrases or words? Make a note of it in the script. Need to emphasize a point? Bold the relevant text.
Voice actors want to deliver a high-quality voiceover that suits your video needs, so don’t hesitate to get specific with your comments. However, you do want to make sure that any notes you include are discernible from the script itself, so make the distinction clear for the voice actor.
You can either use the “Comments” feature available in most document programs, or even italicize the text within the script itself and ask the voice actor to reference them (and not read it in the final voiceover).
Focus on the quality of the audio.
Once you’ve received your voiceover, make sure that the quality of the audio is up to par. Listen for any pops or sound distortions.
Make sure you can understand what the voice actor is saying and that their pronunciation is correct, especially for relevant industry terms. Check the voiceover for a consistent tone, and make sure it matches the pace of your video.
Lastly, listen for any background noise that could distract your viewers.
Wrapping It Up
Voice actors are professionals and they know how to make changes to inflection, tone, diction, pace and more. So don’t hesitate to ask them for another recording or minor edits.
It’s important to note that most voice actors will offer a courtesy re-recording or make minor edits without charging you more. But they may expect a renegotiation if you make significant changes to the script or want multiple versions of the voiceover. Be sure to clarify the terms and costs ahead of time.
2) Record the voiceover yourself
If you don’t have the budget for a voice actor, you can always add voice to video yourself. However, recording voiceovers requires some basic equipment like a good microphone, a laptop or computer, and audio recording software.
Use the right tools
They say a worker is only as good as their tools, and we couldn’t agree more. So before you start recording voiceovers, consider investing in the proper technology.
The first component is a good, reliable microphone.
Microphone
For the most part, microphones can be split into two groups: condenser and dynamic.
Condenser microphones sound richer, but they also tend to pick up more ambient noise. So if you’re using a condenser microphone, you should record with them in a quiet space.
Example: The AT2020 is a great example of an affordable condenser mic, and one that we use at Vyond.
Dynamic microphones are better used for sub-optimal recording conditions because they tend to pick up less ambient or background noise. However, you do have to sit noticeably closer to these mics, which can result in them capturing audible breaths.
Example: The ATR2100 is a great and affordable dynamic mic.
These are just two options to get you started. You can also check out other popular microphones such as the Blue Yeti, which is popular among YouTube vloggers and streamers.
Another important factor to consider when buying a microphone is the microphone polar pattern or mic pattern. The mic pattern indicates how sensitive a microphone is to sounds arriving from different angles.
Here’s a list of common microphone patterns:
Omnidirectional: An omnidirectional microphone is sensitive to sounds from a 360° field.
Unidirectional: As the name suggests, these microphones are sensitive to sounds from only one direction.
Shotgun: Shotgun mics are long, cylindrical microphones that are great at picking up sounds in front of it, while rejecting sounds to the sides and rear. These are commonly mounted on cameras and booms.
Cardioid: Cardioid microphones are the most common unidirectional mics. They are named as such because of their sensitivity pattern, which is “heart-shaped.” They are also the best suited for recording voiceovers.
Pop filter
Another important component in your recording setup is a pop filter or pop screen.
Pop filters reduce or eliminate the “popped” P and B sounds that are common in most audio recordings. They elevate the quality of your audio and are pretty affordable, usually around $5 – $10.
Software
The last piece in your recording setup is the audio recording software itself. At Vyond, we use (and recommend) a tool called Audacity.
Audacity is easy-to-use, has intuitive editing features, and supports multiple audio file types. The best part is, it’s free.
Things To Keep In Mind
Now that we’ve covered the technology you should be using when recording voiceovers, let’s go over some best practices:
Practice before pressing ‘Record’.
Reading your script can require a few trial runs. A good approach to ensure high-quality audio is to read the script out loud and familiarize yourself with it before you hit ‘Record’.
Get comfortable with the words, find the right pace, manage your breath, and most importantly get used to the message you’re communicating. The more you practice, the less likely you are to slip up while recording the voiceover.
Back off the mic and project your voice.
When recording your voiceover, be sure to sit or stand a few inches away from the microphone and project your voice. Doing so will avoid audible breaths, as well as random mouth sounds, such as saliva moving. Yes – this can get picked up on mic!
Consistently projecting your voice will also enable you to deliver a more dynamic, expressive read, resulting in a better quality recording.
Use consistent subject-mic placement.
A common issue with voiceovers is the lack of a consistent subject-mic distance from take-to-take. As the name indicates, the subject-mic distance is the distance between you and the microphone.
Simple movements like sliding a chair with wheels, leaning forward or backwards, and adjusting your posture can change the relationship between your voice and the background ambience. This can result in your takes sounding quite different from each other and they won’t edit well together.
The key is to get very comfortable in your sitting or standing position while warming up, so that your subject-mic placement will remain consistent from take-to-take.
Record ambience.
Even the best of voiceover recordings are bound to have some audible breaths or background noise during pauses. So how do you remove these?
Record about 30 seconds of ambience or “room tone” before or after recording your voiceover. You’re doing this because the room you’re recording in is not perfectly silent. But while editing you may open up “cracks” of total silence between the takes. You’ll need this ambience to smooth over these cracks, making them undetectable to your listeners.
Note: Make sure there isn’t any outstanding background noise like an air conditioner, vehicle passing by, or door opening / closing when recording the ambience. The goal is to match the ambient noise in your track.
Trim heads and tails of audio clips.
Using a pop filter can help reduce the “popped” sounds commonly found in audio recordings. But you’re still bound to hear certain “pops” or audible sounds before and after your voiceover.
So remove these start and stop “pops” and other audible sounds by trimming the beginning and end of your voiceover. This can also help with the pace of your audio / video.
Normalize audio clips.
One of the best features of Audacity is the ability to normalize your audio clips. “Normalizing” your voiceover recording creates consistent volume throughout.
Simply select the entire audio recording in Audacity. Click “Effect” in top navigation menu, and select “Normalize” from the drop-down.
Press “OK” and your voiceover will now have consistent volume throughout.
Listen for noise.
As you record your voiceover, listen to the playback. Listen for any buzzing or other noise and make sure the audio quality is good.
Doing this will allow you to identify any issues with your recording and ensure a high-quality voiceover.
Wrapping It Up
Recording voiceovers yourself can seem intimidating at first, but the major benefit is that you can record as many takes as you want for free. Plus you know the material better than anyone else, so you’re more likely to give a more informed read.
Keep your script handy as you record your voiceover, and focus on reading it with a consistent, conversational tone. Don’t be afraid to express emotion when relevant and most importantly, make sure your viewers can understand what you’re saying.
Conclusion
Adding great audio will help give your video a finished, polished touch. And the best way to achieve that is by recording your voiceover in a quiet room with the right equipment or by enlisting the help of a voice actor.
Once you’ve recorded your voiceover, check out this post on how to best import your audio files into Vyond.
For more helpful tips and tutorials, you can also check out our Help Center.
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#### How to Add Voice Over, Narration, and Lip Sync Audio in Vyond Studio
It might seem overwhelming to record and edit a voice-over or audio track. You might think you need extra software or a fancy microphone or a professional studio. But you don’t. At least, not when making an animated video in Vyond. You can easily record and edit voiceovers and dialogue (and pair that audio with your animation) all within Vyond Studio. Here’s how.
Recording Audio for Vyond videos
Choose the device you want to use and decide if you’ll be recording directly into Vyond Studio or utilizing another platform first.
Recording directly into Vyond is a great option for voice-over that is short and simple. So, if your recording device is of sufficient quality, and you don’t anticipate needing to edit your audio, record away! However, if you anticipate needing to make lots of internal cuts to your audio track, or want to apply special audio effects, you might want to consider recording the audio with complementary software (like Voice Memos on iOS or Quicktime), and then import the edited file into Vyond Studio.
Before you record
Your computer’s microphone can record audio, but not high-quality audio, often picking up undesired sounds from your surroundings.
In contrast, external microphones, like those from your smartphone’s headphones or USB microphones, capture more precise frequencies and tones, making your voice-over more pleasant for the listener.
It’s a good idea to record a sample of one or two sentences, then listen back with headphones. Headphones help you hear your voice much clearer than your laptop speakers, making it easier to spot loud fans, voice volume issues, and enunciation errors before finishing your final take.
Follow these best practices for the highest-quality voice recording possible.
Importing audio into Vyond
If you recorded your audio outside of Vyond, here’s how to import it: Drag and drop your audio file(s) anywhere in Vyond Studio which will add it to the Upload tab.
As long as individual files are below 15MB, you can import the voice-over as one file. If the file’s size is bigger than 15MB, divide your audio track(s) into multiple files to reduce their size before importing them into Vyond.
Recording audio in Vyond
Vyond includes audio recording and editing features with the ability to make simple cuts and volume adjustments. To record audio directly into Vyond:
Click the Audio icon
Click Add Audio to launch the Mic Recording window
There you can either press Record right away or paste in a portion of the script you want to read; the script lines won’t disappear after you hit Record. You may also choose to keep the script open in a separate window or to print it out. If you do print your script make sure not to rustle the papers while recording.
In Vyond Studio, you can record your voice-over in as many takes as you need. For example, you can hit Record, say one sentence, hit Stop, listen to how good it sounds, and only record the next line once you perform the previous one to your liking. Using this method, you won’t have to edit out poorly delivered lines, but it might take longer to record.
Alternatively, you can record your lines multiple times without stopping your recording until you get your best takes on the entire script. You’ll just have to edit out the bad takes later. Depending on the length of the script this might be more time-consuming than recording your audio outside of Vyond.
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How to make characters lip sync to audio in Vyond Studio
At Vyond, we recommend recording your audio before you begin creating your video. This will make the animation process easier, as you can make your scenes the exact length you need to match your voiceover. Alternatively, you can add voice-over in Vyond to finished videos, which we’ll go over in the second part of this section.
If you are beginning to animate after you add voice-over in Vyond:
Method 1
Select the character who’ll be speaking in the first scene they appear, click on Add Dialog under the Dialog Panel, and choose Existing Audio.
If you have not imported your audio files yet, select Upload Audio.
By default, Vyond will open the Upload Panel.
Locate your imported audio file, then click it to assign it to your character and add the audio track to the timeline.
Method 2
Add your voiceover audio to your timeline, starting at the scene in which you’d like your character to start speaking.
Right-click the voiceover file in your timeline and choose Settings.
At the top of the Settings panel, there is a drop-down menu where you can assign your audio to any character in the scene.
You can also unassign audio from a character in the Settings panel.
Tip #1: Choosing Continue Scene from the timeline will keep lip sync/assigned audio connected to characters.
Tip #2: If you import or record one long audio file in Vyond, after assigning it to a character, you can copy and paste that character into other scenes and their lip sync will continue to work.
If you’re recording audio into a finished Vyond video:
Note: You will need to record and assign audio for each individual scene that your character speaks.
Click on the scene in the timeline with the character you want to assign audio to.
Within that scene, select the character that you’d like to lip sync.
Click on Add Audio, then Mic Recording
Click the microphone icon to begin recording.
You may paste your script into the text box so you can read along as you record.
Once finished recording, retime your scene length as needed to fit the audio.
Move on to the next scene and repeat the process.
If you’re adding imported audio into a finished Vyond video:
Note: You will either need to record your audio in short clips (by scene) or cut up your audio file in the timeline before assigning.
For scene-length individual audio files:
Import all of your audio files into Vyond Studio.
Click on the scene in the timeline with the character you want to assign audio to.
Within that scene, select the character that you’d like to lip sync.
Click on Add Audio, then Existing Audio.
If you have not imported your audio files yet, select Upload Audio.
Locate your imported audio file, then click it to assign it to your character and add the audio track to the timeline.
Retime your scene length as needed to fit the audio.
Move on to the next scene and repeat the process.
For video-length audio files:
Import your audio file into Vyond Studio.
Click your imported audio file to add it to the timeline
Split your audio into scene-length sections by right-clicking the audio track in your timeline and choosing Split.
Line up your split-up audio with the corresponding scenes.
Starting with the first scene, right-click on the voice-over track in the timeline and choose settings.
Use the Assign Audio dropdown box at the top of the Settings Panel to assign the audio to the desired character within that scene.
Repeat this process for any remaining scenes.
As a rule of thumb, assign each character’s audio track in the first scene they appear. This way, the voiceover stays attached to the character during the editing phase.
Edit your audio in Vyond Studio
Vyond Studio offers essential tools to edit your audio, like the ability to adjust a track’s volume or split and reassemble your audio tracks. If you need advanced audio editing capabilities it might be easier for you to edit your audio outside of Vyond, but here’s what you can do within Vyond Studio:
Audio cuts
If you recorded one long audio track in Vyond, you’ll want to split it up before building your scenes. In some cases, you may also need to cut out pauses in your audio recording.
To split a track, you must first place your cursor over the audio timeline where you want the split to be. You’ll see a blue line appear on your audio timeline. Then, right-click the blue line and choose “split.” Your single audio track will now be two. You can either move the audio to align with the video, or you can delete the portion you don’t want.
To delete a portion of your audio, right-click over the track you want to be deleted and click Delete. Or simply press your computer’s delete key.
Audio fades
Audio fades are one of the best-kept secrets of professional video editors. They’re a great way to overcome common audio issues, like ambient room tone, by creating a more seamless soundscape for your video. In Vyond Studio, you can add audio fades to your project.
You can adjust the audio’s volume and fade out an audio track by right-clicking on the timeline and clicking on Settings.
Add music and sound effects
When you create a video with Vyond Studio, you have hundreds of royalty-free music tracks at your disposal. Open the audio library by selecting the music note icon (?) — next to the option to add text. You can preview each audio track in the music library, and then click it to add it to your video.
You can add sound effects to your video the same way! Like music, sound effects can go a long way in making your videos feel dynamic, emotive, and engaging. To avoid distracting audiences, though, sound effects ought to be used sparingly and thoughtfully. Look for moments where you can use sound to build a world (like adding ambient typing sounds to an office), or to punctuate a key moment of the action (like a breaking glass).
Volume adjustments
In addition to audio fades, you can adjust the volume of an entire audio track in Vyond Studio. Right-click (or CTRL + click) on the track and head to Settings to adjust the audio. This is an important finishing touch on any video to make sure the right audio is cutting through. You wouldn’t want your music to wash out your narrator, for example!
Add voice-over in Vyond to bring your videos to life.
Use Vyond Studio’s set of tools to fix mistakes during your recording session or synchronize properly executed takes with your animations. As long as you produced your script with a goal or audience in mind, a clear voice-over will engage and enhance your project’s appeal.
After you’ve recorded, imported, and edited your audio, it’s time to create your video…..
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#### How to Animate Yourself
Fifteen years ago, creating an animated video meant hiring an animator. It could take months for the animator to create your characters and scenes from scratch and edit the project. Once complete, you’d have a gorgeous video—but only after paying expensive fees and waiting for months.
While an animated video can be engaging and help demonstrate things better than text, it doesn’t scale well if you need to hire an animator every time.
Today, all you need is an easy-to-use animation software that does the heavy lifting for you. You can learn how to animate yourself into a character that looks like you in a few simple steps. Then, put your animated self in different scenarios to help get your point across.
Define your use case for animating yourself
Animation offers dynamic visuals that you don’t get with PowerPoints or PDFs—or even live video. Animated videos are often cheaper than live videos and easier to edit if something changes. Because you can put yourself and other characters in a variety of scenes, you can easily demonstrate your point without the cost of filming on location. Plus, videos are often the most engaging form of media. The average engagement rate for video posts by Facebook Pages is 38% higher than for images and 323% higher than text-based status posts.
Before you learn how to animate yourself, define your use case. Whether you want to humanize a presentation or create a personal training video, there are several reasons you might want to animate yourself.
By including your animated self in training and eLearning videos, your character can act as a narrator guiding the course, similar to a teacher. You’ll foster the student or trainee relationship by familiarizing them with your voice and animated look-alike.
Including yourself in Internal communications and HR videos can familiarize new hires with you and feel more personal to coworkers. They’ll recognize your character and voice, so the video feels a bit more personal—almost like they’re having a conversation.
And if a policy you mention in the video changes, such as for onboarding videos, you can edit the video without re-shooting the entire thing.
If your identity is tied to your brand, you can use your animated self in marketing videos, such as product explainers or social media ads. Including yourself will let your audience connect to you and associate you with the brand.
Sales teams can humanize the sales experience and build better relationships with prospects. Adding that personal touch to pitches and product demos familiarizes prospects with your brand and helps build trust with you as a potential future partner.
By animating yourself in a sales video, you’ll humanize the sales experience and build a relationship with your prospects.
Whatever use case you choose for animating yourself, knowing what it is before you start will help you select software that’s aligned with your purpose and streamline your character design process.
Secure animation software with character customization features
To create an animated video of yourself, you need software that offers enough customization options so that you can create a character that you feel represents you. That means facial features, hair, skin tone, and even clothing. You don’t want software that constricts you with “average” features that really only represent a few people.
Vyond offers 700+ character creation options for features, clothing, and accessories, allowing nearly limitless combinations. Choose your skin tone, eye color, different body shapes, and even eye and mouth shapes. You can add a hijab, a turban, or that beanie you’re known to wear around the office. There are even options for freckles, beauty marks, and a bindi.
The platform also offers a number of ability-focused actions for characters. If you use a wheelchair or a guide dog, for example, your character in Vyond can, too.
Storyboard your scenes
Once you have your idea and software, the next step is to create a storyboard — a graphic representation of how your video will unfold, shot by shot. You’ll save yourself a ton of time and energy if you do this before creating your character and video.
A storyboard is a graphic representation of how your video will unfold, shot by shot.
Your storyboard will help you conceptualize the video for others, which is helpful if you’re collaborating with a team or need to get approval from stakeholders. By getting feedback in advance, you’ll streamline production by working out the details ahead of time. That way, you won’t find yourself having to make major changes after you’ve already created your video.
Take advantage of your visual medium to help you tell your story. For every scene, consider:
The setting
Whether you or other characters will be present
Activity happening in the shot
The script, or words you’ll be speaking
Any graphs or charts that will help to illustrate your topic
Create your character
Once you have your scenes set, you’re ready to create your character. Vyond Studio makes it easy to create custom characters for any setting or job role. Many animation tools are limited to a handful of customization options—it can be hard to see yourself in these generic-looking characters. Hundreds of customization options in Vyond mean you can create an animated character that really feels like you. Bring them to life with realistic actions and automatic lip-sync.
The way you create your character will depend on your software, but here’s what’s possible with Vyond:
Choose a gender. No matter your gender, there are plenty of gender-neutral features if you want to appear neither feminine nor masculine. If you don’t identify with a gender binary option, click on each gender to view the different facial features and clothing options to find what resonates.
Choose a body type. Gone are the days of one-size-fits-all media representation. Choose from four body shapes to find one that feels most representative of you.
Personalize your features. With Vyond, you can choose from more than 250 face and hair features and customize your hair color. Here you can also add a kippah, hijab, or other headdresses.
Put on an outfit. Choose from hundreds of outfits great for a multitude of different scenarios. Put yourself in business casual, workout gear, religious attire, formalwear, or even a Halloween costume.
Add accessories. Here you can add beauty marks, freckles, occupational headwear like a chef’s hat, and fun costume accessories like a Batman mask. If you use an apparatus like a wheelchair, cane, or prosthetic leg, you can find those in the actions section while you’re creating scenes later.
And there you have it: In five easy steps and just a few minutes, you’ve created a character that looks like you.
Make your video
Now that you’ve created your storyboard and character, it’s time to make your video.
You can make a video in Vyond without any technical know-how—seriously, no prior video experience is needed. With our easy-to-use platform, everyone at your company—from marketing to HR to C-levels—can make an animated video of themselves.
Use one of Vyond’s 100+ video templates and customize it to your needs in just a few steps. You can find templates for many use cases—like a seasonal sale template for your marketing team or a training video template the HR team can use to teach employees about preferred pronouns.
You can also build a video freeform. Combine Vyond’s 1,800 pre-built scenes to build your own video arc—or build scenes from scratch with 10,000+ props at your fingertips.
Start your free trial today to create a video with a personal touch.
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#### How to Book More Weddings With Animated Video
Experienced professionals working in the events and video industry have noticed that the wedding professionals who stay afloat during rough times share one trait: They are open to innovation.
To book more weddings in any season, you need to be creative with your portfolio and strategic with your marketing, this includes optimizing your website and other channels you may use. Moreover, video can be just the right tool for you to dazzle your prospect clients with everything you have to offer.
Create SEO articles for your site
Millions of people use Google every day to inform their decisions, entertain themselves, or learn about a given topic. Hundreds of thousands of people search Google for wedding-related products and services, according to the search patterns—people search for wedding dresses, wedding planners, wedding photographers, and the list goes on. All of these people are or know potential customers. By writing SEO articles, you can reach these individuals and run a profitable business all year long.
Well-optimized articles are profitable in the mid-to-long term because Google sends a steady number of visitors to web results that their algorithm trusts. A page becomes reliable once it repeatedly proves to Google that it is the most helpful information in terms of page usability, expertise, relevance, and other variables for a given set of queries.
A meaningful first step to creating SEO articles to attract soon-to-marry couples is to identify the information people search for so that you know what to write. You can do this by starting with your industry. Let’s say you’re a wedding photographer. Type wedding photography into your search bar. Look at two results, in particular:
People also ask tab
Related searches section at the bottom
The people also ask tab and the related searches section will give you questions to solve and topics to discuss inside your article. These features represent actual search topics. The more answers you can provide searchers, the more Google may reward you by slowly sending your post to the first spots of the search results.
Done well, SEO can provide sustainable results. Once you optimize all your articles, you can use this guide to dive deeper into the craft.
Upload photos and infographics of your services to Pinterest
Pinterest is filled with aesthetically pleasing images, which—because weddings are such visually spectacular events—makes it an ideal social media platform to share the content of your wedding-related products and services.
Unlike Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter, Pinterest keeps showing your posts for days, months, and sometimes years after the day of publishing. Since your posts show up for longer, a single graphic can potentially introduce your services to thousands of customers without having to edit or reupload it.
Sarah, founder and wedding planner mentor behind Chancey Charm, uses Pinterest to expose her services to 854K Pinterest users each month by creating pins for each blog post she uploads on her website.
Another benefit of Pinterest is that it hosts people within the age of marriage. “The average age around the U.S. that people get married,” shares INSIDER’s data team,” hovers between 25 and 30 years old.” According to Pinterest’s audience insights, 27.6% of the 459 million Pinterest users are between 25-34 years old, meaning that more than 129 million people in the age to marry or consider doing so can see your pins.
Pins are the Pinterest name for posts. There are two kinds of pins: standard pins and rich pins. Standard pins are Pinterest’s default pins, and they carry basic information such as a title, description, and URL. Rich pins have these and more data points. They take information such as the most up-to-date pricing of your wedding packages from your website, upload it to your pin, and adjust it based on the changes you make on your site. Since users get a clear idea of the offer, they are more likely to purchase than if they saw a standard pin.
Pinterest has a resource with all the steps you need to activate rich pins from the moment you open your account. Once you complete their simple guide, it’s time to create appealing images for your articles and optimize each posts’ chances of being discovered. Jessica Foster, the lead SEO writer at Key&Copy, shares 12 Pinterest SEO tips to produce engaging images and videos that bring customers year-round.
Experiment with your sales funnel
Testing different ways of attracting, nurturing, or closing a sales lead will help you find more resource-efficient or profitable methods of running your wedding business. In the least desirable scenario, you invest a few days or weeks into exploring a new sales tactic, find out it is less effective than your current processes, and jump back to the traditional way of handling sales. However, if the new tactic proves to be more efficient, those weeks of experimentation will permanently increase your profit and available resources.
Paid advertising
Paid advertising is one of the few ways to guarantee you reach your audience during seasons with few or no bridal shows and networking events. After setting a budget for your campaign, an algorithm will show your ads to a specific group of people inside a given platform: Google, YouTube, and Facebook, to name a few.
Valerie McCartney, a wedding business owner from San Diego, uses and teaches other wedding professionals how to reach the feeds of soon-to-marry couples through Facebook Ads. During an in-depth presentation on paid advertisement, she discussed misconceptions and tips on running profitable ad campaigns.
For example, she mentioned how Facebook’s boosting button, a paid feature to enhance the reach of a published post, only exposes your article to your existing fan base. Instead of boosting a post, she encourages wedding professionals to start advertising campaigns from scratch with the help of Facebook’s audience filters. Through these filters, you can determine the age, gender, location, and other characteristics of the couples you want to reach. So, if men in their 30s are your most popular lead, you can exclude anyone outside of this age.
Video testimonials
Video testimonials feature real customers in a situation where they praise the company’s product or service, serving as social proof for potential customers who are deliberating whether the company’s offer is worth it or not.
The benefit of acting as social proof and the fact that 79% of people trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations from friends or family members make having testimonial videos across your website crucial to increasing sales.
To start seeing and testing the impact of visual reviews, add testimonial videos to your website’s pages where a visitor might consider making a purchase, such as your homepage or pages where you feature your product. You can maximize the chances of seeing benefits from testimonials by—as the above video mentions—repurposing testimonials across all the platforms where your brand has a presence.
It’s simple to check the impact of video testimonials on your sales performance. Implement them on your website, let a few days or weeks pass, and then compare that timeframe’s conversion rate, total sales, and the number of received objections to the weeks when you didn’t have testimonial videos on your website.
Expand your portfolio to include video
Today’s consumers crave more video content than ever. 85% of the U.S. population reported watching online video content in January of 2018. The consumption of audiovisual information goes beyond regular web pages and applies to social media. YouTube has 1.68 billion worldwide users, and TikTok’s user base is expected to grow by 15 million between 2021 and 2024. With the growing interest in video content, wedding professionals have an opportunity to increase their revenue by updating their portfolio with services aligned with today’s demands.
Wedding-related videos
Miss Audio Video is a business that creates explainer and animated videos across different industries. They match the world’s demand for video content and their video expertise to offer caricature, personalized, and whiteboard wedding-related videos for soon-to-marry couples. Their Save The Date and Invitation videos share fragments of the story of how the couple met and eventually decided to engage.
Miss Audio Video uses Vyond, a beginner-friendly animation tool, to create these videos. Our set of tools provide you with the characters, scenarios, props, and tools necessary to create engaging videos. If it’s your first time animating, you can simplify your first videos with one of our ready-to-use love story or save-the-date templates.
Event broadcasting
Worldwide, local, and personal events can affect whether all of your customer’s invitees can attend their wedding. Broadcasting the experience can make distant attendees feel welcomed, but it can also turn your couple’s day from magical to stressful if they are the ones doing the broadcast.
As a vetted wedding professional, you have the expertise to lead the team behind the event’s broadcast and free couples from the burden of setting up multiple lavaliers and shotgun microphones correctly, controlling lighting, and switching camera angles to make the scenes enjoyable.
Book more weddings with new marketing tactics and wedding services
Expanding outside your primary offers and experimenting with marketing tactics can help your wedding business stay prosperous regardless of the season. Vyond’s set of tools allow you to reach new customers, whether you are testing Facebook’s targeted advertising through video posts to strengthen your sales funnel or creating a love story video for a client.
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#### How to Convince Your Boss to Invest in Video
You’ve seen enough research on video to make your eyes glaze over and you’re finally convinced: your company needs to invest in a video creation platform.
This decision may seem like a no-brainer to you, but it isn’t a done deal until you win over the people who hold the purse strings. To get your boss to approve a video platform, you must make a strong case for how video will help your company meet its goals.
We’ll help you secure approval from leadership in this article with guidance on:
Assessing your company’s objectives in order to craft the most persuasive case for adopting a video platform
Outlining the main benefits of video to share with your boss
Constructing a compelling pitch that will win your boss over to the power and potential of video creation
With these tactics, you’ll be able to prove that video creation is a winning idea and convince your boss to approve a video tool.
Step 1: Figure out what your boss cares about
It doesn’t matter if you work in marketing, IT, L&D, or HR: your boss isn’t going to approve the money for a video tool unless you clearly show how the investment aligns with your organization’s goals and objectives.
To understand how video production could fit with management’s priorities, you’ll need to answer these questions:
What are the top priorities for the company this year?
What are your department’s key objectives?
How is your department budget currently allocated?
What do your department’s priorities seem to be, based on the budget?
Answer these questions by digging into internal resources:
Company memos are useful for clarifying company-wide goals, and yearly priorities and positioning your video needs into the wider context of the company’s initiatives.
Quarterly or monthly reports provide a specific look at what the company is prioritizing in any given time period. For example, you may discover that there is a surplus of support tickets during the holiday period and that a resource library would help reps save time resolving issues. Tidbits like these can be seeds for potential video use cases.
Department budgets highlight the resources your department has available for new initiatives, so you’re able to gauge if there is room for a video tool.
Team meeting notes provide better insights on your team’s evolving priorities that are more detailed than less frequent updates, like quarterly reports and annual memos.
Talk to your co-workers. Reach out to team members who have successfully pitched tool adoptions in the past to see how they approached the subject. You could also talk to your boss, if they’re available, to get a better sense of their priorities and concerns.
Once you’ve gathered enough information, you should have a decent idea of your company’s current objectives. Now it’s time to figure out how video can help advance those goals.
Step 2: Understand how video aligns with your boss’ goals
Once you have a good sense for your boss’ main priorities, you can identify which benefits of video are aligned to your company’s objectives and worth highlighting. Below, we’ve broken down some benefits of video by function.
Marketing Benefits
Compared to other media, video is one of the strongest tools for grabbing the attention of prospects and bringing them closer to making a purchase. With a video platform at your disposal, you’ll be able to consistently nurture potential customers with constant video creation.
Video’s primary marketing benefit is an increase in engagement and retention. Vyond users at AmeriCash found that including video in their email campaigns improved their click-through-rate (CTR) by 120%.
In addition to driving conversions, video is an effective tool for building brand and product awareness. In a survey from Hubspot, 43% of respondents found video to be the most memorable type of branded content.
Finally, video is highly shareable. Wyzowl recently reported that audiences are twice as likely to share content that includes video. By investing in video creation, brands are able to get their content in front of more potential customers.
Training Benefits
Along with marketing, employee training is a highly effective way to make the most of video. Training videos allow you to quickly impart knowledge to team members with less overhead than other mediums.
Video training offers the benefits of structure and uniformity. There is no danger of an instructor leaving out details: all employees receive exactly the same information when they watch. In one study, 80% of respondents said that video would make the onboarding and training process smoother and more effective.
Videos can also help speed up the training process. Catalina Marketing saw a 67% reduction in onboarding time for one group of new employees by introducing animated video into their training programs.
Using video can also help companies cut training expenses, such as hiring an in-person instructor or securing a training location. Replacing live action courses with animated video, when done well, can save organizations hundreds of thousands of dollars without compromising quality.
Support Benefits
Support reps can also use video tools to communicate with customers and resolve their issues in an engaging, efficient way.
Creating simple how-to videos, for example, can save support teams time since many customers have the same questions. Instead of repeatedly walking through the same problem for each customer, support teams can create an evolving library of video content to address common questions.
Support staff can also personalize the customer experience by creating custom educational videos for clients. At Vyond, our Customer Support agents often create tutorials and custom videos like this one to meet the individual needs of each customer.
Across each of these three departments, there are clear data-backed benefits of video. Pick out stats that are tied to your boss’ interests and goals and will help you make a case for investing in a video platform.
Step 3: Identify top video creation platforms for your company
At this point, you know how to justify video creation platforms on a general level. Strengthen your case with an in-depth comparison of a few video tools. With this research, you’ll be ready for questions about pricing and features, and have several recommendations up your sleeve to pitch to them.
Evaluate Cost
Understand costs in advance so you can articulate how a video tool will fit into your department’s overall budget.
Prices can vary pretty widely across video platforms, and the right choice for your organization depends on the type, quality, and number of videos you want to produce.
Research a variety of tools, and collect pricing from multiple platforms to get an idea of how rates vary based on features and plan sizes. Many video services have an online pricing page detailing their various plans, but others may need to be contacted directly for a quote.
If your budget is limited, animation platforms like Vyond are worth considering. Animation is cost-effective since you’re able to avoid the major expenses of live video, such as hiring a large production team and location scouting. For example, Cottingham & Butler saved an estimated $600,000 to $1.4 million in potential production costs by using Vyond’s animation platform instead of live-video vendors they were considering.
Evaluate Features
Along with cost, it’s important to look for tools with features that are suited to the organizational goals you identified in step one.
For example; if your department wants to create a large number of tutorial videos, cost-efficiency is going to be a priority. If an individual video is affordable to make, scaling production should be, too.
Some critical features that businesses commonly look for in video platforms include:
Security: Protecting your brand’s assets is essential. Look for a platform that prioritizes security and encrypts your data to minimize the risk of leaked or stolen intellectual property.
Ease-of-Use: If you’re a novice, or someone who wants a bit more guidance, look for platforms that provide helpful templates to jumpstart your creation.
Distribution: Prioritize platforms that enable you to export your work in multiple formats, from .mp4 to .gif, in order to maximize your ability to share your content.
Quality: You’re spending money on this platform, so your videos ought to look professional. Achieving a polished look is particularly important if you’re creating public or client-facing videos. Look for platforms that feature well-designed assets and optional advanced design features.
After doing this homework on available video tools, select the five platforms best-suited for your organization to recommend to your boss.
Step 4: Prepare your presentation
You’ve completed all of the necessary research in steps one through three. Now it’s time to craft this information into a persuasive pitch for your boss.
Lead your presentation with the research you’ve done on your company’s priorities and how video can address the problems they are trying to solve. Remember that video is not a panacea. While there are probably many applications of video within the company, stay focused on what video can do for your department specifically to keep your boss engaged.
Be prepared to recommend three to five platforms that are best suited to the company’s needs. Don’t justify your selections with affordability, even if that was a factor you considered. Instead, focus on features that will be especially useful to the company. Hearing this purpose-driven reasoning, your boss will be more likely to make room in the budget for the tool.
While emphasizing affordability isn’t especially persuasive, explaining the ROI of video tools can be extremely convincing. Explain how video tools can potentially help your company reduce costs and increase revenue in the long run, using the data in step two along with your own research.
As you craft your presentations, try to emulate past proposals from co-workers that were successful at your company. You may even ask team members who delivered these pitches if you could review your video platform presentation with them to get feedback.
Looking for more presentation skills? Check out our 30 tips on planning, writing, and delivering presentations in this resource.
Make the strongest possible case for video
It doesn’t matter how much you think your department needs a video tool. To win over the decision-makers, you must speak to their needs when requesting approval for a video platform.
Make the most of your boss’ time by creating a succinct, yet powerful presentation on why the company should invest in a video tool. To do this, start with the most persuasive information—how a video tool will benefit the company at a high level. Once you’ve grabbed their attention with this narrative, you can dive into the details that will support your argument and persuade leadership to adopt a video tool.
To make a strong case for video, you could try making a video! Learn about Vyond’s video animation platform and start a free trial.
#### How to create a memorable recruitment video for your careers page
Imagine a top candidate browsing your company’s career page. They’re skimming through and seeing the typical phrases: “We take on challenges,” and “We work as a team.” And none of it’s sparking interest.
Now picture the candidate watching and listening to an employee talk about their job. The candidate sees the employee’s face light up and hears the enthusiasm in their voice—subtle cues that give them a powerful, positive impression of the work experience.
It’s the latter interaction that motivates top, high-quality candidates to apply. Watching an employee is authentic—candidates can gauge emotions and tell whether they are genuine. With this level of connection, humans, not words on a page, are best at recruiting humans. You can create this connection to get the best candidates through a simple one-time investment: a recruitment video.
The Value of Recruitment Videos
Whatever type of organization you have, success is dependent on talented, energetic employees. A high-quality team is always ready to find and solve problems and brainstorm ways to grow, so progress remains constant.
Recruitment videos allow you to attract top talent. Posted on your site’s careers page or on other online outlets, videos can influence the best candidates to perceive your brand positively. With that perception, applicants are excited about the prospect of working for your organization and helping it succeed.
Here’s how the value of a recruitment video breaks down:
A well-crafted recruitment video improves viewers’ perception of your brand.
With a positive perception, top applicants are drawn to your company.
Top candidates working at your company enable it to succeed.
With your company succeeding, its goals, are being met or exceeded.
But only the best recruitment videos deliver this impact. To attract top candidates, your video has to establish a personal, emotional connection with them—a difficult but doable task.
How to Create a Compelling Recruitment Video
Like any film, a recruitment video conveys its core message through a combination of elements: visuals, music, voice-overs. Through the interaction of these factors, the main idea of the video—working at your organization—comes to life for viewers.
The trick is picking which elements to include and figuring out how to combine them. While there’s no set formula for creating a recruitment video, there are a few key steps in the process that you need in order to engage viewers and motivate them to apply.
1. Think big and positive.
Top hard-working candidates care deeply about the impact of their career, so they won’t apply at your company if they don’t understand why working there is meaningful.
To motivate them with a greater sense of purpose, your recruitment video should use bold, positive language to describe your company’s work. You don’t want to sound preachy, but there should be a few high-level statements that excite applicants about working at your organization.
In their recruitment video, Facebook uses big statements, such as “connecting the world,” to inspire candidates and drive them to apply.
Watch their “Life at Facebook” series
Find a balance between your brand’s tone and inspirational statements. With this motivational language, applicants will be excited by the prospect of joining your team and helping your organization grow.
2. Define your core messages.
At the heart of every great recruitment video is the organization’s mission. If you communicate this idea powerfully, it will be clear why your employees want to work for you, which will help potential candidates understand why they should work for your company.
Rather than trying to convey your organization’s entire mission, it’s easier to break it down into core messages. Look at your mission statement, and pull apart its defining elements. The main components, for example, might be diversity, social change, or an innovative culture.
Once you have chosen your core messages, pick up to four to include in your video. Trying to include more than that will weaken your overall message, so it’s better to stick to just a few of your strongest points.
The recruitment video for Adidas, for example, features only one core message. By focusing on the sole idea of being a company that welcomes optimists who want to be part of something greater than themselves, the video feels more focused and delivers a stronger positive impression about working there.
If you effectively communicate the core messages that best describe your organization’s mission, your recruitment video will excite candidates about your workplace and motivate them to apply.
3. Decide how many videos you want to create.
Many companies will do a single montage recruitment video that includes a mix of shots, such as employee interviews and views of the office. Pinterest, for example, made one comprehensive recruitment video.
Here are the pros and cons of a single recruitment video:
Pro: Condensing your company’s recruitment messages into a single video can have a greater impact on viewers because they’re presented with more ideas at once.
Con: A single video will most likely be a decent length, such as two to three minutes, to feature all of the recruitment content. If the video is too long, you may lose viewers’ attention.
As an alternative, you could feature a collection of shorter videos for candidates to browse. Rather than posting a single recruitment video, Prezi’s recruitment page offers a series of short employee-interview videos.
Here are the pros and cons of having multiple recruitment videos:
Pro: Breaking up your recruitment content into multiple videos allows you to make each one relatively short. This brief length will keep audiences engaged.
Con: While viewers are more likely to fully watch a shorter video than a longer one, there’s no guarantee that they’ll continue clicking through to each of your recruitment videos.
Choosing between a single video or multiple videos depends on the core messages you want to convey. Consider these ideas, as well as the pros and cons of each format, to determine whether a single video or multiples will be better for delivering your message to candidates.
4. Film a variety of shots.
Every shot of your recruitment video doesn’t need to feature employees at the office. These work-related shots are necessary to give an impression of the employee experience, but they can feel tedious and lose their impact if they’re the sole focus of the video.
Keep viewers engaged by including a few nonwork-related shots that match the tone and message of the video. They don’t need to be directly related in meaning to the video’s message, but they should convey the feeling you’re trying to inspire in viewers at that moment.
This Asana recruitment video, for example, features a nonwork-related shot of employees walking through graffiti-covered alleys.
The shot doesn’t directly connect to technology, but it does convey the feeling of exploration that Asana is trying to associate itself with through this video.
Finding cinematic, nonwork-related shots like this will not only help you engage viewers but also inspire emotions in candidates that drive them to apply to your company.
5. Avoid scripting and speak naturally.
When you film employees for your video, they may feel like they need to prepare a script of what they want to say. But prepared dialogue often sounds inauthentic.
To make employee statements come across as real and believable to candidates, encourage your team to speak naturally. You can see in this WeWork recruitment video how the normal speaking cadence of employees makes their ideas seem more sincere.
To prepare without scripting, employees can:
Write out a bullet-point list of what they want to say. These ideas shouldn’t be full sentences—the main point of the exercise is to decide what should be said rather than how it should be said.
Review the list. Get a quick refresh of the ideas without actually memorizing them.
Practice talking about the bullet points without looking at the list. Trying to recall the ideas and saying them aloud a few times will build confidence in speaking naturally in front of the camera.
Taking these steps to sound natural ultimately pays off. When employees let go of scripting, candidates will find them more authentic and trust their positive words about your company.
6. Showcase your product when possible.
Beyond talking about your company’s mission, showing off your organization’s work in your recruitment video can give candidates a strong, positive impression of your company.
How you showcase your work depends on the product or service you offer. Regardless, you want to find a seamless way for your work to be integrated into the video that highlights your company’s strengths.
Adobe, for example, showcases their product in their recruitment video by featuring segments that are built with their design tools.
By showing off your product or service, viewers will realize why your brand is great and will be motivated to apply.
7. Keep it short.
For any online video, recruitment or not, your typical audience is easily bored and distracted. According to the video platform Wistia, the average attention span for online videos is 60 seconds.
Your recruitment video doesn’t need to be quite this short. You’re trying to convey the main aspects of your organization, so candidates expect it to be somewhat in-depth. With that said, recruitment videos typically shouldn’t exceed two to four minutes. That’s enough time to highlight a lot of information about your company without losing viewers’ attention.
In their recruitment video, Listrak manages to convey the basic features of working at their company in less than two minutes. Keep your recruitment video concise and candidates will be engaged enough to fully watch the video.
8. Share, share, share.
Beyond posting your recruitment video on your site’s careers page, expand your reach by sharing the video through other channels. The more views you receive, the more top applicants you’ll attract to your company.
Here are a few key ways to share your recruitment video:
Share it on social media. Post your recruitment video through every social account your organization has. Monitoring the engagement with the posts will help you identify and connect with top candidates.
Play it at job fairs. If you have a booth set up at a job fair, play your recruitment video at your table to engage potential candidates.
Include it in the email signature of recruiting and HR team members. These team members will constantly be emailing potential candidates, so including the video in their email signature can leave a positive impression on applicants.
Sharing maximizes the value of your recruitment video. After working hard and carefully curating your video, sharing enables you to reach multiple networks and attract the best talent.
How We Built Our First Recruitment Video
When we were considering a recruitment video we knew we needed to make two primary videos and that we would eventually feature a variety of shorter videos. We also decided early on that while we needed those first two videos to be flawless, our careers page and recruitment videos would be ever-evolving.
Here’s our recruitment video, and a brief summary of how we built our first version:
How we built it:
Considered the messages we wanted to get across and the type of video we wanted to create.
Researched to find examples of recruitment videos we loved (and hated).
Discussed the examples, our budget, timeframe, and overall video direction.
Developed a list of interview questions to elicit some of the responses we needed to include.
Selected team members across departments, levels, locations, and tenure to interview.
Prepared interviewees with on-camera interview tips, the general direction the interview would take, and how the final footage would be used. We did not share specific questions ahead of time.
Chose interviewers with in-depth company knowledge who knew which questions would be best for each interviewee and would be able to dig deeper on select questions.
Our skilled in-house video producer recorded many hours of interviews and spent several days weaving them into the story of our company.
Added live and animated b-roll of our offices, people at our company, and our product.
Build a Strong Team Through Recruitment Videos
Your organization can’t achieve progress without a solid team. To move forward, it needs support from dedicated employees who have the energy and the expertise to continuously solve problems and work toward the company’s growth.
Recruitment videos attract high-quality candidates who can build long-term success for your organization. By creating a positive perception of your brand, recruitment videos motivate top applicants to join your team. And by understanding what makes the organization great, these candidates will be ready to work toward making it even better.
About Vyond
GoAnimate is now Vyond. Learn more about the changes.
Vyond allows people of all skill levels in all industries and job roles to create dynamic and powerful media. With features that go beyond moving text and images, you can build character-driven stories or compelling data visualizations that engage audiences and deliver results.
Start making your own videos today. Sign up for a free trial.
#### How to Create a Video Style Guide
Your brand is your identity — it’s your messaging, your tone, the very distillation of who you are as a company. Branding is typically a top priority in your marketing efforts. But when it comes to video, branding is sometimes put on the back burner, especially when it comes to making a video style guide.
It’s a mistake to neglect branding within your videos and training, as this results in a less cohesive view of your company. Branding can also have a huge impact on your company’s performance.
Neglecting branding in videos is equivalent to ignoring sales and the importance of your company’s image. Fortunately, this is a problem with an easy fix: creating a video brand style guide.
Why video branding matters
Your company branding is likely apparent in a few places: your website, your product, your blog articles, and your ads. Unfortunately, it’s easy to overlook branding in video, because the video creation process itself is already involved and unpredictable. But overlooking branding in your videos is a big mistake, for a few reasons:
A lack of consistent branding across your channels and mediums can present your business in a poor, even unprofessional light. Whether people are new to your brand or experienced, they’ll expect your branding to be consistent.
Strong branding in videos allows them to be immediately recognizable as a product of your company. For example, color alone can help drive brand recognition by up to 80%. This can help with the next two points.
Better branding in video can help establish brand recognition for your company as a whole. This allows people, over time, to quickly recognize your brand because of increased exposure.
Branded videos help boost overall brand awareness. Brand recognition starts with awareness, and branded videos make this task easier for you and your company.
Whether you’re using videos for training, marketing, or general awareness, video branding is important. Watch how sales intelligence company, EverString, infused their brand colors into this animated video example:
We’ve established why branding is crucial for your videos — and a style guide can help you get there. Now, what, exactly, is a video brand style guide?
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What is a video style guide?
A video brand style guide is your map for video. It tells you how videos should look, sound, and feel, and even how you should promote them. Anyone who reads through a video style guide should walk away with a firm understanding of how video plays into their company’s branding.
But you don’t have to have a stand-alone video brand style guide. Ideally, you can include videos in your current style guide. This makes for a more cohesive style guide. (Style guides are intended to create a cohesive experience, after all!) By including video instructions within an existing style guide, you’re setting up new hires for a smoother onboarding experience as well.
For example, take a look at Zendesk’s brand style guide. Their style guide covers branding through and through, including areas where video is concerned. They cover video philosophy, sound editing, b-roll style, interviewing, and the nitty-gritty of video editing.
Understanding how to create a video brand style guide is almost as important as understanding what a video brand style guide is.
How to create a video style guide
Video is arguably one of the most complex content formats one can create. But it can still be effectively branded like any other content format. To ensure that your videos are properly branded, create a style guide or a video section in an existing style guide to keep them consistent.
Cover the following areas to ensure that your style guide checks all the right boxes:
Tone: This dictates the general feel of your video. It is your opportunity to explain the overall vibe you’re going for with your videos. For example, do you want videos to be casual and informative? Fun and friendly? Or should they be more professional in tone?
Editing style: Similar to tone, editing style will define how our videos make your audience feel. How do you utilize transitions, graphics, timing, audio, and animation?
Colors: Your company likely has a brand color palette it uses in its marketing materials. Be sure to include guidelines on how and where to use these colors within internal and external videos. Do you want branded colors prominently displayed? Or do you want your brand colors displayed only on the intro?
Logo placement: It’s a good idea to include your company logo in your videos to help with brand recognition. Use this section of your style guide to indicate where and when you’d like the logo placed. Will it go prominently in the intro of the video? Should it stay watermarked in the corner? Or should it be featured at the end of the video?
Audience: Your company targets at least one audience, and possibly more. Clearly define how you want your video to target each audience. Depending on how varied your audiences are, your video will need to take different approaches.
Accessibility: It’s important to make your videos accessible to differently-abled audiences. Set your process for applying closed captions, transcriptions, audio, and color contrast
Distribution: This section of your style guide can describe where your videos live and what they look like once they get there. Do your videos go into a Learning Management System or to YouTube? What’s the process for putting them there? Should thumbnails look a specific way? Do you require a specific process for descriptions or tagging?
Including the above in your video brand style guide or existing style guide ensures that you’re creating videos that feel cohesive with your company’s other content. To see these points in action, be sure to look at the Yeshiva University video style guide, which covers granular technical specs as well as brand-specific points. Keep reading for more video style guide examples.
While the video creation process may feel more cumbersome at first, due to the guidelines you set, it will eventually become quicker and easier. (And, more importantly, more consistent.)
How Vyond makes branding a cinch
When it comes to branding a video, there are a lot of elements to track. Creating a video that feels aligned with your brand can mean the difference between something as granular as using one color over another.
Fortunately, Vyond makes branding animated videos a cinch, thanks to the following features:
Vyond features a library of characters that can be altered to fit your target audiences. For example, you can easily swap the color of a character’s shirt, change their hair, alter their clothing, or design them as silhouettes in your brand colors.
Alter backgrounds and props on the fly. Tweak any preexisting scene template to fit your own audience or brand. For example, if you want to use an office template to mimic your office by including items from your real location, you can do so with ease. Vyond features a vast library of templates, which you can alter in any number of ways to feel like an entirely new scene.
Add audio into any video, making it possible to include a brand jingle (if you have one). This also enables you to include voiceover narration and sound effects.
Import your logo, brand font, photos, videos, and other brand elements to include in your animations.
Watch this video from WebCE Online Education & Training to see numerous customizations in motion and learn more about how to brand your video in Vyond.
Video makes branding the star
A brand style guide can not only make video consistent but also better. A style guide acts as a road map, providing you with direction as you navigate the video creation process. While video creation may be a bit rocky the first few times you apply a style guide, it will get easier over time.
Eventually, you’ll reach a point where following your style guide is second nature. When that moment comes, you’ll be able to make your videos truly shine, and your brand along with them.
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Video brand style guide examples
Each of these companies includes video in their brand guidelines. They all provide excellent examples of what to consider for your own video style guide.
Zendesk
Ben & Jerry’s
Google Marketing Platform
UCLA
Washington State Dept. of Transportation
UC Berkeley
Audi
Mother Jones
UC San Francisco
Ireland’s Health Services
Apple (for developers)
Boy Scouts of America
Starbucks
Harvard Business School
Shazam
eDreams
I Love New York
Yeshiva University
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#### How to Create a Whiteboard Animation Video that Retains your Viewers’ Attention (In 7 Steps)
Whiteboard animation is one of the best ways to educate your target audience or introduce them to new products.
Psychologist Richard Wiseman and his team found people who watched a whiteboard animation—animations where images are drawn from scratch on a virtual whiteboard—could recall 15% more information than people who watched a “talking head” video footage.
This result can mean a higher likelihood of viewers purchasing a product they saw on one of your videos some days ago or simply recalling the brand when discussing the video’s content with a friend.
You can create an engaging whiteboard animation video regardless of your animation knowledge in 7 steps.
1. Define your video’s intent
Defining your whiteboard animation video’s intent allows your team to align each step of the production process with a given goal. Whether to educate your target audience or to present a new product, the intent is a north star.
You can define your video’s intent by gathering the video’s stakeholders—videographers, animators, voiceover actors, managers—and determining the goal that would serve the company the most.
For example, sales might be the video’s intent for a new startup. But for a corporation, it might be to teach their audience about an industry trend. So choose yours based on your needs.
2. Write a script
A script covers your whiteboard animation video’s lines, the person who’ll speak them, and a description of what should be happening on-screen at every moment. If you animate without a script, you risk ending up with a disorganized video that doesn’t accomplish your intent.
The first step to create a script is to brainstorm your story’s structure. You can then describe the events that’ll take place and the characters involved. These two steps are your foundation.
From there, write the lines your character will say during these events alongside a rough visual description of what’ll happen. For example, if your line is about how your character works 24/7, you could add a note that says: “include a sun that goes from left to right.”
3. Design a storyboard
A storyboard is a format that mixes your script and your line’s visual representation, thus showing how your whiteboard animation will look.
Teams can use storyboards to ensure the project’s visuals match both the script and the intent instead of animating a project that doesn’t benefit the brand.
You can draw your storyboard on a piece of paper, whiteboard, or an animation tool like Vyond. Regardless of the medium, storyboards are static sketches of what’ll happen. So draw the only main activity of every scene into the storyboard’s squares instead of squishing in every detail.
Once you draw on every square, include the scene’s corresponding script lines so your team can verify if the story is cohesive. Or, in some cases, check if it’s missing a scene, prop, or character to make sense.
4. Pick a font that suits your brand
Viewers associate your font with your brand, just like they associate your logo, brand colors, and visual style. Therefore, it’s crucial to pick a font that suits the tone and style you want to convey.
For example, a brand animating for c-suite viewers might use serif types—those with a decorative stroke at the tip of the letters—to communicate formality and confidence. Meanwhile, a brand wanting to look friendly may go with a sans serif font—those without a stroke at the end of the letters.
You can use font sites like Google Fonts or DaFont to pick a legible font that suits your brand. You can then import these fonts into Vyond Studio and even make them move to maintain the viewer’s attention.
5. Create your characters and scenes
Now that your team validated the project’s trajectory, it’s time to recreate your storyboard’s idea in your animation tool.
First, create the characters that will say your script’s lines. You can base these characters on individuals or create identities from scratch. For example, you can use Vyond to create characters of any age group and then choose from more than 300 garments to create the voice actor’s outfit.
The next step is to add props that match your storyboard’s description of the background or stage. So if, for instance, your character is a banker, add bank-related props from our prop or Common Craft library: exchange rate boards, a safe, or a vault.
Vyond users can follow Rued’s video above to learn how to create scenes and characters from scratch.
6. Record a clear voiceover
A professional script and animated whiteboard video aren’t enough to achieve your project’s intent if the viewer can’t understand your voice artists’ lines. So it’s essential to record a clear voiceover.
Your project’s budget plays a vital role in how you record. For example, a team with a large budget can rent a sound-treated studio to guarantee the highest audio quality possible. On the other hand, teams with a small budget will spend a significant amount of time finding a room with perfect conditions, adjusting the audio recording settings, and ensuring proper mic placement.
Once you organize your recording space, it’s time to record. Using a smartphone, microphone, or audio recorder, let your voice artist read the lines in the tone and style you want. You can then export the audio files and upload them to your whiteboard animation software.
In Vyond Studio, you can drag and drop the audio files to your library. You can then assign voice lines to your characters so their mouths mimic your voice artist’s voice.
7. Add visual effects to stand out
Visual effects allow your work to stand out among competitors that also use whiteboard animation. In addition, these effects make your work recognizable, increasing the likelihood of a viewer remembering your brand and what you offer.
Typically, whiteboard animations are black and white. Therefore, you can use an animation tool like Vyond to change the color of some props and scenarios that appear in your video. And finally, stand out visually.
Create your first whiteboard animation video with Vyond
Vyond Studio offers dozens of props and characters you can use for your upcoming whiteboard animation video. Because of our intuitive interface and templates, anyone can start animating their storyboard’s idea without previous animation experience.
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#### How to Create Accessible Video Content: Best Practices for Inclusive Digital Media
July is Disability Pride Month, a time dedicated to celebrating the 60 million people with disabilities in the United States.
The month marks the anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Signed into law in July 1990, this piece of legislation was a major step toward achieving equal access for those with disabilities. The act specifically focused on making public transportation and spaces, employment, and government services more accessible.
More than thirty years later, we’re focusing on making another area more friendly to those with disabilities: digital media. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines offer a set of standards to help ensure accessibility. To honor Disability Pride Month and help you create content to be enjoyed by all, let’s take a look at a few steps you can take to create accessible video content.
1. Add closed captions to videos
Closed captions—a textual display of what’s being said, with the ability to be toggled off—help people with hearing and visual impairments understand and enjoy the video content you create. The captions are also necessary for making 508-compliant video content. If you’re making any content for a government agency, the content must be 508-compliant.
Closed captions are an overlay on top of a completed video, as pictured above in this video from Virtual Care for Kids. If captions are built into the video itself, they are called “open captions.” There is no way for viewers to turn off open captions and it’s not possible for screen-reading software to understand them.
With a third-party tool, you can add proper closed captions to any video. Research your options for captioning apps and keep in mind that some programs are platform-specific. For example, Clipomatic or iPhone Clips work well for Instagram Stories.
Vyond’s 2023 Spring release introduced fast and efficient closed captioning for all your Vyond video projects. You can also read this guide on how to add closed captions to your Vyond videos.
2. Be mindful of video design
The design of a video itself is a huge factor in how accessible the video’s content is. The wrong design choices can exclude audiences with certain disabilities. For example, if someone in your audience has a visual impairment, an overly-busy video could be difficult to interpret. But there are a couple of ways you can ensure that your video design is accessible-friendly to your entire audience.
Keep text away from where closed captions will be. Cluttered screen text can be difficult to read for those who require closed captions. When placing text, keep in mind where closed captions will appear in order to prevent this from occurring.
Ensure that your videos are safe for those with photo-sensitivities by avoiding the flash threshold. If videos have quick transitions or bright flashes in succession, they can cross the general flash threshold and cause epileptic seizures. Avoiding flashing effects is also helpful in consideration of people with ADHD, autism, and those in concussion recovery. Use tools to prevent this from happening.
Be mindful of your color choices. More on this in #5 below.
Consider representation in your content. Can you cast or include disabled people or animated characters? This won’t make your content inherently more accessible, but it will help disabled viewers see themselves represented in your message.
The above changes are easy to implement, but make a world of difference.
3. Use alt text on thumbnails
Alt text is copy that both supplements and even replaces an image when necessary. Alt text makes it possible for those with vision impairments to enjoy images and fully digest your content. A screen-reading program will read alt text where the image should be, giving a visually impaired listener an idea of what the image represents. This is equally true for video thumbnails that might be placed on an article.
See below how the image of a woman at her laptop has alt text in the website code to describe the details a screen reader couldn’t understand:
Alt text also helps with general readability if the image doesn’t load. If a user has an outdated browser or poor connection, the alt text will display in place of the image and ensure that the overall experience isn’t affected.
While the example above applies to images on websites, various video players offer alt text options for video thumbnails as well.
4. Transcribe visual or auditory media
For those with any kind of visual or learning impairment, videos on their own may not be enough. A transcript of what is said in the video makes it possible for people to slow down and learn at their own pace.
Not only are transcriptions useful for those needing assistance with a video, but they’re also great for creating additional content. For example, a transcript can be cleaned up and turned into a supplemental article that pairs with your video content on your company’s blog.
Use a third-party app or integration to transcribe your recorded videos. oTranscribe, Rev, and Express Scribe are three great options to start with. It’s also possible to transcribe live videos, such as webinars or conferences, to ensure that your content reaches as many people as possible.
5. Make the right color choices in video
Color vision deficiency affects nearly 7.4% of the population in the United States, meaning your choice of colors could keep 7.4% of people from fully enjoying what you create.
Those with color vision deficiency are often unable to clearly distinguish between red, blue, and green. While you can’t rebrand to cut certain colors, you can avoid layering red, blue, and green in visuals where the colors aren’t pertinent to understanding the message.
It’s also a good idea to use a contrast checker to make sure your text and background combinations are readable by those with color vision deficiency. Contrast requirements vary depending on the size of the text, so be as specific as possible when using a contrast tool.
6. Include video descriptions on social media
Include descriptive breakdowns of videos shared on social media to ensure that those with impairments can understand your posts.
Much like alt text on a website, video descriptions on social posts are typically read by a screen-reading program to help people who are visually impaired experience the content. It’s important to be as clear and as detailed as possible when writing video descriptions so your audiences can fully understand what is happening in your content.
Video descriptions can go in various places, depending on the social media platform. For example, Facebook has a video description area, whereas Twitter requires that you enable video descriptions under options first. If you can’t find an area to enter a video description on a certain platform, it’s possible you need to enter the description as the first comment on the post.
7. Remove autoplay from videos
Auto playing content on sites is distracting and downright impeding for people with certain disabilities. Someone using a screen reader will be unable to hear the page being read because the video will play at the same time as the screen reader. Those with focus problems can find themselves distracted and overwhelmed. It’s also possible for videos to trigger seizures in people with epilepsy, making autoplay videos a possible health hazard.
Whenever you upload or embed videos, be sure they’re set to play only when clicked. This ensures that your viewers get the experience that best suits them. It’s also a good idea to avoid having ads with audio on your site, because these will be equally distracting for people. Fortunately, many social platforms keep sound off on ads by default. But this is something worth double-checking.
Learn more about top web accessibility resources.
Tips for Getting Started on Creating Accessible Videos
We reached out to Vyond customer and accessibility advocate Liz Schumacher, Engagement Manager at Rivermark Community Credit Union, for her advice on creating accessible video content. According to Liz, “universal design is right for everyone. In addition to those protected by ADA, you or I can benefit when we’ve had too little sleep, or have an environmental issue—using a mobile device underground or when we require ease of access due to a temporary injury like a broken arm.” Here are a few of Liz’s recommendations for creating accessible content:
Create a company style guide that incorporates accessibility considerations as part of mandatory brand guidelines for both internal and external communications. This way, content can be presented with accessibility for all as the default and nobody will need to take extra steps to access the content.
Use personas with varying abilities.
Accessible content doesn’t mean graphic design is out. Learn more here.
In the case of interactivity, use shapes with high contrast to differentiate the choices.
For eLearning courses, enable keyboard shortcuts. This helps avoid scrolling or requiring a “click and drag” interaction.
Color and font are an easy place to start. Simple changes can give you an immediate accessibility lift. For fonts, be sure to use ADA and WCAG-compliant font types for accessibility. This can benefit everyone when it comes to comprehension and accessibility for individuals in the following communities: English as a second language, Deaf, limited sight, Dyslexic, Epileptic, and ADD/ADHD.
Learn more about accessibility basics at usability.gov and for more information on disability categories and deliberate strategy in content design visit webaim.org.
Creating Accessible Content for All
The preceding steps for creating accessible video content are just the beginning. The fight for true inclusivity is ongoing. Take it upon yourself to champion this cause by creating accessible and representative content, and push to make your company, as a whole, more inclusive. A world that’s accessible to all is a world we can all aim for.
At Vyond, we strive to empower creators with the ability to make content that’s consumable by everyone. Our animations can be paired with closed-captioning and video creators can include characters with disabilities—to name a few options. If there’s something missing in this post or if you have suggestions for making Vyond more inclusive, please let us know at inclusion@vyond.com.
Create your own accessible animated videos:
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#### How to create animated educational videos (+10 examples)
In 2019 the online learning industry was valued at roughly $100 billion. The disruption of COVID-19 drove offline learners even further into the online space. Now, the online learning industry is projected to be worth more than $375 billion by 2026. Animated educational and training videos are a great vehicle for reaching this ever-expanding audience.
Animated videos are a versatile form of content, capable of adapting to virtually any audience, brand, or topic. But that only scratches the surface of animated content:
Animated educational videos are easy to update. Updating a live-action video entails costly reshoots, hiring actors (again), and possibly even travel expenses. You can easily update animation by adding a new voiceover and changing text or graphics to accommodate new information.
Abstract ideas are easier to convey with animation. Some concepts, like interstellar travel between stars, are difficult to convey with live-action video. Animation makes it possible to illustrate and convey even the most abstract, otherworldly ideas.
Animated educational videos are easier to replicate. Your company and audience will grow. When growth happens, you’ll need to rise to the occasion with more content. Animated videos are easy to create with templates, making it possible to replicate your success and scale with less effort.
Animated educational videos are easier to brand than live ones. You can easily add branded colors throughout your animation. If you’re using live-action stock footage, you’re stuck using whatever’s in front of you. Even a templated animation can be customized to match your branded colors with a few clicks.
Platforms like Vyond make animation possible for virtually anyone, so you can quickly create fun, powerful, educational, and training videos that inform your audience. The following tips will help you stay on course when planning and creating your first animated educational and training video, and every video that follows.
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Create an educational video concept
Every animated educational or training video starts with a concept. But before you begin conceptualizing, you need to see what type of content already exists around this particular topic.
Perform Google searches on your topic, and take a look at what’s ranking on page one. Are any of the top results a video? Or are you faced with numerous in-depth guides spanning thousands and thousands of words?
If you notice every result is incredibly in-depth, a video alone may not cut it for this topic. But that doesn’t mean you can’t use video to supplement written or interactive courses.
Let’s say you want to give an overview of how to create modern digital content. This is a nuanced subject that goes well beyond the scope of a single animation, but you could create a multi-part course on content that features animated videos covering modern content design best practices.
With your preliminary research complete, you can then decide on the granular details: voice actor or no voice actor, types of characters required, additional videos required to cover the topic, supplemental course materials or articles, and so on.
Create a script for an educational video
Every video needs a script, no matter how long it is or what topic it’s covering. A script ensures that your video has structure, that the message is clear, and that it gives you a chance to test the messaging before investing time and money in animation.
A script might sound daunting at first, but, fortunately, there are common elements in every great script: a call to action, memorable characters, and a coherent structure. Take your time drafting your educational video script, keep your audience in mind the entire time, and try to avoid making these scriptwriting mistakes.
Develop a storyboard for an educational video
The script gives your animation the language, but the storyboard gives it structure. Use the storyboard to outline each scene—what action will take place, what characters are necessary, what setting will be used, and so on.
Ultimately, your storyboard will save you time during production. It’s easier to change a storyboard, as opposed to altering an entire animation after realizing there’s an issue.
Follow storyboarding best practices, keep the project’s scope in mind, and refer to your script when in doubt. You can also save substantial time by using a storyboard template.
Choose your animation platform
With your script and storyboard complete, you’re ready to animate. But you’ll need an animation platform or tool to make animation feasible. The right platform makes it possible for anyone to create animation in a cost-effective and timely manner.
Research animation platforms, and look for one with great customer reviews, an intuitive interface, in-depth support, and easy scalability. Animation platforms have different strengths that set them apart, with some prioritizing three-dimensional or lifelike visuals over usability.
Keep your audience and niche in mind when looking at platforms. Different niches latch on to different types of animation, and not every platform offers the same styles. For example, more realistic animation is likely to be a better fit for those teaching astrophysics, while two-dimensional cartoons are great for general use.
You’ll also want an animation platform that’s compatible with a number of learning management systems (LMS). An LMS allows you to host your eLearning content, track participant performance, and essentially determine whether or not your content is working as intended.
Vyond is a great example of this. Our animation platform is intuitive, is backed by solid customer support, and is easy to import to most major LMS platforms!
Create your animation
Your script, storyboard, and platform choice have all led to this moment; it’s time to create your animation. There are a few quick tips to get you started on the right foot when animating:
Make your characters early on, because they’ll likely appear in numerous scenes. Making them early saves you time down the road and lessens the likelihood that you’ll want to change something about them in the middle of production.
Review scenes and dialogue as you record and create them. There are few feelings worse than finalizing your animation and realizing the voiceover is poorly recorded or that certain animations don’t play as you’d imagined. Test every scene and dialogue snippet until you’re happy with them, and then move on.
Utilize any available templates when making your animation; doing so will save a substantial amount of time while ensuring that the final product looks professional. Keep in mind that templates can easily be converted to fit your subject. Our Juneteenth template is great for celebrating any historical day, while our HBCU video acts as a great template for any explainer video.
Learn best practices around digital educational videos and the creative process to lay a foundation for your animation.
The above tips will help you start strong with your animation and avoid some time-consuming mistakes. Most importantly, have fun while making your animation. We’re fortunate that animation tools are more accessible than ever, and that’s something to be excited about!
Test your animated educational videos with audiences
Your animation may seem ready, but there’s one more important step to take before attaching it to a course or loading it into your LMS: running your animation by a test audience and gathering feedback. Gathering feedback early on allows you to make your video as pitch-perfect as possible before it’s seen by the masses (where it can do more damage to your brand).
If you have coworkers who haven’t seen the animation yet, run it by them. Then, branch out and consider selecting a random group of students and having them watch it.
Once you’ve gathered feedback, take stock, and implement any commonly requested changes. Once your video is live, use your LMS to track the course’s performance. If you notice the course completion rate isn’t where you want it, or that it’s steadily falling, further refine your animation and course materials.
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10 examples of animated educational videos
Not sure where to start? Consider these 10 videos to see the vast capabilities and reach of animated educational videos and find ideas for your own.
University of Utah
The Behavior Response Support Team (BRST), a department at the University of Utah, is no stranger to helping people live better lives. In the wake of COVID-19, BRST decided to step slightly outside of their usual psychological studies and used animated educational videos to help parents adapt to the world of COVID-19 and home learning. These videos walked parents through elements of teaching at home but also offered information on tangential subjects, like stress management.
Takeaway: Educational videos are useful for far more than covering your core subject. The University of Utah saw an opportunity to help their core audience improve their lives by covering tangential subjects and amassed hundreds of views on each video as a result.
University of California
Paperwork is hard to avoid in many jobs, especially in the field of education. The University of California recognized this and used animated video to help their staff submit documents and navigate necessary processes.
The University of California could have accomplished their goal by screen-sharing countless times and training groups of employees, a task that likely would have eaten up hours and hours of collective time. Instead, they created a more efficient training resource that their staff can watch again and again.
Takeaway: Think about tasks that require repeated training, or one-off tasks that employees are likely to forget in between completion. Then, create quick animations to fill in those knowledge gaps and save your team the time and hassle of hosting live training.
Matt Moran
Matt Moran, a professional public speaker, uses animation to teach viewers about public speaking and numerous facets of business life.
Moran’s videos are especially helpful because public speaking is difficult to teach via written text, requiring the presence of audio and facial cues.
Takeaway: Some topics lend themselves to video. If you’re unsure about whether you need an animated video to teach a subject, think about how essential visuals are when learning the subject.
Mike Morrison
One university student and UX enthusiast reinvented medical posters and used animation to get his ideas across.
Mike Morrison had the colossal task of reinventing posters. A straightforward animation would have likely gotten some information across, but a mixed-media approach was needed. So Mike included examples of posters within the animation.
Takeaway: Don’t hesitate to include other types of content with your animation; doing so can lead to an engaging, dynamic viewing experience.
City of Calgary
The City of Calgary saw an opportunity to better serve the citizens of Calgary through video. For example, the city helped their citizens access their new digital portal by educating them with an animated video.
The City of Calgary could have sent out fliers on the new portal. But unless the city could post flyers in every area of the city, this method likely would have had minimal reach. By creating educational videos, the City of Calgary now had a way to quickly share information on social media, with their email list (including those paying utilities online), and from their city website.
Takeaway: Think about where your audience is. The City of Calgary branched out of their usual distribution methods to meet their audience online across numerous channels. Is your audience regularly posting in a particular forum? Do they frequent one social media platform more than another? These elements can help shape the type of video you make and where you share it.
North West Boroughs Healthcare
The North West Boroughs Healthcare system of Winwick, UK, used animation to help citizens beat loneliness during the cool and isolating winter months. The video received thousands of views, so it likely had a positive impact on many people’s lives.
Takeaway: Even when it’s not necessary, an animated video can offer a quick, engaging way to improve the lives of others and get some quality brand exposure out of it. The North West Boroughs Healthcare system could have addressed loneliness with a flyer or even a live-action video but instead used animation to bring readers a personal and warm bit of advice. Think about the problem you’re solving (like helping people beat loneliness) and how animation can best be applied.
Vodafone
Vodafone, the international telecommunications company, pulled off the unthinkable — creating training for a globally distributed staff of more than 100,000 employees on 100+ pages of information in only two months. This colossal task was made possible by using animation, along with a custom character that still educates Vodafone workers to this day.
Takeaway: Vodafone still uses HANA, a character they initially created for their training. If you create a character that turns out to be a hit, run with it. There’s no sense in stopping a good thing!
PDT Global
PDT Global, an international diversity and inclusion training consultancy, uses animation to train their clients. By switching to animation, PDT saved $20,000 per video when compared to their live-action costs.
Takeaway: If you’re concerned about the cost of embarking on animation, compare the budget to live educational video expenses. There’s a good chance you’ll come out ahead.
Wrike
This project management software company uses animation to create educational videos for their entire user base. They goes a step further and turns many of their animations into interactive story pieces and games, getting the audience even more involved.
Contrary to popular belief, animation saves time, too. They released one of their most complex courses in record time while using Vyond to animate. Vyond’s platform made animation a breeze, allowing them to quickly bring their ideas to life. Previously they’d have been stuck writing courses and creating visuals manually (or using stock images).
Takeaway: Wrike’s in-depth courses took a substantial amount of time to make before they utilized animation. With their business growing rapidly, they realized the right animation platform allowed them to make better courses, and to do it faster. If you’re spending time manually creating images, consider replacing them with animation; you just might save time in the end.
Rued Riis
Rued Riis, a marketer turned eLearning professional, makes animated courses using Vyond. Rued’s courses help business owners more effectively market their companies, a venture that’s turned into a full-time career for Rued.
Takeaway: Even if you’re not an educator by trade, your knowledge can easily transform into money-making video content.
Quickly create animated educational videos with Vyond
From healthcare networks to local governments to marketers-turned-educators, educational animated videos are arguably one of the most versatile content formats available. And with Vyond’s all-in-one video creation platform, you can effortlessly make any animated video you need using our huge library of characters, backgrounds, and assets—and our amazing new AI.
Any one of Vyond’s hundreds of templates is easy to customize, too, allowing you to quickly create high-quality educational content. See for yourself with our free trial, and begin educating your audience today.
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#### How to create cybersecurity training videos for employees
It often feels like cybersecurity is mainly a concern for large corporations—more sensitive information to lose means more concern about security risks. The truth is, cybersecurity threats can affect all types of companies, and small businesses are the most likely to take the hardest blow. According to IBM, the average data breach costs $3.86 million—enough to put many organizations out of business.
Take data threats seriously by creating a cybersecurity-awareness training video for your company. By training through video, you’ll be able to use movement, characters, interactivity, and other engaging features to communicate the technical details of cybersecurity in a captivating way.
In this post, we’ll break down every step of creating a cybersecurity training video for employees, including:
Planning: Researching and brainstorming the content of the training video
Production: Filming and editing the training video
Distribution: Sharing the training video with employees
Let’s dive in.
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Planning your cybersecurity training video
Cybersecurity is somewhat complicated: There are numerous cyber threats businesses can face that require complex, technical solutions. With so much potential ground to cover, it’s best to plan the content of your training video before production begins. By preparing your topics, you’ll be able to create an effective training video that successfully builds employees’ knowledge of cybersecurity.
Work with the IT department to figure out training needs
To create effective educational programming, it’s best to consult with subject-matter experts first. In the case of cybersecurity, that’s the IT department. Set up a meeting with an IT professional at your company to understand what the focus of your cybersecurity training video should be.
These IT professionals don’t just have a solid technical understanding of cybersecurity; they also know how well your company’s employees understand cybersecurity. By helping employees resolve computer issues—slow loading times, disconnected Wi-Fi—on a day-to-day basis, IT professionals are aware of your colleagues’ cybersecurity blind spots and the areas where training is needed.
Set up a meeting with an IT professional at your company to learn more about employees’ cybersecurity knowledge, and brainstorm which topics your training video should cover. Consider asking the following questions:
What are the most common cybersecurity issues at the company?
What cybersecurity lessons are you constantly teaching to employees?
What is the most important cybersecurity lesson that employees at our company should know?
Choose the topics of your training video
You might think that including as much cybersecurity information in your video as possible will help employees build their knowledge. In fact, stuffing too much content into your training video will hamper learning.
Avoid cognitive overload by thinking carefully about which topics you should explain in your video. Instead of covering every aspect of cybersecurity, your training video should focus on threats that could have the greatest impact on your company.
Reflect on the conversation you had with an IT professional at your company. The cybersecurity issues that employees seem to know the least about, yet also present a serious threat to the company, are the subjects you should prioritize in your video. These topics might include the following:
Malware: being exposed to harmful software
Phishing attacks: a type of social engineering attack in which sensitive data is obtained through a disguised entity, such as an email from a false sender
Denial-of-service (DoS): an attempt to shut down a site by overwhelming it with traffic
SQL injection: using malicious code to access and alter a website’s data
Brute-force attacks: targeting weak passwords by automatically submitting multiple passwords at once to eventually guess the right one
A single training video should focus on no more than three subjects to boost retention and keep employees engaged.
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Creating your cybersecurity training video
You’ve researched cybersecurity concerns—both generally and at your company—and you’ve decided which topics your training video needs to address. It’s now time to actually create this video through filming and editing. We’ll provide several strategies in this section for crafting engaging and informative cybersecurity lessons through video.
Segment information into small portions
Cybersecurity training programs can become overwhelming for employees, given how technical and detailed the lessons can be. Presenting this content in a microlearning style makes it easier for employees to absorb the information and stay focused.
Microlearning is a style of teaching in which information is shared in small bursts to maximize retention. By segmenting the content of your training video into smaller units, you’ll keep the information engaging and digestible for employees. Here’s an example:
To make it easier for employees to learn your cybersecurity lessons, keep these microlearning principles in mind as you edit the footage of your training video:
Focus on one learning objective at a time. Don’t try to explain phishing attacks and two-factor authentication in the same video section. Complete each lesson fully, and establish where you can pause the video to provide a break before moving on to the next topic. For example, you might insert a title slide after a lesson is over so you can stop the video and discuss the subject with employees.
Keep each video lesson brief. While your entire cybersecurity training footage might be lengthy, each individual lesson on a singular topic should be brief—anywhere from 30 seconds to a few minutes.
Add interactivity to your training video
Cybersecurity is a complex subject, so employees may not retain everything in a video after watching it from beginning to end. Improve learning by adding interactive elements to your training video.
Interactive learning encourages employees to participate in the lesson and discover information rather than absorb it passively through just watching the video. Examples of interactive learning in a video include a quiz in between video clips, and a dynamic infographic that responds to clicks or cursor movement.
These elements make videos more engaging because employees must pay attention in order to interact with the lesson. Interactivity also helps to keep employees focused because the elements break up a video into short, digestible segments.
We recommend using Articulate Storyline to add interactive elements to your training video. The e-learning authoring platform integrates with Vyond, so you can seamlessly add interactive-learning elements into your videos. For example:
Multiple choice quizzes
Interactive markers on images
Triggered motion path animations
In terms of designing videos around interactive learning, here are a few tips to help you combine footage with interactive elements:
Make separate videos for each stopping point. Editing one long video into shorter clips can lead to abrupt, awkward transitions when switching from the video to interactive elements.
Focus on continuity. To create a seamless viewing experience, ensure that the video right before a stopping point for an interactive element looks just like the video after a stopping point.
Sharing your cybersecurity training video
The value of your cybersecurity training video ultimately depends on its distribution. To ensure that the video has a positive effect on the company, you must make it as visible as possible. While every employee should watch this training video, your distribution should be focused primarily on two groups: new hires and employees who violate cybersecurity policies.
Incorporate the training video into onboarding
Though they are just starting at your company, new hires have a significant impact on your company’s cybersecurity from day one in their role. Many of their early tasks—setting up new accounts, being exposed to company files—could potentially lead to cyber threats if they aren’t well informed.
Instill positive cybersecurity habits early on by showing your training video to new employees in the early phase of onboarding. Providing this training session at the start of their employment will help to keep your company safe, both in the short term—as the new hire ramps up, and in the long term—as the employee builds a career at your company.
Collaborate with the rest of your team to determine how the video should be presented to new employees. You’ll need to determine:
When the video will be presented. Review the full onboarding cycle, and find a convenient point in the new hire’s first week to show them this training video. Try to show the video on a day when the onboarding lessons are lighter since cybersecurity training is so technical.
Where the video will be presented. Have a conversation with your HR team about whether employees should view the video in the office or they can opt to watch it remotely.
If you want to complement your video with extra materials. You may decide to provide additional handouts on cybersecurity for new employees to refer to throughout their career to reinforce their knowledge.
Show the video as a disciplinary action
Research shows that human error is the main cause of company data breaches. According to a Shred-it survey, 47% of business leaders reported that human error was the cause of a data breach at their company.
Often, the employees who make these mistakes don’t realize that their actions are careless. Given this lack of knowledge, employees who violate your company’s cybersecurity rules should be asked to watch this training video. Even if the employee has already watched the video, they should view it again to refresh their memory about positive data security practices.
Develop a plan for showing this video as a disciplinary measure:
Determine what violations are grounds for showing this video. Watching a video is a simple task to complete, so consider asking every employee who violates your cybersecurity policies to watch your training video.
Create a quiz to test employees’ knowledge. Checking employees’ understanding of cybersecurity is a critical measure for avoiding future data breaches caused by these colleagues.
Protect company data with a cybersecurity training video
Cyber threats have the potential to impact any type of company, big or small, and create millions of dollars in damages. To avoid catastrophic security risks, companies must educate employees through cybersecurity awareness training.
Video is an incredibly effective medium for educating employees about cybersecurity. The movement and interactivity of video will keep employees captivated even as they learn about such a dense, technical topic. Use the tips in this guide to plan, create, and distribute an engaging cybersecurity training video that helps to protect your company from cyber attacks.
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#### How to Create Training Videos That Employees Love
In a world of constant change, effective employee training is critical. In this post, you’ll learn about the value of great training videos and how to make them.
Table of contents
The value of engaging, great training videos
Popular types of training videos for business
How to make a training video from start to finish
Benefits to producing training videos
AI-powered training videos
The best training video maker software for your team
The future of training videos
The value of engaging, great training videos
As organizations vie for talent in a tumultuous job market, employee training programs are becoming more important than ever before. Organizations want to show that they’re supportive of their employees’ career development, and they’re increasing their commitment to ongoing training and professional development initiatives as a result.
But especially when you have a dispersed workforce, providing employee training at scale poses a significant challenge.
For many organizations, the best answer to this problem has been to invest more heavily in creating high-quality training video content.
Not only are we all watching more TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram videos for fun, but we increasingly prefer watching videos to learn. Studies show that 73% of us say we’d prefer to watch a short video to learn about a product or service over reading a text-based article, website, or post—and employees are 75% more likely to watch a training video than read text.
Any old video won’t do, though. Employees are resistant to the old-fashioned, corny training videos you might remember (or have heard about) from the 80s. They’re expecting engaging, relevant content that tells a compelling story and hits like something they might encounter on social media.
So how do you create training videos that your employees will love? Let’s dig in.
Popular types of training videos for business
Instructional design is a serious field of study that requires a strong understanding of how employees learn best. So when it comes time to make training videos, ask yourself which format is likely the best fit for both the content you’re delivering and the audience you’re trying to reach. Here are a few of the most common types of training videos companies produce:
Explainer training videos
Explainer training videos are short-form videos that teach employees about high-level topics in a quick, snappy format. They’re ideal for explaining basic concepts and can be used across a broad range of company functions:
Human resources and L&D departments can use explainer videos to provide an overview of leadership best practices; diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB) terms; company overviews during new employee onboarding; and more.
Marketing and Sales departments can use explainer videos to share new product offerings, highlight thought leadership topics, and walk paying customers through new technologies.
While explainer videos can take many different shapes, some of the most popular formats feature a “listicle” of quick tips, or a problem/solution structure. It’s also important to remember that because explainer videos offer a bird’s-eye view, you might want to follow up with some of the other video types from this list to go deeper on a given topic. Here’s an example of an explainer training video:
hi
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Step-by-step tutorial training videos
A step-by-step tutorial video walks viewers through a given process, like how to operate a machine or use a type of software. These videos are especially useful for teaching hard skills to new employees who might not know how to use certain tools or complete tasks that are necessary for their role.
Camtasia and Loom are popular video editing software options for creating step-by-step tutorials. These platforms offer screen recording and voiceover tools that make it easy for anyone to document and explain each step in a given process.
Animation is also a great option for instructional videos—and now it’s possible to do it yourself quickly and easily with video creation software like Vyond.
Here’s a great example of an animated tutorial video:
Scenario-based training videos
A scenario-based training video involves a narrative that incorporates characters, some kind of conflict, and often dialogue between those characters. These types of training videos are particularly good at helping the viewer understand what it’s like to encounter a given situation in the workplace, and prompting them to consider what they’d do if they experienced something similar.
While this type of video might evoke memories of the 80s-style employee training videos we mentioned earlier, they can also be incredibly effective when done well. The London School of Economics found that when an audience is presented with information using a story, they retain 65% of the information. Take the story away, and they’ll remember a mere 5%.
So think about how you can modernize your scenario-based content with powerful images, emotion-driven storytelling and personalized messaging to make your videos more effective.
Check out our Spring 2023 Storytelling Masterclass to learn how to incorporate authentic storytelling, humor, and great visual design into your training videos.
Spring 2023 Storytelling Masterclass
Interactive training videos
Interactive (or gamified) training videos boost engagement by inviting audience members to click through modules, choose a direction, respond to prompts, or complete other tasks as they’re moving through the content.
While it’s really more of a delivery system than a type of video, gamification can make content more fun, helpful and memorable. In fact, a study from Carnegie Mellon shows that interactive content can be up to six times more effective for learning than static video.
Platforms like NearLife and Articulate Storyline pair well with Vyond to turn animated videos into unique, interactive experiences for your employees. Learn more about how gamification works here.
Here’s an example of a gamified training video with a “Western” theme:
Live-action training videos
Live-action videos might be what come to mind when you think of a fully produced, professional-grade training video. They usually feature either a host or presenter who walks viewers through a concept or process, or a voice over track.
Live-action videos can look polished and positively represent your brand, but there are downsides to consider. Stock footage often looks corny and generic—and studies show that viewers retain 15% more knowledge by watching an animation versus a talking head video. Also, many companies have found that live-action videos are costly and time-consuming to produce long-term. Between hiring actors, renting a studio, and buying expensive production equipment, the outcome sometimes isn’t worth the effort.
Animated training videos
Animated training videos use moving illustrations, text, voiceover, and music to break down complicated topics in an easy-to-understand way.
Animation is a surprisingly powerful tool in creating effective training videos. Not only do AI-powered video creation tools allow you to create videos ten times faster than you could using live-action, they’re also versatile enough to bring your even wildest storytelling ideas to life.
Animation is also more effective than using live-action footage as an educational tool because its simpler, abstracted visuals make it easier for a viewer to understand and retain information. Additionally, when you go the animation route instead of using live-action video, it’s much easier to go back and make adjustments to your content whenever something changes.
How to make a training video from start to finish
The size of your company, budget, and goals will all play a factor in determining how you’ll create, edit, and distribute your videos. No matter your strategy, here are six simple steps to creating great training videos.
1. Choose a project owner
Who will be in charge of creating training videos at your company? Often, L&D or human resources teams are responsible for outlining, creating, and distributing training video content to employees. Other times, marketing or sales managers take the lead on creating online courses for their direct reports.
No matter who’s taking the lead, be sure to assign a project manager at the start. It’s important to have a leader at the helm who oversees goal setting, storyboarding, deadline setting, publishing, and promotion.
2. Understand your audience and their needs
You know what they say about assuming…you may think you’ve got a good idea of what your audience is seeking from a training video, but you won’t really know until you ask.
Before you start outlining video content, do some research to find out what your audience already knows about the topic at hand and what they’re still struggling with. That means conducting real interviews or surveys with the employee groups that are most likely to watch and use your training videos.
Another good idea? Seek out a few internal subject-matter experts to help provide context, recommendations, and ideas for further research.
3. Outline and storyboard
Before you begin creating your training video, you need to plan out exactly what you want to teach and how you want to teach it. Will your video be animated? Live action? Decide on the length of the video, the equipment and software you’ll need, and any props or visuals you want to use.
Then create your storyboard. A storyboard is a graphic representation of how your video will unfold, shot by shot. It’s made up of a number of panels with illustrations or pictures representing each shot, and should include notes about what’s going on in the scene and what’s being said in the script during that shot.
If you need more help creating on your storyboard, here’s a great resource to get you started. (P.S. No artistic talent is required!)
4. Produce your video
It’s go time! Now that you know exactly what your video will look like, it’s time to actually make it. This process will look quite different depending on what kind of video you’re making. Will you outsource the work to a creative agency? Will you hire someone to film live-action footage for you? Or will your L&D team handle animated video creation in-house?
No matter what option you choose, be sure to answer these questions well before you get to the production stage. Assign roles and responsibilities early to make sure everyone understands their involvement and can carve out the appropriate amount of time to complete their video production–related tasks when the time comes.
5. Edit away
After recording, it’s time to edit your video. If you’re handling editing yourself, start by importing your footage into your editing platform. Then trim any unnecessary footage and arrange your clips in the order you want them to appear. Add any visuals or graphics that will help illustrate your points. Add captions or subtitles if needed, and think about adding royalty-free background music.
Finally, review your video, make any final tweaks or adjustments, and seek approval from any stakeholders that need to sign off
6. Publish and promote
Once your video is ready to go, it’s time to publish and promote it.
Think about where your desired audience is already spending time and share your training videos there. Do your employees frequently visit your intranet for more information? Are they more likely to engage with your video via Slack? Should the videos be embedded into existing eLearning course materials? How easy is it for employees to find the videos within your Learning Management System (LMS)?
Thinking like a marketer is the key to making sure your videos are seen and heard. It’s all about meeting employees where they are, with the content that’s most relevant to them, at the time they need it most.
Benefits to producing effective training videos
So what’s the actual return on investment when it comes to producing effective training videos? Let’s dig into a few of the top benefits:
1. Boosts engagement and information retention
Creating great training videos is now as easy as making a PowerPoint presentation–except videos pack more punch. Vyond enterprise customers have seen a 130% increase in employee engagement rates when they use videos compared to outdated methods of learning, and information retention is higher with video as well.
2. Helps you scale your training program
The best training video creation software empowers anyone on your team to create new content, edit and share it quickly, and make adjustments after the fact. In other words, it takes quality video creation out of the hands of specialists and puts it in the hands of everyone.
Offering digital training options also means you can send a simple link every time an employee has a question, rather than burdening your HR or L&D staff with lengthy in-person workshops. Always-available content means employees can study up whenever they have the time, on the device that makes the most sense for them.
Want more tips on scaling your skills training program? Check out our new eBook, The Vyond Guide to Better Skills Training at Scale: New Strategies for L&D Pros.
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3. Helps boost talent retention
When employers invest in videos that promote professional development, their employees reward them for it. A recent survey showed that employees who get professional development opportunities are 15% more engaged and have 34% higher retention than those who don’t.
So giving employees an easy, accessible way to tap into continuing education is crucial for organizations who are looking to attract and retain talent. Training videos play a huge role in scaling your professional development program and making it available to everyone who needs it.
4. Helps improve your company culture
When you share training videos that effectively educate employees about sensitive but important topics like sexual harassment, DEIB, and conflict management, you’re helping to make your workplace a safer, more inclusive, place for all.
AI-powered tools for creating training videos
Like so many industries these days, the next frontier for training videos is—you guessed it—artificial intelligence.
For most people, making videos (beyond recording footage on an iPhone) isn’t a common skill. But a recent wave of new AI-powered tools is helping change all that. Here are a few categories worth investigating:
Text: Yes, ChatGPT can help video makers generate pretty decent first-draft scripts. AI also powers the auto-captioning feature you’ve likely seen on TikTok, Youtube, Instagram and other sites, making videos more accessible to a broader audience.
Images and video: AI image generators like Midjourney and Dall-E 2 and tools like Meta’s Make-a-Video can help you generate custom illustrations and video content based on both text and image-based prompts. Be careful, however: the quality of their output can vary wildly.
Audio: AI tools are emerging that can help video creators generate natural-sounding voice overs in multiple languages based on text input.
Video animation software: The powerful AI built into video animation software like Vyond helps video makers make great videos faster, and includes AI features that turn photos of people into animated characters and quickly translate text anywhere within a video or voiceover track into other languages.
The best training video maker software for your team
Whatever your needs may be, there’s a software platform that will make creating training videos a breeze. Here are a few to consider.
For animation: With Vyond, your organization can easily create professional-grade animated videos that engage and educate your employees and customers—and drive incredible business results.
Vyond is used by thousands of L&D teams and more than 20,000 companies worldwide, including 65% of the Fortune 500. With solutions for companies of all sizes, departments, and skill sets, Vyond integrates with video production and eLearning tools you may already use (like Adobe Premiere, and Articulate) to make training video creation simple and efficient.
For screen captures and tutorials: Platforms like Camtasia, Panopto, Loom, and iMovie make it easy for anyone to share their screen and record voiceover instructions. These tools are helpful for creating step-by-step tutorials like employee onboarding training, customer product walkthroughs, and more.
For interactive content: For teams who are looking to gamify their training videos, Near Life makes it easy to add interactive elements. The platform turns any video, animation, PowerPoint slide or graphic into an immersive experience that drives increased engagement with viewers.
The future of training videos
As employers compete for talent and increase their investment in professional development, upskilling employees is more important than ever. Luckily, technology is evolving quickly, making it easier for HR and L&D teams to create training video content quickly and cost effectively.
When done well, training videos can help organizations of any size scale their employee development programs, increase engagement and boost retention. If you’re looking for even more inspiration, check out the videos our customers have created using Vyond’s animation tools.
Vyond can help you realize all of your training video needs—and save you time and money in the process.
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#### How to Direct Your Internal Voice Over Talent for a High-Quality Video Voice Over
Let’s say you want to record a voice-over through the DIY route, because of either budget or company policies. A DIY voice-over means you likely aren’t hiring a professional but using an internal voice-over from a team member instead, probably someone who has no experience recording a voice-over.
The problem is they don’t know what to do. And you, their teammate, don’t know either, potentially compromising the quality of your voice-over.
To direct your internal voice-over talent toward a successful project, you need to give your inexperienced actors precise instructions to connect emotionally with your listeners while also making them comfortable in this new role.
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Prepare the recording details
Ideally, you’ll be able to direct your internal voice-over talent in a recording studio together, but that might not be possible for a number of reasons. Whether you’re preparing your colleague via email, providing live-stream moral support, or standing next to them in the recording booth there are several factors to consider.
If you can’t control the recording environment in person, you’ll need to make sure your voice actor has a decent microphone, a quiet recording space, and proper microphone placement.
Here’s an internal Vyond video we share with our employees before they record a voice-over on their own.
Ensure your colleague understands your target audience
To record lines in a tone and style of voice that attracts your target audience, it’s crucial to study your future listener. Otherwise, you risk recording a voice-over your listeners can’t relate to or won’t enjoy.
First, determine what your colleague already knows about the audience and then share more information with them, like the reasons why prospects reach out to your brand or how employees feel about your current training videos.
After your colleague understands the viewers’ emotions, they can incorporate them into the project, making it more relatable. For example, instead of reading a line in their regular voice style, your new voice-over talent can make their voice sound frustrated during a scene they know would stress your customers.
Help them prepare their voice
Your internal voice-over artist may be uncomfortable recording a voice-over because they’re not a professional. Their initial instinct when recording may be stiff or formal and they’re unlikely to know how to prepare their voice ahead of time.
Warm-ups are one way to help them feel more at ease while recording. Before your recording day, gather challenging tongue twisters. Then, tell your colleague to practice them. When you rehearse tricky sentences like tongue twisters, says voice actor Rio Rocket, the sentences from your script will be a cakewalk.
Instructing your colleague to drink water and get enough sleep will also improve their sound. Here are some simple tips to improve voice-over skills without formal voice training.
Share tricks to nail the right tone
You probably have a clear idea of the right tone for your video’s voice-over, but describing that tone to others is challenging since emotions are abstract. Instead of giving vague instructions—think, “can you sound happier?”—try these tricks to help your colleague express the tone you want.
Tell them to imagine they are talking to a friend
Susan Glow, Manager of the Award-Winning Voice Over Talent known as the Glow Girls, recommends having your colleague envision talking to a friend so the recording sounds conversational.
When focusing on an audience as we speak, we can sound unnatural because the “audience” is not a person you know. As a result, it’s common to incorporate voice traits we think these people like, such as sounding posh or like a millennial. But since you are forcing these traits into your speech, your voice ends up sounding unappealing.
In contrast, our voice tone sounds more natural when we focus on a friend. Consequently, the voice-over sounds like a conversation, which she says is usually better received in today’s world.
Share examples of other voice actors expressing different emotions
People define emotions differently. For example, your colleague might define a lazy voice as informal and fast, but you might define a lazy voice as one that’s slow. To ensure your colleagues perform the line how you want, share examples of voice actors conveying these emotions.
Examples remove the subjectiveness from vague directives like “act like a veteran lawyer” or “sound like an unusually intelligent ten-year-old,” allowing your colleague to listen to the voice tone and style they need to follow during the recording. So instead of saying “sound lazy,” tell them to speak slowly as a way of sounding lazy while showing your colleague examples of voice actors displaying laziness.
To find what you need, it might be best to search through popular animated TV shows or act the lines yourself. The Vyond template library and this post with 7 industry-leading voice-over examples will also help you find useful examples.
Direct your internal voice-over talent to smile while recording
Speaking with a smile can add warmth to your voice.
For example, say, “there’s a snake in my boot,” in two ways. First, while slightly opening your mouth, like if you were experiencing extreme boredom. Then, with a complete smile, like when greeting your dog. You’ll find the smile-full version will sound warmer, while the “bored” version tends to sound lifeless.
Besides adding warmth to your colleague’s voice, smiles also modify how your audience perceives your character. For instance, if you are recording for a young audience, says voice-over coach Marc Cashman, you’ll need to smile more than if you were recording for an older audience.
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Make their first recording a one-take
Your colleagues are likely the most anxious during the first take. Help them get the jitters out by recording a rough first take of the entire script.
When you let your colleagues record without pauses, you allow the entire team, says Glow, to understand the timing between lines and sections that might need rephrasing or changes in the pace. You might get lucky, and this first take might end up being the best. But if there’s room for improvement, she says, go back to each section or line and record each several times until you get the best one.
Regardless of the first take’s quality, praise your colleague’s bravery for recording in one take without previous voice-over experience, alongside any particular line you found great. These compliments motivate them to give their best during the rest of the session.
Pay attention to their diction
Listeners won’t understand your colleague’s voice-over if the diction is unclear, prompting them to leave before the end or falsely interpret your video’s messaging. Direct your internal voice-over talent with enunciation tips to avoid this scenario.
Give your colleague a copy of your script so they can rehearse it before recording. Besides getting used to your stories’ pacing, they may spot words they don’t know how to pronounce, which you can later clarify.
Additionally, tell your colleague to slow down and articulate each word clearly. Because of the slow pace, it’s harder to skip words than if they spoke at their regular speed. Once they grasp each word, resume the project by telling them to record based on the script’s guidelines.
Highlight what they are doing right
Because your colleague isn’t a professional, they may feel overwhelmed or discouraged recording their first voice over. These feelings are likely to lead to stress, affecting their performance.
Therefore, to ensure they enjoy the project, give your colleague positive feedback throughout the recording. Highlight what they are doing right, for example, by praising an emotion-driven line they just performed, so they enjoy performing instead of constantly wishing to go back to their regular tasks.
Use Speech Enhancement
Vyond’s Speech Enhancement feature – powered by VyondAI – automatically removes background noises to make your voice-over sound crisp and clean. Don’t worry about that lawnmower in the background – just click on the speech enhancement toggle when you’ve finished recording your voice-over! It’s that simple.
Direct your internal voice-over talent for the best results
Share these tips with your internal voice actors before and during your next voice-over session. This expert-backed advice will help them improve their skills and give you a high-quality end result.
In Vyond, an intuitive cloud-based animation software, anyone can create stories aligned with their brand or ideas. Our platform also lets you add voice-overs to communicate with your viewer at a pace, tone, and style you like. See where your creativity can take you with a free trial of Vyond.
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#### How To Embed A Video In PowerPoint From Any Source
Summary: Embedding a video into your PowerPoint is easy–and a good way to improve engagement. PowerPoint supports embedding both online videos (YouTube, Vimeo, etc.) and offline video files (.mp4, .m4v, .mov). Online videos require an internet connection, while offline videos are ideal for presentations without reliable connectivity. To embed, use the Insert > Video options or drag and drop the file, then test playback, video size, and connection stability. Converting slides to a read-only PowerPoint Show (.ppsx) preserves content. Tip: One of the quickest ways to make videos for a presentation is to use an instant video creation tool like Vyond.
There are several reasons to embed a video in PowerPoint. Richard Mayer, a psychologist that has been studying the link between learning and multimedia exposure for decades, says that “it is better to present information in words, pictures, and video.”
Moreover, Mayer’s research found an audience is more likely to recall data for a longer time and more accurately in multisensory environments. So, creating text-only slides makes it more likely that your clients, colleagues, or boss will forget what you said in just a few minutes. In contrast, mixing text with videos can raise the chances of positively influencing your team or prospects.
Whether you are using the app on your desktop or the web version, you can embed videos into your PowerPoint presentations with our three-step tutorial.
How to Embed Video in PowerPoint in 3 Steps
1. Locate the video you wish to embed
Your video’s location determines what steps you have to take to embed it in PowerPoint and whether you’ll need an internet connection to do so.
You’ll need an internet connection to embed videos from streaming sites you haven’t downloaded. PowerPoint supports videos hosted on YouTube, Vimeo, SlideShare, Stream, and Flipgrid as of 2022. If you try to embed an online video without an internet connection, PowerPoint will ask you to join a network or insert a video from your computer.
To get ready to embed these videos, copy the video’s link—it is usually in each platform’s sharing or embedding options. Once you’ve copied the link, you’re ready to add the video to your PowerPoint presentation.
You don’t need an internet connection to embed downloaded videos. But you’ll need the PowerPoint Mac or Windows desktop app, as you can only embed online videos with PowerPoint’s web version.
Unlike online videos, downloaded embedded videos can play without a connection. So, they are ideal for presenting your slides in boardrooms or in-person events where you can’t control the internet’s speed.
PowerPoint allows you to embed offline videos in an .mp4, .m4v, or .mov video file. Although the steps vary between streaming platforms, most let you download videos with these extensions in a few clicks.
For example; you can download Vimeo videos using the download button underneath the video player. YouTube doesn’t allow you to download videos. However, you can use third-party video downloading tools like VLC player to insert downloaded YouTube videos into your PowerPoint presentation.
2. How to embed a video in PowerPoint slides
The steps to add a video to a PowerPoint slide differ based on whether you’re adding an online or downloaded video and the PowerPoint software you are using.
If you want to embed videos from streaming platforms like YouTube and Vimeo using PowerPoint:
Click the Insert tab.
Select Video and then Online Videos.
Copy and paste the video’s URL into the search box.
Click Insert.
If you’re embedding downloaded videos, follow the next three steps:
Click the Insert tab.
Select “This Device” from the Video option. This tab also gives you the chance to insert stock videos from Microsoft’s gallery.
Navigate to the folder that has your video.
Insert the video.
A simpler alternative to these steps is to drag and drop the video file into the slide where you want it to play.
3. Check that your PowerPoint presentation plays as planned
Embedding a video into your presentations doesn’t mean it’ll play when you present it. The screen you will use to show the slides and your internet connection dictate if your audience can see your video.
You can follow three tips to guarantee you can play your videos and keep the viewer’s attention.
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Create a PowerPoint Show before emailing it to others
A PowerPoint Show (.ppsx) is an uneditable version of your presentation that opens as a slideshow. It prevents viewers from changing data, preserving your slide’s message.
You can turn your presentation into a PowerPoint Show using the desktop version of PowerPoint:
Click on File.
Select Save As.
Write a name for your file.
Choose “PowerPoint Show” from the drop-down menu below the name box.
You can now email the file or upload it to a cloud service like Google Drive.
Confirm that you have a stable internet connection
A stable internet connection ensures that you can play embedded online videos when you need to. If your connection is unstable, you risk losing the viewer’s attention while fixing the internet.
You can visit the area where you’ll present your slides beforehand to test if the connection is stable. You can test this by playing YouTube videos at different resolutions. If the video stops or buffers continuously, save the video on your PC or Mac to ensure you can present without an internet connection.
Play the video before your presentation to see how it looks
A video that looks flawless on your computer may look too small, bright, or pixelated on the screen on which you’ll present it. If your audience can’t see your video, it’s unlikely that you’ll achieve your presentation goals.
You can play your video on the screen where you’ll present it to verify that the slides’ content is visible. If it’s not visible, go to the size tab and pick a video size that lets viewers see the video.
It’s helpful to follow the hierarchy principle when choosing a position and size for your video. This design principle states that the most important visual elements should be the most prominent. For example; imagine that the slide where you’ll embed the video has a title, body text, and subtitle. Here, the video should be larger than everything else, as it’s the visual element that you want viewers to focus on.
You can also adjust the video’s appearance in the Video Format tab. The Corrections menu lets you make the video brighter or darker to ensure that every phrase, person, or situation featured is visible. Meanwhile, the Color tab lets you change your video’s hue, tone, and shade to accomplish a specific visual aesthetic.
Bring your presentations to life with your own animated videos.
Make your presentations dynamic using animated Vyond PowerPoint templates like these.
Vyond is an intuitive animation software that anyone without an animation background can use. You can use it to create animated charts, metaphors, and scenes and later embed them into your presentation to make it more engaging. When you’re a Vyond customer, you also have access to Vyond’s templates to create captivating slides. Ready to bring your presentations to life? Create a Vyond account.
How do I turn a PowerPoint into a video?
Generative AI has made this process really easy. For example, Vyond Go’s instant script and video generator lets you drop in a PowerPoint file (or PDF, Google doc, or URL), select which parts you want to use as reference, and generate a video in a wide variety of styles in less than a minute. You can then edit the results directly in Quick Edit or bring the file over to Vyond Studio for larger scale changes.
What’s the best AI tool for making video clips for PowerPoint presentations?
The best tool will depend on the type of video output you want. Canva can help you create micro-clips with audio. Synthesia is a leading AI avatar video creator. But the best overall AI video creation tool for creating short videos of all kinds is Vyond. With its instant video creation feature, you can create talking head videos, animated explainers, screen recording clips, GIFs and more.
How can I embed a video file made in Vyond in an email?
Here are the steps on how to embed a quick video created in Vyond into a Google Mail email: Click Compose to create a new email message. If your video file is 25MB or smaller, click the paperclip icon (Attach files) at the bottom of the compose window and select your video file. It uploads directly and will appear as a clickable attachment. If your video is larger than 25MB, click the Google Drive icon (next to the paperclip), upload your video to Google Drive if not already there. Select the video and click Insert. The email will include a thumbnail and link to the Drive video. Make sure you adjust sharing permissions (e.g., “Anyone with the link can view”).
#### How To Embed Video Codes From Any Source
A video embed code is a string of code containing a video’s data: its URL, size, and name, among other variables. These codes allow you to show video content on your blog and landing pages. And you definitely want video content on your blog and landing pages—research by Wistia showed that videos boost session time by 2.6x.
You need to learn how to customize and embed video codes from any source to ensure the videos play smoothly. Not knowing how to embed your code properly can mean hosting an unresponsive video that viewers can’t watch or share. These three steps go beyond the usual “copy-and-paste” advice, teaching you how to embed videos that stand out in your articles.
1. Choose where you’ll host your video.
Each video hosting service has unique features and constraints. Some hosting providers offer just the basic tools. These will let you host videos and pick their placement, which is enough if all you need is to distribute videos on your website. But for other companies, these tools might be insufficient for all of your needs. For example, a basic hosting service is not enough if you want to edit how a video plays and track its performance.
Cheap hosting providers are affordable, but they experience more downtime than reputable ones. A reader who can’t watch a video that promises to solve an important problem will look for an answer elsewhere. It doesn’t matter if you embed a video from your laptop or a streaming site—you’ll want to choose a reputable hosting provider with tools that’ll help you achieve your goals.
Your goals determine the hosting you’ll choose. If you want to grow your brand awareness, use YouTube. A video you upload to YouTube and later embed on your website will rank on YouTube and Google search, so you’ll reach the widest audience.
For a company focusing on high-intent leads rather than a broad reach, Wistia is a better option because of its in-video lead generation tool. It lets you add CTAs and forms to build a list of potential customers straight from the video player.
2. Locate the video’s embed code
Some CMSs let you embed videos without their embed code. All you need to do is paste the video’s URL, and the CMS will insert it into your website. While convenient, it’s better to search for the video and its embed code manually. Access to the code allows you to present your video how you want.
Complete control over the embed code allows you to provide a pleasant viewing experience across devices. And making it easy to watch the video is essential to helping your page rank on Google. Their Web Vitals measure how easy it is to browse your page. When viewers struggle to play or click a button because of its location, Google can demote your articles.
Most hosting services store embed codes under the video player’s Share option. While the code’s information varies between hosts, you’ll usually see data about the video’s size, duration, and title. You can edit this information once you’re ready to embed your video.
3. Customize how your video looks and plays
You can increase the likelihood that someone watches your video by editing how it looks and plays. Unedited embedded codes can play videos that get lost within the article or take too long to get to the point, garnering zero views. You can maximize the number of views your video receives with a few adjustments.
Appearance
Your video player’s size, color, and placement influence if someone watches your video. Viewers can miss out on your video if its player is too small or barely visible. To influence readers to stop scrolling, pick a color for your video player that contrasts with the rest of the page.
Let’s say your page uses a white background and your video player uses a thumbnail and play button in a light color. In that case, a reader skimming your article might not see it. Alternatively, imagine you edit your embed code so the play button is bright red and the video covers 80% of the page. These edits would make it hard for viewers to miss out on your video.
You can edit a video’s size and the player’s colors by editing the code. To change the size, go to the embed code and look for “width=” and “height=.” Choose a size that covers most of your website’s screen to make it visible. In most cases, a 1280-pixel width and a 720-pixel height are enough.
In-line style code can adjust the color of your video player and its border. Change these elements by first finding the word “iframe” in the code. This text is a code line that embeds another document into an HTML file. Then paste style=”border: 5px solid #AAA; immediately after it. The number before the “px” indicates the border’s width, while the three letters after # state define the border’s color in HTML color codes.
Player settings
Embedded videos play differently depending on your code’s parameters, also known as attributes. Edit the code to make your videos more useful for viewers.
Sometimes you want the viewer to skip the start of a video. Maybe the intro isn’t helpful for their problem, and you want them to get straight to the essential information. Or perhaps it targets a different audience but has information everyone might find helpful. Whatever the reason, you can adjust the code to start your video whenever you choose.
YouTube’s embed options let you edit the video’s start minute without making you write lines of code. Go to Share, Embed, tick the “Start at” box, and write the time where your video should start. People outside of YouTube can usually set the start time under the embedding options.
Another helpful attribute is the Loop parameter, which allows you to make a video repeat itself once it finishes. This is useful for viewers learning a skill from an educational video. This benefit occurs because the brain is better at recalling and retaining information that it sees or listens to more than once.
You can loop your video in most hosting services by ticking a box in the embed options. If you’re hosting on YouTube, look for the web address after “src=” in the embed code—this line of code is the source URL.
Then, look for the Video ID—the alphanumeric letters after “/embed/.” Write “?playlist=[Video ID] &loop=1” next to the last number of your video ID, and, from that point forward, your embedded video will loop itself.
Embed Vyond-Made Videos Into Your Website
Vyond is an intuitive animation software that members of the marketing, human resources, and learning & development teams can use to create engaging videos. These videos reduce onboarding time by 67%, grow conversions by the same percentage, and boost video shares by 375%. With Vyond’s templates, anyone—regardless of video-animation experience—can gain immense benefit from using videos.
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#### How to Energize Your Presentations with Video
You’re giving your sales team a PowerPoint presentation about the group’s performance over the last quarter. After a few slides, you notice that most of your coworkers are either looking down at their phones or at their laptop screens—you’ve lost their attention.
To keep audiences engaged, your presentation needs energy. Movement, characters, color, and more—video is the ideal presentation content for elevating the attention and spirit of the room. It’s one of the most engaging mediums.
Grab the attention of your audience by incorporating video in your presentation. In this post, we will cover three easy yet powerful ways to use video in any type of professional presentation, whether it’s a sales deck or an employee-onboarding session.
1. Adding video to a PowerPoint presentation
If you’re using traditional slide-based presentation software, such as PowerPoint or other popular alternatives, the most common way to add video is to import a video file.
Generally, importing a video is preferred over adding a video through a YouTube link or embed code because you won’t need to rely on streaming the video during your live talk.
A major benefit of importing your video file is that it gives you control over your presentation. For example, PowerPoint allows you to customize the video-playing experience in a number of ways, including:
Manual versus automatic playing
Thumbnail image
Video size
Video borders
How to add video files to your presentation
Importing a video file into PowerPoint is a simple process—click “Insert,” select “Video,” and then click “Movie from File.”
Here are a few technical tips to keep in mind when adding and presenting a video from PowerPoint:
Avoid adding video links that play the video from a specific folder on your computer. You’ll be able to play the video only if you are presenting from that device.
Avoid adding video to your presentation through YouTube links. You won’t be able to play the video if your internet connection is disrupted.
If you’re having trouble importing a video file, make sure it is in the right format. Here is a list of supported file formats for PowerPoint.
2. Adding GIFs to a presentation
Besides video files, you can also import a GIF—an animated image—into your presentation.
A GIF is basically a soundless mini video. It can be used to add information or humor or convey a mood in your slides.
GIFs are a great presentation asset for quickly illustrating small actions and telling micro-stories. They’re simple to create and easy for audiences to digest. GIFs are also excellent for setting the tone of presentation slides as a type of “ambient video”—a seamlessly looping video shown passively to capture attention and cultivate a certain emotion.
The minimal nature of GIFs is, however, somewhat limiting. GIF files are smaller and may appear grainy if they are made larger in slides. For people hoping to show somewhat long, full-screen videos in their presentations, it’s better to import a video file than to use a GIF.
How to add GIFs to your presentation
Adding a GIF to a presentation often begins with creating the GIF itself. There are tools available online that allow you to convert existing video files into GIFs. Recordit is especially convenient if you’re trying to create a GIF of your screen activity. And, of course, if you’re creating a video in Vyond, our platform allows you to save your animated videos as GIFs (a Premium and Professional account feature).
When your GIF is created, importing it into your PowerPoint is easy—just click “Insert,” select “Photo” then “Photo Browser” and choose the GIF file from your computer or saved drive.
To help you make the most of this format, here are a few tips for creating effective, engaging presentation GIFs:
If you’re displaying data, consider creating a GIF to showcase the information. The slight movement of the GIF can illuminate the data’s underlying meaning that you want audiences to appreciate. For example, a GIF of a positive sales revenue chart over a period of time could show a line chart that steadily moves upward.
It’s distracting to view a slide that has a constantly moving GIF, so build in a pause to make the motion less disruptive. In Vyond, you can do this by extending the end of your last video scene so the GIF has a longer pause at the end before it loops.
Here’s an example:
3. Video as the presentation
You don’t always need to use PowerPoint to create presentations: A video can be the presentation.
Animation platforms, like Vyond, offer plenty of presentation-appropriate visuals—title cards, infographics, etc.—so you’re able to create visually appealing “slides,” which are essentially extended video scenes. You can easily pause the video to talk about the information being shown because the frames are longer than normal.
Compared with PowerPoint, the video format is much more engaging because you can incorporate more visuals, motion, and sound throughout the presentation.
Using video as the presentation also makes it easier to keep your content consistently branded. With a video as the entire presentation, you can ensure that every moment is stylistically aligned with your brand.
There are, however, a few challenges with this presentation format. Video players don’t include a notes function, as other tools provide, so you need to memorize your talking points or have a copy of them nearby as you present the video. You also have less mobility as a presenter—you must be near the computer at all times so you’re able to hit the space bar to pause and to play. For those reasons, it’s probably best to use this format for internal presentations that happen in small, laid-back settings.
How to create video presentations
There are no strict boundaries for creating video presentations. While some people create slide-like videos, the presentation could also include scenarios with characters to illustrate a concept.
Technically speaking, there are a few tips that can help with seamlessly presenting through a video:
Extend the time that the visuals in a frame are shown so that you have a moment to press pause and elaborate on what is being shown.
Consider where you need to include or eliminate audio so that you’re always able to talk to the audience as the video is playing.
Keep a physical or digital copy of your presentation notes nearby as you present since you won’t be able to see them on your computer as the video plays.
Download a file of the video so that you can easily play it during your presentation, even if the internet connection is weak.
Raise the energy of your presentation with video
Everyone has sat through at least one boring PowerPoint presentation. You’ll put your audience to sleep if you include too many static slides in your presentation. Instead, liven up and engage your audience by adding video to your presentation. The movement of video—whether it’s in a PowerPoint or it’s the presentation itself—will capture your viewers’ attention and encourage them to focus on the information you’re sharing.
About Vyond
Vyond allows people of all skill levels in all industries and job roles to create dynamic and powerful media. With features that go beyond moving text and images, you can build character-driven stories or compelling data visualizations that engage audiences and deliver results.
Start making your own videos today. Sign up for a free trial and attend our bi-weekly tour of Vyond Studio.
#### How to Evolve Your Corporate Trainings
How do most employees feel about attending work trainings? I’d venture to say that most love to hate them. And although methods have improved, employers still struggle to provide trainings that truly engage audiences and give them what they need – when, where, and how they need it.
While the industry likes to talk about the newest shiny thing in terms of future trends in the training space, I see two foundational concepts driving success for corporate trainings in 2020 and beyond. And they come down to things that are simple and seemingly obvious, but hard for companies to implement.
Message Before Medium
Employees want to be treated as people, not transactions, and corporate trainings need to be communicated in that fashion. This means that when an employee receives a meeting invite for an ethics training, that session better speak to them as humans as opposed to churning out a running list of “Don’t Do” scenarios.
All the new tech and tools in the world won’t help if you don’t have a solid foundation – an authentic message, personalized specifically for your audience.
Once you have that basis, you can think about the best medium to convey the message and oftentimes, that medium is video. Video trainings can help you focus on the key components of your message, since the goal is to keep things simple, engaging, and understandable. It’s also easy to personalize your message so that the training is relatable and connects to your audience.
Matt Moran, a professional public speaking coach for over 20 years, uses Vyond to help build his online courses. Vyond’s ease of use and storytelling capabilities are only part of his reasons for using Vyond, in addition to combining it with live-action to break up the monotony of speaking to his audience. Matt noticed that his students found animation to be more engaging and made it easier to understand his messages and lessons.
Traveling Trainings
Training methods must evolve with the changing nature of the modern workplace. Many of today’s professionals are frequently on the move or do not conform to a normal 9-to-5 workday. Trainings need to reflect that reality and become more engaging, accessible and adaptable.
Using video allows HR leaders to provide the freedom and flexibility employees need. Workers can learn at any time and in any place, the trainings can be easily updated and it’s quicker than ever to create them.
One example that impressed me was Providence St. Joseph Health’s extensive training revamp to prepare their employees for a complete digital transformation in their workplace. They utilized an app that allowed workers to scan a picture or prompt with their phones, which would start short augmented reality-enhanced scenarios. Employees could choose which trainings they wanted to take where they wanted to take them with these mobile, engaging and quick offerings.
It will be interesting to see how these two trends play out over the year, as companies start to pick up on their importance and take advantage of them. I truly believe that those who are able to successfully implement these trends will see long-term results.
Create your own corporate raining videos with Vyond. Start a free trial.
#### How to Explain Your Parental Leave Policy with Video
The experience of becoming a new parent can be confusing for employees in the workplace. Often, people are unsure about their companies’ parental leave policies, and they might even feel scared about asking for the time off, for fear of losing their jobs. Lower employees’ anxiety by clearly explaining your parental leave policies. Employees who clearly understand how your company supports new parents will feel more confident in their ability to perform their job with a child on the way.
Not sure how to explain your policies? Video, especially animated video, is an ideal medium for teaching the guidelines. You can break down the complicated details of these policies visually, making them easier to understand.
In this post, we’ll walk you through the creation of a parental leave policy video, from planning in pre-production to distribution in post-production.
Planning Your Parental Leave Policy Video
It’s important to include the details. You should mention eligibility requirements, the duration, and compensation plans of your policies for the video to be helpful. Ensure that you include all of your policy’s key information by carefully planning your video with the following strategies.
Decide what policy details to emphasize
Parental leave policies and the laws surrounding them are loaded with details that can overwhelm employees. For example, Harvard includes its parental leave policy with other leave of absence options on one web page. This demonstrates the relationship between the internal policy and state and federal regulations surrounding parental leave, but the amount of detail can be overwhelming and confusing.
Your video is an opportunity to demystify this policy information.
Use your video to highlight the most important parts of your policy for employees. Examples of essential details include eligibility requirements for employees and how many weeks of unpaid leave or paid parental leave you offer. By focusing on the key details, employees are more likely to understand and remember how your company supports new parents.
To decide which information you want to include, review the most current documentation on your parental leave policies. Take notes on three key policy factors—eligibility, duration, and compensation—to identify the most essential details. Here are a few questions to guide your research:
Eligibility
Are only full-time employees eligible, or are part-time employees eligible as well?
Do employees need to have worked at your company for a minimum amount of time to be eligible?
Do you offer leave only for employees who give birth (maternity leave) or also for employees whose partners give birth (bonding leave)?
Do you offer leave for the adoption of a child?
Duration:
How many weeks of unpaid leave and/or paid leave do you offer?
Do you offer weeks of sick leave for employees during their pregnancy and/or after the birth of a child?
Compensation:
Do you offer paid leave or unpaid leave, or both?
Does your compensation plan vary by employee type?
Are employees allowed or expected to use their paid time off (PTO) during their parental leave?
Are employees expected to use short term disability benefits in lieu of or in addition to other compensation?
Pulling out this core information, you’ll know which information is critical to share in your video.
Understand how your policy (and video) can vary by state
If your business has multiple locations, you may need to plan several versions of your video based on state regulations.
While there are federal laws that regulate parental leave policies across the US—the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), the Pregnancy Discrimination Act—each state also has its own unique regulations. You must understand how parental leave laws vary in states where your business is located to plan how your video messaging will need to change for each location.
Here is a step-by-step plan for reviewing current regulations and adapting your messaging for different laws:
Review parental leave laws in states where your business is located. You can reference this resource to learn about regulations in each state.
Note differences in regulations for each state where your business is located. For example, three states—New Jersey, Rhode Island, and California—support paid family leave, while the remaining states do not.
Plan to create multiple video versions for each location. You will only need to make slight adjustments to the text to reflect different eligibility, compensation, and duration regulations. For example, employees in Minnesota need to have worked for 12 months to be eligible for leave, while New York employees must have worked for at least 26 weeks.
Vyond protip: Our studio’s drag-and-drop editor makes it easy to adjust a single video for different states. Just click on your video’s text boxes, and then type the information you want to add.
Stay informed on unique parental leave regulations in your business’s locations and you’ll know how to adapt your message for each of your employee bases.
Creating Your Parental Leave Policy Video
After planning the content of your video, it’s time to begin production. While we won’t go into every technical step of making a video (you can learn more about that here), we will explain several tactics that relate to parental leave policies specifically. Use these strategies to create a video that clearly explains your policy in an inclusive and engaging way.
Be inclusive with casting
Your employees’ personal lives are going to vary quite a bit from person to person—that diversity is what makes your company a rich and interesting place to work. In your video, be sure to depict parenting in ways that leave all of your employees feeling included, regardless of their background.
Whether you’re creating a live-action or animated video, casting is a powerful way to make your video inclusive. Here are a few casting tips to show characters that represent a wide range of experiences and backgrounds:
Portray a variety of parenting styles. Show characters that are in heterosexual and same-sex relationships, as well as a single-parent scenario.
Use gender-neutral language to describe characters in your video. Include all genders by using the phrase “the employee” instead of pronouns.
Show a diverse range of characters. With this casting, your video won’t leave any current or future employee feeling excluded.
Vyond protip: Our studio features a custom character creator, allowing you to easily create unique characters of all backgrounds.
The Vyond Studio Character Creator
Cast a wide range of characters in your video and every employee will feel like they are being represented as they watch.
Balance policy details with visuals
Viewers need to understand specific details of your parental leave policy that visuals can’t fully communicate. To communicate this information, your video will need to feature text.
With that said, you don’t want to overwhelm employees with too many words or you’ll quickly lose their attention. You need a fairly even mix of visuals and text to keep viewers both engaged and informed. Here are a few tips to achieve that balance:
Use icons to quickly and simply convey information. While text takes time to read and comprehend, an icon’s meaning is immediately recognizable. Use icons to complement the text in your video and avoid cognitive overload for viewers.
Focus on one area of your policy at a time. If you try to describe every aspect of your policy in one frame, the screen will be overflowing with text and images.
Discuss one aspect—employee eligibility, compensation, leave duration—and your video will be easy for employees to follow.
Limit policy descriptions to one sentence. As you focus on each area of your policy, limit your text to one sentence or just a few words to keep viewers engaged. If you need to fit in more information, use narration to explain what you want to say.
Balance the amount of text and visuals in your video to keep employees engaged while still teaching them about your policy.
Vyond protip: Create your parental leave policy video in no time with our free Vyond video template. (You must have an active Vyond free trial or paid account to access the template.)
Sharing your Parental Leave Policy Video
The power of your parental leave policy video depends on how well you distribute it. If you widely and actively share your video, a large number of employees will understand how your parental leave policy works. To help you distribute the video you’ve created, we’ve outlined three strategies below for sharing.
Make your video a company-wide resource
Every employee should watch your parental leave policy video. If they ever decide to become a parent, they will know what type of support to expect from your company. Even if an employee doesn’t plan on becoming a parent, they should watch your video to understand how their fellow team members’ roles will be adjusted if they have a child.
Encourage every employee to watch your video with these two methods:
Send the video via Slack or email. Once you’ve finished creating the video, share it through your company’s main messaging method with all employees. Include a note to explain the key features of your policy for employees to skim over before watching.
Save the video in a company database. Upload your video to an internal knowledge-sharing platform, such as Tettra, so your entire team can return to the resource when they want to refresh their knowledge about your policy.
By sharing your video widely, you’ll help every employee understand how your parental leave policy works.
Integrate your video into employee onboarding
New employees who join your company should watch your parental leave policy video as a part of their training. Even if they currently aren’t planning to become parents, they should still be aware of your parental leave policy in case they do become parents later.
Integrate your video into your company’s onboarding plan by coordinating with other human resources team members. Explain that you would like to show this policy video during the section of onboarding that teaches new hires about company benefits.
If new employees are expected to watch onboarding videos at home, consider sending a quick, simple quiz to check their understanding of your parental leave policies. To save time, you could create one quiz with other HR team members to quiz new hires on all of your company’s HR policies taught in onboarding.
Send to employees who are expecting
In the weeks and months after watching your video, employees will remember the key details of your company’s parental leave policy. But by the time they decide to become parents, employees may have trouble recalling some of the policy information that they learned.
Refresh their memory by sending along your video when they announce that they are expecting a child and request leave. You can email the video to employees with a brief message that includes the following:
Your congratulations
A summary of the core information of your policy
An invitation for the employee to reach out with any questions they may have
Sending your video to employees who are expecting a new child not only keeps them informed but also shows employees that their workplace fully supports them and their careers as they become new parents.
Educate Your Employees with a Parental Leave Policy Video
When an employee is expecting a child, reading through parental leave policy documentation can be confusing and stressful. Often, the language of these policies is especially detailed, so it’s hard for employees to know what to expect from their employer as they become new parents.
Make the transition of welcoming a child easier for your employees by creating a parental leave policy video. Using this guide, you can create a compelling video that simplifies your policy information by breaking it down visually. Watching your video, employees who are expecting can feel confident about their future at your workplace as they go through a major life change.
Parental Leave Video Template
Follow these steps to access the template video at the top of this post:
Log into your free trial or Vyond account.
Click this link.
The video project will open in your account for you to customize. Customers can download and share.
#### How to Hire a Voice Actor (And Where to Find Them)
With hundreds of websites and companies offering voice over services and thousands of voice over actors to choose from, deciding how to hire a voice actor seems like a lot of work. It is, in some ways. If you don’t know where to look, it’s easy to hire voice actors who tie you into feedback loops, underdeliver, or barely communicate with you.
You can hire a trustworthy and high-quality voice actor easily enough with some guidance and knowledge of some reputable sources. Here’s how to hire voice actors where to find the best voice talent.
How to hire a voice actor
Write a script that includes notes for your voice actor
Complete your script and finalize it internally before starting your voice talent search. This video from Rued Riis will help lay the foundation for one scriptwriting style.
As you write your script, be sure to prepare it with voice performance details. Include notes such as “extend a pause after this line to sound mysterious,” “emphasize this word to sound more heroic,” or “use a sarcastic tone for this line and a happy customer service voice for this line”
While often overlooked, these notes on reading certain lines are the difference between receiving a good voice over and an excellent voice over that conveys exactly what you’re looking to communicate.
Determine what additional services you’ll need from your voice actor
A voice actor’s voice over experience is one of several variables to look at when hiring talent for your voice over. The industries they’ve worked with, the voices they specialize in, and the services they provide all play a role in your voice over’s quality.
Let’s say you’ll pick one of two voice over actors to record a voice over for an explainer video: one specialized in explainer videos and one who isn’t. While both can deliver a high-quality voice over, the one trained in explainer videos can propose changes on enunciation, words, and voice style that will benefit your video; a non-specialized voice actor is less likely to offer such services.
Define your brand’s voice profile and create a job description
Your brand’s voice profile is a set of characteristics and emotions that listeners associate with your brand. Defining your brand’s voice profile will help you locate a voice artist to consistently record voice overs in the same style.
Describe each emotion, trait, or characteristic of your brand’s voice in detail to avoid ambiguity. List your brand’s emotions, feelings, and voice characteristics and support each of these with an example. For instance, if you want your voice to have a British accent, sound young, transmit excitement, and appear genuine, reach a team consensus on what each of these means before hiring a voice over actor.
Your voice over job description will be a blend between your script, additional services (audio editing, for example), and your brand’s voice profile.
Give feedback to your voice actor
Even after sending a script and job requirements, your new voice actor may not record every line in the tone and style you want.
Send them detailed feedback on lines you aren’t happy with, highlighting what went wrong and right. For example, you can tell them to sound more energetic during a specific line while providing a detailed explanation of what energetic means for your team.
Through quick, detail-rich feedback, they’ll be able to record new lines and send you improved audio files shortly.
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Where to find professional voice over artists
Voice actors offer different services, price packages, and levels of expertise, depending on where you look for them. Overall, there are four types of places to find the most professional voice over artists. With this guide, you’ll learn how to hire a voice actor for your next project.
The video above is voiced by Laura Schreiber, a super happy full-time, professional voice over actress who does commercial, character, eLearning, narration, and promo work. Some of her advice about searching for a professional voice over artist is included below.
Professional search sites
Professional search sites are websites where you can access a pool of experienced voice actors. These sites help you find, manage, and make sure your voice over project meets your standards.
Besides exclusively offering experienced voice actors, the benefit of professional search sites is their vast number of filters. Most of these sites let you narrow your search by industry, voice type, and services they offer, among other filters.
Bunny Studio
Bunny Studio is a platform that assembles professional voice over artists. Each voice actor is pre-vetted so companies can exclusively hire top talent to be the voice for their video game, advertisement, learning, movie trailer, or other situation.
On Bunny Studio, you can browse voice over samples from the artists on the site, narrowing by filters like language, keywords, and purpose of the voice over. From there, you can submit your job description to choose a voice actor you like.
If you aren’t a fan of browsing through samples, you can hold auditions or let AI pair you with a voice actor based on your voice over’s needs.
GM Voices
GM Voices is a team of over 1,000 contracted voice actors recording voice overs for eLearning, explainer videos, audiobooks, and six other formats. Their voice artists use the company’s 18,000-foot production facility, ensuring every voice over meets your quality standards, allowing them to produce engaging, high-quality voice overs like the one below.
In GM Voices, you can follow the standard procedure of browsing through voice actors and choosing one. Alternatively, one of their associates can shortlist voice actors based on your preferences and budget.
Then, after adding your script alongside special notes on pronunciation or emotion, you can either wait for the recording to be over or dial into their phone bridge to listen as the voice over is recorded to provide real-time feedback.
Voiceover.biz
Voiceover.biz is a website where worldwide companies can hire professional voice over actors to record in dozens of languages. Their voice talent is part of the World-Voices Organization (WoVO), an association of voice artists that rigorously evaluates each potential member’s expertise before letting them in.
To find a voice over actor in Voiceover.biz, you need to browse through their list of qualified professionals, review each voice actor’s experience and samples, and then contact the one you like the most directly. Since Voiceover.biz doesn’t mediate the relationship, it’s essential to send a detailed job description and build a contract you both agree on.
Still looking for more? Voice123 and Voice Archive are two more search sites to try.
Voice talent agencies
Voice talent agencies know the nuances of the voice over industry, so they can find voice actors who exceed your expectations. These agencies depend on their voice artist’s performance, so they make sure to follow meticulous steps to guarantee customer satisfaction.
In exchange for a fee, usually between 10% and 20% of the voice actor’s earnings, these agencies will hold auditions for you, saving you time in the search process. Other agencies, like Stars, have a pre-selected roster of professional voice artists you can hire through their directory or auditions after submitting your script and requirements.
At Vyond, we used Stars in San Francisco to help us locate and audition voice actors for this company explainer video:
Freelance marketplaces
Freelance marketplaces are platforms where millions of worldwide independent workers signup to offer their services. Because of its freelancer diversity, you can easily find voice artists with the qualities you need.
While some freelance marketplaces like TopTal vet their freelancers, but most don’t have a rigorous selection process. Therefore, you have to research candidates more than you might on professional platforms where voice actors are pre-vetted.
Fiverr
Fiverr is a freelance marketplace where anyone can offer services to companies and individuals. As a result, you’ll find voice actors with various accents, tones, pricing packages, and experience levels. Inside the platform, voice artists publish their skill sets and services, and you, the company, contact them to work together after seeing their work.
Fiverr’s platform is intuitive. Once you log in, type “voice over actor” and any word that helps you narrow the search, like explainer videos, female, or French Canadian accents. When looking at freelancers, focus on those with numerous positive reviews or Fiverr’s Pro badge, a certification of the freelancer’s expertise in what they are offering.
Voices.com
Voices.com is a marketplace exclusively for voice over actors. Unlike in regular freelance marketplaces, like Upwork or Freelancer, you’ll find experienced voice over artists who make a living from recording voice overs, without needing to search through hundreds of amateurs searching for their first gig.
After creating an account, you can fill in the job posting and information from your job description, including a portion of your script. Voice artists from the platform will then read your script as part of their audition so you can sense the entire project’s quality.
Google
Google is the world’s largest search engine, so it’s impossible not to find a voice over actor in its database. However, their size can also work against you, hiding potentially great voice over actors and prioritizing the search results for those following SEO best practices.
While searching on Google, take information from your brand’s voice profile to avoid broad searches like “voice artist” and write more specific queries like “millennial male voice artist” or “mature feminine Spanish accent voice artist.”
Hire a voice actor for your next animated video
Now that you’ve found a professional voice actor, it’s time to create your video. You can easily create videos with intuitive animation tools, like Vyond.
With our platform, you can create a storyboard, that is, a visual representation of what’ll happen during each of your script’s scenes. Then, you can create animations that are perfectly synchronized with your audio, even if you don’t have previous animation or audio editing experience.
See where your creativity can take you with a free trial of Vyond.
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Great voice actors we recommend
Galena White – A multi-talented voice actor for West African English, British English, kids voices, animated characters, and eLearning videos
George Washington III – An authoritative political voice with a range for sports, upbeat and inspirational content, commercials, and even classical singing
Laura Schreiber – A super-happy, conversational, millennial-sounding voice
Lauren Nicole Goode – The voice of many Vyond videos since 2013; highly recommended
Martin Talbot – An energetic British actor with over a decade of experience
Paul Boucher – An expert in unaccented Canadian French, Canadian English, and American English
Sanjo Ogunseye – A soothing African-accented voice talent with a wide variety of experience; based in Nigeria
Samuel Flemming – Someone you may recognize from Marriott and HP
Sophia Cruz – Specializes in English to Spanish voiceovers in Mexican Spanish, LATAM Spanish, or neutral Spanish
Susie Valerio – A global voice with a tropical touch in English or Brazilian Portuguese
See where your creativity can take you with a free trial of Vyond.
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#### How to Improve Your Training and Marketing with GIFs Made in Vyond
After several years in the mainstream, GIFs are no longer relegated to just funny internet memes.
Companies large and small are now creating GIFs to grab and maintain attention, explain concepts, and tell stories, both in their internal training and communications–and their external marketing.
While our team can’t agree on how to pronounce GIFs (is it jiff, or giff?), we do know how to put them to good use. In this brief guide, we’ll share a few great use cases for GIFs in a professional setting and show you how to create them with Vyond.
4 places to use GIFs to capture attention
Email
In an endless sea of boring, plaintext emails, it’s tempting to include a video to engage the recipient of your messages. Most popular email clients like Gmail, however, don’t directly support video play within an email. If you try to embed a video in an email, you may end up with nothing more than an image shown in the body of the message. GIFs, however, almost always play with no issues. GIFs also automatically play, which can help draw attention to your content immediately after a user opens the message. Read more in this helpful resource for further context on how email clients handle video and GIF embeds.
Animated emails aren’t only for expert marketers. Anyone can cut through the inbox clutter with fun and delightful GIFs. The out-of-office GIF below is a perfect example of how to turn a boring email into a memorable one. Vyond customers can edit this GIF as a customizable video template.
GIFs can also be used to make internal communication more engaging. You can inject a bit of pop culture or humor into your email to keep things light, and the share-worthy nature of GIFs can boost the likelihood that employees will further discuss the message that you’re sharing.
Presentations
PowerPoint templates and other slide-based software can cause viewers’ eyes to glaze over. Try adding life to your presentation with GIFs. With their eye-catching movement and often humorous tone, GIFs will help you keep your audience engaged.
GIFs are extra effective when shown while transitioning to a new part of your presentation, as they provide visual support while the speaker introduces the coming section.
Ambient movement, too, goes a long way in making your presentation more dynamic. You can customize the slide above as an editable template with any existing Vyond account.
Social Media Posts
If you’re a marketer, consider using GIFs in your social campaigns. GIFs are popular across social media because they’re easy to share, short to consume, and compatible with almost every platform. Twitter is a particularly popular channel for GIFs, marrying the popular brevity of a tweet with short-form video at its smallest.
Promotional GIFs like the template below are a great example of using animation to drive sales on social media. You can edit this sales promo template with any existing Vyond account.
Of course, you can’t talk about GIFs on social media without mentioning the “reaction GIF,” which shows a recognizable personality showing emotion in response to a message or action.
When the “facepalm” feeling spreads to the entire audience.
Brands can use these GIFs to help viewers connect with a message or understand the tone that the speaker is trying to convey much more meaningfully than with text alone.
Messaging Apps
Brands are increasingly using chatbots to create one-on-one communications with customers via SMS or their smartphone’s messaging apps. In these chats, brands can insert GIFs to capture viewers’ attention and make the conversation feel friendly.
In this example, arts and culture festival South-by-Southwest (SXSW) uses GIFs to celebrate a user’s registration and alert them to upcoming happenings.
Regardless of the channel used, GIFs provide a delightful user experience that captures your audience’s attention.
What to look for in a GIF
Choosing GIFs as a professional isn’t as easy as finding one for a friend. The GIFs you’ll use in business contexts should be polished, unambiguous, and designed to be accessible for all viewers. Here are a few tips to keep in mind when choosing or creating GIFs at work:
Don’t use too much motion. The GIF file format only supports a small number of pixels per image, so scenes with too much motion can appear pixelated and blurred.
Limit your use of color. Unlike video, which supports millions of colors, GIFs only support 256 colors. Consider using a limited palette to avoid videos loading improperly.
Avoid annoyingly repetitive loops. Making your GIFs too short can add a strobe-like effect to the footage, potentially annoying and alienating users.
Be mindful of accessibility. Flashing images or content can trigger unpleasant reactions in viewers who are susceptible to seizures. The WCAG 2.0, the most popular accessibility framework for websites, advises that web content creators avoid using images that appear to flash more than 3 times per second, either due to an actual flash used in the image or the strobe-like effect that can come from looping GIFs.
Keep your file sizes small. Be careful not to create GIFs that are too large, as some platforms have limits on the size of GIFs that they’ll display. Err on the side of caution and aim to create GIFs under 1 MB to ensure that they’ll play in your desired channel.
Keep it appropriate. Avoid GIFs that might alienate viewers based on their beliefs or background. For example, don’t use a GIF that makes fun of a politician.
Follow these tips to find and create GIFs that are both entertaining to watch, while still reflecting well on your brand.
How to create your own GIFs in Vyond
There are plenty of GIF libraries out there (like Giphy), but some projects call for more professional or personalized assets. Try creating your own within Vyond’s easy-to-use video maker! Here are some step-by-step tips on how to export high-quality, engaging GIFs from Vyond Studio:
Start by creating a short, simple video within Vyond
Click the “Export/Download” icon in the top right corner (just as you’d do when converting your video into an .mp4 file or other video format)
Select the “GIF” option
You’re all set!
Animated GIF export is a feature available as part of our Starter, Professional, and Enterprise plans. For more information on which Vyond plans support GIF exports, take a look at this plan comparison.
Create more engaging content with GIFs
GIFs are everywhere on the web, and for good reason. They provide a short, engaging burst of content that captures viewers’ attention. At the same time, GIFs are just long enough to share meaningful information with your audiences, such as highlighting new products for customers.
It’s easy to start creating GIFs right away for your brand with Vyond. Learn about Vyond’s video animation platform and start a free trial.
#### How to Make a Tutorial Video: A Step-by-Step Guide
Video tutorials accomplish something that no other learning content can do: show users, step by step, how to complete a specific task or process.
Whether you’re teaching veteran sellers how to use new customer relationship software or helping new hires figure out how to add an email signature, a video tutorial will help. These how-to videos, which are typically only a few minutes in length, have applications for employee onboarding, customer engagement, internal communications, and eLearning programs.
The good news is that you don’t have to have any video production experience to make a tutorial video that achieves your goals. All you need is the right preparation, video tools, and approach.
In this guide, you’ll find out how to create tutorial videos that are clear, accurate, and, above all, easy to digest. You’ll also learn how to ensure that your videos are effortless to update as needed, which will save you time and money and guarantee a longer shelf life for your content.
Table of ContentsWhat is a video tutorial?Benefits of video tutorialsHow to make a tutorial video in 8 stepsTips for making an effective video tutorialThe best software for making tutorial videosFAQs
What is a video tutorial?
A video tutorial is a type of training video. Also known as a how-to video or instructional video, a video tutorial a recorded, step-by-step guide showing how to perform a specific task. Video tutorials are especially useful for self-guided learning because viewers can see exactly what to do at each step of the process.
Video tutorials are incredibly popular: in the first quarter of 2024, over 25% of internet users watched how-to videos at least once a week — on YouTube and other websites. Learning tasks through video is more effective, as well. Users retain 95% of what they learn from watching a video compared with 10% from reading text.
Popular video tutorial styles include animated videos, live action videos, and screen recordings accompanied by an instructor’s webcam commentary.
Benefits of video tutorials
Video tutorials are more effective and engaging learning tools than lengthy text content. Benefits of video tutorials include:
Flexibility: Video tutorials are uniquely suited to asynchronous learning, allowing users to view content on their own time — and as many times as they need. Unlike live instruction, users can adapt how-to videos to fit any schedule.
Engagement: Users prefer video to instructional manuals by a 3-to-1 margin. Video tutorials meet users where they live, providing easy-to-digest information in a format that they prefer.
Retention: Users retain more information when watching a video than when reading a static script. The main reason for this is that videos engage multiple senses simultaneously. The combination of visuals, sound, and animation provides a more immersive experience, helping to clarify and reinforce concepts.
Personalization: Video content is simple to update, customizable for various audiences, and easy to translate into multiple languages. You can add elements like text pop-ups, onscreen footage, or screen captures as needed.
Accessibility: Features like language translation, captioning, and text pop-ups make it trouble-free to ensure accessibility for all audiences. Because video content is convenient to update, you can even make changes on the fly as you receive feedback from your users.
Pacing: Learners can return to video tutorials as needed. No more scrambling through notes or taking up power users’ time with easy-to-answer questions.
Tutorial videos are effortless to digest, engaging, accessible to users, and encourage self-directed learning and problem-solving. They’re also quick to make — even for creators who don’t have video production experience.
How to make a tutorial video in 8 steps
If you can make a PowerPoint presentation, you can produce your own tutorial videos. It’s as straightforward as following these steps:
1. Define the purpose
What do you want your video to achieve? To nail down this first step, you need to decide on a few factors:
The topic of your video tutorial: This is the easiest part of the process because (hopefully!) you already know what you want your how-to video to teach your users. However, it’s a good idea to state this outright. It will help you double-check the scope of your tutorial to ensure that you’re sharply focused on one particular task, skill, or process.
Your goals: What do you hope users will get out of this? Be as clear as possible.
Your target audience: Depending on the scope of your video tutorial, you may be speaking to one user type or many. For example, everyone from the newest intern to the most seasoned executive needs to know how to make an email signature, but only content marketing folks need to understand how to upload documents to your content management system.
If you can’t name it, you can’t measure it. Defining the purpose of your tutorial video ensures that you target certain goals, such as learning discrete tasks, developing skills, and training new staff.
2. Make a storyboard
A storyboard is a visual framework for your instructional video. It demonstrates how your video will tell the story, frame by frame.
A typical storyboard contains rough sketches of each shot and a brief description of the action, dialogue, and special effects in each frame. Each panel of the storyboard represents a shot in the completed video.
Storyboards are typically hand-drawn, but you can use software to speed your process (especially if you’re not a great artist). The important thing is to focus on what each frame needs to convey: the visuals, the action, and the text or verbal dialogue.
Writing a storyboard also helps make the next step easier: writing your script.
3. Write a script
The script outlines the action and content of your video tutorial. Everything that happens in your video will be included in this text-based document.
A good video tutorial script follows a simple structure: the beginning, middle, and end (otherwise known as the intro, body, and conclusion). It should begin with a clear call to action that sets up the goal, scene, and characters.
The script outlines the journey your characters take to achieve the goal. For example, if your tutorial video shows how to write a cold sales email, you would start with a call to action — writing an email that builds customer relationships and ultimately converts to a sale. Then, you would show, scene by scene, how to write each part of the email and how it results in hitting sales targets.
4. Determine your recording approach
Next up is figuring out exactly how you want to bring your ideas to life. When it comes to recording your video tutorial, you have three main options:
Record real people. Opt for real people, either as talking heads or experts explaining tasks, and record them against a backdrop or location. Or, consider using a realistic AI Avatar to serve as the host of your content.
Share your screen. Record yourself or an expert doing the task with screen capture, either with voiceover or an inset video. Ensure that you’re appropriately zoomed in, that your mic works well, and so on.
Use animation. The animation option enables you to zoom in, zoom out, and create any environment you want, from your office to the surface of the moon. Use your own or another expert’s voice, or opt for a realistic-sounding AI voice narrator. Regardless of your choice, animation lets you save money on a video shoot.
Versatile AI video creation platforms like Vyond enable all three options. You can even upload real video footage to the platform and customize it from there.
5. Rehearse until you’re confident
Just as when you’re giving a presentation or conducting a job interview, the secret to sounding confident is practice. Start by reading your script out loud to ensure that your language sounds as smooth when spoken as it looks when printed on the page. Tweak as necessary and continue practicing until you feel comfortable.
If you choose to record yourself live, pay attention to your body language. Watch your posture, hand movements, and gestures. You’re looking for an open, confident, positive vibe. If you opt for a voiceover, make sure your language is simple and clear.
(Note: Just as there are AI alternatives to a host, there are now AI voices you can choose to narrate your script. One benefit of using AI voiceover is that you don’t have to rehearse as much or worry about your presentation to the same extent. However, you will still have to ensure that your written words translate well into speech.)
6. Record
Regardless of which approach you take — live action, screen capture, or animation — the recording step begins by making sure you have the appropriate equipment. Ideally, use a high-quality microphone and camera (or video creation software that replicates both in-screen). Video creation software can also make it easier to integrate multiple sources like audio tracks, visual assets, and text pop-ups.
Be sure to double-check requirements for your video-sharing platform. For example, if you’re uploading your video to YouTube, you’ll need to shoot in landscape mode to ensure the content fits your viewers’ screens appropriately.
7. Edit
Editing is the stage that will make or break your video. A well-edited tutorial will look professional, engage viewers, and convey your message effectively.
The exact steps you take during the editing process will depend on your equipment, medium, and goals. If you use a video creation platform, you may even be able to create, edit, and share from one dashboard, depending on the product you choose.
Regardless of your tools and goals, your editing process will include some of these to-dos:
Cutting scenes: With your message in mind, look for opportunities to tighten transitions, improve cuts, add zoom shots, or otherwise improve the narrative flow.
Adding text: Decide where you want text to appear in your video. Common uses of text are titles, subtitles, captions, and pop-up text. Make sure your font choices are consistent and legible.
Balancing audio: This step will be especially important if you’re using live recording, but even if you opt for AI narration, you’ll need to decide on background music, sound effects, etc.
Boosting interactive elements: Add arrows, callouts, shapes, and highlights to draw attention to important points.
Toning down excessive Fx: As a last step, rewatch your video with a critical eye. Are the bells and whistles getting in the way of your message? If so, cut anything that seems distracting or unnecessary.
8. Share and promote your video tutorial
Save your final product and share it to your internal eLearning site, YouTube, or social media as appropriate. Pay attention to file requirements and test your video before announcing it to your users.
When you’re ready to roll out your tutorial, make sure it’s easy to find. Consider pinning it to appropriate Slack channels, making it searchable in internal systems, and linking it to related content.
Also, keep in mind that users need a good reason to click — and “it’s mandatory” isn’t as persuasive as we might like to think. Remind your learners why it’s in their best interests to watch this tutorial and engage with it. How will this content help their career?
Tips for making an effective video tutorial
So, now you know how to make a video tutorial. But how can you ensure your how-to video really lands with its intended audience? Keep these tips in mind:
Invest in the planning stage. Do your research before committing to a vision. Ask for input from multiple subject matter experts and stakeholders — don’t just go with one expert’s vision of how to do a task.
Think in images. Users will be more persuaded by what they see, not by what you tell them. Resist the temptation to overwrite your script.
Provide road signs. During the storyboarding phase, signal where your story is going with visual cues such as facial expressions and actions.
Keep it simple. Don’t overload your viewers with multiple stimuli at the same time.
Vary shots. Simple doesn’t mean boring, however. Take full advantage of the video creation software’s capabilities by mixing up shot types and angles.
Consider a video host to boost engagement. Whether you go with AI avatars, animation, or real people, having a host for your tutorial helps people connect with the content.
Inject moments of humor. Funny moments give your viewers a chance to pause, which will help them re-engage with the material.
Consider multiple distribution streams. Incorporate your video tutorial into onboarding, pin to appropriate Slack channels, or distribute through the company eLearning platform.
Set metrics for success. What do you hope to achieve with your video? Know what success looks like, whether it’s a certain level of engagement or increased retention for employees who interacted with the tutorial.
Update your video tutorial as needed. Perform regular audits, updating steps when necessary. Animation makes this process easier because there’s no need to reshoot with live participants.
Remember that your video tutorial is a living document. Be ready to listen to and incorporate feedback and make changes when appropriate.
The best software for making tutorial videos
Learning how to make tutorial videos can seem overwhelming, especially if you don’t have much (or any!) video production experience. But today’s tools make it easier than ever for users with all levels of knowledge to produce effective, engaging videos quickly and easily.
Vyond’s all-in-one AI video creation platform is uniquely well-suited to help both new and experienced video creators make effective tutorial videos, easily, in a wide range of styles. With Vyond’s versatile set of tools, you can create animated explainer videos, mixed media tutorials that incorporate live action footage you upload, webcam and screen recordings, and dynamic text and animations — and more.Also, with the Document to Video feature in Vyond Go, you can convert PDFs, PowerPoint presentations, as well as .doc and .txt files into tutorial videos in less than a minute. And our selection of over 90 AI Avatars offers you a quick and easy way to add an instructor’s commentary to any footage you want to explain.
To find out how Vyond can make tutorial video creation effortless, sign up for a free trial.
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FAQs
How long should a video tutorial be?
There’s no ideal length for a video tutorial, but keep in mind that it’s usually best to break down tasks into smaller steps. Users are more likely to engage with learning in small bites.
What is the best software for making video tutorials?
Vyond is the best all-in-one platform for making video tutorials because it enables users with no production experience to create professional videos in a wide range of styles quickly. Use Vyond Go to create a quick script and video in minutes. Or use Vyond Studio’s library of templates, styles, scenes, and characters to make engaging tutorials with just a few clicks.
Can I make a video tutorial for free?
You can find free video tutorial tools as easily as performing a simple Google search. However, if you want top-quality videos with customization options that are tailored to your needs, you’re better off paying for a video creation platform that really works. Professional video generation tools come at a variety of price points, and even the least expensive tier will provide you with significantly better results.
What equipment do I need to make video tutorials?
You can make video tutorials using your webcam and a decent microphone as long as you have the right video production software. There’s no need to pay more for studio-quality equipment.
#### How to Make a Video Slideshow That Keeps Viewers Watching
Unlike text-based slides, a video slideshow is dynamic. Video slideshows constantly stimulate the viewers’ attention with images, sounds, and animations to keep them watching. When people watch videos for a longer time, they listen to every reason they should buy or learn from you. Wyzowl showed that video is so alluring to consumers that more than 80% of marketers using it generate more leads, traffic, and sales.
But many companies still stick to static slideshows despite knowing about video’s capacity to attract and maintain people’s attention. They believe it’s hard to add them—but it’s not. You can follow six steps in Vyond to embed videos into your slideshow or add dynamism to existing static presentations. Without motion, viewers are more likely to consider your presentation monotonous instead of interesting.
Use this video template and create your own video slideshow
1. Create a storyboard
A storyboard is a hand-drawn or animated sketch of everything you plan to add. Storyboards act as to-do lists, telling you what’s necessary to create your video. Designing one allows you to spot boring, confusing, or unhelpful portions of your slideshow before adding anything.
Storyboards also make it easier to ensure you have all the right information in your presentation. You want it to be as persuasive as possible, so you need to make sure you include the most persuasive information. As a result, you avoid spending hours on a project unlikely to achieve your results or that your viewer won’t find valuable.
Download and print our free storyboard template in a US letter or A4 format and start sketching. Draw the events of the first slide in the first square. Then write out the script for the slide in the lines provided below it.
For example; if your speaker will pitch a product when they reach one slide, sketch the slide’s statistics, text, and graphics. Then add the words they’ll use to persuade viewers to buy your product.
2. Upload your multimedia assets
Uploading images, videos, and sounds before creating your first slide ensures you have every asset you need. This step saves you time from sourcing folders and stock asset libraries each time you make a slide.
Placing your assets in one place also gives you one last chance to see if you’re missing anything you need to build your slideshow. Skip this step, and you’ll be going back and forth between animating and searching for assets. Not focusing on one task makes you less productive and more likely to make mistakes.
Locate the folders of the assets you want to upload to Vyond. Then, log into your Vyond account and click on Create A Video in the top right corner. Choose the animation style that best matches your brand’s style. Once you’re in the animation suite, drag and drop your files into Vyond.
Make sure your files are in the right format and size:
MP4 videos with a size of 100 MB or less
TTF or OTF fonts with a size of 15 MB or less
PNG or JPG images with a size of 15 MB or less
MP3, WAV, or M4A audio with a size of 15 MB or less
Vyond will upload all of your assets to the Upload tab on the toolbar’s left side.
3. Arrange videos and images in your timeline
Your timeline controls when an asset shows up or disappears from your slideshow. You always want to arrange your assets based on your storyboard. This ensures your story is cohesive, engaging, and coherent with the goals you want your slideshow to achieve.
Ignoring your storyboard can upset stakeholders. First, you’re taking a path they haven’t approved. The time they spent ideating or reviewing the storyboard is lost. Second, you’re asking for their feedback again. This request requires more time and slows down the project because of feedback loops.
Each square from your storyboard represents one animated scene. Click on “Add Scene” in the bottom-left corner to add a scene to your timeline, then keep clicking until you have as many scenes as storyboard squares.
Go to the Upload tab and find the images you’ll use for the first scene. Click on the first scene’s square then the asset you want to add. Repeat this process for the rest of the scenes until you fill every slide.
Finally, adjust each slide’s length depending on the amount of information you include. You can do this by dragging a scene’s timeline square’s side to the right to make it longer or to the left to make it shorter.
4. Turn your photos into props
You can merge uploaded images with Vyond’s props. For example, you can cut yourself out from one of the photos and add it to a TV prop. This action is called masking a photo—showcasing a portion of an image within a prop.
You can mask images to hide areas that might distract or confuse readers. Readers will only see what you consider essential, like a person’s facial expression or a data point. Emphasizing an image’s vital areas makes viewers more likely to see them.
Masks also help you create images you can’t find in stock libraries. You’ll be able to create the exact images you need to execute the vision of your storyboard, fulfilling stakeholders’ expectations and making your video slideshow as engaging as possible.
Vyond users can mask photos inside the Prop tab. Open it, and then search “Mask.” Then click the prop where you would like your image to be.
Your prop will now be on the animation frame—select it. Next, enter the Mask menu in the top right corner of the screen and click on “Add Asset.” Vyond will automatically show you the images you’ve uploaded. Pick the one you want to mask, and adjust the image’s look within the prop.
5. Add music and sound effects
An emotional connection can make people more likely to buy your product or learn about a topic after watching your video slideshow. You can add music and sound effects to connect specific emotions to certain scenes in your slideshow. For example, you can include a vibrant background song to make people feel inspired.
Vyond has close to 500 background music and sound effects. You can add them to your project from the Audio tab on the toolbar’s left side. Simply press the Play button to listen to how they sound, and click any of them to add it to your project.
You can also add sounds from your computer or stock libraries. To do this, drag and drop them into the timeline. The files will be part of the Upload tab and can be added with one click.
6. Include camera movements
Vyond can recreate the visual effects of moving a camera. Camera movements make video slideshows more dynamic, constantly drawing readers’ attention to the slides. If the slides were static, viewers might see them as monotonous and get distracted.
Some movements, like zoom-ins, reduce a frame’s size to highlight one of its elements. Without this emphasis, viewers could overlook data capable of turning them into customers.
Vyond lets you create two virtual cameras to reproduce the movements of real ones. To add one, enter the Camera tab in the top right corner of the toolbar and press “Add Camera.”
You’ll now see a dark orange rectangle on the animation workspace. It defines the portion of the frame your camera will show at the beginning of its movement. Next, click on “Add Camera Movement” to add a light orange rectangle acting as your second camera. This camera is the movement’s final state.
Adjust the size of both rectangles to achieve different movements. For example, you can create a zoom-out effect by making the light orange rectangle bigger than the dark one. This combination will enlarge the frame.
Create your first video slideshow with Vyond
Vyond is an animated slideshow video maker. It has templates you can use to create your video slideshow in less than an hour. Pick one based on your team’s needs.
Those new to animation can stick to the slides plus voiceover format. Women’s Suffrage & The 19th Amendment and Pies Around The World are perfect templates for this format. They split the timeline into scenes and add transition effects to keep viewers watching.
You can eventually add animated characters and footage to presentations to make them more unique and appealing. This job is easy with templates such as Employee Appreciation Day and Travel Vlog.
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#### How to Make an Instructional Video: 25 Essential Tips and Ideas
Forget reading user manuals—people today watch instructional videos when they need to quickly solve a problem. Organizations today are tapping into the preference of instructional videos by using video as an educational tool across industries:
Marketing: How-to and explainer videos that are product and industry-focused
eLearning: Online courses
HR professionals: Employee training videos
Of course, there’s no guarantee that people will watch these videos beyond a few seconds. It’s not enough to share instructions for completing a task. Engaging instructional videos must be easy to follow, visually dynamic, and speak to a target audience’s needs, among other important qualities.
Read on for 25 essential tips for creating engaging training material and instructional videos, or click one of the shortcuts below to skip ahead!
PLANNING
WRITING
STORYBOARDING
CREATING
DISTRIBUTING
Learn about your target audience
Tell a story
Don’t worry about artistic ability
Minimize cognitive load
Choose a video host
Set a clear learning objective
Think in images
Storyboard alongside your script
Invest in professional voiceover
Ensure that your video is device-friendly
Pick a video format based on your topic
Prioritize imagery and narration
Signal where the video is going next
Add interactivity
Set up an engaging thumbnail
Determine the budget for your video
Consider branched scenarios
Organize your frames with templates
Sharing on social media channels
Set a short target video length
Make ’em laugh
Speed up creation with animation software
Incorporate your video into onboarding
Ask for input
Categorize your video
Planning your instructional video
Before video production begins, you must take a step back to envision the content you want to create for your instructional video. What will be the takeaway of your video for your target audience? What type of video do you want to create? With this brainstorming of video ideas, you’ll be ready to create a great instructional video that is both compelling and substantial.
1. Learn about your target audience and their pain points
You may have a general topic in mind that you want to cover, but you aren’t sure what part of the subject is worth focusing on for the instructional video. Find your angle by interviewing members of your video’s target audience about the topic. Determine what they understand and where knowledge gaps are—the latter will be the most useful, relevant subjects for your instructional video.
2. Set a clear learning objective
Based on the knowledge gaps discovered during the interview process, set a clear learning goal for your video. This objective is your guiding light for the rest of the video creation process. Every decision you make about the video should serve its larger learning goal.
3. Pick a video format based on your topic
Depending on the topic of your video, some formats will work better than others.
Animation isn’t limited by reality—you’re able to express any abstract concept or out-of-this-world idea with visuals and metaphors, so long as it can be drawn. For example, Big Bang Science‘s video below keeps viewers entertained through various realities as the speaker explains the complex topic of science communication.
Live-action video, or video shot with a camera, depicts life as we see it. It’s the best format for explaining how to complete a complex action that viewers need to see first hand, such as cooking a recipe or knitting a scarf.
This example of an instructional video idea is beautifully produced, but you don’t necessarily need video knowledge to create a useful instructional video. These days, it’s quite possible to shoot quality video at home without highly-specialized equipment. Take a look at this iPhone example created to solve a specific car problem.
A screencast, or digital recording of a computer screen, is the best format for showing how to use a software or an app. An HR training video might be a screencast to explain how new hires can set up their company email account, for example. The video below is an example of an instructional video for marketing (or customer retention). Asana, a project management software, uses a combination of live action and screencast video to explain how to integrate their product with another.
One type of instructional video isn’t better or worse than another—it just depends on how well the style serves your subject. Select the format with visuals that will make your topic the easiest to understand.
4. Determine the budget for your video
Planning an instructional video is only productive if you’re realistic about your resources for the project. Meet with senior leadership to determine a reasonable video budget. Start the conversation by explaining why creating this learning video will be valuable for your organization. If leadership understands how this video helps the company, they’ll be more likely to give you the resources you need to create it. Your budget will depend largely on the video format you select and if you decide to create it yourself or hire a professional.
5. Set a short target video length
According to microlearning research, we better remember what we learn when we watch shorter videos—no longer than two minutes, to be exact. If your topic is complex or complicated, consider creating a series of short videos to reduce viewers’ cognitive overload.
With this planning, you’ll know the basic details of your instructional video and be able to begin scriptwriting.
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Writing your instructional video
After brainstorming your video, it’s time to organize your ideas into a script. This document describes everything that happens in your video—dialogue, visuals, music, and more. You’ll use the script as a basis for storyboarding and filming your video, so it’s important to take this writing stage seriously. Use these tips to write a script for a video that is both engaging and educational.
6. Tell a story
People lose focus when they’re presented with a long list of facts and figures. Weave information into a narrative and viewers will have a framework for remembering the content you present. For example, an HR training video about recognizing negative workplace behavior could show a scenario with a character who experiences discrimination.
7. Think in images
Video is primarily a visual medium, so be mindful of how you can explain concepts through imagery and motion as you write your script. If you have an idea for a visual, explain it as a scene description in your script, and depict the idea in your storyboard (covered in the next section).
8. Prioritize imagery and narration over on-screen text
Trying to process graphics, narration, and on-screen text at once can be overwhelming for viewers. Reduce cognitive load by limiting on-screen text as much as possible. If you can’t express the idea through a visual, explain it with narration instead.
9. Consider branched scenarios
eLearning professionals often create instructional videos with different scenario branches, a form of learning that is similar to a “choose your own adventure” book. The learner makes a decision in the course—choosing an answer, clicking a call-to-action button—which causes the video to unfold in a unique way.
If you’re creating a video with multiple learning paths, be sure to write separate scripts for each scenario to avoid confusion.
10. Make ’em laugh
An educational video doesn’t have to be completely serious. Your audience will appreciate a few jokes and visual gags here and there as a light break from the lesson. For example, you might use a pun in your lesson name or create a funny character to be the narrator of the lesson.
This instructional sales training video includes a few subtle jokes to make the intended audience smile.
11. Ask for input
To ensure that your video is meeting its learning objective, show the script to experts in the video’s subject. They will be able to confirm whether the knowledge you’re sharing is accurate and useful before you dive into video production.
Once you’ve created a script, you’re ready to translate those ideas into visuals.
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Storyboarding your instructional video
Storyboarding is the process of visually representing every shot of your educational video, whether that’s through drawing or a computer program.
By looking at each frame, you’re able to evaluate the visuals of your video and decide which imagery is serving your learning objective.
12. Don’t worry about artistic ability
It’s okay if you only know how to draw stick figures. As long as you can communicate the main actions in every frame, your storyboard will be useful. Here’s an example from Kenneth Chan at Stanford University:
13. Storyboard alongside your script
Make the progression of your video clear by including your script in a column next to your storyboard drawings. If a viewer gets lost, they can refer to the dialogue and descriptions in your script column to understand everything happening at that moment.
14. Signal where the video is going next
Viewers are more likely to focus on your instructional video if they have a sense of what is coming next. To make your video easy to follow, include visual cues in your storyboard, such as character expressions and actions or header text.
15. Organize your frames with templates
If you prefer to hand-draw your storyboard, you don’t need to draw boxes for every frame—use this free template.
Download this: US Letter | A4
The printed boxes will save you time and give your storyboard an organized, uniform look.
16. Speed up creation with animation software
Don’t want to hand-draw your storyboard? Use animation software, like Vyond, to create your storyboard. You’ll be able to quickly create each frame with drag-and-drop scenery, props, and characters. If you’re planning to use animation for the project, you’ll be able to create your video from these storyboard frames in a short amount of time when production begins.
Creating your instructional video
The production phase can feel frantic at times, even if you’ve prepared well for it. Equipment may need unexpected troubleshooting, or you may discover that you can’t film a shot as you imagined in your storyboard. To help you stay on track, here are a few suggestions for crafting an engaging video that you may have overlooked.
17. Minimize cognitive load
Viewers can process only so much information at a time. To avoid cognitive overload, limit the amount of sensory content you present at one time. For example, don’t present dense information through narration at the same time as an energetic music cue.
18. Invest in professional voiceover
If your video includes dialogue or narration, consider investing in a professional voiceover. A trained actor is able to use vocal emphasis to express ideas, so their voiceover will make the content more understandable for viewers. To hire a voiceover artist, consider using the popular online markets VoiceBunny and Voices.com.
19. Add interactivity
Interactive videos allow viewers to click, drag, hover, and complete other digital actions to interact with video content rather than just playing it.
This example from Ana Grade, senior instructional designer at Amazon, includes an interactive skill check at the end.
Adding these features boosts engagement by forcing audiences to stop and demonstrate their knowledge. While marketing and HR professionals might not create interactive videos, eLearning professionals use complex authoring programs, like Storyline, that allow quizzes and other interactive elements to be inserted into instructional videos. Ana used Vyond and Storyline 3 to create the training video above.
If you have trouble playing the interactive example, try switching browsers or updating Chrome.
Distributing your instructional video
It doesn’t matter how well the production phase goes—a high-quality video won’t have any impact unless it reaches viewers. Learn how to make your video easy for your target audience to find and watch with these tips.
20. Choose a video host that fits your learning objective
YouTube may be the most popular online video host, but that doesn’t mean it’s the best place for your video to live. The platform makes sense for marketers who want to reach a large audience, but you may prefer to host your video somewhere else. Review this breakdown of online video hosting options to find a solution.
HR and eLearning professionals will most likely prefer a more secure, customizable learning management system as an alternative, and there are plenty of online platforms to choose from.
21. Ensure that your video is device-friendly
Make it possible for people to watch your instructional video in any learning environment by optimizing your video for all devices. Giving people this ability increases the likelihood that they will view your video and build their knowledge. Learn how to make your video device-friendly with this guide.
22. Set up an engaging thumbnail
When a person is deciding whether they want to watch a video, they look at its thumbnail, or resting snapshot. Encourage views by picking a clear, compelling image that reflects the topic of your video for its thumbnail. These examples from Bon Appétit, are both appetizing and engaging:
Encourage views by picking a clear, compelling image that reflects the topic of your video for its thumbnail.
23. Marketing: Share on niche social media channels
If you’re a marketer hoping to attract leads with your instructional video, consider using niche social media platforms to promote the content. For example, you might share a link to the video on a relevant subreddit or an industry-specific online forum. These spaces aren’t crowded, and they’re filled with high-quality leads who are genuinely interested in your company’s field.
24. HR: Incorporate your video into onboarding
If your instructional video is relevant employee training for new hires, work with your HR team to incorporate the content into your onboarding plan. By scheduling the video in the onboarding timeline, you ensure that new employees will watch the video and build the knowledge they need to succeed in your workplace.
25. eLearning: categorize your video
Online course websites, such as Lynda, typically present their most recent and most popular courses on their homepage. If you’ve just created a set of instructional videos, work with your site developers and administrators to see if the course can be featured on your homepage to promote views.
Engage learners with well-planned instructional videos
Creating a captivating educational video requires big-picture thinking. You’re trying to inform and engage viewers at the same time, so you must be aware of multiple factors at once: your learning objective, technical constraints, distribution tactics, and more.
Instead of trying to remember every area, return to this post, and follow these 25 tips every time you make an instructional video. If you’re able to check off every tip, you can rest well knowing that you’ve taken steps to make your video engaging for your target audience.
Ready to get started? Create your own instructional videos in Vyond.
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#### How to Make and Use Zoom Video Backgrounds
Zoom’s latest update comes with the long-awaited ability to use video as a virtual backgrounds, and we couldn’t be more excited to have another weapon in the battle against Zoom fatigue.
The dynamic nature of video has a knack for capturing attention and engaging audiences, even when it’s not front and center. So, how do you make your own video background for Zoom?
In this guide, we’ll cover:
How to Use a Video Background on Zoom
How to Make Video Backgrounds for Zoom
–> Using Zoom Backgrounds on Desktop
–> Video Background Templates & Ideas
–> Using Zoom Backgrounds on a Phone
–> Video Background Makers
How to Use a Video Background on Zoom
You can add a virtual background to your Zoom calls with just a few clicks, whether you’re using a desktop or phone. Unfortunately, video backgrounds may not quite work on all mobile devices.
Another key difference with using a desktop app is that you are able to load your backgrounds in advance, no matter if you’re using the Zoom app or another client (like their white label RingCentral app). If you’re using a mobile device, though, you’ll have to add your virtual background while your meeting is in progress.
Another thing to note: virtual backgrounds don’t tend to carry over across all your devices, even if you’re logged in to the same Zoom account. You may need to load your background onto each device you use.
How to Use a Zoom Virtual Background on a Desktop
Here are step-by-step instructions for setting up a virtual background video for Zoom on a desktop:
Make sure you have the latest version of Zoom installed.
Have a copy of your background video saved on your device.
Open Preferences > Virtual Background.
Click the + icon under the bottom-right corner of your webcam preview.
Click Add video and upload your video file.
Click on the video background you want to use.
While having a green screen isn’t necessary, it certainly enhances the quality of the effect! Make sure you have mirroring on and decent lighting for optimal results.
How to Use Zoom Virtual Background on a Mobile Device
If you’re using a smart phone, you’ll need to configure your virtual background while a meeting is in session:
Download the latest version of the Zoom app.
Have a copy of your background saved on your device.
Start or join a meeting.
Hit the … icon for More options in the lower right corner.
Scroll down through the options to Background and Filters at the bottom.
Tap the + icon to add a background.
If prompted, give Zoom permission to access your photos.
Select the background image or video, and then hit Done.
As a reminder; you may not be able to use an animated background just yet on your mobile devices, but you can use an image as a virtual background.
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How to Make Your Own Video Background for Zoom
To make your own Zoom background video, you’ll want to use a platform like Vyond Studio that allows you to build your own animated backdrop. While you can certainly use live-action footage as a virtual background, animation tends to have a better contrast to your webcam footage. Vyond lets you build an animated background from scratch or customize a pre-loaded template.
Short videos tend to work best for fitting within the 2MB max size allowed by Zoom. The smaller the file size, the less likely the video background will interfere with your meeting quality.
To make your background move more smoothly, you may want to think about looping. A looping video is one that continuously plays, infinitely restarting from the beginning of the clip once the video is over. Zoom automatically loops your virtual background video, so it’s wise to match up the first and last frames of your video to create a seamless transition. Because the video loops endlessly, you can get away with a shorter video, which helps with the 2MB limit.
Finally, create your Zoom background thoughtfully to avoid distracting from your conversations. Subtle, slow movements work better than fast ones. Rapid flashing (more than two flashes per second) should be avoided, especially for the sake of accessibility. Consider using mid-tone colors instead of extremely light or dark ones to make your background look more natural.
Zoom Video Background Ideas & Templates
1. Set the Scene with Cityscapes
One of Zoom’s pre-loaded virtual background images is a photograph of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, which inspired the trend of using cityscapes as a background. It not only is a fun way to show some local pride, but it quickly helps meeting participants see where you’re located in the world. By creating an animated cityscape in Vyond, you can add ambient movement and delightful elements, color it to suit your brand, and create alternate versions for different times of day.
Vyond customers can use this San Francisco Zoom background as a template to create their own virtual background video.
USE THIS VIDEO TEMPLATE
2. Add Fun to Zoom Meetings
Virtual backgrounds have an uncanny way of breaking the ice. Whether you’re bonding with your closest teammates or forging meaningful new connections, a little fun can go a long way. In this background video, “Tina the Tortoise” crawls across a stylish desert scene. Where will Tina go next?
Bring Tina with you to your next Zoom meeting by importing this video into any existing Vyond account.
USE THIS VIDEO TEMPLATE
3. Celebrate Special Occasions
USE THIS VIDEO TEMPLATE
Celebrate milestones, birthdays, and holidays from a distance with festive virtual backgrounds. The birthday background above is a great example using Vyond to customize your background with touches like the guest of honor’s name and favorite colors.
Take a step further by adding a custom character that looks like your friends and teammates, like in the video below!
USE THIS VIDEO TEMPLATE
As long as you have an existing Vyond account, you can borrow either of these birthday background templates using the buttons above.
4. Use a Branded Zoom Background for Events
With more events going virtual, companies need to get clever about how they can incorporate branding. Using a virtual background video is a great way to display your logo in a way that is seamlessly incorporated with the platform.
In the example above, we used a pre-made background in Vyond Studio to give the video subtle depth and dynamism. With ambient movement and occasional pops of motion—achieved with Vyond’s enhanced motion path features—the branding is memorable without being distracting.
The logo you see above was created using the Wix Logo Maker, one of our favorite online logo makers.
You can customize this branded background video template with a Vyond account!
USE THIS VIDEO TEMPLATE
5. Add Ambient Movement
USE THIS VIDEO TEMPLATE
Even without a logo, you can use ambient movement to take your Zoom calls to the next level. Slow, looping animations—even with abstract shapes—can help captivate meeting participants and retain their interest. Ambient movement is, by design, engaging without being distracting.
USE THIS VIDEO TEMPLATE
Whether you use your favorite color or brand colors, non-literal backgrounds like these can have a meaningful impact on the quality of your meetings. A subtle touch of dynamism and vibrance can go a long way!
USE THIS VIDEO TEMPLATE
If you’re already making videos with Vyond, you can use these examples as templates by clicking the buttons below each video.
6. Minimize Distractions Using Depth of Field
Depth of field is a concept video makers use to direct the viewer’s eyes to elements in the foreground or background. It comes from the world of photography and videography, where the distance between camera lenses can be subtly adjusted to pull focus to objects a certain distance away.
When creating animated videos, we can borrow from this idea to help audiences focus on what matters using layering, opacity, coloring, and blur effects.
As we’ve already mentioned in this post; when using virtual backgrounds on Zoom, it’s really important to not distract from the conversation at hand. We got tips from Vyond video producer Prakriti Rai to create the above background video of the US Capitol Building to bring focus to the speaker in the foreground. In this example, we played with layers and opacity to create a fog-like effect, but you can also use blurred exit effects to stand out from your Zoom background.
To see how we did it or customize this Washington D.C. scene, import this video as a template into any existing Vyond account.
USE THIS VIDEO TEMPLATE
7. Create Your Own Zoom Video Filters
While it isn’t technically the same as a Zoom video filter, this is a great example of using virtual backgrounds to bring fantastic flair to your calls. Create a virtual background with wings, hats, halos, and hair using Vyond’s vast library of pre-built props.
A Vyond account is all you need to use this video as a customizable video template.
USE THIS VIDEO TEMPLATE
5 Best Zoom Video Background Makers
1. Vyond Studio
Vyond Studio is the best tool out there for creating Zoom background videos like the above examples. Because Vyond is an animation platform, you can create both real-world and imaginary settings with total creative control. Vyond makes it easy to collaborate and share branded videos across your team, and even build up a library of videos and characters.
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2. Kapwing
Kapwing is one of the more decent free solutions available for creating your own Zoom background. While it doesn’t have quite as many advanced features as some of the others on this list, its ease-of-use and template selection work great if you don’t have anything specific in mind.
3. Vimeo Create
Vimeo Create is the hosting platform’s solution for quick, pro-quality social media videos. Because it’s designed for platforms like Instagram and Twitter, it comes with everything you need to create a background video quickly, particularly if you’re looking to create something that’s text-based.
4. Canva
Like Vyond, Canva: Online Design Made Easy is a fantastic drag-and-drop design studio specializing in static imagery and graphics. They’re a great fit for anybody looking to create virtual background images for Zoom. Canva users are able to similarly create custom videos, albeit with less creative control as in an animation studio like Vyond.
5. Storyblocks
Storyblocks is a good way to create Zoom background videos if you want your background to include live-action footage. As with any high-definition video, you’ll need to keep an eye on your file size to ensure it works well on Zoom.
Make your own videos with Vyond.
From Zoom video backgrounds to animated GIFs, Vyond lets your creativity soar. Our best-in-class online animation studio puts you in the director’s chair, enabling anyone to make media that moves. With the power of rich, dynamic media, you can communicate in a more engaging way. Try Vyond for Free and create your first animated video.
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#### How to Make Education More Effective with eLearning Animation
Everyone learns differently. Some prefer reading, while others prefer auditory or visual experiences. eLearning gives educators, be they brands, individual teachers, or corporate trainers, the opportunity to deliver training and learning materials that cater to the learner’s preferences.
But reaching visual or auditory learners, as well as those who prefer other types of learning, can still be difficult or expensive, that is, unless you create your own eLearning animation.
Why Use Animations in eLearning
Everyone has a different learning style: One study of medical students has shown that 33% of people learn visually, while 26% learn through audio. Animation allows you to capture that 33%, while audio taps into the other 26%.
Essentially, when animation is used properly and in conjunction with audio, you can reach at least 59% of learners. But the perks of eLearning animation don’t stop there:
Animation is captivating, more so than static images. Effective animation can grip your audience from the get-go and pull them into the eLearning lesson.
It can be easier to explain complex topics when using animation. For example, abstract concepts can be easier to explain using animation along with text.
Animations allow you to break up dense subject matter with fun clips or engaging animated charts and graphs. It’s easy for your audience to get lost in dense subject matter, especially if the eLearning lesson is lengthy. Animation can act as a breather while educating them on the topic.
You can customize and use animation in countless ways, so the above perks are only scratching the surface. There are likely still undiscovered ways in which animation can enhance the eLearning process!
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When to Use eLearning Animation
You can use eLearning animation in a number of ways. Two primary ways you can use animation are with audio and without. Animations with audio offer a complete educational experience, while animations without audio are great substitutes for static charts or graphs.
This isn’t to say you should always use animations with audio, though. There are times when an animation without audio makes more sense.
If you have budget constraints, animation without audio, especially voiceover audio, will likely be easier and less expensive to make. This is also the case if you’re strapped for time since you can create animation without audio faster. For example, the below video explains an app without using any audio beyond the free stock music from Vyond.
If you’re only using animation to show a graph in motion or illustrate a concept with text, avoiding audio is a good idea. This allows the learner to focus on the image and text and avoid feeling overwhelmed. For example, the GIF below visualizes data which might otherwise be presented in an Excel spreadsheet.
While there are times to use animation without audio, there are also times when animations with audio truly shine.
If you have a complex subject or concept, use animation with audio to guide the learner through the subject. This will tap into both of the learning styles mentioned earlier and allow the learner to focus on the material. Take the below video, for example, in which the complex topic of psychology and human behavior is tackled effectively in just minutes.
Use animation with audio when telling a story to deliver a more evocative learning experience. This is especially true when telling any kind of customer- or person-oriented story, as a video can illustrate a scenario far better than text can. For example, the below video on perfecting your pitch uses characters and narration to show how the scenario can actually play out.
The above examples are only a few cases, but there are numerous instances where animation can enhance the eLearning experience. As a general rule-of-thumb, if the animation will enhance rather than detract from the experience, it’s likely worth pursuing.
But before moving forward with the animation, think about how the current course already looks and if the animation would be too much or if it would make the content even easier to digest.
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3 Tips to Use Animations in eLearning
While animation can make eLearning more effective and simplify your instructional design process, it has to be used properly. This means knowing when to use animation, how to use animation, and what kinds of animations to use.
Using animations incorrectly can actually damage the user experience: busy animations can detract from the lesson, too much text in animation can confuse viewers, and so on. Not to mention, creating an animation that isn’t useful is simply a waste of time, money, and resources.
To increase the chances your animation helps your eLearning experience, consider the following tips.
Animate with Purpose
Make sure your animations have a purpose before you create them. Don’t just use eLearning animation for the sake of it. This can be distracting rather than helpful.
Instead, think about the concept you’re trying to get across and how an animation could help accomplish that. If an animation feels unnecessary, it likely is.
For a great example of animation with a purpose, see the below video in which the idea of electric cars is examined in a video. While the concept could have been explained without animation, the animation sets the cars in motion and makes the entire topic more captivating.
Follow Design Best Practices
While animations are in motion, they’re still pieces of design. Follow design best practices to ensure your animations are received well by audiences. Some key best practices to follow are:
Stick to your branding: Animations should be branded in a way that makes them recognizable, just like any other content you create.
Don’t overdo the animation: It’s easy to get carried away when animating. This can result in too many moving pieces and confuse and overwhelm your audience. Instead, animate only what’s necessary to get the point across while leaving other parts static.
Be aware of easing: Animated objects should follow the principles of easing, in that the object moving should accelerate and decelerate in a consistent manner. Objects in the real world take time to accelerate, so don’t have animated objects immediately moving at full speed. Instead, have them ease into motion.
The above tips will help you get started on the right foot with design. When in doubt, consult with your company designer, if you have one in-house. If your company doesn’t have a designer on hand, you could also consider hiring a freelance designer to audit your animations once they’re complete.
For inspiration and an example of these best practices in motion, see the below video from the Texas Bank and Trust in which branding is displayed clearly, animation is minimal, and easing is used on each set piece that moves.
Avoid Overwhelming Viewers
As we mentioned, animations should be easy to interpret and add to the experience rather than detract or overwhelm. To accomplish this, avoid using excessive amounts of copy, don’t have numerous animations on a single slide or screen, and make sure the pacing of the animation is slow enough to comprehend and read.
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Creating Effective eLearning Animations
Making animations used to be a time-consuming task that involved an entire team of designers and animators. In some cases, creating an animation could take weeks or even months and cost thousands of dollars. Now, you can create it yourself, in a fraction of the time, with a single piece of software for one monthly or annual price.
Modern software makes animation possible, even for those with no design experience. For example, Vyond features a library of characters and backgrounds, all of which can be customized to fit any audience. The characters, templates, and assets can all be animated with ease using an intuitive interface that allows for a full range of motion.
You can also use Vyond animations in a wide variety of eLearning platforms as Vyond videos can be exported as MP4s or GIFs, which make them versatile and easy to use anywhere. This means you won’t have to leave your existing eLearning course platform. You can also upload any animations to YouTube or use them on your own site for promotional and educational purposes.
To see how easy it is to create effective animations, try Vyond for yourself with a free trial.
A More Effective Way to Educate
Your audience likely contains a wide variety of learners. Reach as many as possible by integrating animations into your eLearning courses. Whether you’re educating for a living or using eLearning to promote your products, animations can make your courses more effective and help your brand in the long run.
The days of dull eLearning courses are behind us. With the many tools available, creating effective eLearning animation has never been easier. Put on your creative cap and let your imagination run wild. Your audience, and your brand, will thank you.
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#### How to Make Effective Training Videos
Are your employees nodding off during training sessions? Are you wondering how to create content that truly educates and motivates? Good news — you’ve come to the right place!
Whether you’re trying to upskill current employees quickly, improve the value of your compliance and security training, or even increase customer engagement, creating effective training videos can help you achieve your business goals.
In this guide, you’ll discover how to develop engaging training videos your learners will remember, helping you operate more productively and efficiently.
Here’s an overview of what you’ll learn:
What is a training video?
Why create training videos?
What makes a training video effective?
What are the different types of training videos?
How to make a great training video
Produce memorable training videos with Vyond
What is a training video?
A training video is a type of video that a company uses to teach employees or customers specific topics or skills. Impactful training videos often use lively visuals and audio to illustrate information. Common applications include employee onboarding, product demos, hard and soft skills training, mandatory compliance training, and step-by-step process tutorials.
With these basics in mind, let’s explore why training videos are important and how they can make training initiatives more successful.
Why create training videos?
Providing efficient training at scale—especially for dispersed teams and clients—can be difficult. High-quality training videos can ensure your audience receives a consistent message that’s available on-demand and memorable.
Here are the top benefits of using video to educate your team and customers.
Boost employee engagement
Distractions are everywhere—from constant Slack messages and calls to remote work interruptions (hello, pile of dirty dishes!). Traditional learning and development methods like in-person training and distributing printed materials simply aren’t as helpful or even as realistic as they once were. Add on top of that heightened expectations for fun learning materials thanks to YouTube and social media, and making wow-inducing training content can seem like an immense challenge. How can companies do it?
The answer: your training materials must evolve to meet your employees’ and customers’ high standards and capture their attention.
A recent study found that 44% of consumers prefer video over any other format (manuals, calls, webinars, etc.) to learn. Training videos can deepen engagement and improve knowledge retention by presenting information in your viewers’ preferred format.
Another way to think about it is that training videos simply provide a more compelling experience. You can use a wider variety of visual and auditory elements and incorporate engaging narration, ensuring your learners not only see and hear the information but also retain it.
Reduce training costs
Sitting down one-on-one with each employee or even hosting in-person workshops with entire teams eats up valuable resources. It requires scheduling and planning, which can be disruptive. Plus, costs like venue rental, flight and hotel reservations, and instructor fees can add up quickly.
With training videos, you create them once and use them repeatedly, eliminating the need for expensive, ongoing live training sessions. And if you have an AI video creation platform like Vyond, you can create that content much faster than with traditional digital video tools—and make updates to your videos in minutes when needed.
Increase knowledge retention
Have you ever wondered why you don’t always remember information, especially when it’s essential but kind of boring?
This phenomenon, known as the “forgetting curve,” spotlights why using proven teaching strategies is so important for increasing knowledge retention. Training videos employ a multisensory learning approach, such as interactivity paired with eye-catching visuals and catchy audio, to engage different parts of the brain—an essential technique for improving learning retention.
Lastly, storytelling tactics used in training videos, like humor and character-driven narratives, can create an emotional response in your audience, which further enhance their ability to remember information.
Maximize employees’ time
Learning is most effective when it’s delivered in short, digestible chunks—and when it’s easily available to employees in their moment of need, in the flow of work. Training videos are an effective way to check both boxes in that they provide:
Asynchronous learning: The beauty of video training is that everyone doesn’t need to be in the same place at the same time. Employees can watch the content on their own time and consume it in small doses throughout the week.
Efficiency and concision: By condensing complex information into bite-size video segments, training videos help employees and customers grasp key concepts quickly without the need for long training sessions.
Scale and cost-efficiency: More training shouldn’t require more resources. Instead of bringing on more trainers, make a video and use it to train hundreds of employees at once—without spending more money.
Personalized content: Every department has unique problems and solutions. Tailoring your videos ensures training applies to each employee’s needs (vs. watching general videos with information they’ll never use). And with AI video tools, updating content to ensure it remains relevant over time is incredibly easy.
Maximizing your employees’ time without maxing out your budget is a win-win. Let’s see how training videos can reduce employee turnover.
Decrease employee turnover
Employee turnover is challenging, especially in the U.S., where the average voluntary employee turnover rate between 2022 and 2023 was 17.3%. High turnover impacts productivity, morale, and, ultimately, costs.
Thankfully, making effective training videos can actually help reduce turnover rates. Training videos provide continuous learning and professional development opportunities. Employees who feel that their company is investing in their skills are inspired to do better work, with 59% of employees saying training improves their job performance.
Training videos also help employees understand available career paths within your company. They more easily see opportunities for advancement, which increases their commitment to staying with your business.
What makes a training video effective?
Creating a captivating training video requires strategic planning and creativity to ensure the content is engaging and informative.
Out of the many tips for making entertaining, compelling training videos, there are several core elements that you’ll really want to focus on:
It has clear objectives. Define the specific learning objectives for your training video so it’s focused and aligned with the desired outcomes. For instance, if you want to teach communication skills, concentrate on scenarios that show key communication strategies and their impact.
It’s not longer than it should be (generally). Keep your training videos concise—identify the core message and deliver it without unnecessary elaboration to maintain the viewer’s attention. For example, a video explaining a new software feature should directly show the feature in action, avoiding a lengthy introduction or unrelated content.
It’s highly relevant. Tailor your training videos to the specific needs and contexts of your audience. Use scenarios and examples that resonate with their daily experiences. For example, a customer service team might create a video that addresses common customer queries they encounter, using actual dialogue and solutions. And with AI-powered video tools, you can easily take customization further by incorporating job site photos as backgrounds and creating animated avatars of actual leaders and employees.
It engages multiple senses. Use visuals, audio, and interactive elements in your training videos to engage viewers on multiple sensory levels, enhancing retention. A safety training video could include visual demonstrations of safety practices, accompanied by narrative explanations and sound effects that highlight key points.
It’s surprising or disruptive. Incorporate unexpected elements or creative twists in your training videos to capture and keep the audience’s attention. For example, to illustrate the importance of cybersecurity, start your video with a surprising statistic or a short story about a security breach, making viewers eager to learn how to protect themselves and their employer.
It prompts reflection and growth. Create training videos that encourage viewers to reflect on their current practices and identify areas for personal or professional growth. Interactive videos that prompt learners to choose what they would do in a particular situation—or reflect on a time when they encountered a certain problem—are two ways to prompt reflection during the video experience. .
If you need more inspiration, look at these examples of effective employee training videos.
You have the ingredients for an impactful training video. Next, let’s explore the types of videos you can create with them.
What are the different types of training videos?
What makes one video more intriguing than the next? It’s all about the style, format and delivery. Let’s review the video types you can create to train your employees successfully.
Animated training videos
Animated videos are a type of video where you bring static elements to life through movement. These videos may use characters, stock footage, photos, kinetic text, music, and sound effects.
Organizations often use animated videos to create scenario-based training materials that ask viewers “what would you do in this situation?” and to explain information that may be difficult to explain purely through speech, such as technical processes, data, or abstract ideas.
Another benefit of animated videos is that you can make them easily without live-action shoots, actors, or elaborate sets. This reduction in resources makes them a cost-effective solution for delivering content that captures and holds your audience’s attention. Here are some examples of animated training videos for enabling a sales team.
Presenter-style training videos
Presenter-style videos, also known as “talking head” videos, feature a person speaking directly to the camera.
Common use cases for presenter-style videos include testimonials, event coverage, and corporate announcements. However, since they often lack visual variety and are more of a passive viewing experience, some audiences may find them hard to focus on. Even more so when the presenter is a humanoid avatar as they often lack the warmth and authenticity of a real human presenter.
Despite their potential drawbacks, presenter-style videos are certainly still a useful tool for particular situations.
How-to videos
“Show, don’t tell” is the best advice you can get as a trainer. And the ultimate format for this is the how-to video, also known as a tutorial or instructional video. It’s the “Here’s how you do it” of video types, turning viewers into doers, one step at a time. Common examples include step-by-step guides for assembling a new product or walkthroughs of a software update.
Done right, how-to videos are practical and actionable, breaking down intricate processes into manageable chunks of information, which allows employees to follow along at a reasonable pace, take notes, or watch and try new skills simultaneously.
Screencast videos
Screencast videos, also known as screen-recording videos, are a common type of how-to video that businesses often use to demonstrate software or digital tools. They zoom in on the action, capturing every click and keystroke in real-time.
For example, a software company might use screencasts to demonstrate a new feature in their application. Adding animated elements can enhance the performance of screencast videos in that they can add visual variety, emphasize key points, and even help clarify complicated processes within the screencast.
Interactive training videos
Engage, click, learn—interactive training videos are the corporate world’s choose-your-own-adventure books. They invite employees to respond to information, making learning a two-way street.
Picture a scenario-based video where each decision leads to different outcomes, teaching through experience without the real-world risks. Interactive videos are playgrounds for critical thinking and decision-making skills.
Two examples of e-learning platforms that enable interactive training are NearLife and Articulate. They make it possible to create courses featuring virtual reality, animations, graphics, Google Slides, simulations, quizzes, and drag-and-drop interactions.
Text-based training videos
Text-based videos primarily use text, motion graphics, and purchased materials like stock footage and music. Organizations may use them when they have a minimal budget or when they don’t want to have to introduce a speaker, presenter, or characters.
These videos focus on relaying information efficiently through dynamic on-screen text and graphics. They’re useful for delivering quick updates, providing a straightforward way to communicate important messages. However, they may not be as visually interesting since there’s less variety and can even require more work on the viewer’s part since they have to read the text rather than simply watch or listen to the video.
How to make a great training video
While you can create a training video the old-school way using professional filming and audio equipment, AI-powered video creation software is an easier, faster, and more affordable option.
In this tutorial, we’ll walk through the step-by-step process of crafting an effective training video using the popular AI video generator, Vyond.
1. Determine the topic and goals of your video
Before you start crafting your training video, first define the topic and goals of the video. This step sets the foundation for your entire project.
Pinpoint what you want your employees to learn and why. For example, if your goal is to enhance customer service skills, your video may focus on empathetic communication techniques.
Or, if you’re addressing a global team, your content may aim to standardize processes across different regions.
To zero in on your topic and goals, consider these questions:
What is the key message or skill I want to convey?
How does this topic align with our company’s broader objectives?
What does my audience already know about this topic—and what’s new information?
What actions do I want viewers to take after watching the video?
How will I measure the success of this training?
Within Vyond’s platform, you’ll find tools to bring any topic to life, including a huge asset library, 700+ video templates, and AI tools that let you create new assets from scratch with a simple text prompt.
2. Choose the appropriate type of video
Selecting the right format or video type is critical for communicating your training material successfully. Consider the nature of your content, your audience, and the desired learning outcomes to determine the most suitable video format.
As a reminder, the types of training videos include:
Animated
Presenter-style
How-to (includes screencast videos)
Interactive
Text-based
For instance, an animated video can explain abstract concepts, while a how-to video may be more ideal for providing step-by-step instructions.
Vyond offers a range of styles, characters, and scenes to match your desired format, whether you’re creating an animated explainer or talking head or something else. With Vyond, you can tailor the format to your audience’s needs, ensuring your message hits home.
3. Create a training video storyboard and write a script
Crafting a storyboard and writing a script can help ensure your training video communicates your message clearly.
For example, a storyboard for a compliance training video can illustrate key scenarios, while the script clearly communicates legal points.
Here are a few tips for writing a great script:
Keep it conversational to maintain engagement
Use storytelling to make the content relatable
Be concise to respect your audience’s time
Include calls to action to prompt the desired response
However, with Vyond Go, you can bypass the traditional storyboarding and scripting process. Just give it a prompt, and it’ll generate a script and rough-cut video that you can edit as you see fit, streamlining your content creation.
4. Produce the video in an AI video generator
If you were creating your training video the conventional way, this is where you’d set up your cameras, lighting, microphones, etc. Since AI is much faster at creating professional-looking videos, we’re going to show you how to do it in just two steps using Vyond’s AI-powered script and video creator, Vyond Go.
Enter a text prompt. Make sure to enter at least 50 words and no more than 700. Try to keep your prompts highly structured and not simply a stream of consciousness as this may produce a lower-quality result.
Choose layout, vibe, format, and language. At this step, you can select how many characters you’d like in the video (up to two) and location (warehouse facility, law firm office, etc.). You’ll also be able to pick the vibe you’re going for (formal, informative, playful, etc.), format (anecdote, debate, overview, tips, etc.), and language.
Vyond’s platform makes the production phase smooth. With intuitive tools and a user-friendly interface, you can generate your entire video without sourcing any external assets.
5. Edit the video
Editing is a pivotal stage in creating training videos, allowing you to refine and enhance your content to maximize its performance.
From Vyond Go’s Quick Edit screen or in Vyond Studio, you—and any other stakeholder or reviewer on a video project—can make any final adjustments to get your video just right. Things you may edit include:
Narration: If you’re adding a voiceover, you’ll be able to fine-tune the timing and delivery to match the visuals.
Visuals: Add or adjust animations, graphics, and text to reinforce key concepts.
Transitions: Use seamless transitions between scenes to maintain a smooth narrative.
Sound Effects: Add, remove, or adjust sound effects to add depth and realism to your video.
Music: Adjust background music that complements the tone and message of your video.
Length: Ensure your video is concise and focused, trimming any unnecessary elements.
Accessibility: Include subtitles or captions to make your video more accessible to a wider audience.
Vyond’s editing tools allow you to make precise adjustments, ensuring your video meets your high standards before serving it to your audience.
6. Share your training video
At last, you’re ready to share your video with your target audience!
The most important thing to remember with this step is that training videos are only effective if they’re available when and where people need them. Ensure you deliver the content in the appropriate channel(s) so it’s easily accessible to your viewers.
Here are some common ways companies share training videos:
Internal Training Portal: Upload your video to your company’s internal training portal.
Learning Management System (LMS): Integrate your video into your organization’s LMS for easy access and employee engagement tracking.
AI Chatbots: Use AI chatbots in your organization’s communication channels to deliver training videos based on user prompts or discussions.
Email Campaigns: Send out email campaigns to employees highlighting where they can find the video and how it will help them.
Social Media: Share snippets of your video on social media to generate interest and drive traffic to the full video.
Vyond makes sharing simple. Once your video is ready, you can export it in various formats and share it across multiple platforms.
Produce memorable training videos with Vyond
Training videos shouldn’t take days or weeks to produce. Nor should they put your team to sleep. There’s a better way to conduct video training sessions at your company.
Selecting the right video type and using engaging elements to keep your team’s attention is key. But you need the right tools to make the process fast and affordable.
Vyond makes it possible to scale training video production faster than ever before. With its AI capabilities, you can dramatically speed up your video production as compared to both live-action projects and traditional digital video creation methods. What once took hours or days now can take as little as a few minutes.
If you’re looking to create highly engaging, easily editable training content quickly, in more than 70 languages, Vyond is the solution that brings it all together.
Ready to elevate your training content and build better teams? Experience the difference with Vyond’s free trial.
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#### How to Make eLearning Engaging with Video: 12 Tips
With an eLearning course, the learner’s engagement is almost entirely dependent on the course itself because there is no in-person presenter. If the learner loses interest, getting them back is much more difficult because there’s no teacher there to swoop in and re-engage them. To keep learners engaged, the eLearning course must be gripping from the start.
Adding video to elearning courses is one of the most surefire ways to hook your audience and can also make information retention and recall easier for viewers.
But it’s not as simple as just adding videos to your eLearning courses. The videos need to be created in a way that hooks viewers while also delivering the right information. To make this process easier, there are key tips that can ensure that your videos hit the mark.
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Creating eLearning Videos
1. Set a Clear Objective
You won’t know where to take your video if you haven’t set a learning goal. A clear objective for your course and video will keep you on track and make sure you’re being concise with the messaging.
Your objectives should be high-level and functional, not granular. For example, when creating an eLearning video about web design, your objective could be, “ensure viewers walk away equipped to create sites using WordPress.” Save the granular goals, such as, “Teach users how to alter headers using CSS,” for the nitty-gritty course planning.
Objectives should be made clear at the beginning of your course, giving users an idea about what it is they’ll learn. Use clear, straightforward language because the objectives will be used to promote the course, and the wrong language could mislead users into taking a course that isn’t the right fit for them.
Learning objectives will help you and the learner understand what matters most in the course. Distill your video down to its most basic themes and the objectives will be easy to lay out. For an even deeper understanding of learning objectives, Duke has an in-depth guide.
2. Know Your Audience
Before you create your eLearning course video, you must take the time to understand where your audience’s knowledge gaps are and what approach best serves them.
To determine who your audience is, think about the subject of your lesson. Research that topic, and see what kinds of people frequent forums, social media pages, and other sites covering that subject. Are they older? Younger? Tech-savvy? Conduct internal surveys or look at the social media profiles of people who follow pages related to the topic you’re teaching to gather more info on your typical learner.
Use the audience data you’ve gathered to inform how you present the information. The audience and subject you’re presenting should play a big role in how the information is conveyed within your video.
For example, if you’re covering conflict-resolution tips for children, you’ll want to use childlike characters within the video. A video that does a scientific deep dive on how engines work, on the other hand, should use mature imagery, like photos or animated diagrams.
You know your subject matter through and through. Understanding your audience helps you determine how you can deliver your lesson in a way that resonates with them and makes them an expert.
3. Make the Benefits of the Video Clear
A key way to pique learners’ interest in your video is to explain why the knowledge you’re sharing is useful. Much like your learning objectives, stating the benefit of the video upfront will give viewers something to look forward to and make it clear what they’ll gain from the experience.
A great spot to announce these benefits is at the start of your video or course; this will give your viewers the promise of a benefit and motivate them to complete the video. Tell your viewer not only what it is they’re going to learn but also how this knowledge will help them do a task better or improve their life in a certain way.
If this video is a part of employee training, showcase how the video will help the viewer improve their job performance. For example, if the video covers a new sales technique your company will be using, you can explain how this can lead to an uptick in sales and a higher bonus on average. Peter Mercado at Cleveland Water and Power does a nice job of introducing the benefits in this eLearning video about how to find a water leak:
Your learners have already been sold well enough on the title or topic to click the video. Making the benefits of the video clear can motivate them to see the course through.
4. Captivate Viewers with a Scenario
Storytelling in eLearning can inspire audiences and help them get invested in the course. Instead of listing monotonous facts, share information through a scenario to hook your students and show how the knowledge is applied in a real-world setting.
Consider using a classic storytelling arc, based on the Freytag pyramid. Begin with an exciting incident, transition into a conflict, and end with a resolution. This model of storytelling is traditionally used in books, movies, and television, and it works by immediately hooking the viewer with something exciting or interesting.
For example, let’s say you’re making an eLearning video on de-escalating situations in the workplace. Your video could include a scenario that shows how two people get into an argument and how the situation could be resolved with communication techniques.
Here’s a simple sales training scenario from Vyond:
Locate and use more scenario templates from Vyond in our template library.
Videos have the benefit of taking advantage of both visuals and audio, making them a great medium for storytelling. Use this to your benefit, and grip your viewers with an educational story or scenario that fits the lesson.
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5. Add Interactivity
Don’t just talk at your audience with an eLearning video with narration—give them a chance to interact with the course content as well. This interactivity encourages engagement by actively involving the audience.
One way to add interactivity is by adding mini-tests or quizzes after a video plays to ensure that the knowledge is sticking. You can also break up videos with scenarios that allow the learner to select the appropriate response to a situation. This lets them ground the information in a real-world scenario while also giving them a chance to participate. Here’s an example from the British Council:
Videos can already be interesting ways to deliver education. Take things a step further and encourage your audiences to have fun by adding interactivity.
6. Keep it Concise
Studies have shown that engagement dips drastically after six minutes of video. With this in mind, try to keep your videos at or below six minutes. Two-three minutes are often best.
If you have a lengthy topic to cover, try to find areas where a break wouldn’t interrupt the flow too drastically. These breaks are a great spot to include a quiz or interactive segment as well.
Check whether the hosting platform for your courses offers a save function. If so, turn it on so users are able to step away from the session and resume it later. At the very least, be sure that your course video player allows students to hit pause. Interruptions happen, and learners need mental breaks, so an option to stop the course improves the overall experience.
Even the biggest lessons can be broken into concise, digestible pieces. Keep your viewers hooked by keeping it short and to the point.
7. Use a Mix of Visual Media Within Your Videos
Keep your videos visually interesting by using multiple types of media within the video.
Adding Adobe effects to a Vyond video, for example, can give the video an even more professional look while also drawing the eye. You can also use photos as backgrounds or props in animated videos, as exemplified by the channel Learn By Watch.
Pay close attention to the feedback on your courses and videos as you experiment with various types of visual media in your eLearning videos. Over time, you’ll see which types of media perform best with your audiences and be able to replicate that success.
8. Gamify It
Gamification, the practice of turning learning into a game, makes course completion fun for learners. It’s been shown to increase student and employee engagement and even motivate participants to try harder.
Consider adding gamification, where appropriate, to break up videos and make a course more engaging. For example, you might grant students badges for watching a certain number of course videos. You can also add scoreboards to your quizzes or tests and watch as learners compete to get the highest score, learning the material all along.
Duolingo, the language education company, is a prime example of gamification and eLearning. Duolingo’s entire platform is built around gamification, allowing users to earn badges, compete with others via a leaderboard, and build a custom profile that shows accumulated points and achievements.
The example below, a register training eLearning for McDonald’s, allows employees to test their knowledge with a simulated register that tracks score.
With small features, like badges, acting as a great motivator, there’s little reason not to add gamification. Let your audiences have a bit more fun while learning by taking interactivity to the next level with gamification.
9. Use a Professional Voice Actor
Most eLearning video will have some kind of narration that plays over the lesson. Instead of recording the narration yourself or asking a coworker to do so, consider hiring a professional voice actor.
A trained voice actor will sound more professional than an amateur recording, lending credibility to your eLearning. Actors are also able to inject emotion into their narration and dialogue, so learners can clearly understand the meaning of lessons in your video.
Use online voiceover markets, such as VoiceBunny or Voices.com to find an actor that fits your needs and budget. Be sure to listen to their samples to see if there’s a potential fit before hiring the actor.
The visuals of the video are only half of the equation. Make sure your eLearning video delivers the full experience by getting the right voice talent for the job.
10. Loosen Up
Don’t be afraid to bring a bit of personality to your eLearning videos. Being a bit unconventional—whether it’s in your visual style or humorous narration—will make your video content memorable and likely to stick.
If you’re uncertain about where to start with adding personality and creativity to your pieces, here are a few ideas to get your wheels turning:
Tell a joke.
Include a visual gag.
Use an energetic soundtrack.
Name your characters something silly.
Matt Moran does a great job of this in his public speaking course videos:
Take some risks, loosen up, and let your videos be something wholly original.
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11. Make Your Videos Accessible
In the United States, roughly 19% of the population has some form of disability, and your audience could easily consist of people who need assistance with accessing your material. Because of this, it’s always a good idea to make sure your eLearning videos are accessible.
To ensure that your videos are accessible, add closed captions to videos for people who are hearing impaired. These captions should be a separate text file that can be read aloud for people who are visually impaired.
It’s also a good idea to create a text version of your video that details everything said, because captions aren’t always capable of capturing the full effect of the piece.
Also make sure your video is hosted on a player that supports accessibility. Many major players, including YouTube and Facebook, have accessibility features but aren’t necessarily compliant with government’s accessibility standards. For a detailed list of compliant players, as well as further details on accessibility, read our guide on making accessible videos.
12. Ask Your Audience Questions
When it feels natural, take a moment to ask your viewers a question. While you won’t be able to hear them respond, this question will get them to pause and think about the information they’re taking in. Questions will push your viewers to think about the material and pull them back in if they’ve started to drift at all.
For example, if you’ve just presented a concept, think about asking a quick question and pausing, giving viewers a moment to think. Then, tell them what the answer is, and then dive into the next topic. These aren’t a substitute for quizzes or tests but serve more to keep your users thinking and interested.
Keep your Learners Engaged with Video
While eLearning doesn’t allow you to see learners in-person, you can still craft course videos in a way that keeps your audience hooked and excited to learn. The 12 tips above will have you on your way to creating engaging videos for your eLearning courses. Start with these basic guidelines, and then experiment to see what works with your brand and your audience.
Vyond has the tools and customization options to make videos that can be engaging for virtually any audience. Start a free Trial, and see for yourself how easy it is to make engaging videos that benefit any eLearning course.
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#### How to Make Engaging 2D Animations In 8 Simple Steps
Nowadays, anyone can create 2D animations thanks to intuitive 2D animation software. 2D animation is a type of animation where visuals have breadth and length, so you can see how long and wide they are. But you can’t see their depth—the distance from back to front—like in 3D animation.
But no matter how many Ds your animation boasts, simply creating an animation doesn’t guarantee someone will watch it. While viewers may play your video with one click, they could check their email or social media just as fast.
Whether to entertain or sell a product, we recommend you apply the following eight steps. They’ll help you create engaging 2D animations that intrigue and captivate your viewers.
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1. Sketch your ideas on a storyboard
Before you start animating, use storyboards to show your team how the story will look.
A storyboard is a drawn or animated sketch of your 2D animation’s events and dialogues. While it may only be a sketch, team members and clients can comment on the story’s events to ensure they’re clear, compelling, and aligned with the team’s goals before you animate them.
You can create storyboards on a piece of paper. First, draw a series of squares—each representing a scene—and then draw horizontal lines for each scene’s dialogue below each square.
For example; if you were to create a storyboard for The Three Little Pigs, you could sketch the story in nine squares: one for the introduction, three for each pig’s house-building efforts, one to introduce the wolf, three for the wolf’s house-destruction efforts, and one for the ending.
Once your team approves the storyboard, you can animate the project or present an animated storyboard—an animatic—to share a clearer idea of what you plan to create.
2. Animate from scratch or use a template
Creating your 2D animations from scratch gives you the complete creative freedom to execute your storyboard precisely as intended. But unless you have experience with animation, staring at a blank screen can be intimidating, meaning animating from scratch can be time-consuming.
Vyond makes the animated process easier by giving you access to a huge asset library of video templates, characters, backgrounds and props, all in a variety of professional styles. You can find the template that best fits your storytelling needs by browsing our template library, and filtering by Job Role, Category or Style.
You can also use Vyond Go, our instant script and video generator to create an editable rough cut video in less than a minute.
3. Create your stories’ 2D characters
After choosing a template, it’s time to create your storyboard’s animated characters.
You can use Vyond Studio to create characters of any age regardless of your animation experience.
First, open the character panel found in the top left corner of Vyond Studio. From there, you can choose between dozens of pre-designed characters or click on Create new character to open our Character Creator.
Pick the 2D character animation style that aligns with your project’s style, and then choose the body type and shape that better represents your character’s physical features.
As a final step, customize your character’s facial features and garments based on their profession, interests, or personal style.
4. Choose an appropriate environment
A poorly selected location can make a well-designed character look out of place, making the message or narrative you are trying to convey ambiguous.
Take the example below as an illustration of how your scenario affects your message.
On the left, Mickey dresses like a cowboy in a location matching the cowboy era. The character design and background match the cowboy narrative. In contrast, Mickey’s outfit looks out of place when he’s in front of The Simpsons’ house. The environment doesn’t match his aesthetic or the era Mickey’s supposed to be part of. In this scenario, Mickey is dressing for a costume party at best.
You can cohesively decorate your stories’ environment by checking your storyboard and brainstorming the location of each scene with your team. Meet with your team’s animators and scriptwriters to check the props and background elements that should be on the final version of your storyboard’s squares.
Then, head to Vyond Studio and click on Background to choose between 150 locations, over 2,000 props, and 32 patterns.
5. Animate props and characters following Disney’s animation principles
Disney’s animation principles are 12 practices that some of Disney’s most skilled animators follow to bring animations to life.
You can follow some of Disney’s principles of animation to create lifelike 2D animations that entertain and engage viewers.
Look for actions in your storyboard that could benefit from one of Disney’s animation principles. For example; if you’re animating a character running, you can reduce the running speed at the start and end of the action to follow Disney’s Slow In and Slow Out principle.
Follow Vyond’s simple animation process to give life to static characters. Start by selecting a character, click on Action in the top right corner, then pick an action. Going back to our running example, you could add the Running action to the character, followed by a Line Motion Path that makes it run from left to right.
6. Vary your camera’s movements
Camera movements drive your viewers’ attention to specific portions of your video, increasing the likelihood that they watch your 2D animation from start to finish.
For example; during Under The Sea, one of The Little Mermaid’s iconic songs, animators vary between camera movements like zoom outs, slides, and boom shots to direct the viewers’ attention to formerly hidden portions of the frame.
You can also use camera movements to ensure viewers don’t miss the video’s most crucial elements—like call-to-actions, next steps to complete a purchase, or statistics.
Before you vary your 2D animation’s camera movements, look at your project’s scenes and ask yourself, which is the most critical element I want to highlight? Then, choose the camera movement that better highlights said element—action, event, prop, or character.
For example; let’s say one of your scenes features two characters talking at a café. In that case, you could zoom in to hide unimportant portions of the background and emphasize the importance of their conversation.
7. Add motion graphics
You can create 2D motion graphics—like symbols, shapes, and text—to emphasize a phrase, action, or transition from your scenes.
For example; in the video below from SpongeBob’s official YouTube account, the animators used motion graphics to highlight the switch from one scene to another. While the motion graphics are subtle, they are visible enough to allow viewers to distinguish episodes from one another.
You can use motion paths in Vyond to turn static text, props, and shapes into moving assets. First, select the asset and enter the Motion Path menu in the top right corner of Vyond Studio’s interface. Then, choose the type of motion path that best fits the movement you are looking to recreate. Finally, adjust the moving asset’s end position and the time it’ll take to reach it.
Those animating text can use our Kinetic Typography (i.e., moving text) template to speed up the animation process.
8. Include music and sound effects
Music and sound effects that support the emotion your 2D animation is trying to convey help maximize the impact of your animations.
A 2009 research paper found music can influence the emotion we perceive from a visual. During the study, test subjects were more likely to perceive a neutral image as happy (or sad) after listening to happy (or sad) music.
For example; you can include an upbeat song to energize your audience as a positive event shows on the screen or add a rain sound effect during a sad scene.
In Vyond Studio, you can do this by entering the Audio menu in the top left portion of the interface and then choosing from 154 pieces of Background Music and 318 Sound Effects.
Create your first 2D animated video using Vyond
Vyond is a versatile, all-in-one AI video creation platform that makes it easy to create engaging 2D animated videos for any business need.
With our intuitive, easy-to-use AI-powered instant video maker, Vyond Go, and our full-featured video editor, Vyond Studio, you can effortlessly generate your first 2D animated video in minutes.
Create your first 2D animation
#### How to Make Great Animated Videos for Marketing
When it comes to marketing, no single approach will work all the time. You need a blend of tactics and content types: blog posts, videos, emails, social media posts with animated GIFs. The list goes on and on.
Video can be a great addition to virtually any marketing toolkit, but it can be expensive to make. That is, unless you create your own animated videos. Learning how to make animated videos allows you to capture people’s interest using the visual power only a video can provide, all while taking less time and money than a live-action video.
Animated videos for marketing are powerful but often misused. You can learn how to properly use them in your marketing by following these steps.
Step 1: Have a plan
Step 2: Create a script and storyboard
Step 3: Make the animated video
Step 4: Promote your video
Step 5: Track everything
Why Are Animated Videos Beneficial for Marketing?
Your marketing has a lot of work to do: convey brand messaging, educate audiences on a product or service, and ensure any messaging is concise and compelling. Animated videos can boost the effectiveness of your marketing efforts by conveying more information in a shorter amount of time.
But the reasons for using animated video in marketing don’t stop there:
When framed strategically, animated videos won’t feel like marketing at all. Consider this: 96% of people have watched explainer videos about products or services.
With 85% of businesses using video in their marketing, animated video is expected at this point. Not using it means you run the risk of missing your target audience.
Animated video adds context and life to complex ideas. When you stick to words, illustrations, or graphics, you’re limited in scope. Animation allows you to better convey complex ideas.
Animation gives you more options with tone. With animated video, you can strike precisely the tone you want. That can mean the difference between marketing landing versus falling flat with audiences.
When using animated video, you have more control over the cost and final product. Having to reshoot a video means paying actors for additional work, editors for more hours, and so on. With animation, you can use software to ensure you have the actors, tone, and final product to match your other marketing materials.
The reasons to use animated videos in marketing are many. As video’s popularity continues to rise, so will its benefits. But how do you go about implementing a video in your marketing strategy?
How to Include Animated Videos in a Marketing Strategy
While it’d be great if you could throw an animation together, plug it into your marketing materials, and call it a day, but that’s not the case. There’s a lot that goes into knowing how to make animated videos. First, ensure your animated videos feel like they belong in your marketing campaign, serve a purpose, and are effective.
The following steps will guide you as you take your idea for an animated marketing video and turn it into a finished piece that’s ready to be promoted.
Step 1: Have a plan
Before you start working on your video, you need to make a general plan for what it is your video will accomplish and how it will accomplish these things. To do this, there are a few areas you need to focus on.
How your video fits with your brand
Is the concept for your animated video in line with your branding, or is it going to stick out? Is there a natural way to brand this specific video?
Your animated video will have to be a clear part of your brand, just like your other marketing efforts. Strong branding will boost your brand identity, increase general awareness, and ensure the video doesn’t stick out from your other content. Read up on brand storytelling to ensure you’re branding your video effectively.
Create a brief
Once you’ve got an idea of what you want your video to accomplish, create a brief. This will lay out the goals of your video in writing and help you develop a script and storyboard. Some key points to add to your brief include:
Primary goal: Is your video promoting a product? Helping with general brand awareness?
Target audience: Who is your video for? What kind of video and style resonates with that audience?
Core message: This is the meat of your video. What’s the primary message you want your audience to take away?
Availability and promotion: List out where your video will be hosted and where you may want to promote it.
Budget: How much can you afford to spend on this video?
Target launch date: When will your video ideally go live?
A brief doesn’t need to be a work of art. Your primary goal is to ensure all essential elements of the animation and creation process are documented. This will help you stay on track, and can also be useful for winning over any stakeholders that weren’t initially on board with the idea of making an animated video.
Step 2: Create a script and storyboard
With your brief in hand and goals clearly outlined, it’s time to make a script. Once you’ve made the script, you can start creating the video itself.
Even animated videos with little-to-no audio or narration should have a script. A script will lay out all the components of your video, helping you to stay on task when creating your video. Begin by making an outline for your script that includes the following:
A hook: This is the main draw of the video, and will take place immediately. This is your unique stance that should interest viewers. Think, “What does my audience want?” It’s also a great place to put your company song or jingle if you have one.
A middle: The middle is where you’ll add the meat of your message; this is where you tell your story. Think about what’s necessary to uphold the claims made in your hook, and include it here.
A call-to-action (CTA): This is what you want your audience to do; it’s generally placed at the end of the video. Keep your CTA concise and direct. Tell your audience what it is you want them to do: learn more about a product via a link, sign up for an upcoming webinar, etc.
Once your script is complete, you’ll also want to create a storyboard. The storyboard will act as a diagram for the video, outlining what happens in each scene. This will give you an idea of what each scene will look like and help you identify any potential issues before animating the piece.
It’s also important to be mindful of your branding while making the storyboard, noting where it makes sense to use branded colors, place products, add logos, and so on. Learn more about how to create a storyboard for your animated video.
Much like the brief, the storyboard doesn’t need to be a work of art. If the illustrations leave a lot to be desired, that’s okay. The important thing is that you and your team can look for potential problem areas in the video, like a section with too much going on at once.
Your script and storyboard will likely change over time, so don’t get too attached to anything in it. Before you even begin making the video, you’ll likely realize certain lines aren’t working, a scene needs to be altered or removed, etc. Until the video is done and published, the script is very much a living document.
Step 3: Create your animated video
Your script and storyboard are complete. Now, it’s time to tackle how to make your animated video a reality. This process can vary, but there are some general tips to keep you from going off the rails, running out of budget, and blowing past your target delivery date.
Consider your audience
Think about your audience and what kind of animation will resonate most. Your current content and style guide can be useful here, as many of your visual stylistic elements will likely transfer to animation. This is also important for branding’s sake, as an animated video that’s consistent with your style guide will be more cohesive with your other marketing content.
There’s likely a significant overlap between your target audience and that of your competition. Look at what kind of videos or animations your competitors are making and how they appear to be performing. This can help you determine what may or may not be effective with your audience.
Determine if you need to hire a voice actor
There’s a chance you’ve decided your video doesn’t need a voiceover. If so, skip this step! But if you need any kind of voiceover, it’s important to choose the right person for the job.
Some videos will require a professional voiceover artist while other videos will work with an in-house recording. If you have someone in-house who is comfortable recording and sounds professional, give them a shot. If you’re hiring voice talent, there are several places to find voice actors online who will create free demos for you to ensure you’re happy with the final result. The video above was voiced by Laura Schrieber. Read more about her suggestions for finding the right voiceover talent.
Look at animation software options
Consider using animation software. This can save your budget and even cut down on the time needed to make your video, especially when compared to creating custom animation. Some design studios estimate the animation process can take roughly six weeks from start to finish. This time can be reduced by weeks, depending on the time you can dedicate to the process.
The right software will make it possible for you to create an animation that looks professional without needing a designer. It also allows room for more rounds of revision and future updates, as you won’t be paying hourly to have designers and animators redo things. Instead, you only have to pay for the software.
Be mindful of design and branding
Keep design best practices in mind: Don’t over-clutter the video, limit what’s animated to avoid overwhelming.
Make sure you’re using branded or company colors when appropriate. The same goes for any kind of brand-specific font you use in your other content, on your site, and in your other marketing materials.
Step 4: Promote your video
You worked hard to create your video—it’s time to share it with the right people. Social media, your website, and your email list are all great places to promote your new animated video. But there’s more to it than publishing it and forgetting it.
Choose a great preview image
Before potential viewers hit play, they’ll see an image. Make sure it’s one that draws the eye and entices them to click. Try to find an image that piques curiosity. This could be an image with on-screen text that poses a question, or perhaps a snapshot of a new product.
Promoting your animated video
Your animated video is done; now it’s time to make sure it’s seen. There are a number of places where you can—and should—promote your video.
Organic social media: Publish your animation on your own branded channels, such as Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram.
Paid social: Pay for social media ads to target new audiences on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and other relevant platforms.
Email: Your email list is a free, powerful way to promote your video. This audience is likely more engaged than those you’ll encounter on ads, as they’re already following your brand. This makes email an especially great place to A/B test videos. Be sure to read up on how to send video through email beforehand!
Your own website: Include your video where it naturally fits on your website. For the best results, it’s a good idea to place your video “above the fold” aka near the top where people can see it.
Don’t be discouraged when promoting your video. It’s likely many of your early promotional efforts don’t yield the results you’d like. Run tests, collect data on your promo performance, and iterate until you’re consistently knocking it out of the park.
Step 5: Track everything
Creating an animated marketing video can take time. It’s important to know that your work is paying off, as this can influence future efforts and tell you if you’re missing the mark. Make sure you’re properly tracking your video performance, ads, social posts, and emails to inform your future video efforts.
In order to ensure you’re tracking the right things, follow these tips:
Track video performance: Use a platform that has proper analytics, like YouTube or another professional alternative. See where people are leaving your video, what kinds of likes and dislikes you’re getting, and so on, to incorporate these insights into your future video efforts.
Monitor your email sends: You should be tracking your email performance to see if people are opening your emails, clicking the video, and watching your content. If you have a poor open rate, try out different subject lines. If people aren’t clicking the video, it’s possible the preview image isn’t enticing, or the content itself isn’t interesting.
Watch ad performance: You’re paying for ads, so you want to be sure you’re getting the most out of them. A/B test different versions of ads and see which ones get the most clicks and conversions. See what you can learn from these tests and use that data to inform your future ads.
Much like promoting your videos, analytics takes time to get right. Over time, you’ll learn what metrics are most important to you and your brand, and as a result, become more effective at tracking performance.
Recreating Your Animated Success
Congratulations—you’ve completed your first animated video for marketing! But recreating success isn’t always as simple as running through the same process again. You need to vary your approach and constantly revise your process.
The following tips can increase your chances of success and help you capture lightning in a bottle a second time:
Change up your content: Make different types of videos to avoid burning out your audience. Different video formats also achieve different objectives, making it especially important for you to mix things up. For example, an explainer video is an effective way to promote a service, while an animated recruitment video is great for marketing your business.
Watch out for audience changes: Your audiences will change, and so should your videos. Research audience trends and closely monitor the performance of your videos to ensure your audiences aren’t shifting. If they are, it’s time to change your approach to video.
Monitor general trends: Video and animation trends can shift over time. Pay attention to trends in video and marketing to ensure you’re not falling behind. For example, video is now the preferred type of content for audiences following brands on social media. But before this, it was images.
Use the right tools: Animation can be time-consuming and difficult, but the right tools can make it much more manageable. For example, Vyond makes it possible to animate without using any designers or animators. You can make animations that truly fit your brand by customizing any of Vyond’s many characters and scenes.
You can recreate your animated success again and again when you use the right approach and take the time to do research. And the right tools will make animating much easier. To see for yourself how much the right tools can help, sign up for a free trial of Vyond.
Learn How to Make Animated Videos Part of Your Marketing Success
Animated videos can be a boon to your marketing efforts when implemented properly. Making the video is only half the battle. Once you’ve got the video created, take the time to promote it properly and track everything.
If your first marketing campaign with video isn’t a huge success, don’t be discouraged. It can take a few iterations before you determine what kinds of animated videos perform best with your audience.
Sign up for a free trial of Vyond.
#### How to Make Infographics Videos in 6 Actionable Steps
The average blink of an eye happens in 400 milliseconds, less than one-half of a second. If we handed you a newspaper article and took it back after less than one-half of a second, how much of it would you remember? Would it be 80%, 60%, or maybe 50%? The answer would likely be between 1% and 0%.
Neuroscientists from MIT ran an experiment, finding that “the human brain can process entire images that the eye sees for as little as 13 milliseconds.” Video infographics present alphanumerical data in graphics with sound effects, background music, and movement. Since they use graphics, they benefit from the brain’s capacity to process images faster than words, increasing the likelihood that viewers can recall what you are showing them.
The following six steps let you create an engaging infographic video—a video that revolves around an infographic or one where an infographic supports a video’s thesis. Each step gets you closer to creating videos that keep viewers watching and encourage them to buy your products or change their mindset.
1. Gather and validate your infographic’s data
The purpose of an infographic is to present data clearly. But it’s crucial to confirm whether the data we gather is reliable. According to Edelman, 81% of consumers report that being capable of trusting a brand to do what’s right is a deal-breaker in buying decisions. When you use reliable data, you position your brand as a credible source of expertise in an industry, helping you gain and keep customers.
The data you want to feature in your infographic determines where you’ll find it.
Look to your CRM or other internal data sources for reliable numbers you can justify. Since you own this data, featuring it in your infographic means readers will see you as a reliable primary source of industry insights.
Since you collect internal data, you know it’s reliable. But that’s not always the case with external data. Journals and websites often misinterpret quotes or create roundups of outdated stats. To find reliable data, look for statistics no older than five years. These statistics should come from the source who collected them, so you understand the context behind the data.
2. Select the chart that best represents your data
Every chart specializes in presenting different data.
Scatter plots are great for representing how datasets from two variables react to one another. But they are too complex to show how a variable grew in a year. In this instance, a simple line chart would be enough. Choosing the chart that best suits your intent and amount of data allows you to create a simple infographic that your audience can learn from.
Vyond’s End-of-Year Reports template uses a pie chart to highlight some of Zodio’s key audiences over the last year. The speaker brings attention to the two most significant segments as the chart appears on screen to ensure viewers don’t miss this data.
The amount of data you have and your goal determine the chart you’ll use. If you want to highlight a statistic, a simple counter chart is enough. Meanwhile, those comparing many variables can use a vertically stacked bar chart or a pie chart.
Vyond offers seven types of charts. You can add them through the Charts menu in the top left corner of Vyond Studio. Then, you can change their values, ways of representing data, and colors using the Chart Data and Chart Settings menu in the top right corner of Vyond’s interface.
3. Define your target persona
Defining your persona helps you create a video infographic with data that customers find valuable and relatable. Greater personalization makes the video more interesting for the viewer, making it more likely that they’ll share the video.
You can define your target persona in three steps.
First, learn about your clients’ demographic information, like ages, hobbies, and routines. This data lets you spot people who’ll find your product or knowledge helpful in a crowd. You can uncover this data by asking customers about it with a call or survey. Client-facing colleagues, like those from your sales team, can also share this data.
Second, ask clients or colleagues facing them how they have tried to solve the problem that your infographic addresses. This stage will teach you about alternative solution methods clients have used. You can later use this information to create infographics proving why your product is superior than your competitors’.
Third, look for the most prevalent traits and create a fictional persona based on concurrent traits. For example; a productivity tool targeting people in college can use the following persona: Mike, an athletic, third-culture 20-year-old, striving to be the best in his class without neglecting his friends.
4. Write your script
You can use scripts to organize when each voice line or event happens. A script also allows you to provide descriptions of what’s happening, so people understand your intent for the scene. Planning these elements lets you write a story cohesive with your persona, getting you one step closer to achieving your video’s goals.
Start your script by outlining the lessons or topics you want your video infographic to discuss in bullet points. Then, write the information viewers need to understand the infographic’s data. These first two steps help you ideate the background knowledge required to comprehend the value of your video.
It’s not impossible to forget about a foundational concept needed to understand a topic when you are an expert. So, ask for feedback from colleagues from other departments. Their unfamiliarity with your infographic’s data and video topic will help them spot scenes that are too complex, unclear, or vague. These are the scenes that your target audience might also find confusing.
Next, flesh out what will happen during each scene and the exact words your speaker will say. The script lines don’t have to be lengthy, as viewers engage less with videos after the two-minute mark. But the lines should be complete and use simple language so that everyone can understand and find value in them.
5. Design a storyboard
A storyboard is a framework to draw or illustrate how a video’s story will unfold.
You can use storyboards to sketch what will happen before, during, and after your infographic appears on-screen. Then, you can use this asset to determine the most coherent placement for your infographic based on your teaching or selling goals.
Storyboards comprise many squares with lines below or next to them. To use one, draw the events happening during a scene on each square. Next, write the scene’s corresponding lines below each square to check if the script line is clear enough to explain the scene.
You can sketch your storyboard on a piece of paper or print our template.
6. Add motion paths
Motion paths are visual effects that move or change the size of your infographic for a certain amount of time.
When you animate an infographic next to a speaker or other information, you direct the audience’s attention to the data you are presenting.
For example; the Goal Progress Thermometer story and infographic template uses Motion Paths to show the company’s progress in its goal to save trees.
If the infographic is the only element on the screen, motion still helps you keep viewers watching by stimulating their eyes to look at different areas of the screen. For example; the sliding effect of the template above keeps viewers expecting the result of the company’s progress. A static number could also present this number. But it would make it easier for viewers to look at it for one second and look elsewhere.
You can add a motion path using Vyond Studio:
Select the chart you want to animate.
Click the Motion Path icon in the top right corner and pick your favorite Motion Path.
Adjust the timing on the same menu.
You can then click the Preview button on the top right corner of the screen to see how everything looks.
Create an animated video infographic using Vyond
Video infographics are more effective at sharing data that viewers can recall than text-based slides or talking head videos. They also meet employees’ and consumers’ desire to watch video content from management and brands, respectively.
You can use Vyond to create engaging animated video infographics even if you are a beginner at graphic design and infographic video makers. Our set of tools lets you choose between seven pre-designed charts you can add and customize in a few clicks.
You can also use our high-quality video templates to get your animated infographics displayed on your audience’s favorite social media platform or website in less time.
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#### How to Make Onboarding Videos Engaging for New Employees
Make a great impression on new employees right from the beginning—otherwise, they may just leave.
That sounds harsh, but in fact, 20% of employee turnover happens within the first 45 days on the job. When people quit this early, it’s often due to ineffective onboarding that fails to demonstrate the value of the company or how the employees themselves provide value.
Great employee onboarding prepares and excites new hires for their work. It strategically educates them when they can best absorb it. And instead of using dry communication methods like text-heavy documents or bullet-laden presentations, great onboarding happens through captivating media—like video.
Read on to learn how you can use video to add depth to your onboarding and truly engage new hires. With these ideas, you can create an experience that prepares employees for work and leaves them feeling excited about your company and their opportunity within it.
The Value of Engaging Employee Onboarding
When new employees don’t work out, it’s not just disappointing—it costs your company money and resources.
If a new hire isn’t happy, replacing them is expensive. According to a study by Employee Benefit News (EBN), it costs companies 33% of an employee’s annual salary to hire a replacement. If the new hire is poorly trained, your company workflow becomes less efficient. Other employees will have to spend time helping out the new hire instead of focusing on their own tasks.
From day one of employment, the key to new hire success is engaging onboarding—a captivating process that teaches new hires how to complete their job effectively and operate successfully within the company.
Engaging onboarding leads to retention. After a structured onboarding program, employees are 69% more likely to stay with a company for three years.
Engaging onboarding also educates new hires. Using video makes it easier for new hires to learn. Viewers retain 95% of a message through video compared to only 10% through text.
The formula for onboarding with these results is simple: use a captivating medium, like video, and show content gradually and strategically based on each stage of the onboarding process. With this alignment, new hires will feel settled in their position and excited about growing further at your company.
How to Use Video Throughout Employee Onboarding
Onboarding is incremental. Typically lasting around three months, the process gradually builds new hires’ knowledge of their role and the company so they have time to learn and retain all relevant information. While employee learning and development is an ongoing process, the following stages help set up a new employee for success.
The first day: Teach new hires how to access and use company technology, make introductions, review essential company and position-specific information, and set goals for their onboarding.
The first 30 days: Train new hires on role-specific tasks and how to take advantage of company benefits like insurance and paid time off.
60 days in: Celebrate the accomplishments of new hires during onboarding and encourage further growth and learning.
90 days and beyond: Put your training to the test, and encourage employees to apply their new knowledge and skills.
Using video, you can create engaging content that’s appropriate for each onboarding stage. The combination of visuals, audio, and movement keeps new hires interested, and the information is strategically paced so they can continue to learn and grow in their roles.
Here are several video ideas to guide new hires along the four stages of onboarding to help them feel at home at your company.
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The first day: make a great first impression
A new hire on their first day can only absorb so much information at once. You don’t want to overwhelm them, especially since they’re probably already a bit nervous.
To keep them engaged, show videos about the essential, high-level information of the company. Give them a broad sense of the company’s goals, personality, and their own role-specific goals. This general information is just enough to excite them about their job while still preparing them for the next few weeks.
Here are a few video ideas to introduce new hires to the company on their first day.
Communicate purpose
Show a welcome video that conveys the mission of your company and a few basic details. Reminding new hires about your company information reinforces their decision and the value of their position, so they feel excited about their work.
Show off your personality
Work relationships matter. Make it easy for new hires to connect with the rest of the team by using video to show the human side of the company. The non-profit Coast & Country Housing, for example, gives new hires a warm welcome with clips that show what employees like to do outside of the office.
Outline onboarding goals
At the end of a new hire’s first day, send an onboarding checklist or video that presents a checklist of achievable onboarding goals. New hires should have a list of these goals they can print and check throughout onboarding. But for the first day, a video is a great way to quickly convey the expectations and set a friendly tone around the goals.
Get them online
It never hurts to use brief how-to videos to help new employees set up their technology and work-related systems, especially if they require complex instruction.
The first day of onboarding is an important introduction to the company. The key is to keep new hires engaged with videos that highlight the main details of your company and their role without overwhelming them with too much information. With just enough content, new hires leave their first day feeling excited about their workplace.
Here’s a video we use to introduce new employees to the team on their first day.
Get the template
Open this video as a template in Vyond Studio and explore how it works. Click the button above while signed into a paid Vyond account or free trial and the template will open in your account.
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The first 30 days: Time to learn
With a comprehensive first-day introduction, new hires are ready to learn more detailed, department-specific content. Show training videos throughout the first month of onboarding to provide role-specific, necessary knowledge.
By pacing out this content during the first 30 days, new hires have enough time to learn and retain more in-depth material. Using video in this training further increases learning and retention outside of the classroom, because employees can watch when they are motivated to learn, and because the medium lends itself to a more interactive experience.
Here are a few video ideas for the first month of onboarding. These examples are designed for specific roles and may not be suited for the employee you’re onboarding, but they’ll show you the level of detail to aim for in the first 30 days.
Cover mandatory industry training
Many roles require training on industry-specific topics. Give new hires this mandatory training in the first month of onboarding—they’ll need to know the information to begin their job so they’ll be eager to learn. Using video is especially good for breaking down complicated topics or rules with visuals. For example, check out this training video on good cybersecurity practices.
Teach a skill
Employees may also need training that isn’t mandatory but still helpful for completing their tasks. With video, you can use characters, text, and more to bring different tactics to life and make them understandable.
Introduce a department
If you’re a medium-to-large company, it can be difficult for new hires to meet their entire department and understand its goals. Welcome them with a video that features team members, talks about practices, and gives a sense of the group’s culture. Watching employees describe the department will make the team feel more relatable and less intimidating.
Use video to teach new hires the role-specific knowledge they need in the first month of onboarding. Using video to explain lessons with different tools—movement, text, images—and spreading the content over 30 days makes the training understandable and digestible.
60 days in: Celebrate and encourage growth
After two months, new hires have learned a lot but may still feel they need more training and resources to feel secure in their jobs.
To make them feel welcome and set them up for post-onboarding, show them, through video, how they’ve already added value and can continue building their knowledge.
Recognize new hires’ accomplishments
Create a video that celebrates the milestones of new hires based on the goals you set at the beginning of onboarding. Videos feel personal, so it’s the ideal medium for employee recognition. If it feels right, you can even share the video with the rest of your team to make your new hires feel especially appreciated. In the video below, the goals are for a long-term employee instead of a new hire, but it offers a great template for how to showcase achievements.
Build a learning resource
Select a permanent place—such as a landing page or cloud folder—where new hires can rewatch onboarding videos if they need to refresh their knowledge.
Videos have a personal touch that’s perfect for onboarding. With video, you can recognize new hires for the hard work they’ve done, so they feel welcome and appreciated. And with all of the videos you’ve created for onboarding, all employees have the resources they need to refresh their knowledge.
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90 days and beyond: Put your training to the test
Now that you’ve provided a comprehensive onboarding experience for your new employee, it’s time to test your training by letting the employee apply their newly gained knowledge and skills.
With decreasing supervision, your new hires are now able to perform their roles and fully contribute to the team. And one of the best ways to demonstrate a deep understanding of said roles is by explaining it to others. Encourage employees to create their own videos, such as an external-facing sales demo or marketing promotion, or an internal video that explains a process or simply introduces them to the rest of the company. By doing so, you’ll be able to assess the employee’s grasp of their new role and gain additional training content for future hires.
Help Employees Grow with Video After Onboarding
Video at each stage of onboarding makes learning engaging. With content that’s understandable and captivating, new hires are prepared and excited for their work.
You can help employees grow even more after onboarding by creating and sharing new training videos. For example, you could build a set of videos to train your team about new software for your department. Using video to help employees at all stages build their skill set means they’ll appreciate your company and their jobs even more.
About Vyond
Vyond allows people of all skill levels in all industries and job roles to create dynamic and powerful media. With features that go beyond moving text and images, you can build character-driven stories or compelling data visualizations that engage audiences and deliver results.
With Vyond, it’s easy to create videos for your training. Get started making your own videos today. Start a free trial and sign up for a webinar.
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#### How to Make Your Cyber Monday Campaign Stand Out with Videos and GIFs
In years past, the Adobe Digital Index has predicted a 16.8% year-over-year increase in sales, totaling an estimated $6.58 billion in one day
Source: Adobe Holiday Predictions
Consumers are ready to buy, but they’re going to be bombarded with emails and other deal-based marketing from every online store they’ve ever visited. You have to find a way to make your Cyber Monday campaign stand out to attract buyers to your sale. Animated video and GIFs can engage your Cyber Monday shoppers quickly and powerfully. Unlike a static promotion, an animated video or GIF uses subtle motion to attract customers. More specifically, animation comes with unique visual elements—colorful backgrounds, fun effects—that are perfect for grabbing buyers’ attention. We created this guide to break down how you can attract Cyber Monday shoppers with animated video and GIF marketing. We’ll cover how to craft your messaging, create your animation, and distribute your campaign to encourage as many purchases as possible with your video.
How to Frame Your Cyber Monday Video
To decide what your Cyber Monday campaign messaging will be, you have to think about what will motivate your shoppers to participate in the sale the most. A straightforward sale announcement might attract shoppers who are especially discount-driven, while a product-demo ad will encourage shoppers through education. We’ll break down how four different campaign messages drive customers to shop your holiday sale so you can decide which one is the best fit for your audience.
A simple sale announcement
For customers who are especially discount-driven, make your Cyber Monday promotion crystal clear with a simple sale announcement video or GIF.
What’s the best format for this message? GIF. There isn’t much content to share, so you only need the short, slight motion of a GIF to attract buyers.
A thank you video
Your customers are humans, and humans like to feel appreciated—so why not package your promotion as a “thank you” card?
Instead of sending a straightforward promotion, create an animated video or GIF that thanks customers for their loyalty and offers them a Cyber Monday discount as an appreciation gift. Framing the discount as a thank-you gift is more memorable than a typical promotion ad, and it makes customers feel happy and acknowledged.
What’s the best format for this message? Animated video or GIF works. Opt for a video if your thank you message is longer, or use a GIF for a shorter, one- or two-frame thank you animation.
A family-focused message
Spending time with family is what makes the holidays special. With a Cyber Monday event, you give customers more time to spend with their families during Thanksgiving week—they can easily shop online instead of spending Black Friday in crowded stores.
What’s the best format for this message? Animated video. While this message could fit into a GIF, a longer animated video gives you enough time to depict the idea a bit more. You can show characters spending time with family and shopping online for Cyber Monday.
How to Create Your Cyber Monday Video
You can create your Cyber Monday promotion video in minutes using Vyond. Our Studio allows you to create either a playable animated video or a GIF of your video that plays automatically.
Below, we’ll break down the top Vyond resources you need—templates, webinars—to quickly create an engaging Cyber Monday animated video or GIF.
Create a video in Vyond
An animated video is ideal for your Cyber Monday promotion if your message is going to be longer than 15 seconds or include audio. Besides being longer and including sound, a video gives you the opportunity to showcase more scenes and characters to illustrate your idea further.
People getting started with Vyond can quickly learn how to make a Cyber Monday video, even if they have zero production experience. Start learning with our introductory resources page, which includes webinars, tutorials, and FAQs.
With these resources, you can learn the very basics of creating your Cyber Monday video—check out the “How to Make a Video in Vyond” tutorial—and gradually advance to more complex topics, like scene transitions.
After you’ve learned the basics of navigating Vyond, the quickest way to create your Cyber Monday video is to use a template. Each one is prebuilt with backgrounds, characters, props, effects, and more, so you don’t have to spend much time editing. This post includes five video marketing templates for you to add to your own account and modify.
You have access to over 1,500 additional scene templates across all three styles in Vyond Studio.
With our “Getting Started” resources and Vyond templates, you have everything you need to quickly create your Cyber Monday promotion video, regardless of your film production background.
Create a GIF in Vyond
GIFs are the perfect way to grab shoppers’ attention for a brief Cyber Monday message. They have enough subtle movement and are short enough to engage customers without losing their focus.
One easy way to create GIFs is with Vyond Premium, Professional, and Enterprise plans. Once you’re done creating your video, simply export it as an animated GIF.
Keep in mind that a high-quality GIF is typically only 5 to 15 seconds long, so aim to keep your Cyber Monday clip this short before exporting. GIFs are also limited to 256 colors per frame, so it’s best to limit the number of colors you use and avoid gradient backgrounds.
How to Distribute Your Cyber Monday Video
It doesn’t matter how great your Cyber Monday video is—if you don’t distribute it well, it won’t encourage your customers to participate in the bargain event.
There are three main places to share your Cyber Monday videos with customers:
Your website
Email campaigns
Social media posts and ads
We’ll cover the best ways to feature your Cyber Monday animation on these platforms to grab customers’ attention and lead them to your products.
Website
The best place to feature your Cyber Monday video or GIF is your homepage. With this prominent placement, your customers are more likely to see your bargain event and make a purchase.
The fashion brand Charles & Keith, for example, included this sale-announcement GIF on their homepage. The subtle motion and dramatic, large lettering grabs shoppers’ attention before they dive into the site.
[Source]
Email
An email campaign is one of the most common ways to tell customers about your Cyber Monday promotion. You can reach customers directly from their inbox and lead them straight to your website with backlinks in an email.
Emailing a GIF of your Cyber Monday video is fairly easy. GIFs are supported across most email clients (excluding Outlook 2007, 2010, and 2013), and you can link the GIF to your product page or homepage.
For example, Radio Shack emailed a Cyber Monday sale-announcement GIF of a countdown clock to the promotion. The subtle motion catches shoppers’ eyes, and the timer clock creates a feeling of FOMO that makes customers want to participate in the sale.
[Source]
If you’re sending a full animated video, we recommend emailing a thumbnail image of your video that links to a landing page on your site, where the video immediately plays. This method is better than embedding the video to play in the email for a few reasons:
Most email clients don’t support embedded HTML5 videos.
You can’t link embedded videos to outside sites, so it’s more difficult to lead customers to your website from the email.
To learn more about emailing your Cyber Monday promotion, check out our simple guide to emailing a video.
Social
A fast way to share your Cyber Monday video with your top customers is through social platforms. With social, you can target shoppers by their gender, age, purchasing behaviors, and more, so your Cyber Monday video reaches your top customers.
[Source]
To promote your Cyber Monday video through social, you’ll need a Business Account on the platforms you want to use. Here are links to set up Business accounts on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
With a Business account set up, there are two main ways to promote your Cyber Monday animated video or GIF:
A Facebook ad: Directly promote your product as a labeled Facebook ad. An ad allows you to have greater placements beyond News Feeds, such as the right sidebar.
A promoted Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram post: Instead of creating a separate ad, you can boost a post with your Cyber Monday video or GIF to be placed higher on customers’ feeds.
You can learn more about promoting your Cyber Monday video or GIF on social with this helpful AdEspresso guide.
Attract Cyber Monday Shoppers with Animated Video
Cyber Monday is one of the most competitive shopping days for online brands. To stand out to customers, your company needs a visually compelling way to grab their attention and get them excited to shop during the event.
As one of the most engaging mediums, animation quickly and powerfully draws shoppers to your Cyber Monday sale. After using this guide, you can quickly create an animation that reaches a wide range of shoppers and motivates them to make a purchase during your sale.
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Vyond allows people of all skill levels in all industries and job roles to create dynamic and powerful media. With features that go beyond moving text and images, you can build character-driven stories or compelling data visualizations that engage audiences and deliver results.
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#### How To Represent Different Ages in Vyond
Effective visual storytelling almost always relies on thoughtful character design, even if the character’s an inanimate object. That’s why we’ve packed so many features into Vyond’s Character Creator including the ability to create characters of different ages. This is now one of the first tools presented to new Vyond makers.
When you need to build a cast of characters from various stages of life, though, where do you begin? Recently, an expert from Vyond’s customer support team shared a few examples they created in the Vyond Maker Community forum:
Adriana’s examples above show how a few thoughtful design choices—from body type to hair color—can clearly and convincingly convey various stages of life in your characters. Having the ability to represent characters of diverse age groups can be a powerful tool in any animator’s toolkit, especially to depict age-specific relationships like parent and child, and all of these scenarios can be created using Vyond.
With a little thought, you can design child-like characters in any of Vyond’s animation styles. In the video below, you can watch one of Vyond’s own video producers create a young character in the Contemporary style.
Read on for more advice on designing Vyond characters that are young, old, and everything in between.
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4 Tips to Create Characters of Any Age in Vyond
1. Select your character’s body type
Body type is one of the easiest ways to depict various stages of life. Whether your viewers are in Bangkok or Berlin, they’ll register that babies are small and adults are large.
To choose your character’s body type, open the character panel located at the top toolbar and then click on create a new character. After selecting an animation style, you’ll be prompted with a two-step window to pick between several body types that vary in height, weight, and other physical traits.
The first window will allow you to choose between two characters with different physical traits. Because of our Character Creator’s broad range of gender-neutral options, you can focus on picking the body type that best captures your character’s unique gender expression and support it later with clothing and body features.
After choosing between the two body frames, you’ll be able to pick between five body types that vary in height and weight. As a general rule, the smaller and slimmer the body type, the younger a character will appear.
Children are shorter and weigh less than full-grown adults, making our fifth body type (shown above) perfect for younger characters. However, it’s trickier with older generations, where teenagers, adults, and older people can share the same height. Vary the characters’ weights to differentiate between young and middle-aged adults. While real life doesn’t have any rules for weight across age, in animation, you can effectively use slightly larger characters to suggest the extra—ahem—experience we gain as we advance through life.
2. Customize facial features and hair
Children—at least for the most part—don’t have full-grown beards. Facial hair, fine lines, and gray hair are also typical features of a particular age group. By adding or removing these features from your characters, you can help signal their age to audiences.
Vyond’s Character Creator lets you choose between more than 300 face shape, eye, nose, mouth, eyebrow, ear, hair, and eyewear customizations that you can combine to convey a specific age.
With the pair on the left, notice how a mouth with wrinkles can help us suggest a character is older, even with same height, weight, and outfit of their more junior companion. Similarly, for the pair on the right, viewers will assume the character on the right side with the cropped hair is older than the figure with shaggy hair. To take this even further, you could use Vyond’s RGB color selector to change their hair color from dark blue and black to gray.
Of course, age isn’t an exact science. Some young people have fine lines and wrinkles, and some old people keep their hair long and shaggy. Keep in mind that your characters can appear however you see fit, and capitalizing on your audience’s assumptions can help you communicate your story more clearly.
3. Design age-specific outfits
People of all ages are free to wear what they like, but we tend to associate clothing choices with specific generations. Teenagers own band t-shirts to showcase their musical taste while only someone in their late 20s or older could be wearing medical scrubs while on the job.
Inside Vyond’s Character Creator, you can choose more than 300 top and bottom garments for your character by clicking on the one that best represents them. The clothing choices range from casual pieces such as hoodies, blouses, and t-shirts to work-related apparel like astronaut suits, soccer t-shirts, and pilot shirts.
A teenage baseball player wearing a sports tee aligns with the person’s age and what they do. We’d expect him to wear that on the field or even for daily errands. On the flip side, dress that same character in an admiral’s jacket covered in medals, and viewers might think he’s wearing his parent’s jacket or a Halloween costume.
4. Add accessories
The accessories section offers over a hundred details and wearables that you can use to make your characters look younger or older.
As with clothing, Vyond’s Character Creator lets you modify the color of specific accessories. You can alter the hue of a character’s accessories—such as changing a mask from green to black—or turn facial hair selected from the accessories tab to gray to signal age.
While varying a character’s facial hair color can help communicate different ages, there are ready-to-use options to age a character, such as police officers’ and hunters’ hats. Other accessories can make your characters appear more youthful, such as a Batman mask or an academic cap.
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Using the right customizations, your stories will resonate with your audience. You’ll create characters that remind viewers of themselves, their peers and role models, or even the person they want to become in the future.
Age in Vyond is just the beginning. With it, you can create characters with different backgrounds and professions and put them in custom environments to tell your unique story. The best part? You don’t need to hire a film producer to get your story right. Vyond’s user-friendly design—which includes templates and drag-and-drop tools—is easy to learn, whether you’re creating marketing videos or internal training content. Regardless of your message, Vyond makes it easy to bring it to life.
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#### How to Reskill and Upskill your Workforce With Video
The term “automation” has practically become synonymous with layoffs. Business and tech journalists constantly write about how the continuous introduction of new technology will make jobs around the world obsolete.
It’s true that certain technology will eliminate many positions—but it will also create new ones. As more manual tasks are handled with automation, companies will need employees who can perform advanced tasks and operations that machines aren’t capable of, whether that’s managing a team or building an organization’s growth strategy.
To fill these new roles, companies must embrace employee training. “Reskilling” workers allows businesses to be agile in constant technological change. Rather than hiring or outsourcing for every new skill, companies can train existing, trusted employees to handle the shifts in their industry.
In this post, we’ll break down exactly why reskilling workforces is essential in 2020 and explain how to create this training with video.
Why reskilling employees is necessary
As automation becomes more prevalent, research predicts that employees will need new skills to thrive. According to the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs 2018 report, more than a quarter of companies anticipate that automation will create new jobs in their field. McKinsey has identified three skill areas that will be most in demand by 2030, given the rise of automation:
Social and emotional intelligence, such as showing empathy and working collaboratively in teams. McKinsey estimates a 24% increase in demand for these skills in roles by 2030.
Technological skills. As companies introduce new tools to automate tasks, they will need employees with advanced technical skills to operate the tools. McKinsey estimates a 55% increase in demand for technical skills.
Higher cognitive skills, such as creativity and critical thinking. McKinsey estimates a 55% increase in demand for these skills by 2030.
For companies, there isn’t a single solution to meet the demand for these new skills. Outsourcing, hiring, and training will all be used to fill new jobs. Of these solutions, however, training proves to be one of the most cost-effective.
According to a 2018 report from Training Magazine, the average cost of training existing team members is $986 per employee, while the Center of American Progress found replacing employees on average costs 21% of their salary. Without a doubt, this could greatly impact your payroll. Outsourcing also brings its own costs, both monetary and non-monetary. Compared to managing an employee, it takes more time to oversee freelancer and agency relationships and ensure that the work is being done properly.
Beyond costs, training empowers companies to quickly adapt to the rise of automation. Outsourcing and hiring take time, as it’s difficult to find high-quality employees and services. Focusing on internal training enables employers to make the most of their current resources and avoid the time and monetary costs associated with seeking external solutions.
Many leading companies are already embracing reskilling as a solution. AT&T launched a $1 billion reskilling program for its 250,000+ employees. Amazon has also pledged to retrain a third of its workforce—nearly 100,000 people—by 2025.
Luckily, you don’t need the budget of a Fortune 500 company to embrace the trend of reskilling. With accessible, affordable software, businesses can create their own training content to grow employees’ skill sets.
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How to reskill and upskill your workforce with video
Training solutions, of course, aren’t always cost-effective. Outsourcing training to other companies is often an expensive investment. For companies who want a budget-friendly option, creating in-house training is ideal.
Video training is particularly easy to create internally. With the right software, you can quickly create high-quality videos for your team at a reasonable cost.
Fast: You don’t need to be a graphic designer or film producer to create training videos. Accessible software, like Vyond, offers drag-and-drop video templates so you can create professional-grade training in minutes.
Affordable: The subscription fee for video software is almost always going to be lower than the cost of hiring new employees or outsourcing work. It will also take a small amount of time to create these videos, in comparison to the long amount of time it takes to hire or outsource work.
High-quality: Modern video creation tools are equipped with professionally designed props, characters, and scenery—as well as plenty of effects—so your training is always polished. They also offer customization options so you can create training that is useful for your team.
By creating video training, you’re able to prepare your workforce and company for the rise of automation without compromising on cost or quality. We’ll break down below how you can build video training programs to teach employees the three skills that McKinsey predicts will be the most valuable in 2030.
Social and emotional intelligence
Even the most advanced machinery doesn’t have the social and emotional intelligence that roles across all industries require. Research predicts that as more basic skills are handled with automation, companies will want more employees who bring these social and emotional skills to the table. McKinsey estimates that 24% more working hours will be spent using these skills in the US.
Video is ideal for helping employees develop social and emotional intelligence. Using this medium, you’re able to create scenarios that illustrate the positive behaviors that you’re trying to teach. The stylized look of animation is especially suited for this type of training. Rather than depict difficult social topics like harassment with live video, you can use animation to make the subject feel more approachable.
As an example, check out this training video we created about “P.E.T.E.,” an acronym to help service representatives respond to frustrated customers in a positive, helpful manner.
The video starts with a scenario that gives employees a clear idea of what a negative customer interaction looks like. From there, a combination of character actions and on-screen text is used to teach reps how to improve their conversations. As a bonus, the video includes both whiteboard hand animations and fun music to keep employees engaged in the training.
When creating video that bolsters social and emotional skills, there are several tips to keep in mind:
Use facial expressions of characters, or even just smiley faces, to quickly convey emotions. The alternative of describing feelings with text or narration takes longer and is less impactful.
Consider showing both a “do” and a “don’t” situation, as seeing both scenarios gives employees a clear understanding of how they should act.
If you’re showing these videos in a classroom/office setting, pause between scenarios to ask employees questions about the situations and the ways they might act if they were in the characters’ shoes.
By depicting scenarios with engaging visuals, video teaches employees how to successfully navigate social situations at work.
Technical skills
The rise of automation will bring more advanced technologies to workplaces. In response, companies will need employees with advanced technical skills to operate and optimize these tools. McKinsey predicts that 55% more working hours will be spent using technological skills by 2030.
Video content is well-equipped for helping workers build these crucial skills. Unlike manuals, video allows you to display a product as it’s being used, so viewers can learn how to interact with its given features. Narration is another useful video element for technological training, allowing you to explain how a tool works through a voice recording while showing the product in action.
Consider this example of how to use Slack’s video conferencing feature:
The tutorial (one of a series) uses screencasting to demonstrate the product’s features. By deploying the training as a series of quick videos, Slack keeps the content engaging and easy to follow.
When creating your own videos to teach technical skills, follow these suggestions to keep employees focused on the training.
If you’re teaching employees to use software, create a screencast of someone using the product while narrating their actions to explain how to use it. Hearing instructions while seeing the product in action will give employees a full understanding of how to use the product.
Try to incorporate characters into your lesson to make the instructions you’re providing more engaging. Switching back to the figure, whether it’s footage of an employee or an animated character, will give employees a mental break from the lesson, so they’re able to absorb the information more easily when you dive back into the content.
Introducing new technology to your business doesn’t have to be disruptive. Prepare your workforce for the new tools by creating your own technical training videos.
Higher cognitive thinking skills
With automation handling more manual tasks, companies are able to dedicate more of their workforce to higher-order thinking, such as creativity, data analysis, and synthesis. McKinsey estimates that 8% more working hours will be dedicated to using higher cognitive skills by 2030.
Video is a powerful tool for building these higher cognitive thinking skills in employees. With video, you can show how this type of thinking is used in practice, so it feels less nebulous and more concrete for employees.
As an example of this training, consider this video from North Carolina State University. It teaches students and faculty about how to employ creative design thinking when solving new problems.
The video makes the design process easier to understand through a scenario. A character confronts a design problem, and the video walks through the steps that viewers should take to arrive at a solution. The story arc and the fun animations throughout the video keep the training engaging for employees to watch.
Create training content for building higher cognitive skills that are approachable and understandable with these tips:
Create a video of tips that employees can use to complete higher cognitive tasks. A universal set of advice will be especially helpful since higher cognitive skills can be used in a variety of situations at work.
When creating video content that focuses on data analysis, consider using infographics—such as charts and graphs—to visually explain how to interpret figures.
If you plan on showing the video in person, designate stopping points where you can ask employees to model the thinking skills being presented. This role-playing will help employees understand how to utilize these skills when tackling complex cognitive tasks at work.
With thoughtful video training, you’re able to build employees’ creative and critical skills as the demand for higher cognitive thinking increases.
Preparing your employees for the future of work
The skills gap created by automation will require a number of solutions. The government, for example, may need to step in to provide citizens with financial assistance. Citizens may choose to further their education to have access to more job opportunities.
For employers, there is a clear response that is both cost-effective and sustainable: reskilling employees. Hiring and outsourcing work is both costly and time-consuming. As a quick and budget-friendly alternative, companies can create their own training programs. This solution allows businesses to quickly adapt to changes caused by automation with employees they know and trust. Using the training tactics in this post, you can start reskilling employees at your company by building video training programs.
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#### How to Secure Internal Video Content From Competitors And Unwanted Strangers
Every company has video content with confidential information, like announcements of future software features, the onboarding process for new employees, or walkthroughs of how employees should respond to customer feedback. These don’t have negative information per se, but there could be consequences if they leak. To prevent compromising your content, we present to you some tips to secure your internal video content.
This is an example of a video for internal communications that you may want to keep private. You can edit this video and make it your own by editing this template.
Competitors could launch an imitation of your software’s upcoming feature before you do if they know how it’ll look in advance. And if your customers discover there’s a step-by-step process for talking to them, they might perceive your brand as less human or caring.
There are seven security methods for how to secure internal video content and how to share internal video content with team members, stakeholders, and selected third parties safely. You can use them to avoid crucial information from leaking outside of your organization.
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1. Restrict domains
A domain is the website name—like vyond.com—you purchased from a domain vendor. You can restrict the website domains so that your video can only play on the websites you choose.
So if, for example, a company wanted to feature your video in a listicle article or a competitor wanted to embed your video into their database, the video wouldn’t play.
SproutVideo, a live and on-demand video hosting platform, lets you specify the domains where people can play your internal videos and embed your website’s code.
You can include your website as a starting point. Then, add the domain names for industry allies, websites where you often guest post, and sites you use to store content—like Notion.
2. Specify the emails that can access your video
Some platforms allow you to specify the emails of the people who can access your video, hiding it from anyone outside the list. This option is helpful to share videos with people outside of your company without giving them access to all of your content.
You can use YouTube, the most famous video hosting platform globally, to host private videos that only a few emails can access.
Private videos only play for you and the people you choose. Thus, your followers, competitors, or strangers won’t see them on your YouTube channel’s feed or in the platform’s search engine.
To share a private YouTube video, make the video private inside the video settings Visibility tab before or after uploading it.
Once the video is up, go to the Visibility box inside your video’s YouTube Studio settings and select Share privately.
You can include the Gmail accounts of the individuals who can watch the video after signing in.
3. Add a password to your video
As long as your employees don’t share the password with strangers, your videos will remain private. But this good practice is easier said than done.
Keeper found that 46% of U.S. workers share company passwords for accounts used by multiple colleagues, raising the possibility of the password falling into the wrong hands. So before even adding a password, educate your employees about proper password-sharing etiquette:
Try not to share your password.
If you have to share your password, do it through a safe password management app like Keeper.
The next step is to set a password for your video. Wistia, a video hosting solution, lets you include a password in any video hosted in their software. All you have to do is go to the video, select Customize, and add a password.
The password doesn’t need to be 50 characters long. But it’d be best if your employees followed specific rules to come up with passwords that are hard to breach.
4. Use platforms with AES encryption
Encryption is a process where data converts into seemingly random data, which you can understand through a key—the string of characters (or logic) used to alter the data.
The following video teaches you how AES encryption works and why 128+ bit encryption is reliable and secure.
Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) is one encryption method you can use to secure internal communications videos from strangers who don’t own the encryption key.Even with a supercomputer, says senior security architect Mohit Arora, cracking the 128-bit AES key would take 1 billion billion years through brute force.
You can use Kaltura, a cloud-based video platform, to encrypt video calls and meetings. The program generates an AES key at the beginning of the session, making it impossible for anyone to enter your call and listen to confidential information.
5. Use time-based delivery
Time-based delivery is the option to add a scheduling and expiration time to a video’s embed code.
Through time-based delivery, you can control the time a video will remain online, limiting access to whoever tries to watch it after a set date.
VIDIZMO, a private video streaming solution, lets you expire a video’s URL on a given date to avoid spreading information outside your organization.
You can use this feature to let outsiders replay a webinar or company announcement for a few hours after the event finishes, after which the video access expires.
6. Restrict IP addresses
An Internet Protocol (IP) address is a set of numbers that identify a device on the internet.
You can restrict IP addresses outside your organization’s devices to prevent strangers from looking at your company’s videos even if they know where you are hosting them.
You can use Brightcove, a video delivery platform, to block a stranger’s access to your videos, whether they are trying to view it from their home or through an IP masking service.
7. Activate single sign-on
Single sign-on (SSO) is a technology that lets employees write their login credentials once to access a platform’s protected data.
This video will briefly explain how single sign-on or SSO works.
You can use SSO to give employees access to an internal video content hub through a username and password.
Air, a platform to host creative assets, allows you to give employees access to private internal video content.
As long as they protect their credentials by not sharing them and double-check sites where they are writing their details, it’s unlikely a stranger will access your internal video content.
Secure and share your internal video content
Some video creation platforms, like Vyond, let you password protect projects as you work on them.
This feature means you can work, show, or request feedback on any internal comms video—training, company culture, confidential live streams—instead of uploading raw versions to a hosting platform and then returning them to your video creation tool.
Vyond’s set of intuitive animation tools can help you create engaging videos to share with employees or specific individuals, whether you want to make a video of a new service launch or news about a company acquisition.
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#### How to Send a Video Through Email
Including video in email is a great way to drive email engagement and video play rates, but it takes a little planning.
This guide will provide clear and easy instructions for sending emails with a video and/or animated GIFs. We’ll also share the elements of great video emails and present four methods for adding video to your emails.
Watch the video below and jump ahead to this section for detailed instructions.
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The must-haves for sending a video through email
Want to learn how to send a video through email? These are the two things you have to keep in mind:
An engaging visual preview
People are less likely to watch your video if you represent it as a long URL link in an email.
Imagery is the best way to alert readers to a video in your email. Video is a visual medium, so it only makes sense to promote it with images. Not to mention, humans are visually oriented, so imagery is more likely to catch attention in a crowded inbox. Think about “clickability” when deciding how to present a video in an email.
Adrenaline Travel newsletter created with MailerLite
In the example above, it looks like the video is embedded into the email, but it’s really an animated GIF image with a play button over it. More on this below.
Experience across email platforms
Email apps—or clients—are not created equally. They all have different ways of displaying emails and attachments. For best results, you have to try to give every recipient, no matter what client they use, the same email experience.
Here is a comprehensive resource on how email apps display content differently, and which types of video content to avoid.
By thinking about “clickability” and compatibility, you can evaluate the best way for your business to send video emails.
4 ways to email a video
Choosing your method for emailing a video depends on what’s most important to you. Do you care more about a seamless video-watching experience in the email, or are you more interested in getting clicks to your site? How much time can you spend on adding videos to email? Do you know how to use HTML?
A video email example from Wistia
Here is a breakdown of the strengths and weaknesses of four ways to add a video to an email:
Link + image
Our checklist for videos in email:
An engaging visual preview ✅
Support across email clients ✅
Our recommended way to email a video is linking an image or animated GIF. It offers email recipients an engaging preview of the video while still enabling them to click, watch your video, and continue exploring your site.
This method works really well for recipients who are reading the video email on their iPhone or other mobile devices.
It works by including an image—either a thumbnail image or an animated GIF—of your video in an email that links to a landing page. Be sure the video described in your email is at or near the top of the page you’ve linked.
Here’s how you can share a video through email with this method:
Upload your video to a video hosting site like YouTube.
Add the image of your video thumbnail to an email.
Take a screenshot of your video thumbnail or by creating an animated GIF of your video and adding a play button to it.
Vyond Premium, Professional, and Enterprise account holders can create custom animated GIFs or turn portions of a video into an animated GIF for this purpose. Giphy is also a free and easy mp4 to GIF-creation tool.
Here’s how to download an animated GIF in Vyond Studio:
Insert the image or animated GIF into the email body.
Link the image to your video.
Here are instructions for linking an image in Gmail and Outlook.
A GIF is effective because the animation will capture your reader’s attention. Be careful, though: some clients like Outlook 2007, 2010, and 2013 won’t play the GIF.
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Embed with HTML5
Our checklist for videos in email:
An engaging visual preview ✅
Support across email clients ❌
Another way to email a video is to embed it in the message so recipients can play it right from the email. You can embed a video in an email by coding it into the message through HTML5.
To embed a video in an email, you or a developer at your company will need to adjust the HTML5 code of your email using these instructions.
When a video is properly embedded in an email, it’s an ideal user experience—the recipient can watch the video right from their email without needing to go anywhere.
There are, however, a few downsides to this method. Not all email platforms support HTML5 videos:
Emails with embedded videos are sometimes marked as spam, which makes the message unreadable for recipients.
It’s also more difficult to drive email clicks with this method because a video that you can play in the email can’t be linked to another website. The viewer might watch your video but might not visit your website.
Attach an mp4 file
Our checklist for videos in email:
An engaging visual preview ❌
Support across email clients ❌
Instead of including a video preview or the video itself in the email, you can opt to send the video as an attached file in your email.
The process for attaching a video to an email is easy—simply click the “attach” button (typically, the icon is a paper clip), and select the video file that you want to attach.
This method is nice and simple, but it doesn’t offer an engaging visual preview or drive clicks.
A single attachment doesn’t easily capture the attention of email recipients—they could easily miss the video unless they scroll to the bottom of the message and see the attachment. If you’re using this method, be try to include visuals of the video in the body of the email as well to engage recipients.
Email marketing platforms do not support attachments, so emails with mp4 attachments must be sent from individual accounts. This method is not a good way to send large video files, as the typical limit for a video file across email clients is 20 to 25MB. To send large video files to a small number of people, try a file-sharing platform like WeTransfer.
One workaround is to send a large video file as an email attachment through your client’s Drive. Gmail, for example, offers the Google Drive suite; Outlook has OneDrive.
While emailing a video as a drive-file attachment will allow you to send larger videos, this tactic will work only for recipients who use that drive service—so the method is still limited in support across clients.
Attaching a video file doesn’t really encourage recipients to continue exploring your brand, either. Instead of visiting your website, they are opening an attachment.
With these limitations, the attachment method may work for communication with a small number of people who have the correct drive system for opening up your video file. But attaching a video to an email is not recommended for reaching out to a large number of customers, considering the file-size restrictions across clients.
Include a YouTube link
Our checklist for videos in email:
An engaging visual preview ✅
Support across email clients ✅ & ❌
If you include a YouTube URL in the body of a Gmail message, the video will appear as a playable attachment for Gmail recipients. The URL will work for everyone, but only Gmail users will be able to play the video in the email. For those readers, this is a useful way to get your video played right away, in the email itself. It won’t work as well for people using other platforms, like the Mail app on their iPhones or other mobile devices.
On the flip side, this method doesn’t encourage traffic to your site. Recipients who click on the attachment will be directed to the YouTube video page, so they may explore your brand more by poking around your company’s YouTube channel. But it’s unlikely that the video page will bring traffic to your site unless the video itself has a CTA button to your site.
This method isn’t recommended for a large number of recipients, as anyone using another email platform will see only the plain URL and most likely won’t be motivated to watch the video.
Email videos with your viewer in mind
Adding video to your emails is a reliable way to increase engagement from recipients. Marketing research shows that including videos in emails consistently leads to greater open, click-through, and conversion rates.
These results, however, happen only if your videos are emailed with the viewer in mind. From your video display to support across email platforms, you have to weigh quite a few factors to send a video that engages readers. Using this guide, you can find a method for emailing videos that is accessible and engaging and encourages viewers to connect with your content.
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#### How to Storyboard Your Next Video
A storyboard is your roadmap when you make a video.
Like a script, your storyboard visually guides you throughout the production process. By planning your video, you know which shots you need to create and how to create them when filming begins. You can get others’ feedback early on and make simple adjustments to your storyboard, rather than making major changes while filming.
To make a good storyboard, you don’t need to be a visual artist (though you can be). A storyboard can be anything from comic book-like rough sketches to stick figures to computer-generated drawings. To help you plan your own video, we’ll walk through the basics of creating storyboards, including:
The basic elements of every storyboard
A breakdown of two popular storyboarding methods
Understanding different ways to storyboard, you’ll be set to visually plan your own video. Regardless of your budget or design experience, you’ll be able to create a clear map that seamlessly guides you through production.
Your go-to storyboard checklist
Whether they’re drawn by a storyboard artist or diagrammed on a computer, all storyboards share the same information. They need to touch on the main actions, speech, and effects in every shot to clearly communicate how a video will appear.
Here are the key elements that every storyboard should include:
Shot images: Individual panels featuring 2D drawings to show what’s happening—actions, characters—throughout a video
Shot number: The number indicating when a shot appears according to a video’s shot list
Action: The primary activity happening in a shot
Dialogue (or narration): Any speech that is heard throughout a video
FX: Technical details that explain how the shot is created in production and post-production (e.g. aspect ratio, camera angles, camera movement, shot type, sound effects, special effects)
A full storyboard has all of the information necessary to imagine how your finished video will appear. Reviewing your images and notes for each shot, you and your team can brainstorm how your video should be adjusted and what resources you will need in production.
Here’s an example of a blank storyboard:
Download this: US Letter | A4
Two popular storyboarding methods to consider
When most people hear the word “storyboard,” they think of a professional animator quickly sketching out a cartoon feature film.
As it turns out, a storyboard doesn’t have to be a work of art—it doesn’t even have to be hand-drawn. With video production software, there are options for all types of users—regardless of their industry, design experience, or budget—to create useful professional-grade storyboards.
Hand-drawn storyboards
The classic storyboarding process is drawing by hand. You sketch out a mock-up of what each shot will look like.
As mentioned, you don’t need to be a great artist to create a storyboard—stick figures are enough. The principal goal is to convey the main action that is happening in the shot, so each frame doesn’t need to be very detailed.
A longhand storyboard cuts costs, but it’s not necessarily the most efficient option, as seen in these pros and cons:
Pro: It’s free. All you need is a pencil and paper to create a hand-drawn storyboard.
Con: It’s time-consuming. Drawing every single shot—even if they’re not detailed—will take a while considering that one storyboard frame only represents six seconds of a video. For a three-minute video, for example, you would need 30 storyboard frames. There is also a risk of losing your storyboard since your work is tied to a piece of paper.
If you hope to keep video costs low, a hand-drawn storyboard is probably the best method for you. Just keep in mind that you will need to devote at least a few hours, if not more, to complete the task, and you’ll need to scan or make copies of your storyboard for everyone working on your video.
Storyboarding software
People with less time to hand-draw frames and/or larger budgets may opt to use specialized storyboarding software. These programs are built with robust customization and automation features to help you quickly create your storyboards.
Here are a few options to consider for creating your storyboards:
StoryboardThat
Price: $14.99/month
Main features: Equipped with a large image library and a drag-and-drop interface. Characters and scenes are customizable.
StudioBinder
Price: *Starts at $29.99/month
Main features: Offers plenty of customization options, such as filtering columns and changing aspect ratios. Allows you to upload images, add notes, and color-code each shot.
ShotPro
Price: $39.99 with in-app purchases (app price); $25.00/month (desktop price)
Main features: Allows you to create hyper-detailed storyboards at a reasonable price. It’s also mobile-friendly for users who want to storyboard on their iPad or iPhone.
Storyboarder
Price: Free download (Mac OS X, Windows, Linux)
Main features: Easy-to-use drawing tools, edit and save back to Storyboarder in Photoshop, print and import paper storyboards.
Vyond
Price: Business plans start at $89/month
Main features: Vyond is a video creation software, not specifically a storyboarding tool, but the vast array of animated assets available make it easy to create “rough draft” videos or static storyboards to visualize almost any scenario.
With any of these storyboarding tools, there are a few pros and cons to consider.
Pros: You can create a high-quality storyboard in minimal time. These tools allow you to create highly detailed frames with custom aspect ratios, image uploading, and more with the click of your mouse.
Cons: Some programs can be costly and somewhat inconvenient. In most cases, you will need to switch to a separate software, outside of video editing, to create your storyboard.
While these storyboarding tools are powerful, many organizations don’t need these features to create their storyboards. Only companies with elaborate videos and full production teams need to create these hyper-detailed storyboards with specialized software.
Additional storyboard resources
Want to learn more about creating storyboards? Here are a few additional Vyond resources to explore:
What is a Storyboard, and Why Do You Need One?
Why You Need a Storyboard for Your Microlearning Video
Making an Explainer Video Storyboard
Build your own storyboard today
A storyboard is a critical part of the pre-production process. This planning minimizes production roadblocks by allowing you and your team members to refine your video vision before filming even begins.
Use this guide to discover the best storyboarding method for your organization. Whether you prefer to draw your frames or create them in the Vyond studio, there are storyboarding options for users of all types, regardless of your budget or time constraints.
#### How to Teach Bedside Manner Through Video
Nursing and medical schools have come to realize how important it is to not just focus on the practical side of patient care—administering medicine, assessing symptoms, and more—but also the emotional side. Bedside manner is a critical element of being a doctor, nurse, or caregiver.
Here are a few key reasons that sum up the importance of bedside manner:
It builds patients’ trust. Small signs of empathy—a nodding head, open-ended questions—from a doctor or nurse show their patients that they have their best interests at heart.
It increases a patient’s chances of success. When a patient trusts their healthcare professional, they’re more likely to follow their orders and as a result, hopefully, recover as quickly as possible. According to a 2014 study, therapeutic clinician-patient relationships have a statistically significant effect on health outcomes.
It makes for a more fulfilling career. For medical professionals, seeing how their bedside manner helps patients—whether through emotional or physical improvements—reminds them that they’re making a positive impact through their work.
Though many healthcare professionals question whether bedside manner can be taught, a 2011 study from Duke University shows that it can be. Oncologists who listened to a CD tutorial about bedside manner tips treated patients empathetically twice as often as the doctors who hadn’t used the CD.
With both audio and visuals, a video tutorial is even better at helping care professionals improve their bedside manner. A video can demonstrate not just what to say to patients, but also what type of body language and expressions are best to show in different scenarios.
To help you improve patient care, this post will walk through the three stages of creating a bedside manner training video. Follow the video planning, creating, and sharing tactics in this guide, and you’ll be set to create a tutorial that improves bedside manner.
Planning Your Bedside Manner Video
A bedside manner training video is a long-term investment—you’ll most likely be showing it to employees for years to come. Make the most of your content by planning out its details beforehand. By mindfully choosing your video format and topics, you’ll ensure that your training is equipped to help your staff form a better bedside manner.
Decide what type of video you want to create
The first step of creating your bedside manner training is choosing what type of video you want to create. If you decide your video format well in advance, you’ll have enough time to form and secure a video budget, along with other resources you may need.
There are two main types of video to consider: live action and animated. We’ve broken down the pros and cons of each format to help you choose the best one for your needs.
LIVE ACTION
Pros:
Realism. You can show what a patient-client interaction actually looks like to give viewers a clear, accurate idea of great bedside manner.
Personal. Your employees will be able to relate to the video when they see footage of their coworkers and workplace.
Cons:
Costly. To make a high-quality live-action video, you have to pay expensive professional equipment rental fees and actor paychecks, and it takes a lot of time to film and edit.
Difficult to update. Re-shooting is too expensive and cumbersome to do frequently.
ANIMATION
Pros:
Lighthearted. The stylized look of animation makes the potentially heavy topic of bedside manner feel less serious and more approachable.
Easy to update. Adjustments can be made quickly from your computer with animation software, like Vyond.
Cons:
Accuracy. Animated video is more abstract, so it won’t capture the details of a scenario as precisely as live-action footage.
Once you choose your format, build a list of everything you’ll need to create this type of video. Not sure what you’ll need? We recommend checking out this Adorama guide for live-action videos and this Vyond guide for animated videos.
Include a mix of lessons
A great bedside manner does two things: shows empathy and encourages conversation.
Show empathy. Undergoing medical treatment can be a rough, painful experience. Patients who feel like their caregivers understand what they’re going through are going to appreciate and trust their healthcare professionals.
Encourage conversation. Doctors and nurses are more capable of helping their patients recover if their patients speak openly about their condition.
Include advice on both empathizing and prompting discussions to help care professionals build a full set of great bedside manner.
Here are a few tips on showing empathy that you can include:
Greet the patient by name. Instead of diving right into a treatment plan or the bad news of a prognosis, start by saying hello. The greeting is the first step towards making the patient feel acknowledged and understood.
Make eye contact. By looking at your patient as they speak, you show that they have your attention and you’re interested in what they have to say.
Nod your head. As your patient describes their condition, nodding your head shows that you’re listening and understand what they’re saying.
For encouraging conversation with patients, here are a few tips to include.
Use open-ended questions, such as “how does that make you feel?” These questions encourage patients to describe their condition in detail, so their doctor or nurse has the information they need to help them recover.
Use positive body language. If healthcare professionals fold their arms, it signals to patients that they aren’t receptive to discussing their condition. Maintain an open stance with unfolded arms to show that you’re ready to listen and discuss their issue.
Consult with healthcare professionals
Once you’ve decided on the lessons you want to cover, review your ideas with several professionals at your hospital. These people interact with patients every day, so they know which aspects of bedside manner are the best at building patient-caregiver relationships.
Here are a few questions to ask when sharing your ideas:
Are there any other principles you would add for building a better bedside manner?
Would you remove any of the principles that were included? Why?
What are the biggest bedside manner mistakes that doctors and nurses make?
With this input, you’ll be able to refine your ideas and feel confident that your video covers the most important gaps in bedside manner knowledge.
Creating Your Bedside Manner Video
With your video format and ideas planned, you’re ready to think about how you want your final product to look. If your presentation is engaging, your audience will actually be able to remember and implement the bedside manner lessons. We’ll cover a few key ways to make your video’s key principles clear and memorable, so medical professionals who watch are able to form a better bedside manner.
Show don’t tell
A 2014 University of Iowa study showed that people remember less of what they hear and more of what they see. Based on this research, the key to making your bedside manner video impactful is demonstrating the lessons with actors or characters. The alternative of having a speaker simply talk about the principles isn’t visually striking and more likely to lose viewers’ focus, as shown in the example below:
Play out the bedside manner lessons, and viewers will have a visual memory of your video and be more likely to remember the principles.
Here are a few tactics for showing great bedside manner in your video:
Create scenarios. Script how bedside manner would play out between a caregiver and patient, and actors can perform the interaction. For example, the lesson of greeting the patient could be shown by a doctor walking into the appointment room and saying “Hello [patient name], I’m Dr. [doctor’s name].” For each scenario, use text to highlight example sentences that doctors might say to patients.
Highlight do’s and don’ts. To illustrate a principle, show an example of a caregiver successfully using bedside manner and another example of a caregiver failing to show the manner. For example, the lesson of positive body language could be explained with a “DO” video of a nurse having an open stance and a “DON’T” video of a nurse with folded arms.
Include text to make your message clear
Along with teaching through demonstration, your video lessons will also be easier to remember when paired with text.
Consider how difficult it is to follow this bedside manner training video. It only features a single speaker without any other visuals or text, so viewers have to listen closely to distinguish between lessons.
Now, consider the animated bedside manner training video at the beginning of this post. The text captions make it easy to know which lesson is being taught.
With text, your video is easier for viewers to follow. Your team will immediately know the principle you’re trying to focus on because it’s spelled right out in front of them.
Here are a few concepts that you can highlight with text in your video:
Lessons: Highlight the bedside manner principles that you want to teach with large text, which can be below the main action or placed over it.
Dos and don’ts: In a split screen format, place “do” and “don’t” text on top of each screen to show good and bad examples of bedside manner.
Example sentences: As a scenario plays out, show via text the phrase that a caregiver should say to the patient.
Sharing Your Bedside Manner Video
Distribution is the final factor that makes a well-crafted training video truly effective. For your video to improve team members’ bedside manner and patients’ experiences, you have to encourage your staff to watch your video. Here are a few distribution tactics to make sure your video is widely watched.
Add your video to onboarding
Start new hires’ careers on the right note by having them watch your bedside manner training video. Though these employees will have probably formed bedside manner habits in previous jobs, your video will still be helpful in setting patient care expectations for your workplace.
As an employee crafting company training, you may very well be responsible for onboarding and can form your own plan for showing the video. If not, coordinate with your HR team member who handles onboarding to figure out how to fit your video in new hire training. Here are a few points to consider:
Timing: Consider when the video should be shown during the onboarding process. Ideally, the video is shown in the first week to build the fundamental bedside manner skills as early as possible.
Testing: Decide whether you want to create a brief quiz for employees to complete after watching the video to check their understanding.
Materials: Help new hires retain the bedside manner tips by offering them a printout with the video’s key lessons after they’ve watched.
Email your video
Your bedside manner video is also useful for your existing employees to watch in case their bedside manner needs improvement. But with a large number of patients, your employees probably all can’t meet at one point in the day to watch your video.
Emailing the video is a more convenient alternative. Caregivers can watch the video at a time that fits their schedule. As a bonus, they’ll have the video in their inbox if they ever want to reference the bedside manner tips again.
Here are a few video emailing tips to help you effectively train employees:
Enable viewer tracking. If you use an enterprise platform like Wistia or Brightcove, you can check which employees have watched your video and send these employees a friendly email reminder to watch a few weeks after your original message.
Insert interactivity: Check your employees’ understanding after watching the video by sending them a quiz. You can either create a free quiz with SurveyMonkey and link to it in your email, or you can insert a quiz into your video with a learning management system, such as Articulate 360.
Improve Patient Experience with Video
Along with clinical skills, being a good communicator is equally important in healthcare. Help care professionals at your hospital build great bedside manner with a well-crafted training video. After watching your video, your team will be equipped to build strong, meaningful patient relationships.
#### How to Use ChatGPT to Create Great Business Video Scripts: 20 Prompts and Editing Advice for L&D, HR, and Sales
In this guide, we discuss the benefits and limitations of using ChatGPT for creating business videos—and share our recommendations on how to refine ChatGPT’s often generic video scripts so they’re unusually engaging and relevant to your unique audience.
Table of contents
What is ChatGPT for business?
Pros and cons of ChatGPT for business videos
What makes a good ChatGPT prompt?
20 ChatGPT video script prompts
How to improve ChatGPT-generated scripts
Sample ChatGPT script makeover
Some final (Vyond-generated) thoughts
What is ChatGPT for business?
Few new technologies in recent memory have shaken up the business world as dramatically as ChatGPT.Developed by the startup OpenAI and launched in November 2022, ChatGPT is a large language model (LLM) machine learning system that can understand spoken and written prompts and generate new, conversational responses based on the billions of pages of (pre-October 2021) Internet content it was trained on. Not only is the current GPT-3 model capable of analyzing vocabulary, context, and syntax to create new content and make predictions and decisions, but it’s also able to refine its answers when given more information and acknowledge its mistakes.
As you know if you’ve taken ChatGPT for a spin, the interface is able to respond intelligently and imaginatively to just about any prompt. Within seconds, it can deliver everything from a silly rhyming poem about Taylor Swift to Internet-sourced advice on improving your finances or a how-to script based on company information you feed it yourself.
AI is actually augmenting human creativity and productivity. Instead of replacing human workers, AI is being used to assist and enhance their abilities. By taking on repetitive and mundane tasks, AI allows humans to focus on more complex and creative endeavors.
Reid HoffmanFounder of LinkedIn
A few months in, ChatGPT is already proving to be a useful tool for many content creators, including professionals in L&D, HR, Internal Comms, and Sales Enablement roles who are tasked with producing employee and marketing communications.
However, figuring out how to most effectively use this powerful new tool isn’t totally obvious, even for early adopters with a head start. That’s why we created this guide.
In it, you’ll get:
Clarity on the pros and cons of using ChatGPT to make video scripts based on both Internet-sourced information and text you provide directly
20 ChatGPT prompts to use to generate scripts for common L&D, HR, Internal Comms, and Sales Enablement video content
Tips on how to transform ChatGPT’s output into a more engaging, relevant, and effective final product
And finally, one sample ChatGPT script makeover, courtesy of Vyond’s writers and video producers
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Pros and cons of ChatGPT for business videos
ChatGPT has both great potential and noteworthy flaws. You should consider both as you’re experimenting with it.
As of the writing of this article (February 2023), here are some of its most significant benefits and limitations.
ChatGPT benefits:
ChatGPT is great for brainstorming and first drafts. Fear of the blank page and lack of inspiration can be paralyzing. Using ChatGPT to quickly brainstorm new ideas, explore potential themes, and generate starter copy can help you get unstuck and move forward.
ChatGPT can create content based on the information YOU feed it. Beyond producing responses to prompts based on the pre-October 2021 Internet data it was trained on, ChatGPT can create content based on the information you provide in your prompt. (We’ll explain how to do that in a bit, and cover whether sharing proprietary information with ChatGPT poses a security risk.)
ChatGPT can mimic a wide range of writing styles and tones. Prompting ChatGPT to produce content in various styles allows you to get a quick read on which approach to a concept is most appropriate and effective.
ChatGPT generally produces clear and grammatically correct copy. ChatGPT writes in a direct, concise style that many writers aspire to, and its output is largely free of grammatical mistakes.
ChatGPT frees you up to focus on editing and refining. With ChatGPT assisting with brainstorming and early draft creation, you’ll have more time to carefully revise its starter content into more engaging and relevant final products.
ChatGPT limitations:
As previously mentioned, ChatGPT is only trained on information found on the Internet prior to October 2021. As a result, its responses don’t reflect the most up-to-date information on topics, especially those that evolve quickly.
ChatGPT sometimes gets it wrong. When prompted to use the Internet data it was trained on, ChatGPT will sometimes generate fabricated answers, create false citations–and produce biased responses. This is why carefully reviewing its output is always critically important.
ChatGPT doesn’t understand your content’s target audience nearly as well as you do. Yes, you can plug in some details about your audience into your prompt. But ultimately you know what makes your clients and employees tick–their pains, needs, and concerns–in a way that ChatGPT doesn’t—and can’t. This is why we included a section in this guide on transforming ChatGPT scripts into something great—because human touch is necessary.
ChatGPT isn’t great at offering suggestions for visuals. It understands how language works. It does not understand how images work. In the scripts we generated, the visual descriptions were generic and needed significant improvement.
ChatGPT won’t steal your information, but you might still want to take precautions. ChatGPT isn’t capable of digesting your inputs and using them to answer other people’s questions; by design, your interaction with it exists in a vacuum. However, between you and ChatGPT, there are many Internet services, vendors, and API providers that could potentially steal or read any information you upload. For this reason, if you feed ChatGPT proprietary information as part of your prompt, consider redacting any sensitive or classified details, just to be safe.
AI algorithms trained on huge amounts of images or text can be capable of impressive feats. But because they mimic human-made images and text in a purely statistical way, rather than actually learning how the world works, such programs are also prone to making up facts and regurgitating hateful statements and biases — problems still present in ChatGPT.
Will KnightBusiness Correspondent, Wired
What makes a good ChatGPT prompt?
No matter your job role, or what you need to write, the starting point with ChatGPT is the same. To get output from the algorithm, you need to give it a prompt.
ChatGPT writes convincingly, but it doesn’t have ideas of its own. It’s neither sentient nor omniscient. Instead, it repurposes what it has found on the internet. So the quality of your prompts is all-important.
A prompt can be as simple as “write me a script for a recruitment video” and it can be written in any way you like. But for the best results, we’d recommend including the following elements as a baseline:Who: What kind of person do you want ChatGPT to act as—and who is the target audience for the video?
What: What’s the deliverable you want? And what’s the intent and topic of the content?
How: What kind of tone should ChatGPT use?
(Optional) User-sourced data: You can also provide ChatGPT with specific words or phrases you want ChatGPT to include, or feed it large chunks of text to digest and use to create a response. In the prompt, indicate the specific language you want ChatGPT to incorporate or process by placing it within quotation marks.
Here’s what a prompt with these elements might look like:
Act as an employee training manager. Write a two-minute script for an animated video with a voiceover telling junior engineers what to do in case of an emergency shutdown alarm. Set the video in an oil refinery. Write in an informative and reassuring tone. Include the following information in your response: “Emergency Shutdown steps: Safely store and secure all hazardous materials. Close gas valves and secure gas cylinders. Ensure cryogenic liquids are properly vented. Check moisture-sensitive materials and equipment”
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20 ChatGPT video script prompts
Now that you understand the anatomy of a good video script prompt, spend some time playing around with variations on the ChatGPT webpage. If you’d like more ideas on what to include or how to phrase your request, try using one of these 20 sample prompts as a template.
They’re each around 100 words long and can be easily adapted to include both language you’d like included verbatim and proprietary information you’d like ChatGPT to respond to in its output. (To be clear, the language within brackets and quotation marks isn’t to be typed in as is; it indicates where you’d add information you want ChatGPT to integrate into its response.)Three notes before you dig in:
It’s worth repeating that the default results ChatGPT delivers will be based only on Internet data from before October 2021 (which, as of this writing is 17 months ago). Therefore some of the results you get may provide a workable structure for your video but contain details you’ll need to change out with more current or company-specific information.
We kept these sample prompts short on purpose, but ChatGPT can accommodate prompts that are much longer. With models like this, input data is measured in units called “tokens,” not words. And as of February 2023, the limit for a single prompt was 2,048 tokens, which is about 1,500 words, according to OpenAI. This means that you can feed ChatGPT your own information, up to about 1500 words at a time, and prompt it to create outputs based on that information.
That said, keep in mind that the longer the deliverable you request, the more likely GPT-3 (and LLMs in general) are to veer off-topic. Therefore, you’ll likely get better results if you break long projects into sections, create a prompt for each one, and then stitch together the responses into a unified whole after the fact.
ChatGPT Prompts for Learning & Development:
1. New manager training
Act as an L&D specialist. Write a training video script for someone who has recently been promoted to manager. Their new job is in the tech industry for a company called CreateIT which strives to solve your IT problems with the most innovative solutions. Write in a professional, clear, and friendly tone. Include narration and directions for the visuals. Include the following information in your response: “[User enters preferred best practices for meetings here]”
2. Job skills tutorial
Act as a food hygiene specialist. Write a one-minute training video script for a restaurant called “The Sandwich Haven.” Include two characters, Dave and Erika, who interact with each other. Erika is teaching Dave how to make their best-selling sandwich while explaining important food hygiene guidelines. Include sandwich puns and jokes. Write in a friendly, knowledgeable tone. Include the following information in your response: “[User enters preferred best practices, details, and guidelines here]”
3. Accessibility Awareness
Act as an accessibility expert. Write a 90-second accessibility awareness video script featuring two characters—an office manager and a wheelchair user—who work for Write Right, a communications agency based in Chicago. Communicate the main points with dialogue. The script must mention accessibility adaptations for individuals who are neurodiverse, practical accessibility needs such as wheelchair access, as well as other necessary accessibility requirements. The tone should be friendly, clear, and approachable.
4. Importance of DEIB explainer
Act as a diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB) specialist. Write a one-minute video script that explains the importance of DEIB and how a DEIB workforce can benefit a company named Real IT. The video will explain the importance of DEIB to current employees and the company’s shareholders. Include information on the benefits of DEIB and how it will benefit Real IT’s service offerings. The tone needs to be clear, personable, and confident.
5. Soft skills explainer
Act as a professional development trainer. Write a 5-minute video script for a soft skills workshop that explains how to improve decision making, communication, and problem solving skills. State why these skills are important to the product design industry. Characters should include a trainer and a class of students learning the skills. Write in a friendly, professional tone.
ChatGPT Prompts for Human Resources:
6. Open enrollment benefits summary
Write a 90-second video script explaining HealthCo.’s open enrollment benefits. Explain that there is a limited open enrollment period and employees have until March 6th to submit their benefit choices for the year. The tone needs to be clear, friendly, and approachable. I will provide benefits details. My request: “Benefits details: 10% increase in premiums on PPO plan, the new dental provider is SmileRight, pet insurance benefits increased 50%, life insurance plans for smokers no longer available, childcare voucher up 25%, gym membership now free for all full-time employees”
7. Data security compliance training
Act as a security compliance expert. Write a 90-second video script for a compliance training video for staff at a large marketing firm based in California. They have a database with more than 500,000 contacts and must be compliant with CCPA guidelines on data privacy. Include information about what employees need to do to be compliant, how to adhere to these guidelines, and what happens if any of these guidelines are broken. The audience is the marketing agency’s employees. Use this quote directly: “Our customers’ data must be protected at all times.”
8. Job openings announcement
Act as a senior recruiter working for Eola Pharmaceuticals, a company that specializes in products for women going through menopause. Write a 45-second video script for Clara who is looking to hire three new scientists to join the lab in Denver. The audience is potential new employees who will want to know what the company does, its main values, company benefits, and how to apply for the job. Include the steps in the recruitment process. Write in a friendly, enthusiastic tone. Include the following information in your response: “[User enters job details here]”
9. New hire onboarding
Act as a member of the HR team at a construction company based in Carson City, Nevada. Write a two-minute video script for a new hire onboarding video. The new hires are all construction workers who need to know the best practices and regulations of being on a building site in Nevada. Write in a knowledgeable, friendly tone. Include the following information in your response: “[User enters company information details here]”
10. Sexual harassment prevention video
Act as an HR manager. Write a 3-minute video script on sexual harassment in the workplace for managers at a clothing manufacturer. Include a definition of sexual harassment, information on how to report harassment, and the policies in place to protect employees. It must comply with harassment laws in California. The tone is authoritative, sensitive, and clear. Follow this style: Caption: What is sexual harassment? Voiceover: Sexual harassment is any kind of unwanted behavior of a sexual nature that makes you feel humiliated or intimidated, or that creates a hostile environment.
ChatGPT Prompts for Internal Communications:
11. Annual report highlights
Act as a Chief Financial Officer. Write a 60-second script for an annual report summary video that celebrates the company’s success. The tone should be upbeat and encouraging. Include the following information in your response: “[User enters information about the company’s top salesperson, net profit, most profitable product, sales targets that were hit and missed here]”
12. New family leave policy
Act as an HR director. Write a 60-second video script explaining the company’s new family leave policy to all employees. Include the quote “We know that both parents need the time to bond with their new baby.” The audience is all company employees. Write in a casual, empathetic tone. Include visual suggestions for an animated video. Include the following information in your response: “[User enters policy details here]”
13. Employee Appreciation
Act as a CEO grateful for the hard work your employees have put in this year. Write a 45-second long video script to send to employees in appreciation of their efforts. Write in an energetic, enthusiastic, friendly tone.
14. Monthly sales update
Act as the VP of Sales for a car dealership called Car Hub. Write a script for a video that can be used each month to update the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) on the company’s monthly sales figures. The script must be able to be reused each month. The tone needs to be clear and formal. Include the following information in your response: “[User enters details here]”
15. Company culture and values
Act as if you work in HR. Write a 90-second video script describing your company’s culture and values. Audience: potential new employees and customers. Describe the culture in a positive way. Include “compassion for the environment” as a company value and include placeholders for 3 more values. Write in an energetic, informal tone. Include 3 characters interacting in the script. Include a story about an employee named Alice who recently joined the company.
Chat GPT Prompts for Sales Enablement:
16. Product explainer (for prospects)
Act as an account executive. Write a video script for a 60-second explainer video that explains how to use your new product—a self-cleaning microwave. Explain to the user how to use the product and leave placeholders to highlight four key special features of the product. The audience is potential buyers of this new microwave who have visited your website and attended a webinar. In the script, include an interaction between a sales rep and a potential buyer. The tone is friendly, casual, and persuasive.
17. Competitor comparison
Write a 45-second script for an animated video that compares Salesforce and Hubspot. The audience is any company deciding which platform to use. Analyze both Salesforce and Hubspot, give the pros and cons of each. The script should be conversational and contain humor. Include visual descriptions throughout that reflect the narration.
18. Customer case study
Write as a successful marketing agency that is showcasing the success of their work. Produce a 90-second script for a case study video that demonstrates how you helped a client, StuffCo, that was struggling to grow their e-commerce business. Talk about how retargeting ads and a funny social media presence made a big difference. At the end of the script, include a call to action to the marketing agency’s website. The tone should be positive, enthusiastic, and friendly. Include the following information: “[User enters increased sales data and specific testimonial quotes here]”
19. Cold call best practices
Act as an expert in cold–calling. Write a script for a video detailing five best practices. Your audience is a group of sales reps struggling to make successful cold calls, who are trying to increase their success rate by at least 15%. Include a metric detailing how you can measure the improved success of the reps. Write the script following the traditional storytelling structure: a beginning (set the scene and describe how the rep is struggling to cold call); a middle (the rep learns new tricks) and an ending (the rep’s success rate has increased). Write in a positive, casual tone.
20. Data security overview
Act as a data security expert. You work for Vyond. Write a video script that sales reps can use to reassure potential buyers of Vyond’s enterprise-grade standards for data security. Include a brief description of Vyond and what data security is. The script should be 90 seconds long. Write in a persuasive, knowledgeable, and friendly tone. Include the following information in your response: “[User enters details here]”
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How to improve ChatGPT-generated scripts
Whether you’re using one of our suggested prompts as a template or writing your own from scratch, you’ll likely find that the first script that ChatGPT offers leaves room for improvement. Here are some ways to improve that first draft.
First, try out a few more ChatGPT prompts. Before you start editing the script yourself, consider adjusting your ChatGPT prompt and regenerating a few more responses first. Add more details, change the tone, and clarify the structure you had in mind. Then use whichever elements you like the most.
Differentiate the characters. If your script features multiple characters interacting with each other, take the time to give them distinguishing traits or dialogue that an audience will have an emotional reaction to. Audiences respond to stories. And good stories require distinct, relatable characters and conflict, however minor.
Improve the visual descriptions. The visual descriptions ChatGPT serves up in its video scripts are usually generic and uninspired. (At this point, ChatGPT is a far better script writer than production designer.) The on-screen text and visuals you choose for your videos are just as important as the narration or dialogue. So strive to create visuals that are unexpected, engaging, and that pair well with your narration and dialogue.
Cut repeated or redundant elements. ChatGPT will sometimes say the same thing in different ways, adding unnecessary words. Look for instances of this and cut them.
Be more tactical about length, pacing, and transitions. You don’t want your videos to drag. So ask yourself: Is every scene or line of dialogue accomplishing something important–or is some of it window dressing? Are there more interesting ways to jump from one section to the next? Could you jump into a scene sooner? Might your three-minute video be better if it was half as long? And so on.
Watch out for contradictions. In one script ChatGPT generated for us, visual directions were included (“a shot of a quiet office”) which was at odds with the dialogue (“our office is always busy, filled with a buzz”). Be on alert for these inconsistencies.
Check and refine the language. ChatGPT’s output can sometimes sound clichéd. If you find your copy includes too many industry buzzwords or overused expressions, tweak your script accordingly.
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Sample Chat GPT Script Makeover
We thought it would be instructive to edit some ChatGPT-generated content. So we prompted ChatGPT to create a short recruitment video and asked a few of our scriptwriters and video producers to both edit the results and explain why they made the changes they did.
ChatGPT Prompt:
Write a 45-second recruitment video script for a junior finance officer for DDP Logistics, a global logistics company based in Florida. Responsibilities include basic accounting, data entry, reconciliations, data verifications, and variance analysis. Need to be good with computers. Include “Very proficient in excel, salesforce, and powerBI.” Benefits include a competitive salary, health insurance, annual bonus, pension plan, and gym membership. Do not mention any financial decision-making. They will get regular training and mentorship. Applications are now open, include a placeholder to add the web link for applications and an email address you can contact about the applications. Write in an enthusiastic, friendly, and approachable tone.
Chat GPT Output:
[45 seconds video starts playing]
[Intro music and company logo]
[Narrator speaks in an enthusiastic and friendly tone]
Attention all finance enthusiasts! Are you looking to join a dynamic and fast-growing global logistics company? Well, look no further! DDP Logistics is seeking a Junior Finance Officer to join our team in Florida.
[Cut to images of a finance department at work, data entry, reconciliations, etc.]
As a Junior Finance Officer, you’ll be a valuable member of our finance team, where your responsibilities will include basic accounting, data entry, reconciliations, data verifications, and variance analysis. Plus, you’ll need to be proficient in Excel, Salesforce, and PowerBI!
[Cut to a shot of someone using a computer]
We’re looking for someone who’s good with computers and has strong attention to detail.
[Cut to images of benefits such as a gym, training room, mentorship etc.]
In return for your hard work, DDP Logistics offers a competitive salary, health insurance, an annual bonus, a pension plan, and a gym membership! Plus, regular training and mentorship will be provided to help you grow and succeed in your career.
[Outro music and company logo]
[Narrator speaks in an enthusiastic and friendly tone]
So, what are you waiting for? Take the first step in your finance career and apply now! Simply visit our website [INSERT WEB LINK HERE] or email [INSERT EMAIL ADDRESS HERE] for more information. Join the DDP Logistics team and make your finance dreams a reality!
Our assessment:
The ChatGPT script provides a decent foundation to build on. It uses a standard structure for hooking a viewer; covers common responsibilities and benefits; and has a call to action. That said, we felt the script was lacking in a few areas, which prompted us to make these changes:
Replaced some terms related to the role and audience that weren’t exactly right
Cut down the copy to quicken the pace
Fixed a few minor grammatical errors
Added the word “you” more often, to more directly appeal to the viewer
Significantly revised the visual suggestions, which were very generic
Replaced them with visuals that played off the information conveyed in the voice-over, added a consistent main character
Download a PDF version
After we edited the script, we decided to actually create it in Vyond. Here’s the final result:
Some final (Vyond-generated) thoughts:
ChatGPT, while imperfect, is a powerful tool to be celebrated and embraced, not feared or ignored.
Prompted with intention and used with care, ChatGPT is already helping thousands of content creators push past writer’s block, generate fresh ideas and first drafts, and produce high-quality finished products more quickly than they could otherwise. So if you’re hesitant about leaning in, don’t be. Understanding its capabilities and getting comfortable using it will make you better at your job.
In the months ahead, we’ll keep an eye on how OpenAI and other companies producing Generative AI tools navigate concerns around intellectual property, citation, and privacy. And as newer versions of ChatGPT emerge, and the model improves, we’ll continue to test out new prompts, identify evolving best practices, and update this guide as needed.
And to see for yourself why millions of users love using Vyond’s AI-powered video creation technology to bring their wildest script ideas to life, sign up for our free trial .
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#### How To Use Video in 360Learning for Collaborative Employee Training
Most courses aren’t collaborative. Leaders infer employees’ needs and create a course teaching skills to overcome them. It’s less effective to do it this way—what would be better is if leaders could collaborate with employees to determine exactly what and how they want to learn.
360Learning allows for collaborative learning and training. Employees and leaders work together to create a relevant and helpful course. If something can be better, they can suggest how to improve it or simply change it themselves. The collaborative work ensures every course is high-quality, up-to-date, and relevant. For example; AirCall achieved a 99% relevancy score on classes and a 97% completion rate for employee-created courses with 360Learning’s collaborative learning platform.
Follow the next six steps to creating an animated training course on which employees can collaborate. Workers’ involvement ensures that the training is helpful and launches in the shortest amount of time possible.
1. Interview employees
Talk with some employees you wish to upskill to learn about their job’s challenges. When you know their problems and have the space to discuss them in detail, you have the information you need to create valuable training.
Don’t just jump into the deep questions right away; start with some small talk so your employee feels comfortable. Discussing the most pressing issues from the start can overwhelm employees.
Ask them to describe common problems they face and have them walk you through the exact situations where they face these problems. With this information, you can decide if a skill would solve these issues or if the problem lies in how employees do tasks.
Drafting some of these questions beforehand is okay, but don’t stick to a rigid script. You want the conversation to flow naturally with follow-up questions to truly understand the problem and identify possible solutions. Digging into these topics can reveal bigger problems to solve than the ones you considered.
2. Create a script and a storyboard
Scripts outline the video’s structure and speaker’s lines, and storyboards depict events. Create these documents to save time animating redundant, confusing, or boring scenes.
You should review both with your team and cut what doesn’t fit or what you could explain better:
You’re the only one who understands a section? Rewrite it.
Added something you love, but teammates tell you it’s redundant? Reconsider it.
Did you add too many statistics to your script? See if visualizing them with charts would make the scene clearer.
Develop a structure for your script that helps you accomplish your goal. If you want to teach a specific skill, ask yourself, “What information should the speaker say to help employees master this?” Write the answer. Then move paragraphs around until the sequence of events is engaging and cohesive.
Your storyboard should consist of a series of boxes showing rough sketches of your scenes with the lines and direction for that scene written underneath. You can get started creating one with our free storyboarding template. Think of everything you need to display in the scene to clearly communicate your message, then quickly draw them in the boxes. Don’t worry about making them too detailed; you just need to provide a rough idea of the scene so you can garner feedback.
3. Make your video with Vyond
For collaborative learning to work, employees must be able to share their knowledge easily. If creating a course takes a long time, they won’t have time to produce it with their busy schedule. Vyond is an animation software with dozens of templates you can use to quickly turn your storyboard and script into a helpful video.
Start by logging into your free Vyond account and clicking on “Create a new character” in the top left corner of the interface. Design a character from scratch, or model it after someone in your company to lend authority to what they say. There are many clothing and body feature options to recreate any employee.
Now you need to make your character move. Select them and click on the Actions menu. You will find many movements your character can do, such as jumping, checking their watch, and pointing in one direction. Choose the one you like to get your character moving. If you want your character to move across the screen, select your character again and open the Motion Paths menu. Combine Actions and Motion Paths to recreate every movement you planned in your script.
Now it’s time to record your lines. Before you start, make sure you get a good night’s rest, as sleep deprivation makes your voice sound rough. Not drinking water has the same effect, so stay hydrated throughout the day.
Once you’ve prepared your voice, access the Mic Recording interface on the Dashboard. Read your lines slowly and deliberately, enunciating every word clearly. Divide your script into sections and record each one separately. It’s easier to record a flawless 20-second clip than a 20-minute one.
4. Upload your video to 360Learning
360Learning’s collaborative approach to training makes it the ideal platform for upskilling your employees. The various feedback from every level of your organization ensures the courses are relevant to everyone and follow a clear and understandable path.
As you populate each course section, others can give you or your colleagues feedback. They can recommend you add resources to make a video clearer or upload some themselves. This feedback loop keeps your videos and training improving, even after launching them. It also ensures each version of your course is more relevant than the last.
You and your team can upload any Vyond-made video to 360Learning, regardless of size. Log in to the platform and click on “Dashboard.” Go to your Courses section, then click “Add a document” next to any of your courses. Upload a video from your computer or import it from YouTube, Vimeo, or Google Drive.
Read more about adding a video to 360Learning in this article!
5. Design a captivating thumbnail
Employees look past uninteresting thumbnails, missing out on the lessons you or another worker created. The right design persuades them to click and watch the course.
Use a before-and-after layout to create a thumbnail that grabs your employees’ attention. An artificial intelligence analyzed common visual elements among 600 trending YouTube thumbnails. It found that many of these videos use this format for their thumbnail. Much of its success comes from what it communicates: the visual benefit of implementing the video’s lessons.
It’s also advisable to add faces with obvious emotions. According to Netflix, people are more likely to click thumbnails showing intense emotions rather than stoic ones since intense emotions resonate with viewers. It gives the viewer a preview of your video’s tone, so they know if it’s exciting, thought-provoking, or creative.
Canva is a free design tool you can use to achieve a before-and-after layout and find faces with obvious emotions. People of all ages use it, making it ideal for companies wanting every employee to have a voice on how the course looks and feels.
6. Analyze what could improve
No matter how long you work on your animations, you can’t predict exactly what employees will think about your course. You need to launch your training and check how workers interact with it to learn its strengths and weaknesses. Use this data to understand what you should change or improve to teach new skills to more employees.
360Learning’s analytics ability gives you access to all the data you need. On your Dashboard, click on General to see the number of people taking the course, the time they spend on it, and how many finish it. Employees probably don’t see your course as valuable if you have low rates. Talk to some employees, determine why that is, and think through solutions with your team. For example; you might consider incorporating instructor interaction using 360Learning’s video coaching capabilities.
The analytics tab in 360Learning also shows the employees who are creating courses, asking questions, and reviewing documents. These workers interact the most with your training, so talk to them first if you want to improve a course.
Finally, see course Reactions from the Collaborative Activity tab on the left side of the Dashboard. Reactions are a 360Learning feature that allows course takers to flag anything outdated or confusing, or to express when a course is particularly useful. It’s a one-click feedback button so employees can quickly tell you what you should improve.
Use Vyond with 360Learning for your employee training
There’s no better way to embrace collaborative learning than with animations. Anyone can launch Vyond and create engaging animations, even if they have never done it before. And thanks to our template library, those insecure about their creativity can build compelling narratives on top of predesigned structures.
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#### How to Use Video in Adobe Learning Manager to Reskill Employees
Today’s workforce is less hesitant about switching jobs than previously. In the US alone, people quit more often than in pre-pandemic times.
One way to keep employees is to offer reskilling training. Research from LinkedIn found that 94% of workers would stay at their jobs if companies invested in improving their staff’s skill set. Investing in employees’ development shows them you care about their careers.
Follow the next nine steps to learn how to create employee reskilling training in Adobe Learning Manager (formerly known as Adobe Captivate Prime). It lets you build engaging training activities that help workers improve their skills and experience the investment you are making in their growth. Don’t do this, and you incur significant onboarding, churn, and new-staff training costs.
1. Interview employees
Interviews help you uncover skills you didn’t know employees wanted to learn or improve. Through focus groups and 1:1 meetings, you can identify course ideas you never thought of. Training your team on skills they want to learn makes them more likely to stay at your company.
Surveys and emails asking employees what they want to learn can also uncover employees’ needs. However, interviewing employees is a better approach. It’s a live conversation where questions on both ends—either from you or the employee—can arise organically, helping you dig deep into core problems and causes.
Employees need to feel comfortable sharing their thoughts for interviews to be productive. Too much pressure and they might be afraid to share what they wish to learn. You can reduce their anxiety by telling them what you will discuss. Knowing this calms the employee: they will know you only want to talk because you want to help them and nothing more.
2. Write a script
A script helps you lay out and organize the information you want to add to every module. It tells the speaker precisely what to say and includes notes of what will happen. You and your team can read the script to know the number of speakers, the software, and the resources you will need to produce the course.
Reskilling courses that don’t use scripts can look and sound professional but are unlikely to help employees improve their skills. Since no document guides what they will discuss, they can forget to add examples, statistics, and metaphors crucial to supporting your argument.
To write a script, choose the number of speakers you will use for one of your videos and the topic it will cover. Then, use the following diagram to organize it.
In the Video column, describe what will appear on your course. For example; mention if your speaker should perform a specific action or if a chart should appear. You can also include the camera movements and visual effects you’d like to add to a scene.
The Audio column will include the exact words your speaker(s) will say during a scene. Make sure each sentence builds onto the others. Jumping between arguments or presenting unrelated supporting points confuses viewers. You will know your script is ready once every line is as clear and engaging as you can make it.
3. Create a storyboard
A storyboard is a format to illustrate how the speaker, background, and graphics look at unique moments of a training video. Creating one lets you know if the visuals you plan to add are enough to tell your story. If they are not, you can ask stakeholders what could improve.
Being able to adjust your story before animating saves you from investing time and money into last-minute edits. Rather than presenting a course no one likes, you move forward with the project idea only when it’s cohesive.
First, draw the events of each scene inside each square. Most teams will find that the first scene of their course is the introduction. It’s where your speaker familiarizes the viewer with his expertise and shares the syllabus. For this scene, sketch how your speaker, background, and complementary visuals like slides will look, and then do the same for the other squares.
Our template’s squares have three sets of lines below them. Fill them out based on your vision of the project and your script:
Action: Describe a scene’s events. See if they are explicit enough to know precisely what you will animate.
Dialogue: Write the script lines that correspond to the scene. Check if the events you plan to animate match what’s being said.
FX: Describe the sound effects you want to see in each scene. This note reminds you or your teammates to source them.
Once you fill in every line and square, see if anything is unclear. Move on to the next step if everything looks good to go.
4. Animate your scenes
Animation is the most simple and effective way to create your course’s videos. You don’t have to invest in actors, voiceover artists, and sets. All you need is software and an idea to create a compelling course.
Besides cost, animations help employees keep the skills you teach them. Studies show people recall the lessons from whiteboard animations more often than those from in-person classes. So, you can confidently deliver a course, knowing your employees will actually learn from it.
Professional animation software doesn’t require professionals to run them. Vyond is intuitive, and templates give you a head start. It also comes with multiple animation styles, including whiteboard animation. Follow the next steps to ensure you can turn any storyboard into an animated video with Vyond.
First, create a free Vyond account. Click Create a Video in the top right corner and choose an animation style matching your brand. You will now see Vyond’s timeline and features.
Second, enter the character tab on the toolbar’s left side and then on Create a new character. Customize your character’s body type, facial features, and clothes until you find a combination you like. You can also design them based on your employees’ looks to make the video relatable. For example; if your employees are in their 20s, don’t make a character that looks in their 60s.
Third, enter the Prop library on the toolbar’s left side to decorate your scenes. Open the Background menu on the toolbar’s right side to change a scene’s location.
Finally, animate your scene. Select Characters to reveal the Action and Expression menus. Actions are movements the character does in their place, and expressions are the emotions their faces will convey as they move. Choose the ones that match your script and the tone of the scene.
Motion Paths are movements that take a character or prop from one place to the other. To add one, click on a character or prop and pick one out of 79 courses of action these elements can take. Set the time they will take from point A to point B, and get ready to record your audio.
5. Record high-quality audio
High-quality audio raises the odds that employees listen to every lesson, suggestion, or direction your course includes. It’s crisp and doesn’t have static.
You don’t need to rent a studio to record high-quality audio. The correct audio setup and equipment can produce clear, distortion-free audio. Here is how to set up yours.
First, get an XLR microphone to record your voice. These microphones need an XLR cable and an audio interface to pick up sound, unlike USB microphones that plug directly into your computer. The added benefit of XLR microphones is that they last longer and sound better than their USB counterparts.
Next, pick the right room because the place where you record influences how you sound. Recording in an unfurnished room with glass adds echo and distortion to your audio: your voice will bounce across the glass and walls with nothing to absorb it. So, record in a room with decorations and no windows.
To finish, download Audacity. It’s free software to record audio with all the features you need to produce high-quality audio. Anything you produce can be easily exported and then dragged and dropped into Vyond.
6. Design an appealing thumbnail
An appealing thumbnail has carefully chosen images, text, and people that persuade employees to enroll in your course. If your thumbnail is uninteresting, employees can look past your course, even if its modules are helpful.
Netflix found people are more likely to click thumbnails expressing powerful emotions. This is because a strong emotion gives the reader a proper sense of what to expect during the show. While a smirk can transmit happiness, a teeth-full smile is better at communicating this emotion.
You can use Canva to create an attractive thumbnail. It’s accessible, intuitive, and has thousands of photos transmitting precise emotions.
While designing, open Netflix or your favorite streaming platform to take inspiration on how they arrange their thumbnails. These companies spend millions testing and reworking thumbnails. You can base where you place your characters, text, and visual assets on what these platforms do to make an intriguing thumbnail.
7. Upload your video to Adobe Learning Manager
Uploading your video is incredibly quick. The platform walks you through a step-by-step process that ensures you upload the video and customize its information exactly how you want.
The first step is downloading your Vyond-made video using the Download option in the top right corner of the animation interface. Choose a Full HD export to give employees the best watching experience possible.
Then, log into your Adobe Learning Manager account. The platform will greet you with a video introducing its features. Watch it, and then click Getting Started on the left side of the page. Press Create Content and fill in the details to upload your video.
Your videos are now part of your Content Library. You can add these videos to your courses and modules from the Create Courses section on the Getting Started page. While turning videos into a course, you can upload your reskilling training’s thumbnail.
8. Personalize each learner’s home page
Using Adobe Learning Manager, each employee’s LMS homepage can show courses related to the worker’s individual needs and interests. Presenting the most relevant training convinces employees that checking the LMS periodically is worth their time.
Research firm Brandon Hall says the best learning platforms analyze the skills an employee needs to succeed and recommend courses. This level of customization allows employees to take charge of their reskilling path. They can log into a platform, find courses an artificial intelligence knows they will like because of their interests, and do it on their own time.
Adobe Learning Manager ticks Brandon Hall’s requirement. Its AI predicts what employees might like based on data from HR systems, employees’ interests, and Adobe’s extensive resume database.
Employee-Specific Homepage
Tell your employees to fill in their details, and Adobe Learning Manager will automatically suggest courses. You can pair these recommendations with course suggestions from you, managers, or colleagues:
Admin Control Training Recommendation Widget: Managers can recommend reskilling courses to specific employees.
Peer Recommended Training Widget: Colleagues can recommend courses to one another.
By filling the gaps the AI leaves, you bring light to useful courses your team might not know about. These trainings can contain the skills they need to enjoy their workdays even more.
9. Analyze what could improve
It’s essential to track your course’s performance to find areas you could improve. By monitoring how modules perform, you can discover the ones doing worst, study them, and improve them. This will make your reskilling course valuable, increasing its impact on staff productivity and satisfaction.
Adobe Learning Manager’s analytics section is on the My Courses option on the left side of the page. It shows the percentage of the course workers complete and the number of people that enroll in the course vs. how many finish it, among other metrics.
Adobe Learning Manager’s Analytics Tab
Track metrics and test answers to performance problems. For example; you can incentivize course-takers to promote your course among peers if few employees are enrolling in your program. Iterate on solutions until the course becomes well known and appreciated by most employees.
How employees interact with your course determines its success. For example; investing in scriptwriters, voiceover artists, and animators can produce high-quality modules. But your project is unsuccessful if workers don’t finish its modules or don’t enroll in the course.
Use Vyond with Adobe Learning Manager to build a reskilling training
Reskilling employees is essential to keep and attract talent. It’s also a cost-effective alternative to filling roles with new people every month. According to a recent LinkedIn study, 79% of learning and development professionals consider it more affordable to reskill existing employees than to hire new ones.
Vyond’s asset and template library make it easy for companies to create their reskilling courses, even if it’s their first time. Upload your video to Adobe Learning Manager’s AI-powered LMS and see how employees stay and refer your company to others.
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#### How to Use Video in BenchPrep to Upskill Employees
In 2021, Amazon and Gallup surveyed over 15,000 U.S. adults in the workforce. They found that employees from companies with upskilling training were happier, stayed longer, and saw more promotion opportunities. Businesses offering this training avoided the cost of replacing an employee, which can be up to two times the employee’s annual salary. BenchPrep is an LMS that hosts courses to help you upskill your employees. Adding video to these courses will help you include visuals that make lessons clearer and more engaging. The following nine-step guide teaches you how to use video in BenchPrep for your employee training needs so they can level up and stick around.
1. Interview your employees
You can’t guarantee you’re creating a course on the most important skill for employees unless you ask them what they wish to learn. Interviewing them gives you the space to uncover this information.
Start with questions about your employee’s workday to get a sense of the skills they use at work. Listen closely to their challenges and ask follow-up questions to ensure you fully understand everything. After employees tell you their problems, ask them what would make the situation get better—the answer is the skill you need to teach them.
2. Write a script
Write a script for your upskill training—it sets your training’s tone, tells your speaker what to say, and prepares your animators. You can produce a professional one without script writing experience by following five steps.
First, make a plan for your video. Think about what you want the video to accomplish and set a goal. Then, brainstorm ideas about what you want your video to look like. What characters and scenes do you need to add to make your point and achieve your goal? You don’t need all the answers right now as long as you have a rough idea of what you want.
Second, learn more about the video’s topic. Learning others’ opinions about the subject helps you build an in-depth upskilling program. You will also discover ways to phrase and present your message to make your arguments more relatable and easier to grasp.
Third, arrange events in a sequence. The transition from one scene to another should be smooth and unambiguous, so employees keep track of your lessons. Think of scenes in terms of goals and moments:
What is the purpose of this scene?
What are the beginning, middle, and end of this scene?
Answering the first question ensures every scene increases workers’ knowledge. Meanwhile, the second one makes it easier to come up with transitions. Instead of thinking about how to go from scene A to scene B, you only have to consider how to go from scene A’s ending to scene B’s beginning.
Fourth, organize your findings into a script format. Take a piece of paper and create two columns, one labeled “Audio” and the other “Video.” In the Audio column, write what the speaker will say. Make sure the tone matches your brand. For example; include jokes if your company is known for its good humor. This small addition will make videos more enjoyable and recognizable.
Finally, write what will happen visually during each scene in the “Video” column. Add that wonderful chart you found during the research stage or a text box showing the anecdote you brainstormed. With these notes, you can determine if the visuals you plan to add support the story you want to tell.
3. Create a storyboard
It’s nearly impossible to animate a video everyone is happy with if no one knows how it will look. You should arrange your upskilling video using a storyboard and check if the story is cohesive with your goal or if you need to clarify certain areas.
Storyboards allow you to spot problems before they arise. You can identify redundant, confusing, or boring sections from sketches you drew in just a few minutes. Once you correct these mistakes, you can show your sketches to stakeholders and get their buy-in. Winning their support before animating reduces the chances of having to re-do scenes.
You can plan out how your video will look using our storyboarding format. It’s free and printable, so you can use it right away.
Draw the first scene on the left square. This is often the video introduction where you explain the video’s goal, what’s at stake if the viewer doesn’t understand its content, and what they will learn. So, think about the visuals that could help you convey these points. For example; you can use an arrow to show what the employee knows and what they will learn: point A to point B.
Finally, add the script lines you wrote to the Dialogue area beneath each box. Check to make sure your dialogue matches the scene you sketched as you imagined it in your head. If it doesn’t, think of a visual that could clarify what is happening.
4. Animate your upskilling training
Animation is a helpful tool for explaining concepts that are difficult to convey through live footage. This video style makes explaining complex topics easy. You can make everything appear exactly as you imagined it, without the constraints (and added costs) of actors.
The first step to recreating your storyboard is designing your character. You can easily do that in Vyond’s Character Panel. Create a free Vyond account and start a new video project on the right side of the home screen. Go to the Character Panel on the interface’s left side and click the Create New Character button. You can play with the character’s body type and features to make it look exactly how you want. If you are unsure what it should look like, model it after a person in your company to make training relatable.
Once you have your characters, you need to make them move. Use the Actions feature to help your character do things like wave, point, or walk. The Actions menu appears on the right side of the screen when you select a character. Selecting a character will also reveal the Motion Path menu, which lets you move characters from point A to point B. You can determine the pattern in which the speaker will move and the time it will take to do it.
Repeat the same process with any prop you wish to animate. Pick it from the Prop menu on the left, select it, and make it move.
5. Record high-quality audio
A course people can’t hear is worthless—if they can’t hear the lesson, they can’t learn the skill. The right equipment can produce high-quality audio, even outside a recording studio.
You’ll first need an XLR microphone, which comes with an XLR cable. Unlike USB microphones, XLR ones don’t receive enough energy from your computer to work. So, you need to plug the microphone into an audio interface, a device that powers it and passes its audio to your computer. The more energy involved allows the microphone to record clearer sound than USB ones.
Next, find the right room to record. It can’t be too small like a laundry room or as spacious as an events room because the microphone will pick up distortions and echo. Look for a medium-sized office that isn’t being used to set up your recording equipment.
A room of the right size can still produce an echo if it’s empty or has a lot of windows. Fill your recording office with furniture (or keep existing furniture in the room) to prevent this. Furniture helps absorb sound and stops echoes from bouncing around. You also want to find a room without any windows, as the glass will reflect the sound just like an empty room will.
Set up your equipment and launch your Vyond video project. Then, access the Mic Recording interface by pressing the Audio icon on the left side of the screen. Press record, then begin to read your lines from the script. Speak slowly and clearly, just as if you were giving an in-person presentation. And remember, it’s okay to make mistakes. Simply stop recording and start over. Alternatively, you can record everything in one take and cut out the parts you don’t like.
6. Upload your video to BenchPrep
You can use BenchPrep’s import tool to upload a single lesson or an entire course module into the platform. The software converts files such that any device can play them, so employees can watch them anytime.
Log into BenchPrep, which will bring you to its content management system called BluePrint. Visit the Other Tools section on the left sidebar and select Import Content:
If you are uploading a single video, add it as an mp4 file.
If you are uploading many videos, add them as a zip file.
7. Design a captivating thumbnail
A book cover is one of the parts most capable of making someone buy a book. The same happens with videos and thumbnails. Just like dull colors and an unattractive cover affect book sales, these traits can make employees ignore your upskilling training.
According to Netflix, people are more likely to click thumbnails conveying a precise sense of the tone and feel of the video. They do this by using an image or layout that elicits a complex emotion, not a gentle one. Think of complex emotions as the more powerful versions of gentle ones: a person slightly opening their mouth in surprise will convey a gentler emotion than someone shocked. So, if you want your thumbnail to motivate people, add someone jumping mid-air with a broad smile, not a person with a serious face.
The second component of a winning thumbnail is its colors. Choose colors on the opposite side of the color wheel from each other, like blue and orange. This will help them contrast, allowing your course thumbnail to stand out from anything else on the web page.
You can create a thumbnail that follows these tips using Canva. A vast library of emotional images is available in its free plan. Also, it has dozens of thumbnail templates to inspire your work. Decide on a layout, and then use Color Hunt to find a contrasting color palette.
8. Test your viewers’ understanding
BenchPrep’s most unique feature is helping you create tests that follow the exact parameters of a credentialing exam. Employees who know how exams work are more likely to pass them. They will know what questions and topics to expect and the time they will have to answer everything.
Replicating a credentialing exam’s format and topics is valuable even if employees are not certifying their skills. By creating a course that mimics a reputable exam’s content, you can be confident in teaching them skills your entire industry believes to be valuable.
To build your tests, go to BluePrint, and click the Tests menu on the left. You can pick between two types of tests.
A Full-Length Test has many sections, each with its own time limits. You can write a custom introduction, write each section’s questions, and add testing tools such as calculators. These tests are ideal for recreating the experience employees will face during a credentialing exam or making the testing experience more challenging.
Alternatively, you can use Standard Tests. They are untimed and show all questions from the get-go. These are perfect for quickly checking if your team understood a video or subtopic.
At any point, you might decide to add a unique question. When doing it, follow the question structure credentialing exams follow. Many experts often revise these questions, so these tests encourage specific answers, not vague “yes” and “no” ones.
9. Analyze what could improve
You should analyze how well your upskilling training program is doing so you know if you need to add more helpful content or reanimate it. BenchPrep’s analytics suite uncovers these opportunities to improve your course.
Click on the Group section in the homepage’s Analytics tab. You will see how far your employees have advanced into the course and the average test scores for those who have finished. Are 90% of people passing the test? Good, this shows your training is teaching most employees what they need for their certification exams. But if the test score is only 50%, it’s time to check if your videos are beneficial.
Scroll down to find the Strengths and Weaknesses section. You will find out how much employees know about different subtopics. For example; a course on email marketing might cover subtopics like copywriting, subject lines, and follow-up. Employees might be proficient in subject lines but only have a basic understanding of copywriting, even after the course. In that case, create new modules or reanimate existing ones to better teach copywriting.
Use Vyond With BenchPrep for Your Employee Training
You can explain the concepts, examples, and charts employees need to level up in their careers using Vyond. Our platform lets you arrange videos in an engaging sequence that makes workers proficient in any topic you wish to teach them.
Start a free trial
#### How to Use Video in Content Marketing
We’ve all heard the familiar stats that surround video and why they should be used in our marketing efforts:
“70% of marketing professionals report that video converts better than any other medium” – Vidyard
“65% of executives have visited a vendor’s site after watching a video” – Forbes
“When marketers included a video in an email, the click-through rate increased by 200% – 300%” – Forrester
For more video marketing stats, read this post.
And while that’s all well and good, how can marketers go from just talking about video to actually incorporating video as a part of their content efforts?
To answer this and other questions you may have, we wrote this post that shares concrete examples of how videos can be used in content marketing:
6 Examples of Video in Content Marketing
1) Promote Gated Content
One of the best use cases, and probably the most popular one used by the GoAnimate team, is creating a video to support gated content.
Marketing teams work hard to create gated content (eBooks, whitepapers, etc.) that share relevant insights with their readers and capture leads. But how do you go about effectively communicating the benefits of gated content to your audience? And how do you drive form fills so that your message reaches the intended audience?
The answer is pretty simple: make a video.
It’s a well known fact that videos help increase conversions on landing pages:
“Using video on landing pages can increase conversions by 80%” – Unbounce
“59% of senior executives prefer to watch video, over reading text” – Forbes Insight
“Adding video to an existing PPC landing page meant a 130.5% increase in the number of leads generated by the campaign” – Marketing Tech Blog
Read this blog post for more details on how videos can boost your landing page performance.
So the next time you create a landing page for your eBook, be sure to add a video to it. Here’s an example of how we do it at GoAnimate:
Image Source
Adding a video to a landing page allows you to:
Communicate the message in a short amount of time – most of our videos are 60-90 seconds
Drive clicks and conversions on your landing page
Grab your audience’s attention using a fun, visual medium
2) Create an explainer video
Another common and highly effective use case is creating an explainer video. Explainer videos, as the name suggests, give your viewers a quick intro about your product / service.
Explainer videos offer quite a few benefits:
Videos are much more engaging than plain text
It can convey the entirety of your message in less than two minutes (if done right i.e. focus on the value proposition, don’t list product features)
Videos increase conversion rates
For more details on why you should use explainer videos, check out this handy guide.
3) Convert text content into visuals
Remember the old adage “A picture is worth a thousand words.” Well, turns out that extends to visuals in general:
“90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual, and visuals are processed 60,000 times faster in the brain than text.” – HubSpot
A great way to use video in your content marketing efforts is by converting text into images. An example being: add more GIFs to your blog posts.
You know that highly compelling video marketing statistic you want to include in your blog post? Just make it into a video and subsequently into a GIF (or a mini-video infographic). Here’s an example:
Note: If you’re a GoAnimate GoTeam subscriber, you can use the Download an Animated Gif option to do this
You can use GIFs to animate text and add visuals to your blog posts, which in turn:
Differentiates your content
Makes it more memorable
Helps your audience retain the message easily
But GIFs can extend beyond stats. You can also use it to convey important messages.
For example, if you’re a SaaS company that wants to convey that you have great tech support, take a more literal (and fun) approach by animating it:
Note: As an added bonus, you can these use these GIFs in other campaigns or on social media.
4) Create video ads
As a marketer social media can take up a significant chunk of your time, especially if you’re running paid campaigns on various channels. A great way to improve this marketing tactic and drive more conversions is to create a video ad.
Most social channels like Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram will allow users to create video ads for a variety of purposes. You can share content, increase website traffic, or simply promote your social media page.
But regardless of the channel or purpose of your video ad, it’s a well documented fact that video ads perform better than traditional digital ads:
70% of B2B buyers and researchers are watching videos throughout their path to purchase – Google
Video ads have an average click-through rate (CTR) of 1.84%, the highest click-through rate of all digital ad formats. – Business Insider
75% of executives said they watch work-related videos on business-related websites weekly. – Forbes
5) Offer training or share tutorials
Your customers constantly seek more information about your product and how to best use it. Training and tutorial videos offer a great way to get ahead of the curve and proactively help customers. At GoAnimate, we do this by creating one-minute tutorial videos on various product features.
For video tutorials, check out our Help Center
6) Announce product updates
If you’re like us, then you’re constantly updating your product and adding new features. And as a part of this process, you want to inform your customers of these changes and make sure they’re aware of new features that are available.
At GoAnimate, we’re always adding new assets and props to our videomaker. So rather than simply talk about the new changes, we create a video that showcases the new assets.
Wrapping It Up
Video can help improve all your content marketing efforts – from email to social. And while these are just some of the use cases of video for content marketers, they are highly effective ways of driving traffic, increasing conversions, and most importantly delivering value to your audience.
So start identifying how you can improve your content marketing efforts by incorporating more video. Hint: It’s easier to do with animated video.
Have more ideas on how to use video in content marketing efforts? Share them with us on Twitter or Facebook.
#### How to Use Video in Cornerstone LMS for Captivating Training
With more people working remotely, running in-person training is more challenging than ever. A decision maker, subject-matter expert, and employee could be on three different continents, even if they used to live in the same city. In the new normal of a more remote-friendly world, you need to make employee training asynchronous to ensure everyone gets the instruction they need.
In a market where most workers consider leaving companies that don’t train them in skills, self-paced courses are the solution. You can create these videos with Vyond and upload them to Cornerstone’s LMS. Thanks to the LMS’s AI course recommendations, employees will constantly find creative ways to improve their existing skills.
1. Interview employees
Before you write a single word for your training course, interview employees to ensure you choose the most pertinent skills. Your employees can tell you which skills are the most important for their day-to-day jobs, so you craft a course that’s truly useful for them.
Before your meeting, tell employees what the interview is about and how you will structure it. This heads-up also lets them think about what skills could make their work more effective.
During the interview, ask them to walk you through how they solve problems. Listen to their thought process, steps, and results. Were their actions efficient? Is there a better way to solve this problem? Knowing how they work in the present allows you to think about the skills that could make their future work more manageable.
It’s essential to ask “why” after every statement to truly understand why they’re doing things the way they are. These questions help you separate minor problems from detrimental bottlenecks.
2. Create a script and a storyboard
A script and storyboard give you a plan to follow, so you don’t worry about what you’ll say while making the video. They also allow stakeholders to align on the vision for the project.
Scripts contain the words your speaker will use to take someone from not knowing about a topic to mastering it. It needs to be as clear and concise as possible so the viewer understands everything. Avoid complicated explanations or unnecessary industry jargon your viewer may not understand.
Meanwhile, storyboards visually represent your script scenes. They ensure you include the visual aids employees need to grasp a topic. Without the right image or chart, your message can be ambiguous or uncaptivating.
Start your script by breaking down your video’s structure. For example, you could divide it into three sections: an introduction, an explanation of why a skill is valuable, and a use case. Then you can begin writing the lines. You’ll want to keep your video under five minutes; any longer and you may lose a significant amount of viewer engagement. That means your script should be no longer than 750 words, as people generally speak about 100 to 150 words per minute on average.
Next, read your script out loud. If you get stuck at any point, it’s too complicated. Find simpler, shorter words to replace complex ones and repeat this exercise.
Once your script is done, you need to create your storyboard. Draw a series of boxes with lines underneath on a piece of paper. Sketch your scenes within the boxes—they don’t have to be incredibly fancy or skilled drawings, just enough to convey what’s happening in each scene. Write your script for each scene on the lines below it.
3. Make your video with Vyond
Animated videos are perfect for training videos, as research shows that people recall more information from animated lessons than from interview-style videos with just a talking head. Vyond allows you to animate your storyboards using its simple and intuitive interface.
Create a free account and navigate our template library to find dozens of pre-animated videos. Use these templates to inspire the design of your video and save yourself some animating time.
If starting from scratch, log into your account and create a new project. Enter the Character Panel on the left side. See a pre-made character you like? Select it to add to a scene. Otherwise, create your own and choose their body proportions, clothing, and features.
Make the characters talk by recording their lines in the Audio menu. You’ll want to record in a furnished room with few windows to capture clear audio (empty rooms and windows create an echo). You should also take a hot drink with you to maintain your voice quality.
Now that your audio is ready, select your speaker. Enter the Dialog Panel, and click on Add Dialog. You will see your recently recorded lines on the media panel. Select it and watch your character’s mouth move as your recording plays.
Your training would become tedious if your character simply stood in place for two to five minutes. Make it move using the left side’s Motion Path menu. Choose how your character will traverse across your frame and the time it will take to do it. Moving your character from one place to another stimulates the viewer’s attention and keeps them watching.
4. Upload your video to Cornerstone
Cornerstone is an LMS platform where you can host books, articles, and videos. Its artificial intelligence analyzes employees’ skills, roles, and résumés to know which videos and courses to suggest. This helps your team understand how to improve their craft, even if you don’t promote your courses.
This understanding opens up the courses to alternative learning styles. Employees can use articles and blogs to reinforce the lessons learned from your video. And if your employees prefer to listen rather than read, Cornerstone’s AI will recommend audio-only courses. You can easily create your course library to best fit your employees, making it easier for everyone to learn.
It takes a few steps to upload your video to Cornerstone. First, log in to the platform and ensure you are in Admin mode. Then, click on Tools, Learning, Catalog Management, and Videos. Select Create a Video Course and then Upload a New Video.
5. Design a captivating thumbnail
People click on videos that stand out. If employees log into your LMS and see thirty videos that look the same, they won’t know which one to click. Follow three design principles to make captivating thumbnails.
First, establish a visual hierarchy. Make the essential elements in your thumbnail most noticeable, such as by using large, bold fonts.
Second, leave blank space. It’s possible to think that not adding many elements to a thumbnail means you are not designing at all. But employees won’t understand your message if it’s crowded.
Lastly, use colors that differ from each other. This contrast makes it easy for employees to appreciate every element in your thumbnail. They will also recognize it faster while scrolling on Cornerstone, increasing the odds that they watch your course.
Use Canva when designing your Cornerstone course’s thumbnail. You should set a 2:1 aspect ratio and keep the file size below 1 MB, which is necessary to upload your thumbnail to the LMS. Since it’s free, you can experiment with many thumbnail versions until you create one you like.
6. Analyze what could improve
Cornerstone’s analytics suite shows how employees interact with your course. You can learn the training they like the most, understand which skills they work on most often, and use its AI to predict whether or not they’ll keep improving.
You can access the Analytics tab from the homepage. Click on Insights to see a list of various dashboards. The Learning Trends dashboard shows the types of learning material employees interact with the most. Use this information to determine which formats to keep and which ones to ditch. There are also built-in reports for you to study in the Analytics section. See how people are doing on their tests. If only a few people are passing, then you might have an unclear video.
Check the rest of the reports and test solutions. For instance, you can design alternative learning paths where the first courses or lessons discuss the topics employees are less proficient at. Or, if you feel your video is the problem, edit your storyboard and animation. Unlike with live animation, making these changes will be easy, quick, and cheap—just a few clicks of your mouse.
Use Vyond with Cornerstone for your employee training
Use Vyond to create engaging animations that make employees click, watch, and share your training. Workers can reproduce these videos or their audio from any device through Cornerstone. With this flexibility, they can learn new skills whenever they have spare time.
Start a free trial
#### How To Use Video in Docebo for Employee Training
It’s easy to train a few employees. You find a time that works for everyone, host a training session, and everyone resumes their day. But it’s challenging to train hundreds of employees at once and ensure everyone leaves without doubts.
You can, however, train hundreds of employees at the same time using Docebo’s animated training. Docebo helps you keep your employees’ skills up to date by teaching them the latest ways to use your product or to do their jobs. The platform lets you host courses, so you can track the impact your training has on your employees’ productivity.
1. Interview employees
Employees often have problems and needs related to their job that they don’t communicate with you. These challenges are revealed and explained during interviews.
In the interviews, ask specific questions about how employees do their job. The interaction is live, so you can ask follow-up questions to dig into the causes and consequences of their struggles. Then use this data to create the training content to solve their issues.
Interviews should be natural so interviewees feel comfortable and you have room to ask unplanned questions. Stick to a rigid script, and you can miss out on information that’s crucial for understanding your employees. But that doesn’t mean scripts are useless. Interview scripts ensure you always ask essential questions.
To effectively use an interview script, write the questions before your meeting: draft about 10 and aim to spend an average of six minutes on each question. You can ask fewer questions in interviews that last less than an hour. Remember, your goal is to learn a lot about a few key problems, not to uncover as many problems as possible—if you need a broad idea of every problem out there, a survey would be a faster alternative to an interview.
The questions you ask should fall into one of three categories so that your interview remains useful for you and engaging for your employee:
Housekeeping: Explain to workers the tools you use to record interviews, what you will do with the answers, and how the interview benefits them. Employees feel at ease when they have this information.
Simple: Ask questions they can easily answer, such as those related to what they do. These questions build rapport.
In-depth: Explore the exact problems your employees face at work. Ask them to explain their struggles and walk you through how they try to solve them.
None of these questions should lead employees to answer in a few words or a specific way. For example; asking sales employees if they enjoy the latest CRM you bought primes them to simply answer “yes” or “no.” A better question would be, “What challenges did you face while using the CRM during the last month?”
2. Write a script
Employees will close the most well-researched training if the video structure is boring. Write a script to compellingly organize each video’s events.
Scripts become more clear, more concise, and more engaging as you edit them. For your first draft, develop a sequence of events that achieves the video’s goal. Write as much as you can without stopping to edit. Successful drafts don’t need to be super polished; they just need to clearly articulate the goal.
Put your first draft aside for a few days, then come back and look at it with a fresh perspective. Your goal for the second draft should be to identify any unnecessary parts of the script to cut and find places where you need to add some more information for clarity. Continue revising the script over and over and over again until it explains your message as completely and clearly as possible. Once your draft is finished, separate the visual directions from the spoken lines, so you can plan what will happen and what will be said.
Describe each scene in the video column. These notes give you a sense of what you will need to animate later. For example; by writing, “Camera zoom in on the panel,” you or your animator will know you need to figure out how to do the camera movements.
In the audio column, write the lines your speaker will say in each scene. These lines should come from your final outline draft. As you write them, look for what you can trim or clarify. The best scripts share the greatest amount of valuable information in the shortest amount of time.
3. Create a storyboard
Storyboards are paper- or computer-based sketches of what your scenes will look like. Stakeholders can see these drawings and give feedback on how clear, helpful, and engaging your employee training is.
Receiving feedback is vital because every person who interacts with your training video will see something different. While you may detect problems A and C, your colleague may see problem B. Listening to their perspective allows you to create comprehensive employee training.
Asking for feedback also lets you make quick, early revisions. Changes become more expensive as you progress in your work—you can easily spend an extra day filming or animating if you have to edit a lot—so catch any problems now to save yourself time.
You can create a storyboard on a sheet of paper. First, draw squares with horizontal lines below them. Each square will contain one scene, so draw as many as necessary.
Draw your scenes’ events on the squares, such as the teacher’s introduction, the moment a pop quiz appears, or your “Next Steps” slide. Illustrations don’t have to be detailed. A stick figure is better than no figure at all. Your sketch should illustrate the scene’s characters, props, and environment.
Next, add each scene’s corresponding script lines below the squares. Add the exact words the speaker will say during that scene. This space is also appropriate for noting what’s happening in the scene to provide additional context for stakeholders.
4. Animate your employee training
Animation is the most effective format for your employee training. Studies have found that people are better at remembering information they learn from animations than from live classes. So, your employees will receive helpful advice, remember it, and be able to apply it for positive results.
Because it is easy to re-animate scenes, you can change ideas that felt workable while storyboarding but now don’t quite fit your video. There is no need to hire actors, camera operators, or a studio as there is with live video. Instead, simply open an animation tool and create everything in that program.
Start animating by launching Vyond and clicking the button to create a new project in the top right corner. Once you are in the timeline, create your animated speaker. Go to the character tab and scroll through the gallery. See a design that your employees will find relatable? Fantastic. Choose it and go to the next step. Otherwise, launch the character creator from this tab. You can create a character from any age group.
Next, set your scenes. Choose a location from the Background menu in the right corner. A traditional classroom works if you’re looking to take a more scholastic approach to your training, or you could choose a site related to your industry. Then open the prop library on the left side of the interface to decorate your scene.
To animate elements, click on a prop or character and access the Motion Paths menu. Applying a motion path makes the element move from one point to another. Pick the pattern your element will follow when moving and the time it will take to perform that motion. The next time you click play, your element will move.
5. Record high-quality audio
Your voice lines should be crisp so viewers can understand every tip or lesson you teach them. Besides a good microphone and recording in a quiet space, it’s important to also prepare your voice.
First, warm up. Your voice can sound croaky if you go straight from bed to the recording station. Vocal coach Jessica Doyle says sleep and hydration are vital for making your voice sound its best. When you don’t sleep, the muscle tissue that produces your voice is tired, making it sound rough. Sleeping seven to nine hours allows these tissues to rest. But even sleep is not enough to allow these muscles to produce crisp sounds if you don’t hydrate. You should drink water before getting to the set, as it will take about four hours for your voice to be hydrated.
Now you’re ready to record the lines. Make sure you keep a proper posture to make it sound perfect. Your head’s position influences how you sound. Placing your head forward like a giraffe or backward like a boxer creates tension in your vocal cords. Your voice won’t be crisp and will tire out faster than usual if you stay in these positions.
Keep your head straight above your shoulders, not leaning backward or forward. That keeps you at the right distance from the microphone and your voice smooth while you are recording.
Use a microphone with a USB or XLR connection to produce high-quality audio. Unlike phone headphones, external mics register precise sound waves, so the audio will be captured accurately. Those wanting to hear how they sound while recording can plug headphones into the microphone. The computer will capture the sound from the external microphone, but you will still be able to use headphones.
You can record audio directly in Vyond by clicking the Audio icon on the left side of the screen. All you have to do now is press “Mic Recording” and read the script lines.
If it’s your first time recording, consider saying just a few sentences at a time instead of the whole script. This allows you to quickly re-record if you make a mistake. When you’re done recording, you can listen and edit voice lines from Vyond’s timeline.
6. Upload your video to Docebo
Docebo lets you upload any Vyond video in just a few seconds. Log into Docebo as a superadmin. Press the gear icon in the top right corner to access the Central Repository. Then, click on Add Training Material and Video. Copy and paste a streaming platform’s URL or upload a video from your computer.
After you upload all of your training videos, you can add them to any course with the Add Training Material button from the Course Management section.
7. Design an intriguing thumbnail
Entice viewers to click with an intriguing thumbnail. You can create a captivating thumbnail following one or two of the following principles.
First, share the before and after. The video editing company Veed.io trained an AI to collect 600 trending YouTube videos. Then the company had the AI analyze thumbnail similarities between the videos that trended twice. The company found many viral thumbnails that showed the before and after of watching the video.
Second, add images that depict powerful emotions. Veed.io’s study found that “shocked” faces were common in trending videos, though these might not be suitable for a formal setting. Therefore, look for images with strong, positive emotions, such as happiness and excitement. These emotions will attract your employees’ attention without making them question your professionalism.
You can find images with intense emotions and arrange them in a before and after layout using Canva. Create a free account and start a project by clicking the button in the top right corner. Select an 800×400 pixel canvas size—the best one for a thumbnail in Docebo. Finally, use Canva’s tools to achieve the design you want.
8. Test your viewers’ understanding
Often, less than half of the people you survey will answer your questions, so companies can’t tell if people found the training helpful. Docebo’s surveys get an average response rate of 70–80%, thanks to its technology.
Docebo uses A/B testing, reminders, and design principles to encourage employees to answer surveys. The high response rate helps you determine if your course was helpful. Since the questions prompt qualitative answers, you will also learn precisely what your video is doing well and what needs to be improved.
You can add questionnaires to your training after connecting Docebo to Learning Impact from the Course Management tab. Go to one of your courses and click the Edit button, then scroll down to the questionnaire session. You can create one from scratch or use one of Docebo’s templates.
The templates are free, to ensure your survey format motivates people to answer, and are based on data from 5 million surveys. As a result, they will collect data that actually helps you improve your training.
9. Analyze what could improve
Use Docebo’s Learning Analytics to find out if your Vyond video is performing well or if you need to tweak it. The tool compares your course metrics to industry averages, so you know how your course stacks up against your competitors’ courses.
Docebo connects to your third-party apps, such as HubSpot and Zendesk, to link your data to business metrics. For instance, you may learn that the employees who complete the most courses stay with you 40% longer. This proves that you should promote your training frequently in order to retain your team.
Docebo gathers and updates data from your course every 24 hours. To collect external data, log into the Learning Analytics platform and go to the Administration tab. Connect your favorite tools or upload CSV files to allow Docebo to continuously pull data from these sources.
Then go to the Insights tab to set up your widgets. These contain data from your course, such as course completion rate and which employees are doing the most lessons. You can see all of your widgets or set your favorite ones to quickly see the information you value the most.
Use Vyond with Docebo for your employee training
Vyond is a simple-to-use animation software you can use to create your employee training. Thanks to our template library, you can find videos with engaging structures. You can adapt your script to these videos’ structures or get inspiration to outline your story.
Start a free trial
#### How to Use Video in Litmos For Employee Training
Hero stories show that even the greatest and most capable people aren’t perfect without training. While they overcome many obstacles with their initial skills, there are always challenges they can’t overcome without the guidance of a teacher.
Your employees are in the same situation; they run into obstacles that stop them from doing their best work unless they’re taught how to work better. Not helping them won’t make them disappear from a kingdom or put a horrendous curse on them like in movies. But it’ll keep them dissatisfied with how little they learn at work.
You can use Litmos to create video learning paths that teach employees the skills they need to overcome barriers. It also allows you to manage, record, and report your employees’ learning so you can easily review your course to make it more effective. This structure unlocks their potential, taking them from okay to adept at the skills they need the most.
1. Interview employees
You can’t know what employees want to learn without asking them, so interview them. It doesn’t matter if you think an employee should learn a specific skill; if it’s not useful to their job performance, it won’t matter to them. These face-to-face interactions allow you to learn which skills are actually important to your team and why employees want them.
Before talking to employees, ask leaders for reports on their team’s KPIs to understand their weaknesses. For example, employees who miss deadlines likely need a productivity or quality control course.
Now, prepare a list of open-ended questions to learn the sources of these problems. What the manager painted as a productivity issue might be a fulfillment one, which would need a different course. Ask those questions of employees to learn what’s genuinely bothering them, then follow up by asking how they think the problem can be fixed.
While talking to employees, remember that employees should feel comfortable. An employee who feels interrogated or judged is less likely to be honest. Let them know they can ask questions and also praise their work.
2. Create a script and a storyboard
Scripts and storyboards offer a preview of your video. Scripts show you the dialogue, while storyboards show you what will happen in each scene.
Stakeholders can look at these documents and share what they want to change. For example, they can read your script and point out ambiguous or unclear scenes you should clarify. By seeing your storyboard, they can help you brainstorm clearer, simpler, and more engaging ways to depict a scene.
Your script should be comprehensive and engaging so your viewer wants to stick around. Make sure it explains everything the employee needs to know to go from not knowing about a skill to being excited about learning it. Change the words, sentence order, and tone until you’re happy with it. Then, leave it alone. Come back with fresh eyes after a few days and find areas you can improve.
Once you have your script, you should create a storyboard. In the squares of a template, sketch what you’ll need to show for the script to make sense. Draw where your speaker will be, the charts supporting their argument, and the movements they’ll make. Show the result to your team and redraw anything they find unnecessary, dull, or confusing.
3. Make your video with Vyond
You’re better off using animation when creating training videos than live footage. Since you won’t need to rent a place or hire actors, you save hundreds of thousands of dollars in production costs and spend less time creating your video. Vyond is an intuitive animation tool you can use to animate your storyboard.
First, sign up for a free trial. Start a new project and launch the Character tab on the left side. Characters can look any way you want; they can be suit-and-tie managers or eccentric leaders. Play with their proportions, features, and clothing, and exit the creation panel when you finish.
Second, click the Audio icon and then on Add Audio to record your voice lines. Keep your head and spine straight while recording; tilting either will tire out your voice. You should also place the microphone slightly lower than your head, just between your chin and sternum, to record the best audio.
Now that your audio is ready, assign it to a character so their mouths move as the audience listens to the voice lines. Select the character who will speak and click on Add Dialog in the Dialog panel. Pick your existing audio and watch your character’s lips move while playing the video.
The only step left is to make the character move. Select it and open the Motion Paths menu on the right side. Choose how long a character will take to move from one position to another and the pattern it will follow. For example, will it zig-zag its way across the screen or follow a straight line? Set the parameters and see how everything looks.
4. Upload your video to Litmos
Litmos follows SCORM, which stands for “Sharable Content Object Reference Model.” It’s a structure for your courses that allows them to work well with any other system that follows the SCORM protocols. It enables you to create a course once and use it whenever you need it and on whatever platform you choose.
Companies devoted to training their employees are SCORM-compliant because they can import courses from one platform to another without modifying them. You can re-upload your company’s old courses and benefit from the platform’s robust reporting system.
With Vyond, you can export your video as a SCORM package and upload it directly into your LMS, no special conversion tools or separate authoring tools required.
As part of the SCORM package download, you can also add completion criteria directly within Vyond. This is one of the most common metrics and it’s another way Vyond can help instructional designers simplify workflow.
Vyond supports both SCORM 1.2 and SCORM 2004.v4, and you can export the format you want to create the course tracking and analytics you need. To learn more about the differences between the two formats, check out this page.
You can upload videos of many file types—like .mp4 and .mov—to Litmos as long as they’re under 100 MB. This option is available in the Admin view on the right side’s dropdown menu.
Navigate to Content and then to Create Module. You can drag and drop one or more of your video files from there. If you have stable internet, embedded videos play without buffering or cutting.
5. Design a captivating thumbnail
According to a Zapier study, 90% of workers check work messaging apps for up to five hours each day. So, while most employees want to improve their skills, you still need to earn their attention. You can follow three best practices to design course thumbnails people want to click.
Start by adding text that explains why someone should click the video. If you created a productivity course for project managers, this text could be, “Achieve more while working half the time.” Knowing the value of a course from the start makes employees more likely to enroll in it.
You’ll also want to use contrasting colors in your thumbnail. Picking the right layout and adding persuasive text is useless if your thumbnails don’t stand out from other graphics. If you don’t know much about color theory, use contrasting color palettes others created.
You can apply these tips using Canva. Its free plan lets you design as many thumbnails as you want. Thanks to its large template library, you’ll also find designs that already use contrasting colors.
6. Analyze what could improve
Your course comprises assignments, videos, and a module structure. If any of these elements underperform, they’ll weaken the impact of your entire course. You maximize your course’s value by fixing its weak points.
Luckily, Litmos makes it incredibly easy to find and fix those weak points. Click on the right dropdown menu and switch to the Admin view. On the left side, click on Reports. You’ll see data such as the employees doing the most courses, the number of people who never log in, and how much of a course people watch.
There will be a Quick reports sidebar on the right. These are useful to stakeholders to report how a course performs in a specific area. For example, you can report how many people pass exams, reach certain milestones or answer surveys. Experiment with potential solutions if the results don’t look as good as they could.
Use Vyond with Litmos for your employee training
Vyond is an intuitive and versatile animation. Wish to finish a project faster without increasing your animation skills? Use one of our hundreds of free templates. If you can imagine it, you can do it.
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#### How To Use Video in Near-Life for Gamified Employee Training
Gamification is the next wave of education. Adding points, badges, and rankings to your training courses can motivate your students and help them retain information for longer while fully understanding their importance. Making learning more fun means the viewer actually cares about the material and absorbs the information, rather than just completing the course because it’s required. Students benefit from the courses, and educators’ time is well-spent — everyone wins.
Near-Life is a learning management system specializing in gamified training. You can award points for specific decisions and empower employees to choose their paths and see their progress. Unlike traditional, non-gamified videos, gamified scenario-based learning motivates employees to master new skills while having fun. Vyond readers who are interested in trying Near-Life have access to this special offer.
1. Interview employees
It’s hard to create helpful training if you never ask employees what they wish to learn. Interviews give you the space to dig into their needs and come up with potential solutions together.
Tell your employee what the goal of the interview is when you set up the meeting. Let them know they’re not in trouble; you’re just trying to understand what skills you need to upskill to help them grow. This sets them at ease and gives them time to think about the skills they want to learn.
Start with simple questions and small talk at the start of the interview. These build rapport and get employees in the rhythm of answering. Your only goal is for them to open up to you.
Once you sense they are comfortable, ask them to describe a day in their work lives. Listening to what they do, think, and feel allows you to pinpoint what they are struggling with. The skill you will teach must resolve this challenge.
2. Create a script and a storyboard
A script and storyboard set the tone and structure of your video. Before producing your video, your team can review these documents to give feedback and prepare themselves for the production stage.
The script’s words set the video’s tone. That’s what’s going to convey the actual lesson you’re trying to teach, so make sure it’s understandable for your viewer. You don’t want them to be confused when you’re trying to help them.
Arrange your script in a sequence that naturally flows from one scene to the next. Scene A should lead to Scene B, B to C, and so on until the video ends. While plot twists work in movies, your employees shouldn’t ask themselves how you arrived at a conclusion. They’ll just be confused, and confusion is what you’re trying to prevent.
Your storyboard shows the imagery that will appear on screen throughout the video. By looking at it, your team can suggest visual changes to make a scene clearer or more engaging. Create a storyboard using our free template to save time. Draw simple sketches in each square to implement feedback efficiently. If you can convey a scene using stick figures, do so. Done is better than flawless.
3. Make your video with Vyond
Bring your storyboard to life using Vyond. It’s an intuitive animation software most people can use after a few minutes of playing with it.
Log into Vyond and create a new project from the homepage to launch the animation interface. Enter the Character panel in the left corner and pick a character you like. If you can’t find one that matches your exact needs, click on “Create New Character” to design one from scratch. You can choose between hundreds of customization options to make your character look like anyone you want, such as a high-level coworker.
Now make your speaker move using Actions and Motion Paths. “Actions” are specific movements, like waving, while Motion Paths take the character from point A to point B. Combining these two would, for example, make your character move from one side of the screen to the other while waving. You can find both menus in the top right corner of Vyond.
The final step is to record your dialogue. Do it in a furnished room with few windows to avoid echo and distortions. This could be your work building’s lounge, conference room, or someone’s office. You should also position your mic at a height between your chin and sternum. This is where your voice sounds best. Set everything, and then use Vyond to record your voice lines.
4. Upload your video to Near-Life
Games are addictive. The player’s brain releases dopamine when they do something positive, like passing a level or getting a reward, which helps them focus, learn, and strive. Incorporating game-like elements into your training with Near-Life allows you to use that dopamine reaction for learning.
Near-Life turns your training into a game-like experience. It adds a point system and leaderboard like most other LMSs, but it also allows employees to choose how to respond to specific events. Videos take a turn depending on their chosen path or finish if workers make an irreversible mistake. This freedom to progress based on your own judgment keeps dopamine flowing, motivating employees to complete videos.
The platform uses a node-based system. Each node (scene) can lead to other nodes depending on what the viewer does. For your first courses, you should stop the video when employees make the wrong decision. You won’t have to animate as many scenes since there’s only one correct path to take. You should create videos with different paths and endings after familiarizing yourself with Vyond and Near-Life.
You can add your first video to Near-Life just a few seconds after logging onto the platform:
Click on “Create project +”
Set a name for your project
Add a new scenario
Set the time someone can take to decide, the points they must score to finish the video successfully, and how the decision buttons will look
Click on Upload Media at the bottom right and select your video file
5. Design an eye-catching thumbnail
Your video thumbnail should capture your employees’ attention and encourage them to click the video. The colors you choose can do just that, or they can drive potential viewers away.
Use colors vastly different from each other to draw attention. Find these combinations with your favorite tool from art class: the color wheel. Colors opposite from each other contrast the most, like yellow and purple. However, it’s okay not to use these bold combinations if they don’t match your brand’s personality. Those looking for color combinations that don’t contrast quite as much can pick hues closer to each other, like blue and green.
Your images should accurately describe the video’s content. Not doing so can reduce the number of employees who take and share your training. Put yourself in their shoes. What would you do if you click one or two thumbnails and the video discusses anything but what you expected? Click the third one? No, you will probably do something else.
You can create a captivating, accurate thumbnail using Canva. It has millions of photos and a nearly infinite number of colors you can use to create your thumbnail.
6. Analyze what could improve
Creating your training course is just the beginning. You need to look at your course’s metrics to discover how employees interact with it to know its strengths and weaknesses.
Near-Life collects data on how employees engage with your interactive video. You will learn the number of people playing, the number of scenarios available, and whether people successfully pass your videos. If many employees are making the wrong decisions, the options are likely too similar, or the video that taught the correct answer is unclear. Rework these options to teach the viewer exactly what they should do. Update your storyboard and animations with new charts, scenes, and dialogues that make each video clearer.
Implement the changes and check if more people are choosing the right options. If they are, then more employees are benefitting from your video.
Use Vyond with Near-Life for gamified employee training
It’s nearly impossible to come up with the right set of options and scenes on the first try. Your training might be too easy, so people might not feel a sense of progress and motivation to keep going. Or you might make it too hard, discouraging people from playing. You need a tool to create and iterate on videos at scale, which is what Vyond helps you do.
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#### How to Use Video in ON24 for Live Employee Training
Live training is usually the best way to upskill your employees. They get all the essential information at once and an instructor to answer their questions. But the workplace landscape has changed in the past few years. With 58% of Americans working from home at least once a week and 35% doing so full-time, remote work has become the norm. ON24 allows you to keep that live interaction element even when your employees aren’t in the same location.
ON24 is a live training platform for upskilling employees. It comes with tools to keep employees watching, such as polls and surveys. By asking questions often, employees are less likely to get distracted. These tools also help you determine if workers understand what you are saying. If the results are unfavorable, speakers can clarify ideas or provide new examples of a given concept. Directing everything from how your video plays to how others interact with it allows you to deliver engaging training that asynchronous experiences can’t recreate.
1. Interview employees
Synchronous training won’t engage employees if you teach skills they don’t want to learn. So before the event, ask the employees you want to upskill about the skills they need to work efficiently.
Book interviews with a wide range of employees who would benefit from the training. You want an accurate view of what everyone values, not what one or two employees want to learn. Look for skills that are often repeated; these are the ones you need to teach first.
Beware of leading employees to a specific answer. This usually happens if you add unnecessary adjectives and modifiers to questions. For example, asking, “How helpful are your office hours?” implies they are helpful when they might not be. It’s better to ask employees about these meetings’ weak and strong points. You might get more negative responses, but they will better reflect employee opinions.
2. Create a script and a storyboard
Live training doesn’t just mean a person speaking on a Zoom call. Incorporate videos into the presentation to break up the flow and keep the audience engaged. Create a script to outline your plan for the presentation and build some storyboards for short videos you can scatter throughout. These documents help prepare you in advance and allow your team to give feedback about unclear sections.
Start by writing bullet points with the key ideas you want to share. Keep the bullets short but detailed, giving you an overview of the topics without spelling out exactly what you’re going to say. They should be reminders to keep you on track, not speaking lines. For a short instructional video, a four-part structure might be enough. For example:
Share the skills employees will learn
Explain why the skill is worth learning
Share examples of where employees could use this skill
Teach the steps necessary to master this skill
Arrange your script in the following two-column format so the voice lines and your video ideas match. First, add what your speaker will say in the Audio column. Then, in the Video column, write what could happen on screen when speakers say these lines. Let’s say you will add an animated character explaining an abstract concept. In that case, the video column could have notes around adding charts, specific props, and character movements.
Illustrate how your supporting video will look in our storyboarding format. Draw each scene on the squares. Don’t worry too much about perfection—you just want to get the point across, not paint the Mona Lisa. Then add your dialogue beneath these sketches. Does every visual match your script’s story? If everything looks cohesive, show it to your team for one last round of feedback.
3. Make your video with Vyond
It’s nearly impossible to explain every topic using just words and body gestures. Because of the many props, charts, and characters, animation lets you simplify complex or abstract ideas. Speakers can use this format to ensure employees understand every lesson.
Start by creating a free Vyond account. Once you’re logged in, click on “Create a Video” on the right side of the homepage. Pick an animation style that suits your brand so people relate this and future videos to your work. Now you’re inside the animation interface, where you can enter the character panel on the left. Choose a pre-designed character or create one from scratch that looks exactly how you want.
Select your character to reveal the Actions and Motion Path menu on the top right. These make your character move however you need them to—like pointing or looking in a specific direction—to clarify your point.
Finally, prepare to produce audio that anyone can listen to for the presentation and pre-recorded videos. Record in a furnished space with few glass doors or windows to avoid echo. It’s also a wise idea to take a hot drink with you to the recording space and the day of the event. Drinking it prevents your voice from sounding rough.
4. Upload your video to ON24
Once you have your video made, upload it to ON24 to get access to its exceptional tools for live training. The platform allows you to host breakout rooms during live training. Use them to assign challenges to random teams during your live course that workers can overcome together. These activities let them meet new colleagues and learn how to work together, inside and outside the course.
The benefits of ON24 don’t end when your presentation does. Once the event is over, you can keep a recording of your live training in a content hub where employees can find pre-recorded courses on relevant skills. Employees who didn’t attend the live training can watch the lessons to learn new skills. Those who attended the training but still have doubts can rewatch it as a refresher.
You can upload videos to ON24 from the webcast menu on the left side of the dashboard. Click on “Slides & Video Clips” to add your video. Upload it ahead of time to ensure the videos are playing correctly and fix them if they’re not.
5. Design an eye-catching thumbnail
One of the most influential factors in making someone buy a book is its cover. Use an uninspiring cover, and fewer people will look at the book. It’s no different for webinars. An unattractive thumbnail can make employees ignore your live training or recording.
For years, Netflix studied what makes a compelling thumbnail. They found people click on those that evoked the most extreme ends of emotion. For example, a picture featuring an expression of shock will attract more attention than one of mild surprise. Look at an emotion wheel to find the right emotion to convey.
To stand out from other webpage elements, the graphics and background that go with your character should use contrasting colors. Use a color palette generator to find contrasting colors. Pick one that suits your brand and matches the colors inside your video.
Canva is a design software anyone can use to make thumbnails, from students to C-suite professionals. Create a free account to make an eye-catching thumbnail.
6. Analyze what could improve
Track the performance of your live training to make it better in the future. Each metric that isn’t performing well is an opportunity to improve your training.
ON24 measures how attentive employees were during the training. It gives a higher engagement score to someone answering polls and asking questions than to an employee simply watching. It is essential to find these engaged employees, as you can turn them into course advocates. Their interest in the skills you teach makes them likely to help you improve future versions of the course.
The platform’s analytics tell you which training section people interacted with the most. Suppose most employees were engaged during a section. In that case, they will probably appreciate it if you create a follow-up course on the topic it discusses. This data also points to sections you can remove in your next installment.
Use Vyond With ON24 For Your Employee Training
You can create animated videos to present during live training with Vyond. Our vast library of props, actions, and customization options allows you to depict any scene and concept you like, no matter how complex it looks. Those who aren’t confident in their animation skills can use our template gallery to start and finish a project quickly.
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#### How to Use Video in TalentLMS to Create Customer Training
If you are looking to use video in TalentLMS, these 10 steps will teach you how to incorporate it into your customer training on the LMS. And by the end of this article, you’ll be able to create clear and helpful videos highlighting your product’s use cases and value propositions.
Think about the last time you had a problem with a product. Maybe it was a TV you couldn’t set up or a computer issue that kept occurring. How frustrated did you feel not knowing what to do or how to fix it?
You don’t want your customers to feel that same frustration with your product. Teach them how to use your product, so they’re never in this situation.
Customer training allows clients to solve common questions about how your product works in their own time. They can watch and re-watch these videos until they successfully find the solutions.
1. Interview customers
Interview customers to understand the most significant challenges they face while using your product. Then use this knowledge to make a course that teaches them how to overcome these problems.
Interviews also uncover why customers buy your product. You can learn about the experiences clients faced when they decided to look at your solution. Knowing why people buy your product helps you prioritize the courses you need to make. If most clients buy your product for Feature A, build customer training around this use case. Consumers are more likely to stick with you if they can take full advantage of the use cases they value.
Choose different types of clients when you are ready to conduct interviews for your video in TalentLMS. For example, interview both new and existing customers or buyers from diverse backgrounds. Talking to various clients offers an accurate view of how people use your product and the challenges they encounter. You will understand different people’s unique challenges, allowing you to produce videos that solve every user’s concerns.
Ask customers what they would like to see more of and how they use your product. As the interview continues, ask follow-up questions to learn your customers’ opinions.
But no matter what you ask, avoid leading questions. These inquiries prompt a response, leading to biased answers that don’t give an accurate view of what customers think of your product.
2. Write a script
Your script is the roadmap for your video. It tells the actors what to say and explains what’s happening in each scene.
Your script’s language should be relatable, using simple and understandable language. Think about how you talk with friends, family, and customers. Do you use complicated jargon that they don’t understand? Or do you use common words and phrases to get your point across? Using simpler language will make it more accessible to everyone who watches the video and allow everyone to understand the points you’re making.
Write your script in a two-column format. On one side, describe what will happen in your customer training while the speaker says the lines. For example, note the movements you want a character to do in a scene. On the other side, include the script lines you’re planning for the scene. This layout lets you continuously check if how you plan to visualize the script events makes sense.
Let your script sit for a day or two. Taking a break from your work and then coming back with fresh eyes helps you find boring, redundant, or confusing sections in your script.
3. Create a storyboard
A storyboard is where you sketch the rough idea of the scenes you’re planning for your video. Think of it as a draft of what will visually happen in your video, just like an outline is a draft of your script.
The storyboard lets you plan out your video before you start animating. You’ll see each scene, allowing you to pick out any scenes that seemed better in your head than in reality. Besides, you won’t have to guess what to do during the animation stage.
Creating a visual draft also lets you decide if you have the resources needed for your script. Sometimes, an idea might be too ambitious for the scope or budget of the project. Having a full view of your customer training saves you from starting a project you don’t know how to finish.
To begin your storyboard, download our free template in a US Letter or A4 format.
Start by sketching your scenes inside the squares. Let’s say you are recording a live demo of a tool. In that case, draw where your face and computer screen will be. Will your face be displayed within a circle at the bottom of the frame? Or will you go for a side-by-side frame? Sketch your answer, so you know your video’s layout.
Once you sketch every scene, describe the actual events that will occur, such as the speaker launching an app or a chart appearing on screen, using the Action section. These should be based on the left-hand column of your script. Then add your script to the Dialogue lines.
As the last step, mention the sound effects you think would lead to an engaging listening experience in the FX section. Ask others if they agree and plan to source these sounds.
4. Animate your scenes
Animation helps you explain topics that are challenging to convey through live footage. Since animations let you depict anything you want, you can simplify abstract topics. A live video training would force you to explain everything using words and your body language, which not everyone can do.
Log into your Vyond account and create a new video project. Then pick one of three animation styles: Contemporary, Whiteboard Animation, and Business Friendly.
These styles won’t influence the tools you can use. But it’s advisable to choose something that matches your brand’s voice and style.
Now it’s time to create your characters. Start by going into the character tab on the left side of the interface, then launch the creation mode. This allows you to pick the character’s body type, features, and clothing. Base your character’s appearance on your intended audience to keep your customer training relatable.
Find props to decorate your scenes in Vyond’s media library—between three and four are a good number as you don’t want a convoluted scene. These props give the customer a sense of where your story’s events occur.
Now that everything is in place, animate your props, characters, and charts. Select them to reveal the Motion Paths tab on the interface’s right side. A Motion Path changes the position of a visual asset: they move from A to B in a pattern. Pick the motion path you like and how long it will take for the graphic to move. Your element will now move across the frame when you play your video.
5. Record high-quality audio
Your audio quality influences what your customers think of your video. If it’s terrible, they subconsciously assume the video is equally deficient. It is crucial to produce high-quality audio, so viewers don’t close your video just a few seconds after launching it.
You don’t need a professional microphone to record clear audio; just get the best one at hand. Headphones plugged into your phone are enough to produce crisp audio while recording in a controlled setting.
But what makes for a controlled setting? The lack of echo and distortions. You can determine if a room will produce these audio effects based on the amount of furniture, windows, and square footage. A large, empty room with windows will have an echo. But if the room has furniture and no windows, the audio will come out perfectly—your voice won’t bounce off the glass, and the furniture will absorb some of the sounds.
When you’re ready to record, position your recording device between your chin and sternum. Here, your voice sounds clear, and microphones are less likely to capture loud notes in this position. Get in the proper place, and press the Record button on your favorite recording app: Audacity is free and straightforward, while Adobe Audition is for professionals.
Export your audio file and take it to Vyond. Then add the voiceover to the entire track or a specific character. Finish by exporting the video using the download button in the top right corner of Vyond Studio.
6. Incorporate your video in TalentLMS
Adding video in TalentLMS is quite simple. The LMS allows you to drag and drop videos, presentations, and other assets to your course. You can upload and launch your course with just a few simple steps.
First, log into TalentLMS and click on “Jump right in and create a course” in the top left quadrant. You will see a square with the words “Add content to your course” on it. Look for your video file on your computer and drag and drop it into the square.
Alternatively, click the Add button on top of the square and then on Video. Name your video based on its content and choose what viewers must do to move on to one video to the other:
With a question: Customers must answer a question before moving on to the next course item.
With a checkbox: Customers will click a checkbox to go to the next lesson.
After a period of time: Customers must wait a specific amount of time to move on to the next section.
Click save.
7. Design an accurate thumbnail
A good thumbnail persuades people to click it and accurately teases the video’s content. It does this by clearly explaining the benefit of watching the video.
The thumbnail should be simple, not overladen with so many images that the viewer can’t tell one from the other. You want the main point to be precise. If you’re creating a course on painting a bright pink elephant, you could have “Paint an Elephant!” in bright pink lettering across most of the thumbnails. Then add relevant graphics, such as a paintbrush or a pink elephant. You want the viewer to know what the video is about at a glance.
High-performing thumbnails also use contrasting colors. These color combinations help the essential elements of your thumbnail stand out. Ignore contrast and customers might not even see the value proposition you added to your thumbnail.
You can create a thumbnail that teases the video’s topic or references a pain point it solves using Canva. The tool is intuitive and offers thousands of free images and graphics.
First, click the “Create a Design” button in the top right corner and open a new design project. Use 1280×720 as this custom size works on all streaming platforms. Canva will automatically detect you’re making a video thumbnail and suggest templates to help you do so faster.
Second, choose a layout with contrasting colors. If you don’t know how to detect them, use a color palette generator to find colors with contrasting hues, shades, and values for your thumbnail.
Finally, add an image that matches your video’s topic and text that tells customers why they should take your training. A practical way to discover what to include is to ask yourself, “What problem will customers solve with my training?” Your answer is what you should add to the thumbnail.
8. Gamify your TalentLMS videos and courses to hook customers
You can add elements from game design to your training to make learning more fun. Gamification works because it rewards the learner for doing something well. For example, when customers gain a bronze badge for completing a course module, they are motivated to complete the entire course to gain the gold badge. Keeping the bronze badge would mean not progressing.
Gamifying your video in TalentLMS is also possible. The LMS allows you to add points, badges, levels, leaderboards, and rewards to your courses. You can configure these features from the Gamification tab under the Account & Settings menu:
Set the number of points required to level up as a course-taker.
Choose the number of points customers receive for logging into your platform, completing a course, or passing a test.
Establish the steps needed to earn a badge of a certain level. For example, give customers a level one assignment badge when they pass three assignments and a level two when they pass 10.
Specify how TalentLMS will rank your customers on a leaderboard, such as by level, points, or badges.
Once you’ve gone through each setting, press save and move on to the next step.
9. Test your viewers’ understanding
Add quizzes to your training to help customers remember your lesson. Jeffrey D. Karpicke, a professor of Psychological Sciences at Purdue University, found that taking a test helps the test-taker remember the information longer, even if you don’t give feedback about how they did.
When planning your questions, favor short answers over multiple-choice ones. According to the Purdue study, people are less likely to remember the answer to a question by looking at a short open-ended question than a multiple-choice one. This is because multiple-choice questions present at least one correct answer. Looking at the right answer—before knowing it’s correct—helps customers remember information.
Questions using a short answer format offer no hints. As a result, customers’ brains have to work harder to retrieve data. The study believes the greater difficulty in remembering information makes short answers better at producing learning.
TalentLMS lets you use multiple types of questions, like multiple choice, fill in the gap, and free text. Set your questions, their order, and their importance from the Content and TalentLMS menu.
The importance or weight of a question refers to its impact on your customer’s test score. Set it to zero, and it won’t matter whether your customer answers the question correctly. But set it to two, and the question will be twice as significant as the average question.
10. Analyze what could improve
It’s crucial to track your video’s performance to determine if your training is helpful. Use this data to improve current videos and pitch original ideas to stakeholders.
If your goal is to teach a use case, and metrics tell you 90% of customers are passing every test, you will know the training is valuable. Completing your goal makes stakeholders more likely to approve future training. The data proves your training works and raises their confidence in your ability to create a new successful course.
TalentLMS’s report tab contains your video course’s metrics, such as the number of users, progress percentage, and completed tests. You can compare your training goal with the video metrics to see if the video is helpful: high metrics are good feedback, while low ones show there are things you can improve.
Let’s say TalentLMS’s report tab shows that customers finish 30% of your course on average. The investment isn’t as valuable as it could be. But you can use the data to experiment with solutions. For example, you could give more rewards to those who complete the course or reduce the number of assignments in the program’s first half. See how numbers change and keep tweaking your gamification options until you reach 100% completion.
Use Vyond video in TalentLMS to make customer training
You can use Vyond to create videos for your TalentLMS customer training. Our animation software is intuitive, allowing anyone to explain solutions to problems clients often solve or to describe ways of maximizing the ROI of investing in their tool.
These videos will allow you to retain customers longer. They will spread the word about your expertise, leading to new clients and fans.
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#### How To Use Video in Totara for Personalized Learning
The future of e-learning is personalized. It’s not just about what employees learn, but what makes it relevant to each of them as individuals. According to a 2019 study by Axonify, 89% of employees surveyed said that personalized and relevant material makes workplace training more effective.
Totara is a customizable learning management system that enables you to tailor training programs to your employees’ unique needs. You can assign dashboards, tasks, and course content to users based on their requirements and interests. This allows your employees to embark on highly individualized learning journeys with greater ownership over their personal development.
1. Interview your employees
You can’t tailor learning to students without knowing what it is they want or need to learn. The difference between prescribed learning and personalized learning is your employee’s agency. Instead of telling employees which skills they should develop, figure out which skills would be most beneficial to their job performance and roles—and then offer corresponding learning opportunities.
Start by interviewing managers to identify potential skill gaps and areas of improvement within their teams. Align these pain points with appropriate training courses. For example; employees who struggle with consistently hitting sales goals could benefit from training on sales strategies and customer service.
However, what you think employees need to learn might not be what they actually need. Talk to employees directly to find the root cause of their problems. You can use this insight to inform which courses you develop and offer. Perhaps the reason your sales reps are underperforming is that they lack industry knowledge, which impacts the quality of their pitches. In this case, it would be beneficial to offer training that boosts their understanding of the industry so they head into sales meetings more confident and better informed.
Not everyone has the same personal development goals. Pinpoint several key learning objectives and develop separate courses that target each one. This will enable your employees to choose the course best suited for their needs and pursue a personalized learning journey.
2. Create a script and storyboard
Now that you know what you need to teach in your video, write a script and storyboard. Your script and storyboard help immensely in planning your video out before you actually make it.
Your script should be easy to understand and delivered in a conversational manner. Aim to make it short and sweet, avoiding overly complicated sentences or wordy language. Your goal should be to educate the learner on whatever they need to know in a fun, engaging way. Think along the lines of a friendly conversation with your neighbor instead of a lecture from a college professor.
You need to understand how long your video will be before setting your script’s length. According to Wistia, viewer engagement drops significantly after the 2-minute mark on videos. However, the second sweet spot is from 6 to 12 minutes. It’s best to condense microlearning into sub-2-minute videos and keep longer videos under 12 minutes. The average person speaks at a pace of around 125 to 150 words per minute, so multiply your target video length by 150 to get an idea of how long your script should be.
Your storyboard assigns visual components to go with your script, shot by shot. Like a comic book, each square on your storyboard should show or describe what the viewer sees. Start with our free storyboard template or create your own—draw boxes on a piece of paper, with space to add notes below each box. Sketch a basic idea of what image should accompany each line of your script, with the corresponding dialogue underneath. Describe what actions the characters on screen will take along with any production notes, like camera angles or sound effects.
In addition to helping you plan your video ahead of time, your storyboard and script also serve as a rough first draft that you can show to stakeholders for their approval and input.
3. Make your video with Vyond
Now, the fun part—turning your storyboard into a full video.
Log in to your Vyond account. Click “Make a video” from the home dashboard. From there, you can click “Create New Character” from the toolbar on the left side of the screen. Within the character creation tool, tweak your character’s features and design however you see fit. One way to make your characters more relatable is to model them after leaders in your company.
Recreate your storyboard quickly with one of the thousands of scenes in our library, then add props to create depth and realism in your scenes. Animate your video by assigning actions, emotions, and expressions to characters as they act out scenes from your storyboard. You can also upload photos or screenshots to add context where necessary.
Next, record your voiceover. You don’t have to buy a fancy microphone, but the better your audio quality, the easier it will be for learners to understand you. Follow our best practices for recording audio, including using consistent mic placement and recording in a space with as little echo and external noise as possible. For some, this could be an office, a closet, or even their garage. You can either record your voiceover directly in Vyond Studio or record in a tool like Audacity and upload the file to Vyond later.
Finally, put everything together in Vyond Studio and make sure that your characters lip sync correctly with your voiceover. Add scene transitions and effects to make your video more visually interesting. When everything is to your satisfaction, export your video with the download button in the top right corner of Vyond Studio.
4. Upload your video to Totara
In Totara, you can create personalized learning paths by assigning learning material to competencies. These competencies can be assigned automatically through programs intended for either the whole organization or specific positions. Alternatively, managers can assign programs manually to individual employees. Learners can also develop customized learning plans by setting learning objectives and choosing which competencies to study accordingly.
There are several options for uploading a video to Totara via the course management tool.
Embed the video directly into the text of a course.
Start by accessing the text editor in the field where you want to add the video.
Then upload the video directly by clicking the “embedded media” icon (which looks like a picture) and choosing the video.
Add the video as a course file.
Visit your course homepage. Click “Turn editing on” in the upper right-hand corner.
Click “Add an activity or resource” in the location where you want to add the video.
Scroll down and choose “File.”
Give your file a name and select the video to upload.
Set whether it should be displayed as an embedded video, opened in a new window, or downloaded directly.
5. Design an eye-catching thumbnail
Your video’s thumbnail serves a few purposes: catching your viewer’s attention, giving them an idea of what’s in your video, and telling them why they should watch it. To that end, it’s important to design a thumbnail that accomplishes those things.
Use contrasting, complementary colors to draw attention. Your company’s brand colors work well if you want to keep your training materials consistent with your corporate branding. Otherwise, you can use a color palette generator to explore possible combinations.
You can design a video thumbnail for free in Canva either from scratch or from a template. Another strategy for thumbnail design is to start with a screenshot from your video and then add graphics and text to it that tell the viewer what the video is about.
6. Analyze what could improve
Learning isn’t a one-way trip; it’s continuous. Similarly, you need to analyze how effective your employee training program actually is to improve it for future learners.
Totara provides reports that offer insight into how efficient your courses are. These reports are based on how well learners score on performance activities and how many students actually complete the coursework.
You can run custom reports to dig deeper into a specific metric or segment of employees. If employees consistently score low for a certain course, that’s a sign that you should revisit the course materials—you might update the script and storyboard to be easier to understand or break up the video into several chunks for shorter bursts of learning.
You should also seek out feedback from learners who’ve taken these courses. Are they achieving the learning objectives you’ve identified based on their needs? Do they find the courses interesting? Are the courses useful and relevant? The answers to these questions should all be “yes.” If not, you’ll have a better idea of what you can do to improve the course content.
Use Vyond With Totara for Personalized Training
Our platform enables you to visualize concepts and animate videos in a way that engages and informs your workers more effectively than boring walls of text. Pair our videos with Totara to create tailored training courses for your employees at scale.
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#### How Video Bios Humanize Your Business
A business’s success is usually described with facts and figures—profits, year-to-year growth, funding.
These details are critical, but the success of an organization also depends on a more abstract factor: emotional investment.
People need to understand why they should invest in your products or services. When they feel disconnected from your brand, there’s no force driving your company’s progress. Emotional investment matters internally as well. Employees should feel motivated to build the business and make improvements.
Video bios connect people to your brand. Seeing the emotions and expressions of your team members, viewers feel a sense of familiarity and trust in your organization. With that emotional investment, you have more people, both internally and externally, supporting your organization and helping it grow.
What’s an Employee Bio Video?
It’s this, from Asia on our marketing team:
Use this video as a template
A video bio is a way for employees to introduce themselves in a professional context, such as an all-hands meeting, conference, on your website, on social media, or via email. It summarizes their key qualities so viewers can get a better sense of their interests, strengths, and more.
A typical employee bio video should include professional details to show how the person fits within their organization. Examples of this professional info include:
Job title
Years of experience in their field
Area(s) of expertise
At the same time, an employee video bio should include personal details to provide a full picture of their interests. Hearing employees talk about their lives outside of work makes them a bit more relatable. Employees might describe:
Where they’re originally from
Their family and friends
Their favorite activities outside of work
Here at Vyond, we ask every new employee to create an “intro video” their first week so our entire team can get to know them a bit better.
Besides connecting internal team members in onboarding, these intro videos can also be used by anyone to engage with people outside of your organization and build your brand image.
How to Engage with Video Bios
Video bios are a powerful way to humanize your brand. Whether viewers are internal employees or potential leads, watching and listing to a team member—their mannerisms, voice, and more—can help your company feel more relatable, familiar, and authentic.
Here are a few areas where you can expect to find video bios in a business context:
Client communication: Sharing employee video bios with customers builds their confidence in your team and your business’ work.
Conferences: If you’re speaking at a conference, share your video bio with attendees beforehand to build hype around your talk and establish familiarity with the audience.
Team communication: Sharing video bios within your team quickly builds rapport, so everyone feels welcome and excited to work together.
With each of these areas, video bios make your business feel more approachable and friendly, so more people—both internally and externally—want to support it, and you.
Connect with Customers
In a world of online activity, businesses today mostly engage with customers virtually rather than in-person. But the typical types of online messaging—an email, a social media post—often aren’t as personal as meeting face to face.
Video bios are a powerful way to build rapport with customers online. Unlike other mediums, a video captures the emotions and expressions of your team members. With these personal details, video bios build customers’ trust and confidence in your company as they get to know more about your employees.
Here are a few key ways your sales team, support team, and other team members can distribute video bios to connect with clients as they move down the funnel:
Social media campaigns: Use social media ads with employee bio videos to attract targeted leads. Watching and hearing your team member will build viewers’ confidence in your company and push them to click through for more information. The online video hosting platform Brightcove used this tactic by featuring an Account Director video bio in their Facebook ad.
About us pages: Include your team’s video bios on your site’s About Us page to introduce new visitors and leads to your company. The real estate firm AQUILA features their team members’ video bios on their “About AQUILA” page.
Email signatures: Employees, especially sales reps, constantly have to email people who aren’t familiar with their business. Including a video bio in your email signature ensures that you leave a positive first impression on everyone you contact. As an example, an account manager at the screen recording company TechSmith includes a video bio in his email signature. Here’s how they made the video email signature below.
Follow-up emails: When one of your team members needs to introduce themselves to a customer, it can be a valuable opportunity to share a video bio. Sending the video leaves a positive first impression on clients before meeting you. The behavioral marketing company SaleCycle, for example, has sales reps email their video bio to clients once they schedule a product demo.
Email campaigns: Send out an email flow with video bios to introduce key members of your team to existing customers. Brightcove launched a “Meet Your Account Manager” campaign to introduce account reps through video to existing clients.
Using these distribution methods, you can share your employees’ video bios with customers to build their confidence in your brand and drive them to engage with your business.
Connect with Conference Attendees
Beyond online communication, you can also connect with potential clients face to face by speaking at a conference. Sharing your expertise with conference attendees motivates them to learn more about your company and engage with your business.
To prep your audience before your talk, share your video bio with them. Hearing you talk about your background and specialties will build hype around your talk. The more viewers understand your expertise and why you were invited to speak, the more excited they’ll be to attend your speaking session.
Moreover, sharing a video bio before your talk builds an emotional connection with your conference audience. After learning about your personal details—your behavior, voice, story—through the video bio, conference attendees will feel a sense of familiarity with you that helps them stay engaged during your talk.
This video bio of aerospace engineer Natalie Panek was released by TEDxToronto to build hype around her talk.
There are a few ways to share your video bio with conference attendees before your talk:
Talk to the conference about distributing it. You can suggest that they share your video on the conference website or on their social media accounts.
Ask your company to share it. If you think that your business’ target audience will be attending, ask your company to share your video bio on social media as a promo for your talk.
Play the video right before you go on stage. Ask the conference to cue your video bio before you enter on stage. Playing it right before your talk allows you to succinctly convey your background information and introduce yourself to the audience.
Whether you share your video bio weeks before or right before your talk, presenting this to your audience leaves a strong, positive first impression. Feeling like they already know you, conference attendees will be ready to listen and excited to hear more about your company after watching your video bio.
Connect with Your Team
Along with gaining clients’ support, your company needs employees to feel emotionally connected to the business in order to thrive. Without that sense of attachment, team members won’t be motivated in the long-term to work hard and help the company grow.
Sharing video bios within your team helps employees feel a stronger bond with the company, particularly during onboarding. If you introduce new employees to the rest of the company through video bios, you can establish a sense of familiarity quickly.
Here at Vyond, each new team member spends time during their first few days learning how to use Vyond and creating a short biographical video to be sent out to the entire company. This introduction video helps us get to know the new person — and these virtual connections help us build relationships with our international team, and in turn, improve our product development.
Along with new hires introducing themselves, video bios can be used by top executives to introduce themselves to new employees. With the video created, new hires can get to know the leaders of the company during their onboarding period. Here’s an example of a CEO video bio from the human resources software company BambooHR.
Sharing video bios within your team strengthens employee relationships. With closer bonds and a friendly atmosphere established, employees are happy to be a part of your business and work towards making it a better company.
Connect People with Your Business Through Video Bios
Emotional and dynamic, video bios strengthen your company’s foundational relationships. Whether it’s a client or an employee, viewers who watch your employees talk about their lives, jobs, and more will find your business more relatable. With that feeling of attachment, they’re more emotionally invested in your business and ready to contribute towards the company’s long-term success.
About Vyond
Vyond allows people of all skill levels in all industries and job roles to create dynamic and powerful media. With features that go beyond moving text and images, you can build character-driven stories or compelling data visualizations that engage audiences and deliver results.
With Vyond, it’s easy to create video for your training. Get started making your own videos today. Start a free trial and sign up for a webinar.
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#### How Vyond Can Help HR Communicate with Video
Top 10 Videos HR Managers Create with Vyond
Orientation and onboarding
Explanation of benefits
Policy descriptions
Change management
Training & development (microlearning)
Introductions
Recruitment
Internal event promotion
Building Culture
Wellness
How Can Vyond Help Human Resources?
Important announcements and new policies need to be distributed quickly. With Vyond, you can make videos your team can watch anywhere in the world, regardless of language or time zone. In minutes, you can create memorable videos for a more productive, more informed staff. Vyond keeps your team on the same page to help you increase engagement, retention, and performance from top to bottom. HR teams can use video to:
Build Culture
Employees get the message you deliver in a novel format that increases engagement and retention. You can create short films that build culture through relatable characters, dialogue, and a range of dynamic charts and graphs.
Increase Engagement
Video is the most engaging form of content. You can keep your employees captivated — while still delivering important information — with video that gets results. Drive adoption, increase engagement, and speed up productivity across the organization.
Improve Employee Results
The distributed workforce of today wants self-paced, mobile content. With video, you can create content that’s accessible anywhere, on any device, through a medium they already use. Customizable templates, characters, and props keep your message on brand, every time.
See What’s Possible
Present information in a relatable, engaging, and exciting way with Vyond. Watch what other makers have created, and then start a free trial to make your first video.
#### How Vyond Uses Video to Improve Candidate and New Hire Experience
How Vyond Uses Video for Hiring and Onboarding and Why It Motivated Me to Interview for Them
Hello! My name is Fabricio Perez and I am a digital marketer from the San Francisco Bay Area. Recently, I had the privilege of joining Vyond’s hybrid team as their new Marketing Communications Specialist. Throughout my hiring and onboarding, video played a huge part in finding my way at Vyond.
With an unprecedented global pandemic that challenges many aspects of our lives, all of us have come up with clever solutions to some of the most disrupting changes to how we interact with others. Video conferences, instant messaging, and calls have kept us together as we face uncertainty and change.
During these trying times, socializing, being close to strangers, and coexisting in a working space are practices that can compromise public health. So we rely on technology to connect us and preserve the collaboration that cultivates productivity and innovation in the workplace.
Nonetheless, not only has communication changed. As workers redefine the notions of work and continue to ponder about career options, it is no surprise that one of the procedures to observe a significant shift was the hiring process.
The Shortcomings of Traditional Interviews
I am no stranger to the traditional hiring practices of the past. Over the last 4 months, I had my fair share of struggles: computer issues, internet connection problems, and some instances of “your microphone is muted”. I, for one, welcome video interviews if that means I can avoid long commutes and having difficulties finding a parking spot. But even with the comfort and flexibility of interviewing from home and the ability to send an email and get a response, I could not avoid the headache caused by a confusing candidate experience.
After several tedious video interviews, unclear expectations, and a lack of effective communication, I began to lose motivation. Quickly, the process became monotonous as I saw myself missing the fun aspects of human communication like nonverbal cues and expressions of emotion. Burnout was imminent, and I am certain that it is just as exhausting for HR professionals trying to find the right talent.
I can imagine how time-consuming it is to filter through dozens of messages and have to juggle with applicants and hiring managers’ calendars. Not to mention the tough act of communicating bad news to candidates.
Use Video to Attract Top Talent
While continuing my search for an opportunity in the field of digital marketing, I stumbled upon a company with a versatile product: Vyond. Their belief in concise and enjoyable communication through animated videos caught my curiosity. Their mission to make video animation production accessible and more affordable while simplifying the creation of content compelled me to apply.
Quickly and effectively communicate your brand identity and mission through video. Entice the candidate with a short video explaining the company, what they do, and why working for them can be fun.
Vyond customers can use this video as a template to create their own benefits explainer video.
CREATE A BENEFITS EXPLAINER VIDEO
Use Video to Enhance Candidate Experience
To my surprise, Vyond provided a short video explaining some of the topics covered during the introductory phone call with the hiring manager. The quick and friendly video also described the next steps in the interviewing and hiring processes.
The step-by-step video was encouraging, easy to follow through, and effective at stating what happens next. Not to mention that the visuals, tone, and language used, were quite enticing.
Making onboarding straightforward
As my journey with Vyond began, I prepared myself to endure the customary onboarding procedures that usually involve a lot of paperwork and boring training. In pre-COVID times, the onboarding process was a hands-on experience that involved constant interaction with Human Resources professionals and colleagues. To the average employee, training can be time-consuming and tedious.
Use Video to Train New Hires
Vyond’s creative and efficient approach to onboarding includes short and animated videos that make the process less of a hassle. I was given a series of videos on complex topics, like cybersecurity, and was able to comprehend a novel concept without feeling brain fatigue or a significant loss of interest.
Use Video to Introduce Your Team
Create a better sense of belonging by introducing your team to a new hire with a short video. Having a resource that conveys the company structure, the different teams that work in tandem with each other, and the leading members of each department is very useful.
The following video is not only informative since it helps with organizational way-finding, but welcoming. As each department representative explains how the team operates, they inspire a sense of trust and openness with the new hire.
Create your own introduction video with Vyond’s customizable template video!
CREATE AN INTRODUCTION VIDEO
Use Video to Communicate Hybrid Office Policies
Need to effectively communicate new COVID-19 protocols to new employees? Videos can help. Short and enticing videos explaining COVID-19 safety protocols within the office and the proper ways of navigating a hybrid/work-from-home environment will save you and the new hire a lot of time.
Vyond customers can customize this return-to-office (RTO) video to create their own COVID-19 safety videos.
CREATE A COVID-19 SAFETY VIDEO
Create Videos for Hybrid Onboarding
I believe that animated videos have become one of the most dynamic methods of storytelling and learning, but I am uncertain if their full potential in business communications is yet to be seen.
Short videos with the capability of being created and distributed with ease are a game-changer for relaying important information. Give this approach a try! Short and animated videos are impressive at effectively conveying organizational expectations and results without compromising learning or attention. I am confident that this form of innovative and creative problem-solving will surprise your new and current employees.
#### How Vyond’s All-New Plan Streamlines Your Video Tech Stack — and Saves You Serious Money
The average company uses a range of point solutions to create videos, which can get messy and cost you a lot of time and money. With Vyond’s new all-in-one AI video creation platform, you can simplify your entire video making process like never before. Here’s how:
Try Vyond for Free
#### How Vyond’s customer success team creatively solves requests
Vyond customers have the most enlightening product suggestions. Our global community shares dozens of requests a day for interesting, innovative additions to Vyond Studio.
Our customer support (CS) team not only summarizes and shares all feedback and requests with our product development team, but they actively work to discover unique solutions to the customer obstacles behind each request.
In this post, we’ll look at several stories that showcase how our customers have challenged our support team to make the most of our available features. We’ll explore how Vyond’s team is structured to meet the evolving needs of our customers, teach you a few Vyond tips, and hopefully inspire you to think creatively inside Vyond Studio.
How Vyond’s CS Team Unleashes Customer Creativity
We’re passionate about helping our customers discover the limitless potential of Vyond.And we’ve found that effectively solving a dilemma for one customer can help aid many more. Here are a few creative solutions our CS team has helped customers discover:
Talking props and animals
We all wish animals and toasters could talk in real life. While props aren’t yet equipped with lip syncing powers in Vyond Studio, a few members from across the Vyond team have found a way to pull it off.
Recently, a customer reached out seeking a way to make a sun prop “sing.” After some thought and collaboration, Jack and Dustin from our support team came up with an ingenious solution to use our character creator and new masking feature to make it appear as though the sun was singing.
We highlighted these steps in an advanced hacks webinar to show how to make a Panda speak. Watch the steps here:
Sometimes, these kinds of discoveries made for one customer end up enhancing the video creation experience for the entire community. That same technique ended up being used by grocery chain Whole Foods to create a talking calculator for a video series.
Custom locations
Shipyard control room
We have a wide range of templates in Vyond, but some videos require a much more specific location. Recently, one customer was trying to set a scene in a shipyard control room, but couldn’t find anything that was quite right.
Dustin from our support team knew their vision was possible. Starting with an existing scene, he swapped in some new elements to create the desired setting. Dustin began with a basic scene of an office with several laptops and then created the illusion of a ship’s windows with clever masking. Finally, he added water in the background and moving ships to bring the scene to life.
The customer was amazed at the outcome. Dustin went above and Vyond to create a detailed tutorial to help this customer, and others, develop similar scenes on their own.
Ice fishing
Similarly, a customer reached out to Adriana for help creating an ice fishing scene. At first glance, the customer didn’t think we had what he needed, but Adriana was able to offer some creative alternatives:
Kinetic typography in Vyond
A customer asked about how to make a kinetic text video and a Vyond account executive made a quick template, our video producer improved upon it, and Roshni from the support team took it a step further with her collaborative work on this free kinetic text template video and related resource post.
What Makes Vyond’s Support Team Exceptional
At Vyond, support team members don’t rush to close support tickets—they own them until they’re deemed complete and solved by the customer. We’re able to work closely with customers to solve their problems thanks to these three aspects of our support team:
We’re an in-house solution
Many companies outsource their support to call centers or other third parties. Vyond’s CS team members, however, are full-time employees who work directly with other departments at the company to find creative solutions and develop new product features. Our CS team spends as much time working in Vyond Studio as many of our customers and are well-equipped to solve customer needs.
Easy to contact
At Vyond, there are many ways to get in touch with our CS team: Live chat, phone calls, email, and social media (via our marketing team). We also have accommodating support hours, Monday to Friday from midnight to 5:30 pm Pacific. Our team supports a number of languages, including Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese, so we’re able to assist customers from different backgrounds. Our network of international resellers also works with our team to offer native-language support to their customers.
One-on-one enterprise support
Large organizations are looking to create high-quality videos at scale, and team members need to onboard quickly and with consistency. To accommodate, our team offers custom Vyond Enterprise plans. As part of this package, our dedicated customer success managers create custom training to help organizations ramp up quickly and get the most out of Vyond. We work closely with companies to build their employees’ video skills and help the company meet its larger video goals.
Working Together to Solve Customers’ Needs
Our CS team is always available to help customers realize their video creation goals. Whether you’re a new user or a veteran video creator, we’re here to work collaboratively with you tell your story with video. If you find yourself struggling to create a particular character, element, or setting, our CS team will use the flexibility of our product to make sure that your finished video realizes your vision for the piece.
More creative solutions from customer support
Character customization: Rear view
Character rear view is another popular request we’re eager to build. In the meantime, our support team has found a creative solution for our customers.
Highlighting text
“I had a customer that wanted to have their text highlighted (similar to a yellow marker). To make this happen, you can take a transparent shape such as this one [that comes up when you search “rectangle”], then adjust the size, aspect ratio, and color to fit over their text. Then you can also apply a “whiteboard animation” entrance effect to make the text appear as if it’s being drawn.” – Chetan
Realistic movement: Walk towards screen
”I had a customer ask to have their character walk towards the screen. We have an action for this, but to add the depth of approaching the camera, you can apply a motion path and then increase the size.” – Chetan
Adjusting actions: Security card door access
“A customer reached out requesting a “security card door access” action where a character waves/swipes a card at the waist level. It seemed like all of our waving actions were too high, so I recreated her scene, added a padlock for effect, and applied the “pay by credit card” action to the character.” – Jocelyn
Character customization: Blinking
Recently, a customer wanted to increase the speed of a blinking action to show a character more excited than usual. We don’t currently offer the option to adjust blinking speed, but that didn’t stop our team from making it happen.
Adriana created a custom solution for the customer. First, she added a shape to the character’s eyes. Really anything that covers the eyes will do, although an oval is usually most appropriate. Once the shapes were grouped into one element, Adriana used an “instant” entrance animation, and then repeated the animation several times to create the desired effect.
Adriana’s clever work on the blinking idea was a hit with the customer, so support team member Gabriela created a step-by-step tutorial to help customers ace the trick on their own, making the most of our support team’s collaborative ethos.
Character creator creativity: Beekeeping uniform
“A customer reached out to request a custom beekeeper uniform to make beekeeping videos. I put together this apiary (bee farm) using a “park” background and a Business Friendly file cabinet to act as the bee holding drawers. Then I used the hood accessory in contemporary and clear glasses over the face.” – Jocelyn
Our support team is taught early on that nothing is “impossible” when it comes to achieving a customer’s vision. As these stories show, our support team embraces that lesson every day by helping customers create the videos they want, even if it seems outside of our current features.
We’ve got your back.
Get creative with Vyond Studio and start making your very own animated videos. As a Vyond customer, you’ll have access to our best-in-class support team dedicated to your success. Give Vyond a go with our free trial.
#### How Vyond’s Latest AI Cut Your Content Creation Time in Half in 2025
At Vyond, we put our content creators first.That’s why our product releases this year were laser-focused on optimizing your work flow, converting new ideas and existing content into videos faster, and delivering the easiest, most enjoyable video creation experience possible.
We simplified avatar creation and leveled up voice quality with cutting-edge AI, because your presenters deserve to sound as good as they look.
We added industry-specific contact packs, templates, B-roll, props, avatars and characters that help you tell consistent, targeted stories in a snap.
We expanded collaboration features for every plan so your teams can create and share content with fewer headaches and more virtual high-fives. (Passing the torch beats starting from scratch.)
And to ensure your audience is engaged from the moment you hit send, we made it easier to export your videos to wherever they’re needed most.
Want to see for yourself? Here’s a closer look:
Create and Convert Content Faster
When it comes to content creation, speed isn’t a luxury anymore — it’s a must. To help teams meet this reality head-on, we launched features in both Vyond Go and Vyond Studio that help you generate, convert, and edit videos faster than ever.
New Avatar Templates in Vyond Go
As any content creator knows, fresh wins, stale loses. But making timely, high-quality content requires bandwidth many teams don’t have. Now, with dozens of new avatar presenter templates, Vyond Go makes it so easy to convert static content (decks, PDFs, website pages, scripts) into polished videos, even the busiest teams can generate entirely new video libraries in a few hours.
Seamless AI Avatar Video Creation in Vyond Studio
Make avatar creation even easier, you said … so we did. With our December 10 product release, you can now seamlessly build and edit avatar videos directly in Vyond Studio. Use the new content panel to browse and choose avatars. Add avatars easily to scenes. Change avatar Text-to-Speech voices and edit scripts right in the platform and more.
Mixed Media Templates & Industry Content Packs
Tell your story with new scenes, motion graphics, photos, and props that give your content a fresh, engaging look. This year we added dozens of new mixed media templates and animated packs for healthcare, warehouse, modern office environments and more.
Sales Enablement Templates
You only get one chance to make a great first impression. Our Sales Enablement templates make it easy for your entire sales organization to seize the moment by quickly creating videos that help them sell, engage, and train better. They’re perfect for creating videos for outreach, follow-up presentations, product walkthroughs, and executive business reviews.
Ensure every message is credible, relevant, and effective
Content that feels custom and authentic grabs attention and boosts retention. So in 2025 we made it even easier to create tailored, on-brand videos. And we elevated the quality and variety of our avatars and AI voices.
Custom Templates for Vyond Go
We know you need to stay on brand when creating content for your organization. Now you can do that easily with personalized brand templates that meet your standards for fonts, colors, and designs embedded directly in Vyond Go. How great is that?
More Natural, Versatile Avatars
There’s a reason AI avatar usage exploded this year. With 1,300+ avatars, 95 languages, and industry-leading voice and lip-sync quality, teams are realizing avatars can help them quickly and confidently:
Deliver sensitive or critical messages without chasing down SMEs
Scale training, onboarding, and customer communication
Keep every message on-brand and consistent
Text to Avatar
Sometimes AI avatar libraries don’t have exactly what you need. Text to Avatar solves for that. Now you can create the ideal presenter for any message in seconds. Just type in a description of exactly the presenter and background you want, in whatever style you want, and our AI will generate it for you in less than a minute.
Custom Avatars & Voice Cloning
We upgraded our self-serve avatar model to reflect expressions and gestures more accurately. And with voice cloning, your SME or leader can appear exactly as they sound without having to get them into a studio.
Enhanced Text to Image
Our upgraded image generator helps you instantly create the exact visuals you need, in any style, sparing you hours of stock library searching.
Deliver more compliance, accessibility, variety and convenience
You don’t create videos just for the fun of it (though it can be really fun). You create them to help you connect with audiences more effectively — and boost your bottom line. Here are some other ways we expanded the business utility of Vyond this year.
SCORM Package Export
You asked, we answered. L&D teams can now export Vyond videos directly as SCORM 1.2 or 2004.v4 packages into their LMS. That means easier audit prep, better tracking and stronger compliance. (**Enterprise & Agency plans only**)
Smarter Closed Captioning and Translation
Ensuring your content is accessible to every single person who comes across it is as important to us as it is to you. To that end, we improved auto-captioning accuracy and translation, making captions clearer and easier to control. You can now adjust visibility, preview without affecting exports, and burn captions into videos or download separately.
Extended Screen Recording
Our four-minute screen recording limit grew to fifteen. Now you can capture complex workflows and processes all in one go and share widely. And for added clarity, you can always bring the footage into Studio and add helpful images and call-outs.
Improved Transparent Backgrounds
With so many styles at your fingertips, it’s no wonder Vyond users like to mix and match. Now, with our improved transparent backgrounds, it’s even easier to seamlessly combine avatars with charts, scenes, B-roll, or branded elements for maximum effect.
Create secure, mission-critical content from anywhere
Last but not least, we significantly expanded the Vyond ecosystem this year by making a huge splash in the government space and adding new integrations with popular business software platforms.
In July, Vyond was granted FedRAMP® Certification, making Vyond available to thousands of federal agencies and government entities. We partnered with companies like Slack, Google, and Zapier to enable instant video creation inside those platforms. We were added to Phenom’s Talent Marketplace, making HR content creation easier. And through our new partnership with Vbrick, you can securely manage, distribute, and measure Vyond video performance at scale for maximum impact.
Excited for 2026?
Yep, us too. 🙂
In the months ahead, we’ll be announcing some exciting enhancements to our instant video creation capabilities — and more. See you next year!
#### How Vyond’s New Shutterstock Partnership Helps You Create More Relevant and Effective Videos
We’re always looking for new ways to give our customers more creative freedom — and to make our already-user-friendly AI video maker easier to use.
That’s why we recently partnered with Shutterstock to provide our customers more flexibility and choice, in their Vyond video making with nearly 4 million stock video, audio, music and photography assets.*
If you were in the market for a stock library, good news: now there’s no need to add a standalone account. If you have other stock imagery accounts, this means no more annoying platform-switching or added cost: now you can search for — and integrate — Shutterstock assets directly in Vyond. And if you haven’t considered integrating stock content into your animated videos before, there’s no better time to explore the possibilities.
Here’s how easy access to new stock assets can help you create more engaging and relevant video content for any audience.
*Currently Shutterstock is only available to Professional and Enterprise users. Learn more about our pricing plans.
The benefits of using stock content in your animated videos
As Vyond users know, animated videos are a powerful form of business communication. They’re ideal for storytelling and reflecting diversity because of their unlimited possibilities for creating characters and scenes. And they’re uniquely effective at conveying complex ideas in a simple, visual way.
But in some business communication and learning contexts, there can be benefits to incorporating photorealistic elements as well. For example:
Your company brand guidelines may require using photorealistic content for certain communications
Some companies have strict brand and style guidelines, especially for external-facing content. Having a wider range of assets to choose from can help you both communicate better and stay on brand in every context.
Certain departments may prefer using stock content
L&D, HR, Sales Enablement, Compliance and Internal Comms teams love being able to use animated characters, objects, and backgrounds to create engaging scenario-based training, announcements, and explainer videos.
But their colleagues in finance may prefer using more buttoned-up photorealistic elements when creating videos for certain audiences. Having a full suite of animation options and Shutterstock assets in-platform makes Vyond relevant, engaging and cost-effective for employees companywide looking to communicate better.
Example of a mixed-media video for a financial services audience
Representing specific locations or landmarks is easier — and faster — with stock photos
If representing a specific, recognizable location is important for your video — like a particular sports stadium or national landmark — you might opt to use stock imagery or video as a background rather than creating its animated equivalent.
Your audience will probably recognize it more easily that way — plus, just dropping in a photo saves time. (Many Vyond users love creating mixed-media worlds featuring animated characters against photorealistic backgrounds, like this educational series from the City of Roswell, Georgia or this Dutch language tutorial.)
In some cases, sensitive topics can benefit from photorealistic assets
L&D and HR teams are routinely tasked with communicating about important but delicate topics like sexual harassment prevention, mental health awareness, and racial inequity, to name a few.
As Vyond users know, animated characters and scenarios are hugely effective at both driving home the most important ideas related to these topics — and bringing difficult situations to life.
However, in some cases, video creators may feel that using stock photos or footage of real people are more tonally appropriate or emotionally impactful. (For example: photographs of real Black families instead of animated characters in a series about the legacy of Martin Luther King. Or evocative video clips of real people meant to capture the impact of anxiety or PTSD.)
Whatever your video-making needs and challenges are, we hope these use cases — and our new Shutterstock assets — inspire you to try some new techniques and help you create the content you need for all your video projects.
Don’t have a Vyond license yet but you’re eager to see this Shutterstock library for yourself? Start your free trial and you’ll be browsing the library in a few clicks (no credit card needed – our treat)!
Get My Access
#### How Wrike Uses Vyond to Increase Adoption of eLearning Courses
In 2015, the work management platform Wrike began rapidly growing. With an expanding user base, the company needed a way to quickly create high-quality customer training resources.
Wrike’s need for a scalable training method led them to make eLearning courses. Enter Vyond. Upon using Vyond to create animated eLearning courses, Wrike saw an increase in course completion and even found themselves saving money on training—all without extensive experience using Vyond.
We sat down with Wrike’s head of customer education, Chris Van Reusen, to learn more about the company’s journey with animation and eLearning development.
Why did you decide to create videos at Wrike?
Chris: My team works on three self-service areas: eLearning, online community forums, and our help documentation/knowledge base. We needed a training solution that could scale as fast as our business. We decided to use videos as a method for delivering content because of the huge increase in video consumption as a learning medium over the last two decades.
Why did you decide to use Vyond?
Chris: A Wrike team member had experience with Vyond, so we decided to give it a trial. Vyond seemed like an excellent way to quickly produce high quality and engaging videos to use in our eLearning courses. Turns out I was right. We quickly found that Vyond was quick and easy to use and enabled us to provide great story-based courses. Our team members have an aversion to stock images, so Vyond was a very welcome alternative.
How long did it take your team to become Vyond experts?
Chris: We’ve had a few different people on the team use Vyond, and they each came with varying levels of experience. One of our team members had to start working on a Vyond video the week he started. He was given a complex video involving fish jumping out of baskets. This was very much a case of being thrown into the deep end and learning to swim, but two hours later, he was comfortable with Vyond, and we released the course in record time.
Not only was this Wrike course released in record time, but it also featured complex and captivating animation to boot! Check out the course here.
What was your first or favorite video that you made with Vyond?
Chris: Very soon after shelter-in-place orders were being issued, we realized we needed to provide something to help our customers with the transition to remote work. We ended up releasing an animated course on remote work in early April. The quick turnaround and the ability to meet a customer’s immediate needs (even when it’s not what you were planning for) made the course extremely rewarding.
This course is a great example of a topical subject, covering remote work during a period when many companies found themselves transitioning to a different operations model. Check out the course here.
What is your video creation process?
Chris: We have a template that we follow for each of our courses (i.e., videos), but the main process is: outline goals, create a storyboard, and then create the video. We follow an agile process, so in between each of those steps, there’s a review and room to make changes.
Storyboards and videos are actually made by different people. Making sure there’s a solid handoff and sync between the two people is really important for our team.
How do you keep learners engaged in your video courses?
Chris: In effect, the learner is immersed in the story and actively participates. We introduce a problem and describe how our tool could solve it. Then we pause for a practical exercise where the learner experiences how Wrike solves the problem. Then the user comes back and continues the story to the next problem.
What other tools are in your “video stack?”
Chris: We use a few different things: Camtasia, Adobe Creative Cloud Suite, Wrike (of course!), and Articulate Storyline for the courses.
Wrike uses Articulate Storyline to turn their animations into interactive courses with branched pathways. Check out the course here.
How do you record audio?
Chris: We have a very passionate audio guru on the team, Ivan. Pre-COVID, he worked from a sound studio in one of our office conference rooms to record audio for our video courses. Since mid-March, our office has been remote, and it’s much harder to have multiple individuals record audio from home. Cramped closets, though, can provide somewhat decent acoustics.
How do you measure video success?
Chris: Our customers’ feedback! Ultimately, that’s who we make videos for, and we want them to learn from and enjoy the content they’re consuming. We also keep a close eye on course completion rates. Lastly, we’ve managed to cut costs by reducing the time it takes to create training while seeing an increase in course completion and product adoption.
What is your number one tip for professionals who want to create videos but aren’t sure where to start?
Chris: Don’t start with the video. Outline the video, create the storyboard (keep in mind, some video tools have this functionality built-in,) and add as many details about what you want the video to show at this stage. Then make the video. Making the video should be like following a recipe – it’s an art, but you have guidelines to follow.
What’s your next project?
Chris: We’ve been working on a Wrike product certification for a little while, and that’s our next big release. We created all the video modules for certification in Vyond and are really excited to release it to customers and see what they think.
Creating your own eLearning courses today
Wrike used Vyond to educate their customers in a meaningful, fun way. With a little creativity and handiwork, you can too. Animation with Vyond is simple, affordable, and scalable. But, don’t take our word for it — start your free trial and see for yourself.
Crush your 2020 goals and keep moving forward with Wrike’s work management platform.
Make a video
#### IconLogic Training Course: Creating eLearning Videos with GoAnimate
We’re excited to announce our partnership with training company, IconLogic, Inc. IconLogic delivers live, highly interactive online classroom training, and is now is offering a unique eLearning development course featuring GoAnimate.
#### Interactive Video: 12 Great Examples And How To Recreate Them
Interactive video technology offers a powerful way to guide viewers into taking the exact action you want them to take when they’re ready to take it. By giving control over “what to do next,” your audience crafts custom-tailored experiences suited perfectly for them.
The next time you need to create a video, consider emulating one of these engaging interactive examples. Not only will they help keep your viewers’ attention longer, but also help bring more qualified leads.
We collected twelve of the most engaging interactive videos to inspire your next marketing, sales, training, or human resources video project. Companies that used these videos obtained higher engagement, longer watch times, and more qualified leads. You’ll learn how these companies designed the examples they did and why they’re so engaging. Let’s get started so you can bring this powerful new form of engagement to your videos.
Sales and marketing interactive video examples
Sales and marketing videos cut the sales cycle by introducing prospects to the value of what you offer before you get on a call with them. When you include interactive elements like “buy now” buttons into the video, you can sell to prospects who recognize the value you offer and are ready to buy.
1. Nike: Air Max Dia
Nike’s fun interactive video lets you choose your own outfit for a photoshoot. The stylist interacts directly with viewers, asks questions, and gives positive confirmation after each selection. This allows you to get a realistic idea of how outfits look and gives Nike a natural way to tie in their products.
Buying clothes online often comes with questions about how the item will look in real life. It looks great on the model, but what if it’s too large or fits the viewer differently? Nike uses shots from different angles to highlight how fabrics and silhouettes flow and look together. These interactive videos give the reader an accurate sense of how items would look at home, answering their questions and giving them the confidence they need to click “Buy now.”
2. Feelunique x NARS Shoppable E-Commerce Videos
Online beauty retailer Feelunique replaced the brick-and-mortar storefront with video. Using Smartzer’s interactive video platform, Feelunique turned its e-commerce product videos into shoppable experiences for site visitors.
The video gives the visual experience of in-store shopping with the convenience of e-commerce, allowing the viewer to shop while they watch. If it were a regular video and the viewer saw something they wanted, they would have to close the video, navigate the website, find the product, then buy it.
Here, the built-for-clicks interface makes it easy to add beautiful products to your cart the moment you see them. Thanks to the ability to click on a product straight from the video to buy it, Feelunique saw a 40% higher engagement rate and quadrupled its conversion rate.
3. Oral-B Pro Expert
Oral-B used an interactive vertical view to introduce customers to the benefits of their Pro Expert line. The video includes buttons to “Buy Now,” see the suggested products, and learn more about why people should try Oral-B.
These buttons let viewers interested in the product jump straight to a sales page, reducing the risk of losing their attention mid-ad. Since Oral-B’s buttons are permanently in the video, it’s easy for interested viewers to buy the products they offer. So far, the interactive video has resulted in an interaction rate nine times higher than usual.
Viewers have different levels of urgency and interest in your product. By including clickable calls-to-action, you’ll appeal to viewers learning about your product and those ready to buy it.
Customer education interactive video examples
Consumers get most of their information online, making demo videos a great way to highlight and explain the best features of your products. Additionally, interactive videos detailing product features and usability are great supplements to a customer support team.
For example, if a user is confused, they can watch a quick video rather than spending 10 minutes on the phone trying to connect with a support representative or emailing back and forth for days. Watch these customer education video examples.
4. HP Officejet Pro X Series
HP’s interactive and instructional video uses a branching technique that allows viewers to explore different features of one of the company’s printers. The video starts with a “main menu” screen, where viewers can select one of the printer’s features. From there, they can see a short clip of an HP customer explaining how that feature benefitted their company.
Learning about use cases and customers increases viewers’ trust in the quality of the printer, as it shows that others have had successful experiences with the product. It also gives them ideas of how they could use the printer to make their company more efficient, reducing doubts about whether the printers are worth the price.
5. Vyond: Taking Your Video From Good to Great
Webinars can be handy for providing a comprehensive lesson on a complex topic. Live attendees can interact in the chat with moderators. In contrast, on-demand viewers can interact with a sidebar menu to jump to different sections, which helps make a long-form video more accessible.
Polls and live chat help hosts adapt the tone, difficulty, and topics to the viewers’ challenges and interests. Imagine you’re giving a talk on a complex subject, and you see a lot of comments in the chat saying they don’t understand it. You can introduce a section that explains the topic again using simpler language. Without these features, you would have continued your presentation, and viewers would have stayed confused.
Videos relevant to viewers are more likely to persuade them. Watchers will know the importance of what you’re discussing and be more inclined to invest in a solution.
6. The British Impact Presented by Jaguar: Understanding Typography
Colophon Foundry is a team of designers specializing in typography, the art of creating forms that make up a letter or an alphabet. Jaguar featured them on a video about how typography affects how humans perceive the world.
The video has one interactivity point per featured designer. Viewers can click on these points to learn more about the designer’s background, expertise, and values. They’ll also learn about the importance of typography in their projects and the value Colophon Foundry could bring without watching a long video.
Employee skills training interactive video examples
The traditional learning and development tools don’t cut it anymore. The most talented professionals add interactive elements to their instructional videos to improve their effectiveness and learning experience.
The following are three examples of interactive training videos that help reduce the learning curve by walking employees through workplace situations. They show how interactivity allows learners to apply their knowledge to solve realistic potential workplace problems.
7. Amazon: Mastering Customer Service
The course, created by Ana Grade at Amazon, introduces a woman on her first day at the company as she learns the company’s five tenets. It lets you walk through Amazon’s onboarding process, teaching customer service associates how to handle various scenarios using a gamified approach.
Onboarding videos can save managers time from answering repetitive questions new employees have. Instead of contacting their manager, new employees can listen to dialogues and click on buttons that solve their problems.
In Amazon’s videos, viewers can click buttons to learn more about the company’s five tenets. There is no timer. So viewers can open information boxes for as long as they need to grasp each idea. Without them, they’d have to continuously stop and rewind the video to memorize each tenet.
8. Lifesaver: An Interactive Film by Martin Percey
Lifesaver teaches viewers the pros and cons of certain decisions. With CPR, the right or wrong move can mean the difference between life and death, making this choice-based presentation especially effective. Each choice puts viewers in the shoes of the person helping others, helping them see how devastating not knowing what to do can be.
You can play four different versions of this “game” where you have to use your life-saving skills to keep someone alive. As you advance in the story, you’re given options at various points where you have to make decisions and use your life-saving skills.
Like Lifesaver, you can create branched videos where viewers have to live with the consequences of their decisions. Simulating an emergency lets employees see the value of knowing how to react to the unexpected, motivating them to learn the skills that prevent or solve these situations.
9. The Game Agency: Handling Sales Objections
This instructional video looks and sounds like a game, starting with a big “Start Game” button. After an animated scenario plays out, viewers answer questions in an interactive quiz about how to handle objections.
The interactive quiz portion of this instructional video helps reinforce everything the viewer learns from the animated scenarios, as retrieving information helps integrate it into your long-term memory.
The final score also helps reinforce learning, as the leaderboard can motivate the trainee to retake the quiz for a higher score.
Recruitment and human resources interactive video examples
Recruitment videos help ensure the best-fitting candidates find and apply to your company. These videos explain company culture and values by offering an inside look at the company’s inner workings. The videos below show how a company can use interactivity to help candidates determine whether their work style and personality fit a company.
10. Deloitte: Fitting Into Company Culture
This gamified interactive recruitment experience from Deloitte is a fun way for viewers to learn about the company’s values and to determine whether they would fit in with the company culture. Viewers see hypothetical situations they might have to respond to in the office.
The overall vibe of the video is light and fast-paced, which helps keep viewers engaged. It’s an immersive way to teach culture and values on a case-by-case basis. Job candidates can use the video to decide if they’d fit into the existing company culture, self-qualifying themselves. Self-qualification saves recruiters time from interviewing non-ideal candidates.
11. JetBlue: Making the Right Choice for Your Retirement Plan
JetBlue’s instructional video helps employees understand how to borrow money from their retirement plans. They discuss pros and cons, reasons someone may want to do this, as well as important information to consider.
Sometimes employees and customers are unaware of the repercussions of an action. People aware of the pros and cons of working with you are more likely to remain as customers or employees than people who misinterpreted the value you could bring to them.
You can present this information with interactive quizzes, like the one found in JetBlue’s video. Interactive quizzes keep viewers engaged while they watch your video, making it more likely they consider the nuances of the decision or topic they’re thinking about.
12. AB InBev: Understanding Company Expectations
Brewer AB InBev created a first-person point-of-view video giving employees a sense of the work culture at the company. The video puts the viewer in the shoes of a current employee tasked with an important presentation. Throughout the video, viewers choose what to do in different situations. There are also hidden areas throughout the video the viewer has to find.
The video provides viewers with enough references and information to understand what’s going on and what they need to do. This data shows job candidates what AB InBev expects of them. It also gives them a sense of how colleagues communicate projects and ideas across the company. As for the company, the video helps them reduce the number of applicants, especially those who thought workdays involved beer.
What is the best platform for interactive video content?
Your needs determine the interactive video software that’ll work best for you. Some companies want simple features, like adding a text box and hotspots, so viewers can choose to learn more about a subject shown on screen, as Jaguar did. Others wish to let viewers choose options that change the trajectory of the video.
The following are three of the best platforms to include interactive content, like clickable areas, into any type of video.
Rise 360: Best for simple interactive courses
Rise 360 is a simple all-in-one system to create and manage courses. There are no fancy animations or complex transition libraries. Instead, Rise 360 lets you create, distribute, and monitor a course’s performance without going through an extensive learning period. The access to assets and the lack of a learning curve make Rise 360 perfect for teams creating interactive video courses for the first time.
You can use Rise 360 to create easy-to-consume eLearning courses for your organization. The platform lets you organize and add external resources into modular blocks. You can use Vyond-made videos to share lessons and then include text, quizzes, and cards to help viewers recall what you’re teaching.
You can watch our Vyond + Rise webinar to learn more tips and tricks on using the two.
Storyline 360: Best for captivating interactive videos and courses
Storyline 360 is an interactive course creation platform with 25 different types of questions to test your viewer’s understanding of your lessons. In addition, it offers more than 8.3 million photos, videos, and assets to make every lesson engaging and memorable. Storyline 360 is perfect for teams wanting to create the most captivating courses they can.
You can use Storyline 360 and Vyond to create engaging animated videos employees are more likely to remember. First, upload your Vyond video to Storyline 360. Then include the interactions aligned with what you’re trying to do. For example, you can add a button that gives more context about a scene or a quiz to test your viewer’s attention.
You can watch our Vyond & Storyline webinar to learn more about how to use them together.
Adobe Captivate: Best for multi-module branched courses
Adobe Captivate is an eLearning course creation platform that stands out because of its ability to create multi-module branched courses. In them, viewers can’t advance to new sections until they successfully pass a quiz. Failing the quiz will send viewers to a relevant lesson, raising their odds of retaining the information.
The goal of training is to influence your customer or employee’s behavior. You can use branched courses to encourage viewers to only move on when they comprehend concepts. Video is a helpful asset to pair with branched courses, as you can direct people to an in-depth video discussing a topic after they’ve missed a question. Add charts, examples, and clear concepts into your video, and viewers are bound to conquer the quiz.
Recreate an interactive video using Vyond and one of three tools
Vyond is a straightforward animation software anyone can use to create engaging videos. Our suite includes a custom character builder, thousands of props, and voiceover capabilities to create the perfect video to later export to Rise 360, Adobe Captivate, or Storyline 360.
Try Vyond for free
#### Internal Communications: Double Your Impact with Video
Employees are facing unprecedented volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity in their day-to-day work lives, and a strong internal communications strategy is critical to keep teams aligned. Nevertheless, 60% of employers do not have an internal communications strategy, and only 13% of employees feel their leaders share information effectively.
Building an effective internal communications strategy calls on leadership to reimagine their internal communication tools. Email is no longer the reigning channel for distributing information, and its successors (like Slack) require careful implementation to avoid further fragmenting internal corporate communications.
In this article, we’re going to look at one of the most powerful internal communications tools in any employer’s toolkit: video. This year, Vyond is dealing you in with 52 ideas to improve how you communicate. Here are four inspiring examples of how to use video as an internal communications tool:
Rally Your Team
Make Your Own Memes
Introduce New Employees
Promote Diversity, Equity & Inclusion
4 Ways to Use Animated Video for Internal Communications
Roughly 93% of enterprises viewed video as a way to empower employees to share information, and it’s no wonder why. Video is a naturally engaging way to communicate, and animation makes it easy for anybody in the organization to quickly build dynamic messages that make an impact. Take a look at these four ideas for using video in your internal communications:
1. Rally Your Team
Whether you’re inviting the team to a training session or getting them excited for a wellness initiative, video is a great way to rally the team.
On the Vyond team, we’re big fans of heart health. When a few employees suggested an office fitness initiative, the HR team rose to the challenge by producing rousing promotional video above.
The great thing about videos like these is that they provide a channel for both distributing information and calling employees to action. In this case, Vyond’s director of human resources was able to engagingly illustrate why fitness matters and also introduce the Fit February initiative.
Want to challenge your own team with video? Vyond customers and free trial users can import this video as a customizable template.
MAKE YOUR OWN FIT FEBRUARY VIDEO
2. Make Your Own Memes
Even if you don’t want your videos to go viral, making your own memes is a powerful way to build team rapport. Even a quick GIF is a great way to bring folks together.
These funny pop-culture references aren’t just good for levity, either. When used correctly, memes can be a finely-tuned internal communications tool to inspire creativity, bolster morale, and encourage collaboration.
Within moments of Senator Bernie Sanders’ appearance at the 2021 United States Presidential Inauguration, he became an internet icon for his begrudging body language and wool mittens. Vyond team members Marco and Asia got inspired to create their own take on the prolific meme, and so they reached for Vyond Studio.
Within 24 hours of being shared on Vyond’s internal communications platform, the meme energized members from across the organization to build on the video together. Team members from customer success, digital marketing, community management, and video production all came together to collaborate in a cross-functional way. Memes can bring teams together, and you can even create your own memes to communicate with employees in an entertaining way.
If you have a Vyond account, you can click the button below to use Marco and Asia’s meme as an editable video template.
MAKE YOUR OWN BERNIE MEME
3. Introduce New Employees
If the Bernie meme didn’t yet convince you of our digital marketing manager’s endless creativity, check out her intro video!
Bringing new employees onto the team is an exciting yet daunting adventure. In a remote landscape with distributed teams, the need to help them make a personal connection with new colleagues is all the more critical. The solution: invite new hires to introduce themselves with video!
At Vyond, all employees are invited to use Vyond Studio to create a short video introducing themselves. Making a new hire video is a fun addition to the onboarding checklist that has a huge impact, forging personal connections across the entire team. Beyond HR, introduction videos are a great way to connect with any audience: from sales prospects to existing customers.
Asia’s introduction video (above) is an especially impressive example of making a first impression with animation. Take a look at her clever use of humor, camera movement, and color in particular.
If you have a Vyond account, you can use Asia’s example as a jumping-off point to create your own introduction video.
MAKE YOUR OWN ONBOARDING VIDEO
4. Promote Diversity, Equity & Inclusion
Training videos can—and should—be a key element of building a collaborative, supportive, and safe workplace. Employers and employees share a responsibility for developing an organizational culture that is diverse, equitable, and inclusive.
Video is a great internal communications tool for promoting DEI initiatives and bringing your team’s cultural literacy up to speed. Animated videos, in particular, allow you to make space for these topics in your internal communications action plan while giving them the care, nuance, and psychological safety they deserve.
Take it a step further by giving everybody on your team access to a tool like Vyond, allowing them to share stories they care about. While you’re at it, teach them how to make their videos accessible for everybody.
The above video is a great example of how a short video can make a lasting impact when included in your internal communications. By educating team members on cultural traditions like Juneteenth, you can engage them in a much more meaningful and memorable way than with a memo.
This Juneteenth explainer video is available to Vyond customers as an editable template video.
MAKE YOUR OWN JUNETEENTH VIDEO
Make video part of your internal communications strategy.
When it comes to how your team communicates, play with a full deck. Vyond gives everybody on your team the power of video with its build-it-yourself animation studio. With a robust library of inspiring examples and template videos, you can easily create media that moves. See if Vyond is in the cards with our free trial.
START A FREE TRIAL
#### Introducing Vyond for Enterprise
Enterprise-level organizations have unique requirements for software and often require flexibility that isn’t available in ‘out of the box’ plan types and solutions. Vyond for Enterprise is designed to provide that flexibility and more. Whether your company needs service level agreements, training to get your team up to speed and creating videos, or enhanced security options, Vyond for Enterprise makes it easy to deploy Vyond Studio across your organization.
With Vyond for Enterprise, you get access to a multi-seat Vyond Professional plan—our top tier plan—as well as SLAs and Vyond Secure Suite.
Vyond Secure Suite
Enterprise organizations often have unique data security needs, making additional security options and configurations necessary for compliance. Vyond Secure Suite, available only with Vyond for Enterprise, gives administrators the flexibility they need to implement Vyond while ensuring that company data remains secure. Vyond Secure suite includes:
Brute force login protection
IP whitelisting
Inactivity logout
Customizable password complexity
Single sign-on
Custom video cache expiration
Vyond Studio
Vyond Studio is an intuitive, powerful video creation platform that allows individuals of any skill level to make media that moves. With pre-built templates, a huge library of resources, and features like automatic lip-sync, you can build character-driven stories or compelling data visualizations that engage audiences and deliver results.
Contact a sales representative today to create a plan for your organization.
#### Japan Content Pack, Search in Japanese, and Japanese Help Center Articles
Japan Content Pack
From sushi to Mount Fuji and plenty in between, the Japan content pack has arrived! This year we’ve seen a great wave of requests for content relating to Japan. So we’ve created this bumper collection of backgrounds, props, clothing items, and actions. The team behind the creation of these new items are all dreaming of visiting Japan now, and their level of ramen consumption has drastically increased!
Here is a list of our newly added Japan content in Business Friendly:
Props: 174 props, including a bullet train, traffic lights, household items
Backgrounds: 9 backgrounds, including shops and travel locations
Character Creator items: 15 upper items, 8 lower items, 6 feet items, 8 face decoration items, including yukata and uniforms
Actions for Adults: 37 new actions for adults, including using a fan and giving a business card with both hands
In the showreel templates below you’ll also find:
15 template scenes for Japanese locations
96 characters wearing outfits from this release
Templates and characters. Use this video template >
Props, actions and backgrounds. Use this video template >
Spanish, Japanese, and more languages in the Help Center
No matter how you say it, our latest update is worth celebrating.
The Vyond Help Center now supports nine new languages, allowing more makers to get support in their preferred language. Toggle between English, or any of these recent additions:
Arabic
Simplified Chinese
Traditional Chinese
French
German
Italian
Japanese
Brazilian Portuguese
Spanish
To find tutorials in other languages, visit the Help Center >
Search in Japanese
You can now search for items in the library with Japanese keywords! We are experimenting to cover the majority of props and actions, but of course, all the latest Japan-themed assets are already searchable in Japanese.
#### June 2026 Vyond Newsletter
Watch the Video Now
New AI voices, productivity enhancers, a look ahead with Vyond’s new CEO, and more reasons to join Community. Watch this month’s update to see what’s new.
Get access to creator tips, exclusive giveaways, product previews, and a direct line to the Vyond product team.
Join Community Now
Create narration with the right tone, pace and emotion for every message with premium Text to Speech voices from ElevenLabs, Google Chirp 3 and Gemini.
Watch to Learn More
Discover CEO Scott Ernst’s vision for the future of Vyond and what’s ahead for customers like you.
Learn More
Check out new tools that simplify editing, keep AI-generated visuals on brand, and help you reach global audiences.
Read More
Read the video transcript below
As always, we have some great news to share this month. Starting with our new text-to-speech voices. At Vyond, we’ve been significantly upgrading our text-to-speech voice offering for Enterprise and Agency plan users. While that means we’re retiring our WellSaid voices, it also means you can immediately replace them with world-class integrations from ElevenLabs, Google Chirp 3, and Google Gemini.
Our updated text-to-speech voice options will deliver you vastly improved results from some amazing new capabilities, including greater performance control, “This changes everything.” adjustable voice characteristics, “Hi! How are you doing today?” top-tier multilingual capabilities, “Hello!
Hola! Ciao! Konnichiwa! Annyeonghaseyo!” and a pronunciation library, so every word sounds just right. “Next, add the tomato into the frying pan.”
We’re thrilled to bring you these new and improved text-to-speech offerings. To make your Vyond experience even easier and more productive. And thanks to our bulk replacement feature, you’ll be able to replace all instances of a WellSaid voice across a video in a single action. Our June product release includes Hide and Show, which makes editing complex scenes easier by allowing you to hide overlapping assets without removing or rearranging anything in the scene.
And with Style Prompts, you can generate consistent-looking imagery across projects by simply including a style description in your image generation prompt. Plus, we’ve added over 20 new language options to help you connect with more audiences. We’re thrilled to announce the appointment of Vyond’s new CEO, Scott Ernst. Scott has more than 20 years of experience building and transforming SaaS and tech companies to help them accelerate growth and strengthen operations.
We’re really excited for the future of Vyond. Don’t miss out on Community-only video creation tips, AI workflow hacks, content giveaways, and direct access to the Vyond product team. Join one of our upcoming community events! So, to recap, we have amazing new text-to-speech voices.
Our new releases streamline your videomaking, save you time, and help you reach more audiences. We’re excited to welcome our new CEO, Scott Ernst. And remember to check out our Community events for helpful tips and updates. What will you make in Vyond today?
More from Vyond
How to Make AI Videos in Minutes
Prompting AI: Getting the Best Results from Vyond Go
AI-Powered Instant Translation
#### Kinetic Typography: Create Stunning Animated Text Videos
Video has moved to the forefront of communication and in many instances replaced the written word. Video is more engaging than text. It’s eye-catching, auditorily stimulating, improves message retention, and can convey ideas using an infinite combination of visual representations. And when you combine the age-old communication method of the written word with video—you get kinetic typography.
Grab your audience’s attention by incorporating kinetic text in your video tool kit. In this post, we’ll cover the basics of kinetic typography, share inspiring examples, and teach you how to create kinetic typography videos on your own.
Kinetic typography
Kinetic typography, or kinetic type/text, is the technical term for “moving text.” It’s an animation technique that mixes movement and text to convey ideas and evoke emotion.
You might utilize kinetic text to emphasize a portion of a long audio recording, to advertise your product on social media, or to help your viewer remember terms more easily.
Having too much text on the screen can be overwhelming for viewers, but when done properly — with the combination of precise timing, music, and visual emphasis — text-based videos can be entertaining and effective.
When creating kinetic-type videos, it’s good to stick with one or two primary fonts and use stylized fonts to bring attention to certain words. It’s also wise to use an array of entering effects to keep the video engaging. This helpful example from The Futur communicates the rules of typography in a kinetic text video.
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Kinetic typography video examples
Here are a few inspiring video examples:
Lyric videos
Lyric videos are excellent examples of how to execute kinetic text videos.
R.E.M (1986) and George Michael (1990) are credited with creating the first lyrics-based music videos. Ten years later, Cee Lo Green (NSFW video) released the first official lyric video, and they’ve since become the norm.
It’s common for pop stars to release lyric videos before an official music video release. Record labels see them as a marketing tool to reintroduce music content as video and to build hype.
Plus, engaging with a lyric video helps fans learn the words. You can apply this same strategy to help your viewers retain your content.
Taylor Swift – You need to calm down
Taylor Swift and her marketing team know how to capture attention. Her most recent lyric video is a perfect example. The text effects are simple, but the combination of color, timing, and the occasional animated graphics make it incredibly captivating. Our favorite part about this video is that more than half of it could have been created in Vyond.
Two Feet – I feel like I’m drowning
This video uses black as the primary color to draw out the emotion in the song. The tone is quite different from Taylor Swift’s above, but the kinetic typography style is very similar. The simple text elements and color changes in this video could have also been created in Vyond.
Here are a few more great lyric video examples: Ciara, 5 Seconds of Summer, Snail Mail, Cuco, Ed Sheeran, and Demi Lovato.
We hope you use these lyric videos as inspirational examples and remember that importing music you don’t own into Vyond Studio is against our terms of service.
Informational videos
Kinetic typography videos are a great way to break down complex information. Here are a few more excellent kinetic typography videos to inspire your next project:
Curiosity
Dan Palmer is a skilled motion designer and animator. His videos artfully break down topics to inform viewers with beautiful and engaging text-based content. This video explains the importance of nurturing curiosity.
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WAKE COUNTY Schools
Wake County School District in North Carolina created this animated kinetic text video in a recruiting push to hire new bus drivers. The campaign generated 565 applicants in its first two months.
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Kinetic type in Vyond Studio
The example videos in this post were created by professional animators and designers, but this medium isn’t limited to professionals. You can create stunning kinetic typography animations in Vyond without breaking the bank.
To show you how easy it is to create kinetic text videos in Vyond, we made this example in about an hour. Log into your Vyond account to open this video as a template.
Follow these tips to create your own kinetic type video in Vyond:
Write out your full script in a word document and highlight or bold the words and phrases that are most important. These will be the elements that get extra design emphasis when you create your video.
Create a new video in Vyond in any style. Start with a blank scene and update the background color or pattern if you’d like.
Design and layout your text. Each word should be its own text element to ensure you have complete control over text transitions.
NOTE: Try not to overload the viewer with too many words on the screen at once, one sentence at a time is a good starting point.
Apply your enter and exit effects to each word or text box. You can use simple effects like typing for the bulk of your text and then use more eye-catching effects like pop, slide, station panels, hand slide, or any other effect where you want to call more attention.
Adjust the enter and exit effect timing of each text element. Preview your scene and adjust the timing until you’re happy with the results.
Select Continue Last Scene on the timeline if you’re looking to extend the current text animation (zooming in and out, for example) or to adjust the background color.
Add a motion path to your text. If you have multiple text elements to sync and rotate together, select all of your text boxes, right-click on the stage, and then select Group. Also, make sure auto-size is enabled on every text element.
NOTE: Always preview each scene you create and make sure you’re happy with the timing before you continue.
Add props and characters to compliment your text.
Repeat until your video is complete.
Experiment with fonts and animation options and have fun with what you create!
Kinetic typography resources
With its combination of simplicity and movement, kinetic typography videos are an excellent medium for communicating your message. Use this post as a guide to get started and create your first kinetic text animation video in Vyond. These links will provide you with additional resources:
The Kinetic Typography channel on Vimeo.
The Nice Type channel on Vimeo.
10 Ways to Make Kinetic Typography with After Effects from Webdew.
42 Must-See Kinetic Text Examples from Creative Bloq.
Make a video
#### Learn the Difference: Scene vs Video Templates
Scene Templates
There are hundreds of scene templates in the Vyond platform, all pre-populated with backgrounds, animated effects, props, and characters. These templates are a great starting point for individual scenes. To access these templates, simply select ‘Choose Template’ after clicking ‘Add Scene’ on your timeline.
Video Templates
Did you know that in addition to the scene templates found within the platform, Vyond has a library of full video templates? In addition to backgrounds, props, characters, and animated effects, video templates include multiple scenes, background music, sound effects, and dialogue. Vyond’s video template library has full, pre-made videos that you can quickly and easily import to your Vyond account, then modify for your own projects.
Creating with Templates
Both scene and video templates can be quickly and easily used to create stories of your own. Choose scenes you like from other videos, modify them with your own props, actions, and voiceovers, and mix and match with scenes you’ve created yourself – or modify a whole video from the video template library. The opportunities to quickly and easily create your own videos from pre-existing templates are endless.
Create Your Own Animated Videos
There’s a reason why Vyond is the leading platform for creating your own videos. Robust and powerful customization features are all wrapped into our simple, easy-for-everyone studio that comes fully loaded with everything you need to build engaging video experiences.
See where your creativity can take you with a Vyond free trial; no credit card required.
USE THIS TEMPLATE VIDEO
#### Learning and Development Video Ideas that Go The Whole Nine Yards
This year, we’re dealing you into better business communications with a full deck of 52 video ideas. Next up: Learning & Development!
We’ve come a long way from the primitive training videos of yesteryear, and tools like Vyond Studio make it easy to engage audiences with interactive, story-driven, and on-demand content. Read on for four fresh ideas you can bring to your L&D video strategy:
Promote Your Program
Conference Staff Training
Scenario-Based Training
Cybersecurity Training
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4 Examples of Video for Learning and Development
Promote Your Program
This kind of learning and development video can boost learner engagement before your first session even starts. Promotional videos can go a long way in generating interest and excitement for any kind of learning experience. Just look at the above example from instructional design expert, Rance Greene!
Conference Staff Training
Just-in-time (“JIL”) training is one of the biggest crazes in eLearning, and with good reason. By producing short consumable chunks of Learning and Development content that learners can access as soon as they need it, you can boost retention and maximize engagement. Training videos for conference staff like the one above are perfect for giving employees everything they need for event success, whether they watch it on the plane, at the hotel, or on the conference floor.
Scenario-Based Training
One of video’s greatest superpowers is its ability to tell a story. Communicate complex ideas with training videos driven by stories and characters. Using scenario-based training not only engages learners effectively but also provides an opportunity to make the video specific to your context without revealing personal information. (It also helps that Vyond Studio comes packed with props for hundreds of industries, jobs, and settings.)
With a Vyond plan, you can customize this anti-retaliation training video by using it as a template.
CUSTOMIZE THIS VIDEO
Cybersecurity Training
Engaging learners can feel ten times more difficult when you’re faced with a tricky topic, and few topics are as tricky as cybersecurity. The all-important subject comes with everything you need to bore learners: technical jargon, regulatory policies, and abstract ideas. Use video to cut through the fog.
If you’re a Vyond customer, you can use this video—and more of our creations—as a template that you customize with your own branding and content.
CUSTOMIZE THIS VIDEO
Create Your Own Videos for Learning & Development
There’s a reason why Vyond is the leading platform for creating your own training videos. Robust and powerful customization features are all wrapped into our simple, easy-for-everyone studio that comes fully loaded with everything you need to build engaging learning experiences. See where your creativity can take you with a free trial of Vyond.
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#### Legacy Video Maker Retirement
In December of 2019, the Legacy Video Maker will be retiring. The first phase of this process took place on August 14, 2019, when all user accounts were defaulted to Vyond Studio. The Legacy Video Maker and all legacy videos will be available for migration to Vyond Studio after the Legacy Video maker is retired.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why is the Legacy Video Maker retiring?
The Legacy Video Maker is built on Flash, which is being retired by Adobe in 2020. Vyond Studio is built in HTML5 – a faster, more responsive technology.
How long will I be able to continue to edit my videos in the Legacy Video Maker?
While the Legacy Video Maker will be retired December 2019, you will still be able to migrate your videos from Legacy to Vyond Studio after this date. Legacy videos will remain present on the Legacy Video Listing page. While you won’t be able to edit them in the Legacy Video Maker, you will be able to migrate them to Vyond Studio and make edits there.
Will my legacy videos disappear after December 2019?
While you will not be able to edit your videos in the Legacy Video Maker after December 2019, the video listing page, and all videos on it, will continue to be available and ready for migration to Vyond Studio.
Will all assets transfer when I migrate my videos?
Most assets will transfer when videos are migrated, with the exception of uploaded assets, retired assets, and some others. These assets can be replaced once the video has been migrated to Vyond Studio.
Have more questions? Email us at support@vyond.com.
#### Letter from Vyond’s CEO on COVID-19
I’m Gary Lipkowitz, the CEO of Vyond.
As preventative measures to slow the spread of COVID-19 accelerate around the world, we expect you’ll have questions regarding the continuity of our service and the safety of our employees. You may also want to learn more about how you can best use video to engage remote employees and customers you can no longer meet and serve face-to-face.
Continuity of our Service
The Vyond platform will be unaffected, continually operating 24 x 7 x 365. Our customer service hours will remain unchanged at midnight to 5:30 pm Pacific, Monday through Friday, excluding Vyond holidays. Our customer success teams will provide the same outstanding service to their accounts as they do now, and our product team will continue to develop new features, characters, templates, and other assets. Should there be a technical issue affecting the site, our engineering team will respond as rapidly as ever.
Safety of our Employees
We have been proactively rolling out precautionary measures for our team over the past couple of weeks, including restrictions on travel. Since late January, the Vyond Hong Kong office has been on a voluntary work from home schedule. This morning (March 12), the State of California issued a ban on gatherings of more than 250 people. Although our group in San Mateo is smaller than that, and regular workplaces are exempt, we are using this as the trigger to begin voluntary work from home as well. We are well-prepared to transition to remote work, and it will not affect the continuity of our service in any way.
Using Video to Educate and Engage
We recently released a video template that our community can use to communicate to their teams about precautionary measures for COVID-19. In a distributed work environment, video can be an especially powerful way to engage and educate your workforce. We hope to produce more topical content in the coming weeks that addresses this unusual time.
In the interim, you can find additional templates to customize and an extensive library of resources on how to use video on Vyond.com and our help center.
Our greatest hope is that you, your employees, and your loved ones follow the precautionary measures shared by public health authorities and stay safe until this pandemic has passed. To the extent we can support you during this time, we will strive to do so.
#### LinkedIn Cover Story Video: The Simple Guide with Examples & Templates
With over 756 million LinkedIn members and 15 million open positions, finding a job on the platform or standing out to prospects and customers can seem near impossible. But with a LinkedIn Cover Story video, it’s not.
A LinkedIn Cover Story video is a 30-second vertical video you can add to your profile. With this feature, you can satisfy a visitor’s affinity for video and, more importantly, stand out from those who aren’t taking advantage of this capability.
Jump to these sections to learn more:
Why create a LinkedIn Cover Story
Mixed Media Cover Story template
How to upload a LinkedIn Cover Story
What to include in a Cover Story
Custom character template video
Cover Story size specifications
Animated Cover Story examples
Animation-only Cover Story template
Create your own Cover Story video
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Why create a LinkedIn Cover Story video
Anyone can benefit from sharing their story on LinkedIn with video. This concept isn’t new and has proven to be a successful tactic over the past several years. Video creators such as Louis Ceaser IV, Ferréol Hoppenot, and Hahn R. are already using video to introduce themselves and market their skills on LinkedIn.
Video is the best way to tell your story in your own voice. Letting your personal network know who you really are—through video—helps open the doors to honest communication. If you’re comfortable telling your story on camera, great. If you’re not, you can use animation. In the video below, Louis Ceaser IV shares a few of the ways he uses video to develop his personal brand and expand his network on LinkedIn.
Cover Story videos are an even simpler way to stand out on LinkedIn. The first three seconds of your Cover Story previews ahead of your headshot and captures attention right at the top of the page. Once clicked, your 30-second vertical video can highlight the details you want to share with your target viewer—prospects, team members, recruiters, customers, or job candidates.
Watch Cover Story examples
What to include in a LinkedIn Cover Story video
Highlight your expertise or product for prospects. Whether you’re a small business owner, freelancer, or salesperson at a large company, highlighting your offering in your LinkedIn Cover Story is a great way to gain exposure and humanize yourself to your audience. Watch the examples below.
Introduce yourself to team members & current customers. Use your Cover Story video to start conversations about common interests, building a relationship that not only transcends work but improves your performance at it. “If you have friends in the company,” says organizational psychologist David Burkus, “it’s far easier to ask for help without fearing you’ll be judged a poor performer,” which, according to recent research, has a positive benefit on work productivity. Have a look at these Cover Story examples from Vyond’s customer success managers Erin, Reid, and Olessya.
Give recruiters a reason to contact you: Employers hire three people through LinkedIn every minute, making the platform one of the go-to places to find for a new role. In March 2021, LinkedIn shared that 76% of recruiters believe it’s helpful to see a pre-recorded video of a job seeker, but with so many competitors on LinkedIn, you need to choose your video’s information and tone strategically.
Advertise job opportunities: As a recruiter or hiring manager, your Cover Story is the perfect place to talk about available job opportunities. You can market a specific role or show off why your company is a great place to work. Use the last few seconds of your video to direct candidates to your job listings or recruitment video.
Introductory Cover Story videos don’t need to be complicated. Pick three of your favorite hobbies, accomplishments, work experiences, or other main points and share them with your intended audience.
3 animated LinkedIn Cover Story video examples
LinkedIn has a built-in feature to create selfie videos, but for anyone who wants to stand out—without necessarily showing their face on camera—animation is a great solution. Here are three types of animated videos to consider for your LinkedIn Cover Story.
These videos are all available as free templates for Vyond customers.
Mixed media LinkedIn Cover Story template
Sofala Knapton, a video producer and photographer, used animation, photography, and behind-the-scenes video to liven up the traditional Cover Story selfie video. Her use of animation adds an engaging element without overpowering or distracting from her portfolio examples.
Customize Sofala’s video
Mixed media videos can be as simple as adding a few photos to represent your hobbies, family life, or accomplishments. Watch this example from Reid Horimoto, customer success manager at Vyond.
Custom character LinkedIn Cover Story video template
Michelle Miller, learning and development director at Vyond, used her LinkedIn Cover Story video to let her new co-workers in on her work experience, passions, and hobbies.
Don’t let camera shyness be a barrier. Like Michelle, you can use a fully animated version of yourself to invite others into your story without worrying about your best camera angle.
Customize Michelle’s Video
In Vyond, you can create custom characters in three animation styles. Michelle chose Whiteboard Animation for her video. Erin and Olessya at Vyond chose the Business Friendly animation style and Reid chose the Contemporary character style.
Animation-only LinkedIn Cover Story video template
Like Sofala and Michelle, Chris Lawrence—sales at Vyond—shared a brief overview of his work-related experience, but with a twist. He didn’t include himself or his animated character at all. Instead, he used animated elements to enhance his story, like a rocket blasting off as he claims to skyrocket leading companies’ revenues.
If you don’t want to visualize yourself at all, animation-only is the way to go. And since the first three seconds of your Cover Story preview in your profile, this is even a great option to replace your profile picture altogether. With Vyond Studio, you can use animated images, charts & graphs, kinetic text, and music to keep your profile visitors engaged—just like Chris did below. If you prefer, you can even create an engaging video without any voice over.
Customize Chris’ Video
Salespeople like Chris can export leads from LinkedIn while using LinkedIn Cover Stories as a way to introduce themselves. The animation is eye-catching in your profile and adds an opportunity to share more about your product or service.
How to upload your LinkedIn Cover Story
LinkedIn’s Cover Story feature is mobile-only. So, to upload your video, visit your profile from the LinkedIn app on your mobile device and click on your profile picture.
From there, click on Add cover story to record a 30-second video with your phone’s camera or to upload your pre-existing video.
If you’ve created your video in Vyond or another video editing platform, email or text the video to yourself and save it to your device first.
LinkedIn Cover Story size specifications
However you create your video, be sure to create to export a 9:16 (vertical) aspect ratio to fit LinkedIn’s Cover Story guidelines. In Vyond Studio, you can adjust aspect ratio by clicking on the gear icon (next to the preview button in the top-right corner) and choosing 9:16.
And remember that your video must be under 30-seconds. We’ve found it best to stick to about 29.5 seconds. It’s also a good idea to prioritize the visuals in the first 3-seconds. That’s what will preview on your profile and you won’t have the option to change it within LinkedIn.
Use animated LinkedIn Cover Stories
Your Cover Story is part of your personal brand. It shows your unique skills and personality, giving prospects and potential employers an inside look into what you most want them to know. Like Sofala, Michelle, and Chris, you can stand out with an animated Cover Story. With Vyond Studio, you can do this without any previous animation experience.
See where your creativity can take you with a free trial of Vyond.
START A FREE TRIAL
#### Live Streaming in a Digital-First Era: How to Leverage Video Marketing for Brand Visibility
Content marketing is, without a doubt, a great way to expose your brand to the world and grow your business. You could think of it as a virtual open house for your business. But what is content marketing? The answer is a long list of products, including social media, email marketing, and blogging. But hands down the most effective form of content marketing is video marketing.
We can all become budding video producers, and you can use the platform of your choice – social media or specialist software – the choice is yours.
Why Include Video in Your Marketing Strategy
Video for business is by far the most effective form of content out there. It offers everyone something: people who like great visuals to people who want to consume content whilst running on a treadmill.
It’s predicted that video will, in the coming years, make up 80% of all consumer traffic on the Internet. On Facebook alone, 500 million people watch videos on a daily basis and videos on social media are shared over ten times more than texts or images – combined. The clear data points toward the fact that people love watching videos online.
Source: Wyzowl
So, if your brand is not putting the videos out there that people like, then you’re likely to suffer and not get the digital marketing results you want or need.
Keep your business healthy and put your video content on it. One of the reasons why video is so much better is that it promotes engagement with the audience. This, in turn, means that you can direct all those people engaging with you toward your website. Searching for the right domain for your business is key – many businesses are choosing to buy .io domain names, touted to be the top domain choice of the tech industry.
And what is the result of more people visiting your website? Higher customer conversion rates and increased traffic data.
Video content is unique. Creating colorful, interesting video content will better reflect your brand’s personality, and it will be more likely to be viewed, enjoyed, and shared.
Here we have a few top tips on how to leverage video marketing for brand visibility in the digital era. Let’s get down to it.
To Educate and Inform
We can use video to exchange information with our customers. Today, time is an extremely valuable commodity, so video helps in this hectic life. Turning your best video conference for small businesses, for example, into a video will allow them to consume it at their convenience.
Also, making straightforward educational videos for customers will help them understand what your business is about.
For Highlighting a Client’s Story in a Testimonial Video
Your customers are by far your best advocates. Video testimonials – using video calling software if made virtually – are a powerful sales tool because one customer can influence another, creating a knock-on effect. They may recommend you to their friends, colleagues, and potential customers.
Inquiring about a client’s experience working with your company is a great approach to reassure prospects about your capabilities and services while also moving them around the sales flywheel.
Share News About Your Brand
It can appear inauthentic and cold if you choose to pre-record your corporate updates. Announcements and other news-related messages are a great way to stay in touch with your customers, and live streaming, sales kickoff live stream, for example, is a great way to accomplish it.
By live broadcasting brand news, you’re demonstrating to your audience that you care about them enough to address them personally. You can also accomplish the same effect by live streaming these types of announcements to your employees.
Influencer Live Streams
Influencer marketing allows you to reach a broader and more diversified audience; therefore, using influencers in live streaming is becoming increasingly common. Plus, because influencers are likely to be comfortable speaking to an audience on video, it spares you or your team potential stage fright.
You might even be able to save money by hiring an influencer to host the live stream using his or her own equipment.
Launch a Vlog Series
Vlogging is a cost-effective, innovative method to present your content marketing program in a more visual and engaging manner.
A vlog is a brief, micro-production video in which a subject matter expert speaks directly to the camera while talking about a certain topic. Tutorials or “how-to” videos, behind-the-scenes peeks at a project or process, product demos, explainer videos, tips and tricks, and interviews are just some of the possibilities for vlogs.
The videos can be shared on social media and then rehashed and reused in one of your company’s blogs.
Use Video as an Introduction to Weightier Content
A brief video can help activate your social media platforms and generate traffic to topics that would otherwise go unnoticed. You can use video as a way to make reports, studies, and even blogs more accessible.
Think about this as an upside-down funnel, with social media’s broad reach attracting the intended audience to more substantial material while raising general awareness at the same time.
Distribute Your Videos Creatively
Pinterest, for example, didn’t use to be a “standard” video-sharing site, but for some brands, it’s a great place to upload videos due to the demographic-specific niche of the content. Not many marketers think of Pinterest as a place to upload video content, but it’s gaining traction as a solid video-hosting platform.
Show Your Expertise in a Webinar
Live webinars allow your customers to engage and participate with your content in a more extended format. You can show off your knowledge on a certain issue, take questions from a live audience, and share your thoughts on industry trends.
Even if a potential user is unable to attend the live webinar, by learning how to set up a video conference, you can record the session and make it accessible for consumers to view at their leisure following the broadcast.
This is a fantastic addition to your content marketing plan and a key component in establishing yourself as an industry thought leader.
Host Live Q&A Sessions
Live Q&A sessions, like webinars, allow for ongoing communication with your audience. This allows your audience to understand exactly what they want from your company while also giving them the impression that you care about making them feel heard. Use the best screen-sharing software for the best viewer experience.
Furthermore, live Q&As appear to be the simplest and fastest approach to inform on what your brand is all about. Consider asking a specific member of your team, such as the Product Developer to answer questions if you believe the queries will be product-specific. Alternatively, you can always enlist the help of a public relations, marketing, or social media manager for the Q&A.
The ability to provide a face to the brand will be appreciated by your audience.
Photo by My Networking Apparel via Unsplash
Promote Product Releases
A few prominent firms, such as Nike and Samsung, make use of releases to promote new products. This can give your product releases a sense of authenticity and make people trust it because it’s happening in real-time. Additionally, viewing a live release of a product is exciting and generates anticipation for the release. Just make sure you organize your release well in advance – using workflow software can help.
You can even record your streams and then repurpose them on product landing pages.
Incorporate Visual Branded Imagery
Instant brand recognition. You know what it is. Just think about what goes through your head the moment you see that apple with a bite taken out of it.
Using your unique brand imagery, you can utilize video marketing to boost both visual awareness of your brand and to let people know when a terrific video is coming from a trusted brand.
Ways to do this are either starting your marketing video by saying either “Apple presents” or by inserting the recognized logo in the corner of the content throughout. You should always include a call to action (CTA) at the end of the video to encourage people to visit your website. Make sure you do this subtly – get it noticed but don’t detract from the film.
Photo by Alexander Shatov on Unsplash
Animate an Infographic
Making an infographic come to life through animation is one innovative approach to using video material. Infographics make how-tos and instructional pieces simple to understand. And the content resonates even more when presented in a video.
Keep It Simple and Brief
Because most people’s attention spans are limited, start your video with the most important information. Make it genuine. Give a tour of your offices or place of work to give your customers an insight into your company. Or you might want to introduce your employees or a new product.
You can either narrate your video personally or use a professional voiceover to guide viewers through it.
Make It Worth Watching
This is a crucial point that’s frequently missed. You’re creating promotional content for your brand, but that doesn’t mean it has to be boring, such as content that plays in the corner of a dentist’s surgery.
Truly branded videos will be both entertaining and instructive – your mission is to provide the viewers with value.
Your goal is for the viewer to finish the video and love your brand – even if they’ve never heard of the product before.
Make it memorable, and make a connection.
Conclusion
Video will be great for your business, whatever your business goals. But the most important piece of advice is to have fun with your videos. If you’re having fun, your customers and potential customers will be too.
And why not invite them along. Your customers are your biggest asset. They know how great your business is. So let them tell everyone about it – in a video!
About the Author:
Grace Lau – Director of Growth Content, Dialpad
Grace Lau is the Director of Growth Content at Dialpad, an AI-powered cloud communication platform with CTI or computer telephony integration for better and easier team collaboration. She has over 10 years of experience in content writing and strategy. Currently, she is responsible for leading branded and editorial content strategies and partnering with SEO and Ops teams to build and nurture content. Here is her LinkedIn.
#### Make Healthcare a Perfect Ten with Video
The rise of telemedicine has brought bedside manner into the digital sphere, and there’s still plenty of room for innovation. With on-demand videos, healthcare professionals and providers have the opportunity to reach patients with easy-to-understand information that empowers them to engage with their care.
Today’s technology has made it easier than ever for health insurance companies, providers, public agencies, and support staff to create their own health videos. With tools like Vyond Studio, anyone can create custom animated videos with ease.
This year, Vyond is dealing you in with a full deck of ideas for using video. Here are four fresh ways to bring video into your practice:
Care Instructions
Mental Health Training
Supply Chain Education
Policy Communications
Healthcare Video Templates & Ideas
1. Care Instructions
Dynamic video can communicate critical information in a more understandable format than pages of photocopies. Provide care instructions that patients can reference again and again to ensure they follow the advice of their physician—or, in this case, veterinarian!
To illustrate the idea of an aftercare video, we teamed up with the veterinary specialists at Lenity to teach puppy parents how to take care of their dog after TPLO surgery. What resulted was a video that can not only help patients recover, but can help calm preoperative stress by showing what to expect after TPLO surgery. Because the video was animated using Vyond Studio, the team at Lenity can easily update the video as needed, and even tailor the video for patients with specific needs.
2. Mental Health Training
While mental healthcare has come a long way, pervasive stigma continues to prevent many from tending to their psychological well being. The cure to these biases is engaging, accessible, and accurate education. Whether you are a healthcare professional, or just looking to create training for your teams, you can reach for a tool like Vyond Studio to produce animated mental health training videos.
The video above introduces a full series of videos produced by Vyond on promoting mental health on remote teams. All the videos can be used by Vyond customers as customizable templates.
CUSTOMIZE THIS VIDEO
3. Supply Chain Education
The Internet has made it easy for anybody to do their own research. Unfortunately, it has made it equally easy for misinformation to spread. When it comes to health, it’s especially important that credible sources are sending a message that can compete in the digital landscape. Creating videos for public education is a great way to spread awareness in a transparent and credible way, building trust in your patients. With this example, viewers can better understand what happens to a COVID-19 vaccine before it reaches their arm, nurturing their confidence in evidence-based medicine.
Vyond customers can use this COVID-19 supply chain video as a customizable template.
CUSTOMIZE THIS VIDEO
4. Policy Communication
The policies that govern how healthcare is provided can be just as impactful as medicine in shaping patient behavior. Failing to communicate these policies in an easy-to-digest format can actually disincentivize getting necessary care. By spreading policy information with video, you can encourage patients to navigate their healthcare from an empowered and informed position.
In the example above, WebCE Health answers the question “What Are The New Health Reimbursement Arrangements (HRAs)?” beautifully.
Create Videos for Healthcare
Vyond Studio is designed to give everybody the power of video. Whether you’re a nurse practitioner, a benefits coordinator, or something else altogether, you can easily create your own animated videos. Kick start your first project using any of Vyond’s ready-made templates, or build your video from the ground up. Try Vyond for Free, no credit card required.
TRY VYOND FREE
#### Make More Impactful Videos Faster: Vyond’s Fall 2025 Release Delivers Results
You’re constantly asked to do more with less, meet impossible deadlines, and create compelling, on-brand communication that delivers real business impact.
That’s why Vyond’s Fall 2025 Release isn’t about us — it’s about you. Every update we’ve made is designed to help you and your teams move faster, create more credible and relevant content, and deliver greater impact across your organization.
Here’s how.
Quickly deliver useful content – without sacrificing quality
In the age of AI, creating content lightning-fast has become table stakes. And the need for efficiency is only growing as small teams are squeezed to do more with less.
These stats reflect a stressful reality:
90% of learning leaders feel overwhelmed and under-equipped to meet their priorities.*
67% of enablement leaders say assets are too slow to produce.**
And interestingly, 57% of enterprises see guaranteeing quality (especially for AI-generated content) as a major challenge.***
If you relate to these challenges, good news: the upgrades in our Fall Release make it easier than ever to deliver instantly-valuable content—without sacrificing quality.
Here’s how:
Create and scale quickly — with new Vyond Go Avatar Templates
Instantly generate explainer, demo, training, or HR onboarding videos with a human touch — with avatars ready to host, translate, and be updated at scale.With Vyond, you can generate a video by just typing in what you need or dropping in a URL, PDF, or presentation document as reference. The result is a working draft with an AI voice and scenes you can quickly tweak before downloading a completed video.
Recently, to help make Vyond Go even more useful, our product team added a new diverse selection of AI avatar templates right into Vyond Go, making it even easier to turn your ideas and existing content into impactful videos. Work completely in Vyond Go or bring your draft into Studio and adjust the layout as you see fit. (All plans)
Shorten cycles and boost performance — with Sales Enablement Quickstart Kit
Improve ramp time, train faster, and drive better sales performance with our new sales enablement templates.Our Sales Enablement Quickstart Kit includes 9 pre-made, editable video templates focused on sales outreach, tech stack training, product demos, QBRs, and proposals. They give enablement teams a huge headstart on creating training – and enable reps to effortlessly create on-brand, rinse and repeat assets that help them win. (All plans)
Jumpstart your video creation — with Mixed Media & Industry Templates
You can also connect better with a range of business audiences with new easy-to-tweak mixed media video templates (featuring photos, designed elements, and text) and work-environment-specific content packs (healthcare, warehouse, and modern office). Add speaking avatars, narration, screen recordings, or your own charts or images to personalize for your brand and use case. (All plans)
Bottom line: These additions deliver what we like to call “speed to value” – enabling you to cut ramp time, launch campaigns faster, and deliver training and communications that stick with minimal lift.
To see these tools in action, register for our Fall 2025 Release webinar.
Make your content more credible, relevant and effective
Content made fast that doesn’t land with your audiences isn’t worth much. Our new AI-driven upgrades ensure every video you create and share is credible, audience-relevant, brand-compliant—and effective.
Respond faster and land better — with more natural AI Avatars
Our AI avatars aren’t just cool new tech—they’re a business game-changer. The quality has skyrocketed, adoption has hit a tipping point, and usage on our platform is spiking.
Why? With our library of 1,300+ avatars and AI-powered Text to Speech voices, teams across your organization no longer need to hire talent or chase down internal SMEs to deliver critical, sensitive messages. Instead, they can scale content production like never before—creating credible virtual spokespeople with the highest-quality voices and lip sync in 95 languages with a few clicks.
That means L&D can fulfill content requests faster. Customer Support can reduce churn more effectively. And sales enablement can onboard, train, and close deals faster. (All plans)
“You’ll be very impressed by what it generates quickly. And the response to the videos has been STRONG.”
Joel FleetSenior Director of Field Readiness
Scale trusted expertise — with Custom Avatars and Voice Cloning
Our self-serve custom avatars are also being leveled up. Our enhanced AI model lets you reflect the gestures and expressions of your leader or SME spokespeople better. And voice cloning (coming mid-November) will ensure they sound exactly right too. These are a perfect tool for capturing and sharing trusted expertise without the hassle of scheduling recording time and re-recording. (All plans)
Design the perfect spokesperson — with Text to Avatar
If you want an avatar more specific than our library options—but don’t want to spend time “cloning” a real person—try our new Text to Avatar feature. In seconds, create spokespeople or characters for training, demos, and presentations that match your brand’s diversity, attire, and style. Add text-to-speech with automatic lip sync to bring them to life. Just type a detailed description, and our AI does the rest. (Professional plan and above)
Get the visuals you need instantly — with upgraded Text to Image
Similarly, our enhanced Text to Image tool generates the exact visuals you need, saving time otherwise spent endlessly searching stock libraries. With unlimited style outputs and faster results, creating the right images for training and presentations is easier than ever. (All plans)
Save time and stay on-brand — with custom Vyond Go templates
Ever wish you could create on-brand videos directly in Vyond Go? Let Vyond build templates to your team’s specifications and add them right into Vyond Go, saving you time and ensuring all Vyond users at your company produce brand-compliant content. (All plans)
Bottom line: These upgrades ensure your content is consistent, credible and audience-relevant–helping you train, sell, and communicate more effectively to global and diverse audiences.
To see these tools in action, register for our Fall 2025 Release webinar.
Deliver more value, accessibility, and compliance, org-wide
The best tools deliver long-term value across multiple departments — and they evolve with your needs. Here’s how Vyond’s Fall Release expands the business utility of our platform, improves accessibility, and helps you stay compliant.
Mix styles without limits — with Improved Transparent Backgrounds
Vyond’s diverse range of formats makes it easy to combine elements and integrate branded elements for maximum effect–without switching platforms. Our improved transparent backgrounds make these combinations seamless and more polished–letting teams communicate better. For example, with transparent backgrounds you can have an avatar host present in front of images of your office, charts, and graphs, or company B-roll. (All plans)
Capture and scale knowledge fast — with extended Screen Recording
Capture complex processes once and scale that knowledge in onboarding and training. Record up to 15 minutes (up from 4) and add callouts or visuals in Studio to boost clarity and recall. (All plans)
Make content clearer and accessible — with Smarter Closed Captioning
Closed-captioning is key to accessibility and smoother viewing–a priority for you and us. We’ve improved auto-captioning accuracy and translation, making captions clearer and easier to control. Adjust visibility, preview without affecting exports, and choose to burn captions into videos or download separately. (All plans)
Track results and reduce compliance risk — with SCORM Package Export
For L&D teams exporting to LMS, Vyond supports SCORM 1.2 and 2004.v4.
Now you can upload your videos directly into your LMS, no special conversion tools required; track learner data seamlessly; and reduce audit prep and compliance risk. (Enterprise & Agency only)
Create and share more conveniently — with new Integrations & Partnerships
Tools that succeed are those built into daily workflows that play well with others. That’s why we’ve partnered with Slack, Google, and Zapier to enable instant video creation inside those platforms.
For HR, Vyond is now in Phenom’s Talent Marketplace, making it easy to add engaging videos to hiring and employee strategies. And with our new partnership with Vbrick, you can securely manage, distribute, and measure the impact of Vyond videos at scale for maximum impact.
Bottom line: With these upgrades, Vyond helps you scale knowledge, ensure accessibility, stay compliant, and connect seamlessly with the tools you already use — making video more impactful across every department.
Make high-impact content faster – with Vyond
You don’t create videos for the sake of creating videos. You make them to help you reach unique audiences–and your business goals.
With Vyond’s Fall Release, you’re now more equipped to make content that’s faster to produce, more credible, and easier to scale across your organization. The result? Videos that deliver real impact where it matters most — helping your teams inform, engage, and perform at a higher level.
Don’t have a Vyond account yet? Sign up for a free trial. Or pick a plan now.
Already a customer–and want to check out what’s new? Log in here.
Have questions about the platform? Talk to sales.
*2025 State of Digital Learning Report, Elucidat **2024 State of Digital Learning Report, Elucidat***Digital Content Creation and Management: Trends and Insights for 2024, Korcomptenz
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Instant, effortless video. AnyStyle. Every audience.
#### Making An Explainer Video Storyboard
Is your audience confused about what your product does? That’s an important problem to solve because it could prevent all your hard work from having a meaningful impact. After all, people won’t buy what they don’t understand.
In my last post, we discussed what goes into creating a script for an explainer video. The script contains the words that will be read for the voice-over in the video. It’s under 500 words and tells the story of a person who learns about your product and uses it to accomplish a goal. You’ve received feedback from customers and even family on your script. Now that you’ve edited it a few times, you’re ready for the next phase: the storyboard.
Nearly every movie or commercial has something important in common: each scene is planned out before any video is shot. An important part of this process is called storyboarding. It allows producers and directors to see and evaluate low-fidelity versions of each scene. Usually, storyboards are hand-drawn representations that capture sets, characters, and so forth that will appear in the final product.
Your explainer video is no different. An important step in creating the video involves thinking carefully through each scene and how the visuals will work with the voice-over. By planning the scenes in a storyboard, you can further ensure that it’s understandable.
At Common Craft, we storyboard every video we produce. Like the script, it’s a cheap and easy way to make changes and refine the story before production begins. I am providing instructions for creating a storyboard below, but first, a few rules of thumb:
Keep visuals simple: Your goal is to be understandable and complicated visuals may work against you. Everything that appears on the screen should be there for a reason.
Look for visual metaphors or themes. Some of the best videos have a visual theme–a visual or symbol that is woven into the video across multiple scenes. Having a theme can help the video feel cohesive and unique.
Beware screenshots and interfaces. Always remember that your video wants to live forever. One change to a product’s design can make a video look out-of-date. To avoid this, use symbolic versions of products, websites and interfaces. This can help the video remain evergreen, even if designs change.
Use words sparingly. Unlike a conversation or presentation, you have only one chance to deliver your points to the viewer in a video. Use too many on-screen words and you’ll lose them. I recommend letting your voice-over to do the heavy lifting and only using words visually to make points that highlight a big idea. Sometimes scenes with one short sentence can be effective.
How to Create a Storyboard
For most explainer videos, storyboards can be hand-drawn using basic tools that enable you to plan the video. You can simply draw boxes on a sheet of paper to create a very simple storyboard. There are also a number of storyboarding tools online.
At Common Craft, we use PowerPoint to create and print storyboard templates that help us plan the video in a simple storyboard format. Here’s how:
1. Create blank slides. Open PowerPoint or Keynote and create blank presentation slides. Make sure the title field of each slide is available. Start with 8 or 10 blank slides.
2. Add your script to the slides, scene by scene. Copy and paste sections of your script into the titles of the slides. You should end up with a deck of slides that represent each scene in your video.
This process creates a template that provides two important items:
The script for each scene.
A place to draw the scene’s visuals based on your script.
3. Print the presentation. Instead of printing whole slides, print multiple slides per page (we do 6). You’ll see that this provides a space for sketching your storyboard, scene-by-scene, with your script in-place.
4. Sketch your story. You don’t need practiced drawing skills. Using basic stick figures and symbols, draw each scene of the video using the script as a reference. Read the script aloud and imagine what visuals would work for that scene and draw them on the page.
Here’s an actual thumbnail storyboard from a Common Craft video:
You’ll find that this process will force you to think about the script as well. Remember to ask yourself: Does this make the idea more understandable?
5. Once you feel good about the storyboard, you’re ready for production and turning the script and visuals into an explainer video.
Create a new project on GoAnimate to get started. Using your storyboard as a guide, assemble your video, scene by scene. Before long, you’ll see the ideas you drew in stick figures come to life on the Web. Thanks to storyboarding and consciously planning your video, you’ll increase your chances of creating an effective and high quality explainer video.
About the Author
Lee LeFever is the founder of Common Craft, whose video explanations have been viewed tens of millions of times online and have established the explainer video industry. He can be found on Twitter @leelefever.
Lee is also the author of The Art of Explanation – Making Your Ideas, Products and Services Easy to Understand.
#### May 2026 Vyond Newsletter
Watch the Video Now
New “members-only” content in Community. An inspiring success story. And get ready for Vyond Turbo in June. Watch to learn more.
Join the Vyond Community for exclusive templates, tutorials, and direct access to the Vyond team.
Join Community Now
See how a global consulting firm made videos 97% faster and expanded Vyond across four departments.
Read the Story
Explore May’s product updates, including Custom Pronunciations, improved Text to Avatar, and refreshed Storybook characters.
Learn More
Read the video transcript below
We have some really exciting Vyond news to share this month. First off, we’re really excited to announce that our Vyond Community site is live! When you join Community, you’ll get access to members-only templates, tutorials, and a direct line to the product team. Plus, you can trade ideas and share your Vyond-related victories with hundreds of your peers.
Join one of our upcoming Vyond Community events to get product updates, video tips, and all of your key questions answered by Vyond experts. We love hearing our customers’ success stories. For example, when a global consulting firm brought in Vyond for use within their L&D team, they were able to cut proposal video turnaround time from 10 weeks to 48 hours. And when word spread, three other departments started using Vyond too.
On the product front, our May Updates will help you work smarter, faster, and easier. We created a new Custom Pronunciations tool, so you can stop repeatedly fixing the same tricky pronunciations by hand. We’ve upgraded our tools to include Nano Banana 2 for Text to Image, which gives you expanded options for creating custom characters. Plus, we’ve added new body types for our Storybook characters, so they’re more relatable for the wide range of your audience.
So, to recap, Vyond Community is live! Join today for access to members-only tools and guidance. Vyond is helping global companies work remarkably faster, at scale. And our May Product Updates will help you do the same.
Finally, we’re excited to tell you about Vyond Turbo, a whole new way to convert static documents into video, automatically, quickly turning your old document library into your dynamic new video library. Full details are coming in June! What will you make in Vyond today?
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How to Make AI Videos in Minutes
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AI-Powered Instant Translation
#### May The 4th Be With You: How to Create Scrolling Text in Vyond
Full-time Vyond project manager and full-time Star Wars fan, Dany Rizzo, shares how she recreates Star Wars’ famous scrolling intro text in Vyond:
Happy May the 4th everyone! Sometimes the Force is strong with you and you’re inspired to create videos worthy of a Jedi…or are you a Sith? Whatever side you’re on, we can all agree that making videos with Vyond is not nearly as difficult as building a second Death Star. In fact, it’s so easy even Jar Jar Binks can do it! In honor of May the 4th, here’s a tip on how to create your very own captions, Star Wars style.
How to create scrolling text in Vyond
It takes seconds to achieve this fun Star Wars effect.
Add a text box and adjust your font and color.
Place the text at the bottom of your stage.
Apply a motion path to your text box.
Adjust the motion path duration to achieve your desired speed.
Here’s a helpful diagram:
Master Yoda will be proud to see what you will accomplish in Vyond. May the 4th be with you, always. – Dany Rizzo.
About Vyond
GoAnimate is now Vyond. Learn more about the changes.
Vyond allows people of all skill levels in all industries and job roles to create dynamic and powerful media. With features that go beyond moving text and images, you can build character-driven stories or compelling data visualizations that engage audiences and deliver results.
Start making your own videos today. Sign up for a free trial and attend our weekly tour of the Vyond Studio.
Start a free trial
#### Meet Vyond’s 2023 Community Champions!
The Vyond Community forum is the destination for Vyond users to connect with each other, share ideas, and collaborate.
And each year, the Vyond Community team recognizes a small group of members as “Community Champions” to celebrate their demonstrated product expertise and generosity in providing support and sharing best practices with their peers on the platform.
The 2023 Community Champions cohort includes four new inductees. Browse their stories below and join us in celebrating this incredible lineup of folks!
Star Peterson
Mary Nunaley
Marco D’Abbraccio
Alexander Salas
Star Peterson
Instructional Designer and Diversity Trainer at Stellar Instructional Design
Star (@StarPeterson) has been using Vyond for two years and is a fierce advocate for producing diverse and inclusive training content. Star has contributed meaningful feedback and suggestions in the Community, embodying our commitment to making Vyond accessible and delivering on-screen representation.
Mary Nunaley
Co-founder of Lavender Dragon Team
Mary (@marynuna) has been a member of the Vyond Community for three years. In her video you’ll learn her Vyond “secret super power” and the best advice she’s received from the Community. Mary also co-led a recent Vyond webinar on Using AI to Design More Human-Centered Learning Experiences. If you haven’t seen it yet, check it out!
Marco D’Abbraccio
Instructional Designer at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia
Marco (@CHOP_ID) has been a Vyond user for five years! This year marks his first as a member of the Community, but he quickly climbed the ranks as one of our champions. Marco’s deep knowledge in media, arts, and animation has helped many Vyond users of all levels gain new ideas and creative solutions.
Alexander Salas
Instructional Designer and Owner of StyleLearn consulting firm
Alex (@StyleLearn) has been a Vyond user for nine years! Alex joined Vyond’s product testing programs this year and has been an incredible partner for us to understand how to improve the user experience, including which features truly matter.
Congratulations, all! Thank you for your trust, meaningful contributions, and for helping others find belonging in our community. You’re paving the way for the next cohort of champions and we cannot wait to witness all you’ll create in the coming year.
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#### Microlearning Made Simple: A Step-by-Step Guide
This guide will summarize everything you need to know about microlearning and how to start creating your own microlearning videos. We’ll explain why microlearning is beneficial, how to approach scripting and storyboarding, and lay out a path for you to get started.
What is Microlearning?
5 Benefits of Microlearning
Why Your Company Should Create Microlearning Videos
Steps to Creating Microlearning Videos
How to Script a Successful Microlearning Video
Tips for Creating Animated Microlearning Videos
Creating Animated Microlearning Videos
Let’s dive in:
What is microlearning?
Microlearning breaks the material down into short, easily digestible components (typically around 30 seconds to a few minutes in length) that tackle a single learning objective.
You’re arguing with your parents over politics, and you pick up your phone to Google the specifics of a recent bill.
You’re on a flight to Rome. Before you land, you use an iPhone app to learn how to say “more pasta” and “double espresso, please,” in Italian.
You don’t know how to tie your bowtie before a formal wedding, so you fire up a quick YouTube tutorial on your laptop.
What do these three things have in common? They’re all examples of microlearning.
“Microlearning allows for learners to receive the information they need, when they need it, in the relevant context,” says Lauren Freeman, M.A.
Watch the first video in Lauren’s microlearning video series below, and read her full Master’s report on microlearning.
Most of the time, microlearning experiences in our daily lives — say, watching a tutorial on how to cut a pineapple or Googling a stat to resolve a dinner table argument — go unnoticed. But as we incorporate microlearning into our regular routines, we inevitably expect it to be available to us during more formal pursuits of knowledge as well.
In particular, microlearning has powerful applications in today’s workforce, where employees “are expected to constantly acquire new information to stay current,” according to Freeman. Traditional learning experiences — think textbooks, long lectures, and even PowerPoint presentations or PDFs — are often prohibitively time-consuming and static given the fast pace of the modern workplace.
5 benefits of microlearning
Increasingly, companies are adopting microlearning as a core component of their L&D strategies. In a recent survey by the Association for Talent Development, 38% of companies reported currently using microlearning, while 41% plan to implement the strategy within the next 12 months. Of those organizations delivering microlearning, 63% have completely replaced formal learning with microlearning.
Microlearning offers numerous benefits, in that it is:
Flexible. Microlearning experiences are much easier to personalize for each learner’s preferences and needs. By creating short chunks of content dedicated to a single learning objective, organizations can easily swap out content for individual learners or create new modules as the curriculum evolves. This is in stark contrast to traditional training curricula, which are often expensive to create and difficult to modify without overhauling the whole program.
Accessible: As Near-Life puts it, “learning needs to be accessible in today’s world to ensure there are no barriers for learners to access learning content.” Microlearning can occur during short windows of time and on a wide variety of devices (computers, tablets, phones, etc.), enabling flipped classrooms, blended learning, and online instruction.
Just-in-time: It’s 3pm, and you need to get up to speed on pivot tables in Microsoft Excel before a 4pm meeting with your boss. Enter microlearning. A quick YouTube video can tell you exactly what you need to know, right now — without forcing you to sit through extra minutes or hours of irrelevant material.
Sticky: Learners’ short-term memory (also known as working memory) “can only retain a certain amount of information simultaneously,” writes Christopher Pappas of The eLearning Industry. Bite-sized videos and other short modules help boost knowledge retention and prevent cognitive overload, particularly when dealing with complex topics.
Cumulative: Ideally, each microlearning module has its own learning objective, but also represents “a small win on the way to a larger goal,” according to Alex Khurgin, Director of Learning Innovation at Grovo. Learners can learn what they need, exactly when they need it, while at the same time building their knowledge over time to gain mastery over the subject at hand.
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Why your company should create microlearning videos
Advantages of microlearning video
While microlearning can take a variety of other forms (text, games, podcasts, PowerPoints, etc.), research suggests that short microlearning videos are the most effective and engaging medium.
Humans are drawn to videos.
The human brain is wired to respond to video. We know much of the information transmitted to the brain is visual and that visual aids have been found to improve learning. It will also come as no surprise that employees are 75% more likely to watch a video than read text, and that video conveys more powerful messages than written communication.
Why? Video is uniquely well-suited to storytelling — and humans love stories. “A narrative works off of both data and emotions, which is significantly more effective in engaging a listener than data alone,” writes Cody C. Delistraty in The Atlantic. Delistraty cites Stanford professor Jennifer Aaker, whose research shows that people remember data incorporated into narratives up to 22 times more than when the data is given on its own.
Video can engage employees on a visceral level by replicating a face-to-face connection. Learners are much more likely to connect with a narrative and visual depiction of a person guiding them through a process than they are to a block of static text (or a static image) explaining the material. Video also gives today’s learners the sense of control they crave over material — they can watch it anywhere, anytime and can pause, slow down, speed up, or rewind as many times as they see fit.
Video increases long-term retention.
Research suggests that videos are uniquely suited to maximize the retention of material when compared to other media.
“Multimedia presentations (such as narrated animation) are more likely to lead to meaningful learning than single-medium presentations” (like static visuals in a PowerPoint or an audio recording like a podcast), say researchers Richard E. Mayer and Roxana Moreno in the Educational Psychology Review.
This is based in part on dual coding theory, which holds that humans store audio and visual information in two separate areas of the brain. Watching a video engages both channels of the brain, which work together to reinforce the material. “The cognitive process of integrating is most likely to occur when the learner has corresponding pictorial and verbal representations in working memory at the same time,” according to Mayer and Moreno.
In order to store information in our long-term memory, our working memory must first process that information. But our working memory’s capacity (cognitive load) is limited, and if we overload it, we’ll retain less from the activity at hand. Microlearning videos help address this problem in two ways: a) they’re short, so they provide our brains a break to process information and refresh working memory capacity, and b) by engaging both visual and auditory channels at once, they spread the burden for processing the information across these two channels, providing more room for processing and retention.
4 initial steps to creating microlearning videos
Before you make a micro-learning video
Microlearning videos are a rapidly growing component of many organizations’ eLearning strategies. According to a survey by the Association for Talent Development (ATD), 72% of organizations plan to create microlearning videos in the near future, if they aren’t already.
Ready to get started?
The first step of any successful microlearning video (or video in general) is pre-production — a.k.a., planning. It may be tempting to skip this step in favor of going straight to the execution stage. Don’t!
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Steps to creating microlearning videos
1. Set goals.
First, explicitly identify the main training goals for your learning program. Then, think about how this microlearning video (or series of videos) will align to those goals.
Consider questions like:
What specific objective are you trying to communicate with this video?
What objectives are you trying to communicate with the larger series this video will be a part of (if applicable)?
Who is your audience for the video (e.g., all employees or employees in a certain job function or department)?
How will the video be used in your training program? E.g., is it a supplement to an in-person training session or a stand-alone lesson? Is it an optional or mandatory component of the program?
How will you measure success (e.g., viewership, engagement, assessments, etc.)?
2. Identify the scope.
Before diving into creating a microlearning video — whether you’re planning to make one short video or hundreds — consider:
What is your budget (both for the training program overall and for the individual video)?
What is your timeline for creating the video(s)?
Who are the main stakeholders in the project, and what approval processes do you need to follow? Involving decision-makers early on and clearly setting expectations about how you expect to share drafts and receive feedback will prevent headaches down the line.
What resources do you have available to help with content and production? Do you need to hire a subject matter expert, or request time from someone within your organization?
How long will your video be?
How many videos will there be in the series, if more than one?
3. Decide what kind of video you plan to make, and how.
Your goals, budget, and scope will help determine what kind of video it makes most sense to create. Will your video be live-action, animated, or a combination of both? If you have hired outside consultants or have a production team on staff, this is a decision you can make collaboratively.
Drag-and-drop animation is a great option for organizations of all sizes looking to create videos — especially if those videos need to be created quickly and cost-effectively. Animated video offers all the benefits of live-action, with far fewer resource requirements (e.g., no actors or studios or sets). Even organizations with larger budgets often choose animated video because it’s easier to update training modules while ensuring stylistic consistency across a video series.
Regardless of what type of video you choose, now is the time to sort out logistical concerns. What software program(s) do you plan to use? Do you need to rent or buy equipment or studio space? Do you need to hire or train additional people to produce the videos?
4. Brainstorm and outline.
Putting together a creative brief for your video is a good way to kick off the production process. Here’s a video brief template from Act-On Software that might be helpful as a starting point. Be sure to include goals, topics, and takeaways as well as who is responsible for each component of the process.
Then, develop an outline. Think about questions like:
Is this a scenario-based video? Will you have a narrative? Is there interactivity?
What is your main learning objective, and how do you plan to communicate this in the video?
What situations or storylines could help bring your main point home?
Will you have a narrator? Characters? Both? If a narrator, what will his/her personality and purpose be? If characters, who are they are and what will their story arc be? How will you use them to educate and engage your audience?
Remember, microlearning videos are “micro” for a reason. Each video you create should address one main learning objective. Trying to take on too much in such a short period of time is antithetical to the main benefits of microlearning, such as reducing cognitive load, maximizing engagement, and improving retention. Give yourself permission to create an expansive first draft, then be ruthless about making cuts. Remember that you can always produce multiple videos if you need to communicate multiple learning objectives.
How to script a successful microlearning video
Scripting for Microlearning.
Once you’ve completed the pre-production work for your microlearning video — including identifying goals, scope, and format, as well as creating a basic outline — it’s time to start scripting.
Here are a few best practices to keep in mind when writing your script:
One video, one objective.
Especially with a very short video, everything in your script should tie back to your main objective. It can be tempting to include fun tangential details, but be ruthless — the effectiveness of your video depends on it. Remember, you can always create more videos later or include embedded links to additional content.
Tell a story.
Creating a narrative and developing characters will help you connect with your audience and frame your video in the most effective way possible. The way you tell this story will vary depending on the style and objective of your video.
For example, an explainer video might feature a straightforward narrator introducing a problem and describing the steps to take to solve this problem. A video focused on more abstract themes might instead use fictional characters to connect with the audience and elucidate the main takeaways.
Either way, keep in mind traditional story structure. Your video should have a clear beginning, middle, and end, and each section should relate back to your objective.
Keep it simple.
Remember: you’re writing a script, not a term paper. Keep your sentences short and sweet, avoid unnecessary adjectives and adverbs, and use the active tense. Your script should look and sound like a conversation.
You should be cutting most of what you might include in a written format and summarizing key points. Keep it high-level and focused on the key points. Read it out loud to avoid producing something that sounds stiff or overly formal.
Not everything needs to be spoken.
Think of your script as a support system for the visuals in your video (we’ll discuss how to storyboard these visuals in a future post). The language you choose should complement rather than compete with these images.
Don’t waste time with lengthy introductions or conclusions.
There’s no need for preambles in microlearning videos — employees or other viewers will know exactly what they’re about to watch from the way it’s presented in your training program or on their search engine. Getting to the point immediately will engage viewers and give you a few extra seconds to explore your topic.
Similarly, there’s no need to waste time recapping your main takeaways at the end of the video — the beauty of a microlearning video is that viewers can rewind a specific section and/or rewatch the whole video if and when they need to.
To get started, refer to the outline you already have and fill in the blanks to demonstrate the problem, incorporate your persona, illustrate how to solve the problem, and call your viewer to action. Combining the problem and persona and getting the story “on its feet” is where the magic happens.
Get your story on its feet.
Setting: Where should your story take place? At home? At the office? At the airport? Where is the magnitude or urgency of the pain point at its highest?
Characters: Who should tell the story? A manager? An employee? A narrator?
Narrative Style: Are there characters? Should the characters speak to each other like they’re in a TV show? This dialog enhances storytelling, but is often slower. Should there be a narrator, talking about the characters from a top view? This allows you to be more efficient and precise, but often at the expense of identification with the characters.
Structure: Should you start at the beginning? This is the most simple. Or should you start at the end, showing the good (or bad) outcome and tracing back to the start? This shifts focus toward the “how” and away from the result.
Metaphor: Metaphor can help bring difficult concepts to life, especially with animation. Metaphors help us understand new concepts by attaching them to concepts that we already know. A little boy using a leaky bucket to bring water back from a well can illustrate poor cost control or a faulty process. These metaphors can be spoken or visual.
(Original scripting tips by Gary Lipkowitz, Vyond CEO)
Make it visual.
Video is a visual medium, so consider what the script will look like while you’re writing it.
“As you progress, you’ll begin to get a better sense of how your video will come together. You may find yourself adjusting some dialog or narration to better match your planned visuals or timing. This give-and-take is a part of the creative process. When things start really going well, you’ll find yourself deliberately creating rich media moments, in which non-verbal movement or effects can “carry the tune,” instead of simply wallpapering your words (Lipkowitz).”
Call to action.
If you’ve done a good job, viewers won’t want the story to end. Give them a way to stay involved while they’re still motivated.
What do you want them to do next? Watch the next video? Read more about the topic? Put their skills into action right away? Encapsulate this into one (and only one) call to action at the end of the video. Once your script feels complete. It’s time to move into storyboarding.
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Tips for creating animated microlearning videos
Ready to create animated microlearning videos?
Microlearning has powerful applications in today’s fast-paced workforce, providing employees with a flexible and accessible way to learn new information at their own pace.
Videos are particularly effective channels for microlearning. Video engages a viewer on multiple levels and in doing so can increase knowledge retention.
If you’re ready to take the plunge and create microlearning videos for your company, start by crafting a plan. There are a few best practices that apply to every animated video, whether you’re hiring an outside studio or using a tool like Vyond.
Keep it simple.
One of the best parts about animation is all the bells and whistles you can add in, at little to no additional cost. In Vyond, you can introduce new characters, props, and settings with a click of the mouse. You can add audio narration or background music or visual on-screen text.
But remember that learners can only process a certain amount of information at a given time. Richard Mayer’s Coherence Principle holds that “people learn better when extraneous words, pictures, and sounds are excluded rather than included.”
Vyond pro, Keith Anderson, who previously managed eLearning at Orchard Supply Hardware (check out some of the company’s animated microlearning videos here) and is now the director of learning at Penn National Gaming says, “the human brain filters out 90% of what you’re watching. Only put things on the screen that are relevant.” For example, Anderson makes sure that his videos have a consistent template (primarily whiteboard-based, with some colorful add-ins from Vyond’s Business Friendly animation style, and that his slides always move in the same direction to minimize distractions.
For more on effective visual instruction, watch this video by Michael Zielinskie, National Learning Specialist at Advanced Behavioral Health. And read more here.
(GoAnimate is now Vyond)
Prioritize auditory narration over on-screen text.
Again, less is more! It can be tempting to try to emphasize your main points with on-screen text in addition to graphics and spoken narration. However, Mayer’s Redundancy Principle says that combining graphics, narration, and on-screen text is actually less effective than just including graphics and audio narration.
“The flow of language is important, too,” says Anderson. “Humans typically process up to 150 words per minute, so we try to limit our videos to that amount of narration.”
Give the viewer an idea of where the video is going next.
“Every video we make starts exactly the same way,” says Anderson. “Having the same introduction signals the viewer that it’s time to enter ‘learning mode.’ It’s like the opening sequence to a TV show.”
According to Mayer, signaling — i.e., providing viewers with cues as to how the information in your video is organized — can lead to a more meaningful learning experience. In addition to consistent intros, signals like headings, vocal emphasis on keywords, and nonverbal character actions can help encourage learners to direct their attention to the most important parts of your video, and better follow the logic of the lesson.
Invest in audio.
High-quality audio and clear vocals will make a big difference in your final product. If you’re on a tight budget or just getting started, Vyond provides free text-to-speech capabilities in 58 languages and counting. However, a friendly, human voice will more effectively engage viewers.
There are plenty of services that make it easy to hire a professional voice artist to record your voice-over. VoiceBunny and Voice123 are a couple of options. Or, if you have access to a USB mic with a pop filter, record someone from your team using an audio program like Audacity or GarageBand.
Read about finding the right voice-over talent for your video from voice-over artist, Laura Schreiber.
Whether you plan to hire a professional or record on your own, do so towards the end of your project to avoid having to re-record when you inevitably make changes to your script. We recommend using Vyond’s text-to-speech feature as a placeholder until you’re ready to record. Then make final timing adjustments to your video once the voice-over is in place.
Don’t forget about music and sound effects either. Just like in the movies, sound can add mood and atmosphere to your animated microlearning videos. Vyond offers royalty-free music and sound effect to accompany any narrative. You can also purchase and upload specialized music and effects into Vyond to create an even richer viewing experience.
Get started!
One of the best parts about creating animated videos is the low barrier to entry. Sure, you’ll hone your style and perfect your execution as you gain more experience, but even a newbie can create effective animated microlearning videos in Vyond. Try it out with our free trial. For guidance, once you’ve started, browse our Vyond Bootcamp sessions. If you’re already using Vyond, and looking to take things to the next level, watch one of our more advanced on-demand webinars.
Creating animated microlearning videos
Once you have a plan in place, the next step is to actually create your video. Many organizations turn to animation to create multiple or one-off videos. Animation is a rich, engaging, and cost-effective medium that offers all the benefits of traditional video — with far fewer resource requirements.
Animated video isn’t just for kids either, says Karen Kostrinsky, eLearning Developer at mortgage lender Ellie Mae. “Some people think animated videos are childish. They can be, but they don’t have to be.” Kostrinsky, who uses Vyond to create her animated videos, does sometimes use “fun” themes — think superheroes, zombies, and country-western — for internal meetings, but more often she tends to create realistic characters in office settings. “My people look like people… I like that they look current. It’s still fun, but professional.”
Watch an excerpt from one of Karen’s animated microlearning videos:
About Vyond
Vyond allows people of all skill levels in all industries and job roles to create dynamic and powerful media. With features that go beyond moving text and images, you can build character-driven stories or compelling data visualizations that engage audiences and deliver results.
With Vyond, it’s easy to create a video for your social media marketing. Start a free trial.
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#### Netflix for learning: What the streaming service can teach L&D professionals
Over the last few years, there have been numerous headlines about the human attention span getting shorter.
Journalists from nearly every major publication claim that we’re losing our ability to focus and that our attention spans are shorter than that of a goldfish. But if that is true, how do we explain our ability to binge on streaming sites? People get distracted after spending a few seconds on a smartphone app, yet they’re motivated to watch Breaking Bad and Stranger Things for hours on end.
The popularity of video streaming services offers an important lesson for learning and development (L&D) professionals—people are able to focus if their environment is designed to engage them. In this post, we’ll break down what makes the design of streaming services so captivating—and how L&D professionals can emulate these tactics with their own educational content.
Engagement: The learning pain point that Netflix has cracked
L&D professionals assess how engaging educational content is by measuring the length of time students spend with it. By that standard, Netflix and other streaming services have cracked the code for creating captivating content. These services excel at getting users to watch shows and movies for long periods, as seen in these staggering binge-watching stats from Deloitte:
91% of Gen Zers, 86% of millennials, and 80% of Gen Xers report that they binge-watch TV shows.
In a single binge-watching session, millennials and Gen Xers watch an average of 7 episodes. Gen Zers, on average, watch 6 episodes in a single sitting.
While L&D professionals shouldn’t encourage binge-learning—it can create cognitive overload and lower retention—they should take inspiration from streaming sites’ captivating quality to engage their learners.
You may think that Netflix (along with Hulu, Amazon Video, and others) is able to grab users’ attention because the service is sharing entertaining rather than educational content. But engagement isn’t just about the content itself—people stay on streaming sites for hours to watch a range of TV shows—it’s also presenting the content in a way that is designed to captivate audiences.
By emulating how streaming sites present content, you can design your courses in a way that keeps viewers learning for as long as you’d like.
5 tactics from streaming sites that will captivate learners
When you accidentally watch four hours of Queer Eye, it’s not just because the hosts are hilarious. Your binging also happened because:
Netflix recommended the show in a personalized playlist;
you could watch on your iPad while walking on the treadmill; and
each episode automatically played, one after another.
All of these product features are geared toward keeping users engaged with the platform. Just like Netflix is designed to captivate users, you can craft your courses in a way that keeps learners focused. We’ve broken down five ways that video streaming sites grab users’ attention and tell you how you can apply these principles in your own educational content.
Curate content on an individual level
With so much available content online, people choose to read, watch, and listen to material that is the most relevant to their lives. A marketing associate, for example, will be more excited to watch videos about SEO tactics than about general workplace training. Why? Because the SEO videos will help them become better in their specific role.
To keep users engaged in the platform, Netflix clearly shows that their content is worth watching with personalized playlists. When you sign into the platform, it displays a series of shows or movies that you should watch based on another video that you watched. These lists might be displayed as the “Top Picks” for you, or it might be based on one movie or TV show you watched.
When users remember how much they enjoyed the last show they watched, they’re going to feel motivated to watch similar TV programs that Netflix recommends.
Reassure learners about the value of your course by presenting personalized learning options in your learning management system (LMS), just as Netflix encourages users to watch by using customized playlists. As an administrator in your LMS, you can assign courses to individual users based on a number of factors, such as location and role. Seeing their customized learning path, users will feel confident that the courses will benefit them, and they will feel encouraged to complete the lessons.
Stimulate a dopamine release
Along with being personalized, educational content needs to be pleasurable to be engaging. If students enjoy completing their lessons, they’re going to come back to finish the entire course.
Viewers enjoy the escapism of watching multiple episodes on Netflix—73% of people report that binge-watching gives them positive feelings, and 76% say binge-watching is a “welcome refuge from their busy lives.”
When viewers experience these happy feelings, their brains are forming a positive association with Netflix that keeps them coming back to the platform. Clinical psychologist Dr. Renee Carr, PsyD, explains this process on NBC’s health and wellness blog, Better:
When engaged in an activity that’s enjoyable such as binge-watching, your brain produces dopamine. This chemical gives the body a natural, internal reward of pleasure that reinforces continued engagement in that activity. It is the brain’s signal that communicates to the body, ‘This feels good. You should keep doing this!’ . . . You experience a pseudo-addiction to the show because you develop cravings for dopamine.”
While educational content may not evoke the happy escapism of Netflix shows, you can engage learners with another dopamine-releasing tactic: gamification. Create a system that rewards students, such as allowing them to earn badges or points, every time they complete a portion of your courses. Dopamine will be released every time a student receives a reward, so they’ll feel motivated to return to the course and complete more lessons.
The LMS Litmos, for example, allows you to reward learners with badges and points for completing courses. There is even a leaderboard feature to create feelings of fun competition.
Just as the escapism of shows makes Netflix enjoyable to watch, a game-like reward system will make your lessons more fun to complete. Happy with the learning process, learners will be more likely to return to your LMS and finish your courses.
Create a continuous flow of learning
Students’ ability to focus on your lesson depends on the number of distractions present. If you present educational content in a setting with few disruptions, learners are more likely to stay engaged with the educational content.
The same is true for viewers on video streaming sites. People binge-watch on Netflix because the platform allows them to watch TV shows without interruption. There are no commercials, and the player is automatically on full-screen to discourage users from clicking on another show or, worse, another site. When an episode finishes, Netflix will autoplay the next episode in the TV show’s season to encourage viewers to keep watching.
Emulate this seamless viewing experience in your learning content, and students will be more likely to continue moving through lessons on your LMS:
Use a clean, uncluttered design for your course. When the learner begins the lesson, display the course content only without showing other aspects of the LMS or the student’s browser. Just like Netflix automatically uses a full-screen player, this minimal design discourages students from clicking away from the lesson. The language learning tool Duolingo, for example, uses a simple, white interface to display their lessons.
Direct students to the next lesson. Feature clearly labeled CTA buttons in your lessons that encourage learners to move to the next part of the course.
Limit the number of educational content learners can consume. If you successfully make your course seamless to complete, there’s a good chance that students may binge on your courses. Completing so many lessons at once can lower retention, so it’s best to set a cap on your educational content to avoid binging. For example, an HR training leader might limit employees to three modules per day.
Just as Netflix removes interruptions from their shows, minimize disruptions in your courses to keep students focused and engaged in your lesson.
Offer a high-quality viewing experience on every device
Because portable devices are so convenient to use, people are much more likely to engage with your content if it’s mobile-optimized. In a Merrill Lynch survey, smartphone users were able to complete training 45% faster than computer users, and their test scores were comparable to computer users.
Though most Netflix users watch content on a TV, the service’s device-friendliness still attracts a significant number of users to the platform. Recode reports that 20% of viewing hours across Netflix’s global user base happens through a phone or tablet.
Users enjoy watching Netflix on their devices because the platform is successfully optimized for mobile. For example, the platform uses machine learning to detect the differences between devices and make necessary adjustments to provide the best possible viewing experience. This reliability encourages users to watch shows on Netflix, even if they’re limited to a portable device.
Likewise, L&D professionals should use an LMS that offers a high-quality mobile experience to attract students. Evaluate your LMS’s mobile experience with this checklist:
Assess the navigation. Is the layout of the LMS intuitive on all devices?
Watch a video on the LMS. Are the dimensions properly reconfigured for each device?
Pay attention to loading speeds. Does the LMS load as fast on mobile devices as it does on a computer?
If you find that the LMS offers a low-quality mobile experience, consider switching to new software. People are eager to use their mobile devices to complete learning courses. Keep these students engaged by presenting your lessons through a high-quality, mobile-optimized LMS.
Make your content highly interactive
Anyone who has worked in L&D already knows that interactivity in learning is essential—it grabs your learners’ attention by forcing them to stop and actively engage with your lesson.
Netflix’s recent programming reinforces this idea. The streaming service recently created interactive shows—Black Mirror’s “Bandersnatch” episode, You vs. Wild—that allow viewers to influence how the program’s story unfolds. Bandersnatch garnered so much attention and attracted so many viewers that Netflix’s VP of Product stated that the service would be doubling down on interactive content.
Seeing how these shows captivated viewers, L&D professionals should aim to make their courses as interactive as possible to engage learners. Consider these three levels of interactivity from eLearning software provider Articulate to understand how far you can go to create active learning content:
Basic: Learners move through courses by clicking a simple “Next” button, and quizzes are limited to multiple-choice and true-or-false questions.
Intermediate: Courses include “click and reveal” interactions, and quizzes include drag-and-drop and matching activities.
Advanced: Courses feature many interactive media elements—such as interactive infographics and videos—and quizzes include branched scenarios where learners follow a certain path based on their answers.
While you may not always have the resources to reach the advanced level, aim to include as much interactivity as possible to grab learners’ attention and keep them focused on your lessons.
Design your courses to be as captivating as Netflix
When learners aren’t engaging with your courses, a short attention span isn’t to blame. The popularity of binge-watching reminds us that people are able to engage with content for a sustained period. Their ability to focus depends on whether the content is presented in an attention-grabbing way, as Netflix content is.
If learners tend to lose focus during your courses, it’s time to reevaluate your lesson design by using the principles in this post. While you don’t want students binging on your educational content, applying these streaming service tactics can help you gain control over your ability to engage your audience and ensure that they’re fully completing your courses.
Create your own engaging video content with Vyond.
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#### New “In-Between” Body Types for the Business Friendly Style
New “In-Between” Body Types for the Business Friendly Style
Everyone is different – and at Vyond, we strive to make sure that you’re able to express all of the features that capture this rich diversity. With that in mind, we’re releasing two new body types for the Business Friendly style. Take a look at the video below to see them in action.
Featured Help Center Articles
What are the technical specifications of Vyond Studio’s video formats?
Videos created with Vyond Studio are available for download as an MP4 in either 720p or full high-definition 1080p format. The above article gives more information on the technical specifications of Vyond Studio’s exported videos.
How do I flip or mirror an asset?
Assets can now be flipped or mirrored, giving you more flexibility when placing a character or asset. Take a look at this article for more information on flipping and mirroring assets.
#### New Masking and Cropping Features
Masking Enhancements
The mask feature allows you to use certain shapes, frames, and screen props to hide or show parts of another asset. We’ve enhanced it to add a visible overlay—making it much easier to see what you’re masking. To learn more about masking and maskable assets, take a look at this help center article.
Cropping
To make it even easier to modify the assets and images in your video, we’ve added a crop tool. Cropping allows you to trim the edges of an asset—cutting out the parts you don’t want, and controlling exactly how much of the asset you’ll show.
Learn more about cropping by watching the video below.
New COVID-19 Related Actions
In response to COVID-19, we’ve added some new actions to the platform to enhance your videos. These actions include:
New coughing actions
Coughing actions for kids
A more flexible hand-washing action
Take a look at the platform for the new actions!
Featured Help Center Articles
What is masking?
This month’s update has added new functionality to the masking tool. Take a look at this help center article to learn more about what masking is, what assets can be used in masking, and how to modify your assets.
How do I make animals/custom props talk?
With cropping, you can mix and match assets to assign lip-synch to any asset—for example, making an animal talk. This help center article gives clear step-by-step instructions on how to achieve this effect.
How to crop an asset
The crop tool allows you to adjust the borders of an asset, cutting out parts that you don’t want to be visible. This help center article gives more information on cropping and how to use it.
#### New Research: What Employees Want from L&D in 2024
We partnered with our friends at TalentLMS on a new research report exploring 1,000 full-time employees’ assessment of the training they’re getting now, what they want more of in 2024—and what might be at stake if they don’t get it.
Also within the report, an array of L&D leaders and industry experts weigh in on what the findings might mean for L&D leaders looking to make an impact in the new year.
Read on for a few of the findings. But for the full story, download the report.
Download the Report
Employees remain hungry for training and recognize its role in their success
Respondents recognize the evolution of work and understand the importance of upskilling and the shrinking half life of skills today. In fact, 41% of employees say they would look for another job in 2024 if their company doesn’t provide them with training opportunities.
Their appetite for learning also extends beyond what their companies offer: 68% of respondents say they take training on their own time and dime to improve their workplace skills.
[L&D teams] can’t keep the gates to education closed anymore, no matter how hard we try. Instead, we need to become learning marketplace curators—and trust that our employees are smart enough to figure out what they want to develop in and give them the autonomy to seek it out.
– Sarah Cannistra, Fractional Chief Learning Officer & L&D Career Coach
Host of The L&D Career Club and Good Learning Podcasts
Download the Report
Employees want more training content on topics related to the evolving nature of work
The future of work is fueling a desire for training that both helps people understand and use AI tools.
Notably, however, there was a meaningful gap in the AI training respondents want compared to what employers are currently providing: 71% of respondents want to understand how AI affects their roles, with 51% getting relevant training content. And regardless of their age group, 67% of respondents say they want training on AI tools, with only 29% getting it.
“The most important educational need in the workplace is to teach people how to use and innovate with generative AI,” says Professor Jules White, Director of the Vanderbilt Initiative on the Future of Learning and Generative AI. “It’s imperative that they are given the opportunity to learn these tools and innovate with them, so they aren’t at a disadvantage in the workplace.”
Short, convenient training with a human touch hasn’t gone out of style
In terms of engagement, even in an age of automation, humor, storytelling, visuals, and videos get high marks for effectiveness. For example, 72% of respondents feel more engaged by training programs that incorporate short video content than programs that don’t, and nearly three quarters (74%) say that information delivered as part of a story helps them retain information better.
“Leveraging these methods of communication can help cultivate a positive and enjoyable learning atmosphere that motivates and focuses employees,” says Professor Jessica Briskin, graduate coordinator in the Department of Technology, Analytics, & Workforce Learning at Commonwealth University, Bloomsburg. “It’s important to note, however, that their effectiveness always depends on factors such as the target audience, cultural sensitivity, media quality, relevance and tone.”
For all the insights—including additional findings about personalization, preferred training formats, top learner pet peeves, and much more—download the full report.
And to see what four forward-thinking L&D executives make of the findings—and what they recommend L&D leaders consider as a result—register for our January webinar:
New Webinar
How to Retain Your Best Talent in 2024: 4 L&D Execs Weigh In
Sign Up Now
#### New surfing content, a new administrative feature, and more
New Surfing Content
We’ve added new surfing content to the Business Friendly style, including 10 surfing actions, 7 props, and 2 new backgrounds. Take a look, and hit the surf!
Administrator Content Transfer
Professional or Enterprise account administrators can now transfer content from a deactivated user to new users on the team, even if they haven’t yet created their Vyond account. This process greatly streamlines the onboarding of new users.
Take a look at the video below for a preview of the content transfer process.
Premade Templates
We now have premade video templates for each of our animation styles, covering a broad range of scenarios, settings, and job types. These templates can be used nearly unchanged or as a starting point for your video. Take a look at our new template library to browse our collection of available templates and transfer them directly into your account.
This Month’s Featured Help Center Articles
How Do Vyond Subscriptions Work?
Vyond subscriptions have several different levels, and can be purchased on a monthly, quarterly, or yearly basis. Take a look at the above article for information on account levels, upgrades, and more.
Can I Copy and Paste Assets?
Most items in Vyond Studio can be copied and pasted, including characters, assets, text, scenes, and more. The article above takes a deeper dive into the types of items that can be copied and pasted, and how copying and pasting works in Vyond Studio.
How Do I Make a Character’s Lips Open More Widely?
The way your character’s lips move can be influenced by the way you record your audio. This article gives more information about how to change your audio to achieve the effects you’re looking for.
#### New Survey Reveals Forced Socialization at Work Isn’t Working: #VyondtheSurface Explores Top Factors Behind Being Connected at Work
Participation in staff meetings and receiving regular communication from leadership make employees feel most connected at work.
SAN MATEO, Calif. – March 29, 2022 – Vyond, the leader in animated video content creation for the enterprise, today released results from its fourth #VyondTheSurface survey, a national survey of 1,000 full-time employees at large companies that explores how the pandemic has impacted the way employees experience the workplace, how they communicate with one another, and their perception of leadership communication.
Surprisingly, results revealed that common team building activities, like game nights, were not the activities that drove employees to feel most connected at work. Instead, participating in staff meetings (40%), receiving regular communication from leadership (37%), and getting to know colleagues on a more personal level (36%), particularly through video platforms as more than half of employees (54%) feel they have been able to build relationships with colleagues through video conferencing, were among the top responses. Lesser valued activities included virtual town hall meetings (14%), playing games with coworkers (13%), and being part of a mentorship program (12%).
“It’s clear that forced socialization or gimmicky ‘perks’ isn’t what makes employees feel most connected at work,” said Jeniffer Strub, Director of Human Resources at Vyond. “Rather, it’s when employees have the opportunity to naturally build one-on-one relationships, which is why companies must provide ample opportunities to make those real, genuine connections, while being communicative about their organization’s mission to ensure employees truly understand the work happening around them.”
Feeling connected at work looks different for employees of different ages and genders
Boomers feel the most disconnected: 1 in 3 employees (36%) said a top frustration of remote work was feeling disconnected from colleagues. Boomers feel the most disconnected (51%, a 4-point increase from last year), which is more than double the 23% of Gen Z that reported feeling the same way.
Millennial workers love all-day IMing while other generations feel connected at work in other ways: Millennials say they feel connected at work when instant messaging throughout the day (38%) and receiving virtual kudos from colleagues in a public forum or chat (24%). On the other hand, Gen Z employees feel connected by getting to know their coworkers on a personal level (43%) and having team lunches (39%), whereas older generations feel most connected at work through participating in staff meetings (40% of Gen X and 45% of Boomers). Additionally, women are more likely than men to feel connected by sharing funny memes, emojis or GIFs when communicating with colleagues (25% vs. 19% of men).
Can you repeat that? When asked about frustrations and challenges during meetings, men reported being more annoyed by needing to repeat themselves because a colleague wasn’t listening (28% vs. 18% of women), being asked to “hold for a moment” while a colleague attends to something else (24% vs. 17%), and a colleague only using audio while others use video (21% vs. 15%).
Employee communication lessons from the pandemic
As workplaces navigate staying connected in a disjointed work environment, the way companies approach employee communication is key. The good news is that leaders are doing far better now than at the start of the pandemic, according to employees:
Leaders have found their stride two years after pandemic communications: Employees are now more likely to acknowledge company leadership is communicating more effectively (67% vs. 58% in February 2021). The channel for communications matters too – half of employees still prefer to watch or listen to a company announcement or communication instead of reading an email or blog post, and 56% say video messages from their company CEO are more engaging than text-based messages.
Gen Z and Millennial employees overwhelmingly prefer video communications and digital tools: When it comes to company communications, Gen Z and Millennial employees find video messages more engaging than older employees (61% and 63% vs. 49% of Gen X and Boomers). They’re also embracing digital transformation more, with 88% of Gen Z and 78% of Millennials saying they are happy to see their company push digital transformation initiatives, versus 64% of Gen X and 57% of Boomers.
The digital workplace – what employees want, need, and could do without to feel connected at work
As workplaces have adapted to increased remote and hybrid work arrangements, digital transformation efforts — which integrate digital technology into all areas of a business — have been further prioritized and accelerated, but that doesn’t mean all employees fully understand their impact or feel like they can weigh in, nor does it mean they have a healthy relationship with the digital tools in the workplace:
Employees’ take on digital transformation at their company: 70% of employees say they are happy to see their company push digital transformation initiatives, and 2 out of 3 employees say they can see and understand their value. Still, some employees are uncertain about these efforts, with a fifth (22%) unsure if their organization is taking part in digital transformation efforts, and 1 in 3 Boomers saying they are unsure. Additionally, less than half of employees (44%) feel they have a seat at the table when it comes to their company’s modernization.
Employees are conflicted over new digital communication tools: 34% of employees said they have too many communications channels to reach colleagues, but when asked if they would get rid of any communication platform they use at work, almost half of employees (46%) said they would not.
“Most employees are familiar with the term ‘digital transformation,’ but it’s frequently believed among non-IT and tech employees that it doesn’t impact them directly,” said Matt Harney, CTO of Vyond. “In reality, digital transformation touches all employees and aspects of the workplace, including the communications tools we all use to connect every day. Leaders need to consider their ‘comms tech stack’ as a part of their broader toolset, which will empower all employees to feel like they have a seat at the table when it comes to digital transformation.”
To review Vyond’s survey findings, visit vyond.com/vyondthesurface. New data will be published later this week. For advanced access, contact press@vyond.com.
Survey Methodology
FleishmanHillard’s in-house research practice, TRUE Global Intelligence™, conducted a survey among a nationally representative sample of n=1,000 adults in the U.S., 18 years of age and older, who are employed full time at a large organization with 500+ employees. The sample is demographically balanced for age, gender, and geographic region to represent employed adults in the U.S. according to the U.S. Census. It also included a mix of remote, hybrid or non-remote workers, seniority levels within the workplace, as well as a mix of people managers and those with no direct reports. The survey was fielded online between February 21 – March 1, 2022.
About Vyond
Vyond’s mission is to put the power of video in the hands of everyone. Vyond allows people of all skill levels in all industries and job roles to create dynamic and powerful media. With features that go beyond moving text and images, you can build character-driven stories or compelling data visualizations that engage audiences and deliver results. Founded as GoAnimate in 2007, Vyond has helped tens of millions of users across six continents easily and cost-effectively produce high quality videos to address any business need. To learn more about Vyond, please visit www.vyond.com.
#### New UK Assets + Webinar
You may have noticed some new, UK-themed assets in Vyond Studio in the last couple of weeks. From NHS workers to the iconic black cab – the new assets will help you make videos that will resonate with a British audience.
In addition, alongside Omniplex, we presented a webinar on September 23, 2020 – Using Video Templates to Create Branched Scenarios in Vyond and Articulate Storyline. During this webinar, we showed off the new British assets, as well as show you how to:
Create animated videos easily with Vyond, matching your brand and bring your eLearning to life
Transform Vyond templates and customise them to your heart’s content
Incorporate your Vyond content into Articulate Storyline to create branched scenarios.
A recording of the webinar can be found here.
Ready to start making your own UK-themed videos? Take a look at some of the examples of the new assets in the below templates, then log into the studio and start making your videos more British today!
How to use templates
A Day In The Life of Lockdown
Use This Template
Clap For Carers
Use This Template
Appreciating Key Workers
Use This Template
#### November Product Update: Copy/Paste Between Tabs, Updated Flip Functionality, and More
Copy and Paste Between Projects
Now you can copy and paste between different projects. Take assets from one browser tab to another:
Keyboard Shortcuts
Select assets in the first tab and press Ctrl+C or Cmd⌘+C on Mac.
In the next tab, paste with Ctrl+V or Cmd⌘+V.
sdf
Updated Flip Character Functionality
The Flip feature has been updated to take clothing and hairstyle into account. Previously, if you selected “Flip” on a character, the clothing and hairstyle would flip as well. Now, when you select “Flip Action” the characters will move their arms and actions to the other side, but outfits will stay the same.
You can still invert the character image as you did before, but we’re calling this “Mirror” from now on.
100+ New Sound Effects
The right sound effect at the right time can make all the difference when creating your video. We’ve just added more than 100 new effects! The full list of new sound effects can be found here.
Retiring the Legacy Video Maker and Pause Users Feature
On December 16, 2019, Vyond will retire the Legacy Video Maker (The old video maker). The first phase of this process took place on August 14, 2019, when all user accounts defaulted to Vyond Studio. All legacy videos will continue to be available for migration to Vyond Studio for the foreseeable future after the Legacy Video Maker is retired, though we recommend that if you use the Legacy Video Maker extensively, you should download all of your videos from legacy prior to December 16th to ensure that you have the original MP4 file.
As part of the Legacy Video Maker’s retirement, we will also be retiring the Pause Users feature, as it is incompatible with Vyond Studio. In the short-term, the Pause Users feature will be replaced by two new features: the ability to deactivate users and the ability to transfer content from one user’s account to another. This will ensure that any currently paused user’s data is not lost.
Retiring the Legacy Video Maker and Pause Users feature
In the longer-term, we will be releasing an all-new Admin Panel in 2020, which will have many new features that streamline user management:
User Groups – Assign users on your team to groups and give them the ability to share videos and assets within those groups.
Additional User Roles – New user roles will allow admins to more effectively classify your team into functional user roles, allow or restrict the use of individual features, and more.
Activity Logs – Administrators will be able to track activity across their team, including things like last login, last shared video, last created video, and more.
For more information about the retirement of the Legacy Video Maker, see this blog post. For more information about the retirement of the Pause Users feature and a list of frequently asked questions, see this help center article.
Featured Help Center Articles
Can I Copy and Paste Assets?
Copying and pasting assets can greatly increase your productivity while creating videos. Take a look at this article for information about copying and pasting assets, and even copying and pasting between projects.
How Do I Flip An Asset?
Vyond Studio’s new flip and mirror functionality allows much greater flexibility when working with characters and character actions. This article explains more about the ins and outs of the process.
#### October product update: New clear scene functionality, higher quality MP4 uploads, and more
New Clear Scene functionality
You can now clear all the contents in a scene while retaining scene duration with the new clear function. There are three ways to clear objects from a scene.
Option 1: Top bar
Option 2: Keyboard shortcuts: Ctrl or command + delete
Option 3: Right click on the stage to trigger the context menu and select the clear option.
Higher Quality 1080p Videos
We have upgraded the bitrate for the 1080p resolution videos from 1.5Mbps to 8Mbps, increasing the quality of exported 1080p videos. This quality enhancement will be most noticeable when your video uses uploaded 1080p MP4s.
What is Bitrate?
Bitrate determines the size and quality of video and audio files. The higher the bitrate, the better the quality.
Change Head Facing Direction in All Styles
You can now change the direction that heads face in all styles — Business Friendly, Whiteboard, and Contemporary — in the Expressions panel. With this change, it’s even easier to represent different points of view and make your characters even more lifelike.
Retiring the Legacy Video Maker and Pause Users Feature
In December of 2019, Vyond will retire the Legacy Video Maker. The first phase of this process took place on August 14, 2019, when all user accounts defaulted to Vyond Studio. All legacy videos will continue to be available for migration to Vyond Studio after the Legacy Video Maker is retired.
As part of the Legacy Video Maker’s retirement, we will also be retiring the Pause Users feature, as it is incompatible with Vyond Studio. In the short-term, the Pause Users feature will be replaced by two new features: the ability to deactivate users and the ability to transfer content from one user’s account to another. This will ensure that any currently paused user’s data is not lost.
In the longer-term, we will be releasing an all-new Admin Panel in 2020, which will have many new features that streamline user management:
User Groups – Assign users on your team to groups and give them the ability to share videos and assets within those groups.
Additional User Roles – New user roles will allow admins to more effectively classify your team into functional user roles, allow or restrict the use of individual features, and more.
Activity Logs – Administrators will be able to track activity across their team, including things like last login, last shared video, last created video, and more.
For more information about the retirement of the Legacy Video Maker, see this blog post. For more information about the retirement of the Pause Users feature and a list of frequently asked questions, see this help center article.
Featured Help Center Articles
How do I replace a character action or facial expression?
Characters have hundreds of actions and expressions to allow you to create exactly the emotional impact your scene needs. Take a look at this article to learn more about picking exactly the right one.
Can I add a transparent background to my Vyond video?
While you can’t natively add a transparent background to your videos in Vyond Studio, take a look at this help center article for a useful workaround.
Managing Professional user access
With the retirement of the Legacy Video Maker and its admin panel, there are several changes on the horizon that will impact the way subscribers to our Professional plan are managed by team administrators. Take a look at this article for answers to all of your questions.
#### On-Demand Marketing Webinar: Strengthening Your Content Marketing with Animated Video
Karla Franco from Wistia and Amanda Morgan from Vyond walk you through how to convert content marketing video views into leads (and ultimately customers) with animated video. This webinar references GoAnimate and GoAnimate’s Legacy video maker. Please note that GoAnimate is now Vyond, and our video maker is now the new Vyond Studio. Learn more about the changes.
Watch to learn why animated video performs better in certain content marketing contexts, how to implement animated video into your content strategy, and tips for generating leads with animated video using Wistia’s video hosting platform.
About Vyond
GoAnimate is now Vyond. Learn more about the changes.
Vyond allows people of all skill levels in all industries and job roles to create dynamic and powerful media. With features that go beyond moving text and images, you can build character-driven stories or compelling data visualizations that engage audiences and deliver results.
Start making your own videos today. Sign up for a free trial and attend our weekly tour of the Vyond Studio.
#### On-demand Webinar: 4 Vyond Updates to Enhance your Videos
While you keep getting better at creating videos, so does Vyond Studio. At Vyond, we’re always working hard to bring new improvements, features, and enhancements to help video makers like you.
Join resident Vyond expert Chet Parmar on June 24th for this free webinar Vyond Studio’s latest updates. Chet will show you how to add new tricks to your video making toolbox, like creating color gradients, evenly spacing props, and custom motion paths.
#### On-Demand Webinar: Enhance Your Microlearning with Video
Designing instructional videos your learners will watch and retain doesn’t need to be time consuming to create or consume.
We’re bringing together two leading training professionals to share their expertise live. Hear Karl Kapp and Keith Anderson talk about microlearning video concepts that make it easy for you to quickly generate small bursts of effective learning. Then, learn how you can apply those concepts to your animated training videos.
Watch Now, On-Demand
This webinar references GoAnimate and the GoAnimate Legacy video maker. Please note that GoAnimate is now Vyond, and our video maker is now the new Vyond Studio. Learn more about the changes.
Karl Kapp, Director of the Institute for Interactive Technologies and professor at Bloomsburg University will discuss:
How to use animation to explain concepts in ways people will quickly grasp
Effective microlearning that moves learning forward
Subscription based learning vs. event based learning
Keith Anderson, Senior Learning Director at Sears Home Services and experienced animated microlearning video creator, will delve into:
Blended learning with video
Training designers to flip their thinking for animated microlearning
Keeping it simple and honing in on your message; clearing out the noise
Conditioned learning techniques you can apply to video
Erin Champion from Vyond will also show you how to recreate the examples shown by Karl and Keith on the webinar.
About Vyond
GoAnimate is now Vyond. Learn more about the changes.
Vyond allows people of all skill levels in all industries and job roles to create dynamic and powerful media. With features that go beyond moving text and images, you can build character-driven stories or compelling data visualizations that engage audiences and deliver results.
Start making your own videos today. Sign up for a free trial and attend our weekly tour of the Vyond Studio.
#### On-Demand Webinar: Mixing Media in Vyond (GoAnimate Legacy Video Maker)
Watch to learn how to combine live action video with Vyond animation. Our Video Producer will teach you how to take a new approach to making videos in Vyond. He’ll show you his workflow for importing and resizing videos, combining live action video with animation, and exporting assets into other video editing platforms (like Premiere) for next level video making.
Mark references GoAnimate and uses the legacy video maker throughout this webinar, but please note that GoAnimate is now Vyond, and our video maker is now the Vyond Studio (beta). Learn more about the changes. Also note that you can not currently import MP4s into the Vyond Studio. This is coming soon.
About Vyond
GoAnimate is now Vyond. Learn more about the changes.
Vyond allows people of all skill levels in all industries and job roles to create dynamic and powerful media. With features that go beyond moving text and images, you can build character-driven stories or compelling data visualizations that engage audiences and deliver results.
Start making your own videos today. Sign up for a free trial and attend our weekly tour of the Vyond Studio.
#### On-Demand Webinar: Telling Compelling Stories with Video
In a learning environment, great storytelling can be the difference between a bored audience and an engaged one. PowerPoint slides and spreadsheets do little to motivate or drive retention. We continue to use these methods, but there is a better way. In this on-demand webinar, Vyond’s head of marketing, Stacy Adams, will explore the basics of storytelling through video. She’ll show you how the best marketing communications strategies can be utilized in a learning environment to persuade, engage, and inspire.
About the Speaker
Stacy is the head of marketing for Vyond (formerly GoAnimate), the quickest, simplest, and most cost-effective solution for producing professional videos. She has over 20 years of B2B and B2C marketing expertise for a variety of technology companies. Stacy is passionate about emerging technologies and how marketing must respond to an ever-changing array of devices and channels. In the last ten years of her career, she’s been focused on new media, content marketing, and how multi-channel strategies can support, enhance and lead initiatives for forward-thinking organizations like Vyond, Shopkick, and Mblox.
Presentation Slides
About Vyond
Vyond allows people of all skill levels in all industries and job roles to create dynamic and powerful media. With features that go beyond moving text and images, you can build character-driven stories or compelling data visualizations that engage audiences and deliver results.
Start making your own videos today. Sign up for a free trial and attend our weekly tour of the Vyond Studio.
#### One Year Later: Is The New Normal What We Expected?
It’s been one year since the pandemic began. When millions of employees packed up their laptops last March, nobody knew what lay ahead. Twelve months later, it’s still uncertain, but we do know that this year has served as a real shock to what we’re used to at work.
To find out more and determine what issues were and are continuing to permeate in our new workplace reality, we surveyed 1,000 full-time employees at large companies (500+ employees) in February 2021 with True Global Intelligence. What we discovered is that one year in, there’s a new set of workplace behaviors and attitudes that exist below the surface of our everyday environment and interactions. And while some things have gotten better – like experiencing fewer technical issues while working remotely – there is a new set of challenges facing the workplace too.
For leaders, that means an urgency to lean on a new toolbox for remote communication; otherwise, they risk falling behind in addressing the changes in our new workplace.
Scroll down to see research findings and how they compare to results from the pre-pandemic era (February 2020), as well as when we surveyed them months into the pandemic (July 2020), and click here for prior #VyondTheSurface survey data.
ACCESS THE FULL REPORT WITH ALL FINDINGS
The New Rules of the Workplace
We’ve heard of the “death of the 9 to 5”, but the pandemic has impacted more than just how employees structure their days. There is a whole new set of cultural norms that have developed in the past year; what was considered inappropriate at work a year ago has changed almost completely.
Once Taboo Subjects like Politics and Religion Have Suddenly Become OK at Work
In the last year, perceptions have changed around talking about politics and religion at work, with the number of employees who consider discussing politics a workplace violation decreasing by 23% points in 12 months (from 43% in February 2020 to 20% in February 2021) and religion decreasing by 17% points (from 43% in February 2020 to 26% in February 2021). As the pandemic has forced many workers to be physically distant from colleagues but closer with smaller circles of family and friends, conversation topics once considered only permissible among close connections are now more broadly acceptable. Further, employees are now expecting their organizations to take a stance on social issues and want to feel the freedom to express their own beliefs openly at work.
Taking a 5-Minute Break to Check Personal Social Media is No Longer Seen as Slacking
While 46% said they consider using personal social media while working a violation last year, now only 23% consider it so. In general, remote work has required employees to self-manage in many ways and flex work to complement their lives at home. And without colleagues around to be mindful of, employees feel more freedom to work in a way that works for them.
The Rise of Remote Work is Making Workplace Romances More Acceptable
While having romantic relationships with people in the office was seen as a workplace violation by 52% of respondents in February 2020, now only 20% consider it to be one. Remote work’s tendency to break down the barrier between work and personal lives is likely impacting this shift.
Employee Experience is Better, but Divided
Overall, employees have found their groove with snags like technical issues (35% said it was a top frustration in July 2020 and now that’s down to 29%), but when it comes to things like work-life balance and how employees are adapting to workplace changes, things look different based on employee’s work status, age and gender. And as different identities experience work differently, workplace communications will need to adapt to becoming more personal and engaging as the one-size-fits-all approach to corporate communications risks alienating some groups of employees.
Working From Home Isn’t As Balanced As It Seemed, But Has Its Benefits
Non-Remote workers report they have a healthier work-life balance compared to Remote Workers (90% vs. 83%), and things have improved for them since the summer. Non-remote employees reported a 12% increase in their work-life balance from July 2020, suggesting a physical separation between work and home made a significant difference for this group.
Still, remote work does boast benefits for employees like money and time savings by not commuting (56%), followed by improved overall comfort while working (50%) and increased time at home with family or roommates (49%).
Away From the Office, Younger Workers Thrive While Boomers Struggle to Find Balance
Younger generations are more likely to say their work-life balance has improved during the past year (38% of Gen Z, 47% of Millennials and 38% of Gen X), compared to just 30% of Boomers. As younger generations have a leg up on technological skills and using virtual tools to communicate, they’ve adapted better to work during the pandemic.
The Workplace is Divided on Mental Health
Half of all employees and 52% of women indicated training on mental health would be valuable, whereas only 37% of Boomers and 37% of men feel that way.
While 56% of all employees feel their company is committed to its employee’s mental health needs, 40% of Millennials do not think their company takes employee mental health seriously enough.
As changing conditions continue to disproportionately impact employees across age and gender, organizations need to listen to the most vulnerable workers to better understand training and mental health needs.
Without Personal Connections, Remote Workers Could Fall Behind
Three-fourths of employees say there are office politics in the workplace, and four-in-five employees report office politics have remained the same or increased over the past year. Among the most common types of office politics employees notice is preferential treatment for colleagues who have more personal relationships with superiors (35%). As more companies adopt a hybrid approach to on-site and remote work, they need to make sure everybody has equitable opportunities to make personal connections at work.
Company Communications Are Perceived Differently Across Gender
We asked all surveyed for their gender identity and noticed stark divides in employee experience, particularly between men and women.
While 73% of men say their company is transparent about their return to work policy, only 63% of women agree. Similarly, 61% of men say leadership at their company is doing well communicating with employees, while only 55% of female employees agree. On mental health; 60% of men say they feel their company is committed to employees’ mental health needs, while only 52% of women agree.
49% of men say they have a completely healthy work-life balance, compared to 39% of women. All employees experienced a dip in their work-life balance this past summer. Women continue to suffer disproportionately in this area.
Navigating a New Toolbox of Communication Channels
As work continues to happen virtually and we rely more heavily on email and collaboration channels, new questions arise around how and when to use which medium to communicate.
When Sending and Receiving Messages, Channels Matter to Employees
44% say it’s frustrating when colleagues share messages on the wrong channels (using collaboration platforms instead of an email, etc.), with Millennials feeling the most frustrated (50%). Older generations struggle more with determining which communication tools are appropriate for a given situation. Boomers are less likely than younger generations to opt for email over real-time conversations (35% vs. 46% overall).
Creating explicit guidance for employees on which channels to use is a great way to avoid the common tensions and confusion of our increasingly-fragmented workplaces. Such internal communications policies should still be flexible enough to accommodate organic norms that emerge from team members. Training videos are a great way to start the conversation about communication channels get everyone on the same page.
This animated video (created with Vyond Studio) is a great example of how leaders can explicitly delineate channels to improve team communications. If you’re already a Vyond user, you can use this video as a template and customize it for your organization.
USE THIS VIDEO AS A TEMPLATE
Email Is No Longer King As Messages Can Lead to Mix-ups
More than half (54%) of employees feel emails can lead to miscommunication and unintentional offense (54%). Still, email reigns as the communications leader in workplaces, so it’s critical to arm employees with the skills they need to use it effectively.
Boomers Still Like an Old Fashioned Brainstorm, While Younger Generations Bring Them Virtual
Boomers are more likely to say it’s hard to spark a conversation or brainstorm in text-based messages (51% of boomers, compared to 48% of Gen X, 46% of Millennials and 37% of Gen Z). Organizations and team leaders should provide guidance on the preferred method for sparking ideas to help bridge the gap.
How do we make it easier for employees to avoid the frustrations of communication channels? Addressing it directly in an easy-to-understand and visually appealing format is key.
How Leaders Must Pivot their Communications
As the workforce grapples with everything that’s different – changing workplace norms, varying levels of adaptation to remote work and the reliance on virtual communication tools – it’s critical for leaders to communicate differently and adapt to these employee preferences:
Accommodate Employee Preferences by Pressing Record
56% of employees say they prefer to watch a company announcement or communication on their own time instead of attending a live session.
As Employees Are Inundated with Emails and Chats, It’s Better to Lean on Video for Corporate Announcements
52% of employees prefer to watch/listen to a company announcement or communication instead of reading an email or blog post.
A visual format is even more preferred when it comes to CEO communications. 57% of employees say video messages from the company’s CEO are more engaging than text-based messages.
Remote workers have a stronger preference for video than non-remote workers. Remote workers find video messages from their company CEO significantly more engaging than text-based messages (65% vs 49%).
The New Normal Needs New Communication Tactics
Beyond making employee communications easier to consume, video allows companies to address the complexities of today’s workplace with nuance. That includes everything from communicating around return to work to announcing pandemic-related benefits with the understanding that it impacts everyone differently. Plus, video isn’t only reserved for leadership communication – it can also help enhance communication between departments (by helping spark or brainstorm or livening up a meeting invite with smaller animations or even used to introduce new employees), as well as driving engagement with employee training. Here are some of our favorite examples:
Vyond customers can use these videos (and more!) as templates to create their own animated videos for internal communications. If you’re already a Vyond customer, you can explore all our templates in the Vyond Video Template Library.
BROWSE VYOND VIDEO TEMPLATE LIBRARY
#### Online Presentation Tools for Salespeople
Remember the days when you anxiously waited for the mail to come so you could rip open the latest direct mail advertising materials and start shopping? Of course you don’t. That’s because, as e-commerce in the United States has grown, advertisers and sales professionals have increasingly turned to online presentation tools to capitalize on what market research company eMarketer predicts will be a $349 billion industry in 2015.
At first glance, it may seem like the more online presentation tools available to sales professionals and consumers the better. Salespeople are able to experiment with different ways of interacting with the consumer and in turn, the consumer has a plethora of different user-friendly methods for finding the products and information they are looking for. However, the market can be a double-edged sword because it’s flooded with new tools and not all of them are going to deliver the same experience. Deciding between using a PowerPoint presentation or a different kind of slideshow to entice potential customers may seem trivial, but with so many options available to that customer, it may also make the difference between converting interested lead into a satisfied customer.
According to a 2014 online shopping survey from PricewaterhouseCoopers, more than 80 percent of the 7,000 online consumers surveyed from across the globe conduct online research before they buy electronics, computers, books, music, and movies. Additionally, 88 percent of respondents in the United States said that they research a product online before buying and 73 percent reported that they research online when buying clothing, footwear, toys, and health and beauty products. The numbers make a pretty clear statement: not everyone actually purchases the products online, but nearly everyone shops online before making a purchase decision.
This is why online presentation tools are so important and why sales professionals need to have a nuanced understanding of the benefits and drawbacks of each type of tool.
Slideshows: The lowest common denominator of presentation tools, slideshows are great because they’re easy to put together, much more visually appealing than text on a page, and easy for consumers to understand. In some sense, the traits that make slideshows great are also what holds them back. In terms of interactivity and user experience, they have been lapped by newer tools. Software like Haiku Deck, SlideRocket, and SlideShare are part of a new and improved cache of slideshow tools worth looking into.
Infographics: The infographic is a tried and true way for sales professionals to turn dry and complicated data into an easy-to-read visual presentation. They aren’t particularly hard to create and they are easy to post. The problem is that infographics aren’t exactly a market inefficiency, which means the Internet is flooded with infographics – some good, and some awful.
Prezi: Everyone’s favorite online presentation tool is easy to think of as a sort of PowerPoint on steroids. It allows its users to create non-linear presentations that come with all of the animated and motion bells and whistles available as well. It’s all online and it is free for anyone to use (although they have premium plans). Its comprehensive offering can cause some sales folks to get too fancy, but its diverse set of tools make it nearly everyone’s new favorite tool.
Animated Video: The newest player on the scene is animated video which is steadily rising in popularity amongst sales professionals. But, like all other tools, it has its pros and cons. Videos can be interactive, they can be more user-friendly than slide shows and they allow the sales professional to pitch the customer more easily. But if made incorrectly, they can be hectic to follow, boring and uninteresting. Companies like Knovio and Moovly are some of the most popular options currently on the market.
Learn more about business presentation templates here.
About GoAnimate
GoAnimate is the world’s #1 animation video creation platform. We were the first to enable businesses on six continents to produce videos quickly and easily, and we have never stopped innovating. Our platform is the most powerful of its kind, with many unique features – yet everything is controlled through the same, super-simple, drag & drop interface. We offer tens of thousands of pre-animated characters, backgrounds, props, and actions representing hundreds of industries and occupations – with more added all the time. Our templates will get you to a quick win in a matter of minutes. You can stop there, or customize further until your video is truly one of a kind. Adding voice-over narration or lip-synced dialogue is a snap! Music and sound effects from premium libraries are included at no extra cost. When finished, simply download your video as an MP4 or publish directly to YouTube or any of our video hosting partners.
#### PDT Global speeds up learning production and saves $20K per video with Vyond
Summary of success
Saved up to $20,000 per video by using Vyond instead of making live-action videos with production crews.
Created videos more quickly since Vyond allows PDT Global to create storyboards and videos from the same interface.
Increased engagement from clients in training materials that include Vyond animations.
Take a look at one of PDT Global‘s videos on Imposter Phenomenon:
Background
Founded in 1998, PDT Global is an award-winning diversity and inclusion training consultancy that delivers training solutions to clients around the world. The company offers both in-person and virtual learning services, and its headquarters are located in Ware, Hertfordshire in the UK.
The challenge
In 2017, PDT wasn’t using animation as a learning solution for clients. Instead, the consultancy was creating live-action videos as workplace training materials. Their clients used these videos to teach their employees how to interact with each other in an inclusive way and embrace inclusion in the workplace.
The live-action videos, however, were challenging for PDT to produce. When the company translated videos for their global clients — covering 27 languages — it was difficult to dub actors in a way that felt seamless and authentic. Beyond dubbing, the cost of creating live-action video was high. It cost roughly $20,000 to hire a production crew and create a twelve-minute video.
Nic Girvan, PDT’s Global head of digital, knew that there was a more engaging and affordable learning solution — animation. She understood the benefits of animation after using Vyond in her previous work as an organisational development consultant at the National Health Service.
Experimenting with animation
“Using animation is much easier than getting a full crew each time you want to produce a video,” said Nic. “It’s more affordable, and lip-syncing animated characters looks more realistic than dubbing in live-action videos.”
With this knowledge, Nic felt confident that offering animated videos to clients at PDT as a part of their training materials would save the company money and time and create a more seamless viewing experience. She explained her idea to her directors at PDT, and they allowed her to test animation in their market. Using Vyond, she created animated videos for a small group of PDT’s clients.
“We have a few really good clients that we work incredibly closely with, so we sent them animations in different formats and styles to see how they would respond,” said Nic.
Contact partners@vyond.com for information about selling Vyond video services.
Creative implementation
The clients who received test animations responded positively with feedback about how great the videos were.
“They like the fact that animation has more of an informal style, and it gets that information across in a really friendly way,” said Nic. “One client has chosen animation over any other approach because they can address serious topics, like inclusion, without sounding too preachy.”
With this positive reception, PDT was ready to expand its use of Vyond and create more animation for clients. In order to create more animated videos, Nic needed the help of her team members. She taught her colleagues how to use Vyond by giving a brief lesson on setting up scenes and then directing them to Vyond’s tutorials and webinars online.
“To be honest, it made sense quite quickly,” said Nic. “One of my team members used Vyond for the first time last week and was able to make a video within two hours. It’s a really simple system to use.”
Across their videos, PDT values how Vyond’s different styles allow them to achieve the appropriate tone for their workplace training content.
“In a video about accommodation and making reasonable adjustments for employees, the contemporary style worked really well” said Nic. “The colourful yet relevant design made the content easy to follow and provided a challenging topic in a way that feels safe and inclusive.”
PDT produces all types of animated videos with Vyond for their clients. Specifically, PDT likes to create behavioral “nudge” videos, which are 30 to 60 second clips that appear on users’ screens within the workplace during times when they are most relevant to the user’s activity.
“A nudge, for example, might remind a user how to be more inclusive when completing a workplace task such as a performance review,” said Nic. “They’re a branch of microlearning videos.” Here’s an example of a nudge on talent acquisition:
The consultancy also uses Vyond to create augmented reality learning courses where students in a classroom can scan posters to watch videos.
“Participants download the learning app Zappar, they scan the posters in the classroom, and that pulls up Vyond videos we’ve created on the app,” said Nic. “Students love it–they can start learning right away, even if the class hasn’t started.”
The results
According to Nic, switching to Vyond saved PDT time and money and increased global engagement for worldwide organisations.
Before using Vyond, creating a twelve-minute live video with a full crew cost PDT $20,000. With Vyond, the cost is minimal.
“To create Vyond animations in English, we manage the development and voiceover work internally, so the costs are only tied to existing salaries,” said Nic.
Beyond costs, Vyond saves PDT time. It’s much quicker to produce a Vyond animation than a live-action video. Here’s an example about non-binary identity:
“The animation process tends to be fast because the storyboarding process also happens in Vyond,” said Nic. “Not to mention, you don’t need to spend time on live production logistics—waiting on a venue’s availability, booking background actors—and it’s much faster to dub with animation.”
The PDT team is excited to see how using Vyond in their training materials has improved clients’ learning results and helped the company save both time and money.
“Our team loves Vyond,” said Nic. “Our clients are really happy with the animations we’ve created and compared to most animation software, it’s just so easy for anyone to pick up.”
Create your own videos
Interested in creating Vyond videos to sell? Contact partners@vyond.com for information.
Visit PDT Global to learn more about their services.
#### Product Post: Grids, Folder Enhancements, and More
Video and folder layout enhancements in list view
You may notice a new layout in Your Videos! We made some big updates to list view thanks to your feedback. Now you can organize your video library more efficiently with this latest update that sees large thumbnails for recent videos, a new navigation path, as well as bulk actions on folders and videos.
Grid and safe area guidelines
You now have the option to use line guides in Vyond Studio, making it even easier to compose balanced scenes in your next video. You can find the Guides menu on the right side of the stage just above the timeline, with the option to show ‘Grid’ and ‘Safe Area’ lines.
Read more
Braids, black hairstyles, and more character creator items
We’ve added 28 new hair items that include afro-textured and two-tone hair options, along with brows, mouths and more in Business Friendly style. Head to the Character Creator to try out a fresh new look.
Here is a list of our newly added content in Business Friendly:
Hairstyles: 28 hair items for Adults and Kids
Mouths: 4 mouth items for Adults and Kids
Ears: 3 pairs of earrings for Adults and Kids
Eyebrows: 7 eyebrow shapes for Adults and Kids
Headband: 1 headband accessory for Adults and Kids
Mustaches: 4 face accessory items for male Adults
This Month’s Featured Help Center Articles
How do I align assets in a scene?
Our new Alignment tool makes it easy to align assets in your videos. Take a look at this help center article for a step-by-step walkthrough of the alignment tool.
How do I use folders to organize my videos?
If you make a lot of videos, you might find that it becomes difficult to find the one you want. The solution? Folders! This help center article will teach you how to use folders to keep your videos organized and easy to find.
Grid Lines and Safe Areas
This helpful article will teach you more about the new grid lines and safe areas feature.
#### Product Update – Curved Motion Paths
Curved Motion Paths
We’re excited to introduce new, improved motion paths!
In addition to simple curves, we’ve added:
The ability to customize motion paths to angled, smooth, or sharp curves
The ability to add multiple points, easing, and rotation to the path
The ability to choose a motion path from a preset library of options
With this new feature, you’ll be able to choose motion paths from pre-existing templates, or create your own!
Motion Path Templates
While playing with regular motion paths and curved motion paths, take a look at these templates that show off some of the more complex things you can do. Import them into your account by clicking the link below each video, and use them to get a head start on making motion paths!
Import this video to your Vyond account
Import this video to your Vyond account
Import this video to your Vyond account
Featured Help Center Article
Using Motion Paths
The new motion path feature has many options that can be used to make your ideas into videos. Take a look at the article below for more information on how to use the new motion paths.
#### Product Update – New Assets, Enhanced Security, and More
Dragons, Knights, and Fantasy Content
Use Vyond to animate your next adventure. With this update, we’ve added all the props, backgrounds, and characters you’ll need to storm the castle, slay a dragon, or rescue the princess.
Here is a list of our newly added content:
Fantasy props (Business Friendly): 78 props including fire-breathing dragons, swords, and a horse-drawn carriage
Fantasy props (Contemporary): 17 props including an opening and closing storybook
Fantasy backgrounds (Business Friendly): 5 backgrounds including a castle, village, and spiky forest
Storytelling templates (Business Friendly): 2 templates to use for the beginning and end of a story
Character Creator outfits (Business Friendly): 6 upper items, 5 lower items, 1 face decoration, and 2 hair items (all for Adults)
Character Creator outfits (Contemporary): 3 upper items, 2 lower items, and 1 headgear item (all for Adults)
Knights and royalty (Business Friendly): 17 stock characters including medieval-style outfits
Knight and royalty (Contemporary): 3 stock characters
Sword actions and more (Business Friendly): 29 actions for Adults
Sword actions (Contemporary): 12 actions for Adults
Enhanced Security for Expired Accounts
Security is a top priority at Vyond, so we’ve added an extra privacy measure to further protect your work. Now, you’ll find that if your account expires, before you can access it, you’ll need to confirm your identity by clicking on an access link sent to the email address registered to your account.
Learn more about Vyond’s security features in this article >
List View
We’re always thinking of ways to enhance your productivity in Vyond and we’re excited to share what we’ve been working on: List view and bulk actions!
Try List View
Click on the button in the banner to try these features and give us your feedback. You can see more videos at a glance with list view. It’s now easier to sort and organize them, too.
Bulk Actions
Get more done at once with bulk actions. Now you can select multiple videos and right-click to download, copy, delete, or move them all to another folder.
Share Your Feedback:
We’re still working on list view and would love to hear your suggestions on improving further. Please fill in a one-minute survey and help us continue to provide high-quality Vyond Studio experiences.
#### Product Update: Volume Control and Facial Feature Enhancements.
Adjust Facial Feature Colors in the Contemporary Style
People come in all different colors and shapes, and we constantly strive to better allow each individual to be able to represent themselves within Vyond Studio. With this in mind, we’ve updated facial features in the Contemporary Style. You can now change the colors of noses, mouths, and other facial feature outlines in the Contemporary Character Creator to better highlight features against any color skin tone.
Enhanced Volume Control Settings
We’ve made a few enhancements to make it faster and easier to adjust volume in the audio settings panel.
1) Keyboard shortcut
When an audio clip is selected, you can open the audio settings panel with a keyboard shortcut:
Windows: Ctrl + Shift + A
Mac: Cmd + Shift + A
2) Adjust Volume From Dropdown List
Just like selecting font sizes, you can now choose your volume level from a list. You can still type in a number into the field if you want to adjust to a custom volume.
3) Persistent Volume Control Panel
As well as making it easier to open up the audio settings panel, now it’s more convenient to adjust multiple tracks. When you click between audio tracks, the panel will stay open. The panel remains open even if you split a track.
New Content – Actions and Props
We’re always adding new content to Vyond Studio. This month, we’ve added many new daily life props and actions, including:
Scratching actions and insects (Business Friendly): 10 props, 3 actions for Adults and Kids
Scratching actions and insects (Contemporary): 4 props, 3 actions
Throwing garbage (Business Friendly): 1 prop, 2 actions for Adults and Kids
Throwing garbage (Contemporary): 1 prop, 2 actions
Lanyard (Business Friendly): 2 props
Lanyard (Contemporary): 1 prop
Sanitation (Business Friendly): 4 stock characters, 1 lower outfit item and 1 footwear item for the Character Creator
Animated eyes (Contemporary): 10 props
These props and actions can be found in this video template
Carrying a bag (Business Friendly): 8 actions, 1 prop
Carrying a bag (Contemporary): 8 actions, 2 props
Long cane (Business Friendly): 12 actions, 1 prop
Long cane (Contemporary): 6 actions, 1 prop
Brown cane (Business Friendly): 1 action
Brown cane (Contemporary): 1 action
Hospitality (Business Friendly): 4 actions including wiping table, placing food
Hospitality (Contemporary): 3 actions
Cleaning hands (Business Friendly): 2 actions, 25 props
Cleaning hands (Contemporary): 2 actions
These props and actions can be found in this video template
Featured Help Center Articles
How do I add a face mask to my character?
With COVID being at the top of everyone’s mind, many people have been wondering how to add a face mask to their character. Take a look at this article for step-by-step instructions.
How do I replace a character action or facial expression?
Characters have hundreds of actions and expressions to allow you to create exactly the emotional impact your scene needs. Take a look at this article to learn more about picking exactly the right one.
Can I add a transparent background to my Vyond video?
While you can’t natively add a transparent background to your videos in Vyond Studio, take a look at this help center article for a useful workaround.
#### Product Updates: Custom Aspect Ratios, Save Scenes to a new video, and more
Custom Aspect Ratios
Change the aspect ratio on your videos! Next time you’re in Vyond Studio, head to the Video Settings menu. You can change the aspect ratio from the usual Horizontal (16:9) to become Square (1:1), Vertical (9:16), or even a Custom size.
Video Settings
Not sure where the Video Settings are? Go into Vyond Studio and look above the stage. You’ll find a cog icon next to the ‘Preview’ button.
Place assets inside the camera frame
When you save the settings you’ll see the camera frame adjust to your selected aspect ratio, giving you the freedom to move the camera position across the stage and only show the assets in the frame. When it’s time to download, the generated video will match the aspect ratio selected in the Video Settings.
Learn more about aspect ratio from this article >
*Please note, this feature is available to Premium, Professional and Enterprise users.
Japan Content Pack
From sushi to Mount Fuji and plenty in between, the Japan content pack has arrived! This year we’ve seen a great wave of requests for content relating to Japan. So we’ve created this bumper collection of backgrounds, props, clothing items, and actions. The team behind the creation of these new items are all dreaming of visiting Japan now, and their level of ramen consumption has drastically increased!
Here is a list of our newly added Japan content in Business Friendly:
Props: 174 props, including a bullet train, traffic lights, household items
Backgrounds: 9 backgrounds, including shops and travel locations
Character Creator items: 15 upper items, 8 lower items, 6 feet items, 8 face decoration items, including yukata and uniforms
Actions for Adults: 37 new actions for adults, including using a fan and giving a business card with both hands
In the showreel templates below you’ll also find:
15 template scenes for Japanese locations
96 characters wearing outfits from this release
Templates and characters. Use this video template >
Props, actions and backgrounds. Use this video template >
Spanish, Japanese, and more languages in the Help Center
No matter how you say it, our latest update is worth celebrating.
The Vyond Help Center now supports nine new languages, allowing more makers to get support in their preferred language. Toggle between English, or any of these recent additions:
Arabic
Simplified Chinese
Traditional Chinese
French
German
Italian
Japanese
Brazilian Portuguese
Spanish
To find tutorials in other languages, visit the Help Center >
Save Scenes as a New Video
Have you ever wanted to turn parts of your video into a GIF? Or only share certain sections of your video project? Now, you can make quick copies of your selected scenes with the following steps:
Holding down the Ctrl / Cmd key, select the scenes and any audio you want to save
Right-click to open the menu
Select “Save as New Video”
A success snackbar will give you the option to open a new tab to view your scenes
Your new video will be saved in the same location as your original file.
Search in Japanese
You can now search for items in the library with Japanese keywords! We are experimenting to cover the majority of props and actions, but of course, all the latest Japan-themed assets are already searchable in Japanese.
New Audio Tracks
The list of background music audio has been updated! We’ve retired 58 tracks and added 79 new ones.
Retired audio
Any background music that was licensed by PremiumBeat has been retired. These will no longer be listed in the audio library. You will notice in old videos where the track has been used, the track name in the timeline will have “(Retired)” next to it.
New audio
Here is a list of our newly added background music:
Weekend Away
Undeniable Joy
Steady Climber
My Stories
Newphoria
Bossa Lounge
Seeds Of Solution
Fearfully, Wonderfully
Lazy Stroll
Thriving
Everlasting Energy
Time of Triumph
Make It Yours
Tricky Tracks
Deck The Halls
Achieving Your Goals
Creating Greatness
Sunshine Summer
Funky Meter Maid
Fun Fun Fun
Fields of Green
On The Double Trouble
Cosmonautics Memorial
Formally Yours
Loving Embrace
Chasing The Spotlight
Happy Bells
Smile And Jump
Bright Sparks
Morning Reflexion
Fresh And Simple
Mechanical Faces
Open Your Eyes
Cheerful Blossom
When Good Weather Goes Bad
Silent Night
A New Path
Happy Faces
Bright Days Ahead
Come On And Go
A More Perfect Day
Hit Me One Time!
Sunset in the Garden
Making Breakfast
Sass And Splendour
Holiday in the Sun
American Cafe
Listening Learning
One Foot After Another
Date Night
Merry Christmas Wishes
Mosaic
Back To You
Such a Sunny Day
Fun With Family
Talent On Parade
Clap And Stomp
Goofy Guitar
Bright Mornings
Mood One
Happy Cheers Holiday
Figure It Out Together
Modern Sophistication
Mendelssohn – Wedding March
Techno Phonia
Linear Happiness
Typing Pool
Chirpin’ Birdies
CMPLKTD
Epic Companions
Happy To Be Me
Secret Love
Countdown To Doom
Trumpet Voluntary
Zombie Planet
So Sad
March Of The Little People
Everyone Is Here
Panorama
Learn more about the audio track update from this article >
#### Prompting AI: Getting the Best Results from Vyond Go
In this post, you’ll learn how to craft the perfect prompts to maximize your video production with Vyond Go, Vyond’s AI-powered instant video maker. Get insights on choosing the perfect vibe, format, and layout for your videos.
We often hear from customers that the hardest part about creating videos is getting started. It’s the perfect kind of challenge for generative AI. Enter Vyond Go, the industry’s most versatile AI-powered script and video creator.
In 2024 alone, Vyond users made 487,000 videos in Vyond Go — everything from animated explainer videos to mixed media social media videos to short scenario-based training videos. Whether you’ve had a chance to take it for a test drive yet or not, we wanted to give you a look under the hood and offer some tips on getting the most from this powerful tool.
To create a video with Vyond Go, you’ll either enter a text prompt or upload a script or reference document to describe your topic, then click on options in the interface to choose the vibe, format, layout, and location you’d like for your video. Within seconds, you’ll have a fully editable video and script that you can tweak on the spot with Quick Edit, or else bring into Vyond Studio for deeper customization.
Try Vyond for Free
The benefit of integrated AI
If text-based AI tools are the ignition, prompts are the keys.
If you’ve experimented with standalone AI tools like ChatGPT to create video scripts, you know that your outputs are only as good as the prompts you provide. And great prompts require adding a significant amount of detail.
With Vyond Go (which is powered by ChatGPT), we’ve streamlined and simplified the prompting process by conveniently building a number of important factors directly into our platform.
Let’s take a look, starting from the top.
How to get the most out of Vyond Go
Topic
This is where you’ll give the most detailed, text-based input. The prompt you enter will affect the draft script you get. (Don’t enter details here about the vibe, format, or layout/location you want – you’ll select those later, via the interface.)
There are three ways you can use Vyond Go here.
Enter topic: You can enter a general description of what you’re looking for and rely on AI to deliver a result based on its vast internet training data,
Enter script: If you’ve got specific details you’d like included in your video — say, talking points or steps in a procedure — you can paste those into your prompt, or upload a document with that information for Vyond Go to digest, along with the general description of what you’re looking for, or
Upload content and add prompt: You can also opt to add a File with more detail (.docx, .pdf, .pptx or .txt files under 70MB or 30 pages) or add a public Website/URL that Vyond Go can crawl for context, in addition to the guidance in your prompt
Whichever route you choose, we’ve found that adding at least 50 words for your topic prompt gets the best results.
Keep these tips in mind:
Language: Enter a prompt in your preferred language to get a draft script in English—or choose among 95 languages if you’re a Professional or Enterprise user
Length: You can enter as many as 4,000 characters, or about ~700 words; however, note that longer, “stream of consciousness”-type prompts may yield a lower-quality result.
Structure: Structured prompts are helpful to the AI model and get better outputs. For example: “Create an L&D video based on the below text: [paste in source material for the model to base your video on]”.
Duration: specifying a duration in your prompt ( e.g. “write a 60-second video”) doesn’t work…yet. However, including longer sets of talking points in your prompt will yield longer videos.
Data points: if you have authentic stats and facts about your topic handy, cut and paste them into your prompt. This helps reduce the chance that the AI will pull in an unverified internet stat (or make something up).
Edit and verify: always run a quality check on your script (are these facts accurate? Is this content tailored appropriately to my target audience? etc.)
Vibe
The vibe you select — formal, informative, casual, playful — will affect your video’s background music, as well as the characters’ personalities and way of speaking.
Vyond Go features four vibes, which translate to the following speech and character personality outputs:
Vyond Go Vibe
Speech
Use when
Formal
Professional, as if talking to a coworker
Your video covers a serious topic and you want the talking points delivered in a business-appropriate manner
Informative
Structured, educational, detailed
You’d like to showcase expertise on a given topic and come across as insightful and credible
Casual
Everyday, conversational language
Your topic will fit best with a relaxed, friendly feel
Playful
Colloquial and informal
You want to bring a little humor and imagination to a lighter topic
Keep these tips in mind:
Each vibe has its own list of options for background music — a track will be added for you at random. If you’d prefer a different track, you can always adjust that in Vyond Studio.
If you’re including specific talking points in your topic prompt, make sure they fit with the vibe you select. For example, if your prompt includes details about a major organizational change at a bank, choosing a “Playful” vibe probably won’t give you the results you’re after.
On the other hand, if you enter a very short, generic topic prompt, Vyond Go will rely on the vibe you choose for more guidance on what to include in the script. So with a “Casual” vibe, entering a simple prompt like “reorganization” might give you a script draft that opens with, “Hey, guys! I have some exciting news to share about our company!”—which may or may not suit the tone you’re going for.
Format
At the time of writing, you can choose one of seven formats for your video. All formats can work as either Talking Head (1 character or avatar), Conversation (2 characters), or Narration (Kinetic Text and Mixed Media Design) layouts.
Here’s an overview of each format type, along with suggestions for key things to include in your topic prompt to generate the best results.
Vyond Go Format
Overview
Include this in your topic prompt
Anecdote
Character(s)/avatar shares a personal story, including a main conflict, a resolution, and their lessons learned
Title for the personal story being featured
Details of the personal story to feature / include some level of conflict to keep story engaging
Lessons learned from the experience
Announcement
Character(s)/avatar describes a key event or change
Key event / change: rationale, key facts, impact
Details related to the launch: timing, location, activities, etc.
Debate
Character(s) debates different viewpoints on a topic, with arguments supported by data/facts where appropriate
Main aspect of the topic under debate
Arguments for supported by data & facts when appropriate
Arguments against supported by data & facts when appropriate
Rant
Character(s)/avatar rants about a topic and explains what frustrates them about it
Main frustration about the topic
Key points of frustration to feature in script/include data when appropriate
How-to
Character(s) outlines a process step by step
Goal/task to be broken down into steps
Details of the steps to follow
Overview
Character(s) presents about a given topic, TED talk-style
Topic to share knowledge about
Details why topic is important
Key facts to feature about topic
Examples/data to be featured
Tips
Character(s) offers best practices about a topic
Topic to share knowledge about
List of specific tips to cover with context like do’s, don’ts, and real life examples
Keep these tips in mind:
If you’re including specific talking points in your topic prompt, match them with the type of format you select. For example, if you choose “Announcement” for a product launch, you’ll want to include a date/time, details about what’s launching, where people can go for questions, etc. Or if you choose “How-to,” be sure to include details about what process you’ll explain and the steps you want included.
If you enter a very generic topic prompt like “birds,” then Vyond Go will look to the format you choose for more guidance on what to include in the script. So for “birds,” had you chosen “Anecdote,” it will create a personal story related to birds; if “Debate,” it will come up with arguments for and against something related to birds: like how they’re amazing creatures with incredible abilities.
Layout
At the time of writing, Vyond Go supports three layouts: Talking Head (one character or avatar addressing the audience), Conversation (two characters in dialogue), and Narration (kinetic text and mixed media).
These video types define the number of characters to feature, whether characters should have a conversation between themselves or talk to the audience, or whether the video will feature an AI avatar host and on-screen text.
Each layout offers its own templates, with different combinations of locations and characters, so you don’t need to include those details in your topic prompt.
We’ll continue to add new locations for more variety – just as we do with other templates and assets in Vyond.
Talking Head videos with AI avatars
You’ll now find our AI avatars available in the library of Talking Head templates. For templates with avatars, you’ll use the topic field (prompt box) to enter the exact script you want the avatar to say, then select the avatar template you prefer.
Please note:
Generating a Vyond Go video with an avatar may take 30–60 minutes
Once generated, Vyond Go avatar templates can only be edited via Quick Edit at this time (versus in Vyond Studio)
Videos featuring AI avatars require AI credits both to generate the video and also when the text-to-speech is generated (per 10 characters).
Keep these tips in mind:
Right now, you can’t specify a different number of characters in your topic prompt in attempt to override the format settings
If you need a location that’s not available in Vyond Go but is available in Vyond Studio, it’s currently possible to edit your video using the alternate location. You can replace every scene with your desired template and relink the text-to-speech clips to the correct characters.
Try Vyond for Free
Writing AI prompts for Vyond Go: best practices summary
Prompt length: For topic prompts, enter at least 50 words (and up to ~700 maximum).
Prompt structure: Structured prompts are helpful to the AI model and get better outputs
For example: “Create an HR video based on the below text: [paste in source material for the model to base your video on]”.
Longer, “stream of consciousness”-type prompts will have a lower-quality result
Duration: Don’t try to specify a duration for your video — the model can’t yet heed duration as a parameter ( e.g. “write a 60-second video”). But adding lengthier talking points in your prompt will yield longer videos.
Number of characters: Don’t try to specify a different number of characters in your topic prompt attempting to override the format settings — it’s not effective yet.
Data points: Include authentic stats and facts about your topic in your prompt, if you’ve got them. This helps reduce the chance that the AI will pull in an unverified internet stat (or make something up).
Match talking points to format and vibe: If you’re including specific talking points in your topic prompt, match them with the type of format and vibe you select. For example, if you choose “Announcement” for a product launch, you’ll want to include a date/time, details about what’s launching, where people can go for questions, etc. — keeping in mind the appropriate vibe you selected for what you’re announcing. Or if you choose “How-to,” be sure to include details about what process you’ll explain and the steps you want included, aligned to your chosen vibe.
Format dictates direction where needed: If you enter a very generic topic prompt like “birds,” then Vyond Go will look to the format you choose for more guidance on what to include in the script. So for “birds,” had you chosen “Anecdote,” it will create a personal story related to birds; if “Debate,” it will come up with arguments for and against something related to birds: like how they’re amazing creatures with incredible abilities.
Edit and verify: always run a quality check on your script (are these facts accurate? Is this content tailored appropriately to my target audience? etc.)
Sample topic prompts and videos by content type
We tried out a few sample topic prompts to illustrate the guidance above. Here’s how the output videos turned out – plus the parameters and topic prompt we used to get there.
HR
Vibe: Formal
Format: Anecdote
Layout: Conversation
Prompt:
Lessons from a First-Time Manager with an Underperforming Team Member
Grace was a first-time manager at HipTech, a tech company in Austin
In her new role, she inherited a team of accountants, and one of her team members was not performing well.
Grace learned: she should have addressed performance issues right away, that it’s OK to ask for help from her peers who are managers, and to trust her instincts even though she’s new to managing.
Raw video output:
hi
Notes:
The characters, location, and flow worked well. Vyond Go added relevant details we hadn’t included, such as offering the employee resources, and an ultimate outcome: that the employee turned things around.
L&D
Vibe: Casual
Format: How-to
Layout: Conversation
Prompt:
(language cut and pasted from a Vyond Resource post)How L&D professionals can create digital media that is accessible and inclusive
1. Add closed captions
Closed captions—a textual display of what’s being said, with the ability to be toggled off— help people with hearing and visual impairments understand and enjoy the video content you create. The captions are also necessary for making 508-compliant video content. If you’re making any content for a government agency, the content must be 508-compliant.
Closed captions are an overlay on top of a completed video, as pictured above in this video from Virtual Care for Kids. If captions are built into the video itself, they are called“open captions.” There is no way for viewers to turn off open captions and it’s not possible for screen-reading software to understand them.
With a third-party tool, you can add proper closed captions to any video. Research your options for captioning apps and keep in mind that some programs are platform-specific. For example, Clipomatic or iPhone Clips work well for Instagram Stories.
2. Be mindful of video design
The design of a video itself is a huge factor in how accessible the content is. The wrong design choices can exclude audiences with certain disabilities. For example, if someone in your audience has a visual impairment, an overly-busy video could be difficult to interpret. But there are a couple of ways you can ensure that your video design is friendly to your entire audience. Keep text away from where closed captions will be. Cluttered screen text can be difficult to read for those who require closed captions. When placing text, keep in mind where closed captions will appear in order to prevent this from occurring.Ensure that your videos are safe for those with photo sensitivities by avoiding the flash threshold. If videos have quick transitions or bright flashes in succession, they can cross the general flash threshold and cause epileptic seizures. Avoiding flashing effects is also helpful in consideration of people with ADHD, autism, and those in concussion recovery. Be mindful of your color choices. Consider representation in your content. Can you cast or include disabled people or animated characters? This won’t make your content inherently more accessible, but it will help disabled viewers see themselves represented in your message.
3. Use alt text on thumbnails
Alt text is copy that both supplements and even replaces an image when necessary. Alt text makes it possible for those with vision impairments to enjoy images and fully digest your content. A screen-reading program will read alt text where the image should be, giving a visually impaired listener an idea of what the image represents. This is equally true for video thumbnails that might be placed on an article.
Alt text also helps with general readability if the image doesn’t load. If a user has an outdated browser or poor connection, the alt text will display in place of the image and ensure that the overall experience isn’t affected.
4. Transcribe visual or auditory media
For those with any kind of visual or learning impairment, videos on their own may not be enough. A transcript of what is said in the video makes it possible for people to slow down and learn at their own pace.
Use a third-party app or integration to transcribe your recorded videos. Transcribe, Rev, and Express Scribe are three great options to start with.
5. Make the right color choices in videoColor vision deficiency affects nearly 7.4% of the population in the United States.Those with color vision deficiency are often unable to clearly distinguish between red, blue, and green. Avoid layering red, blue, and green in visuals where the colors aren’t pertinent to understanding the message.Use a contrast checker to make sure your text and background combinations are readable by those with color vision deficiency.
Raw video output:
Notes:
The script did a fine job of translating the talking points into a conversation between the two characters. It didn’t create a conclusion, so it currently ends abruptly after the last tip — we’d want to adjust the script to add an ending.
Sales
Vibe: Casual
Format: Overview
Layout: Talking head – Citrina Avatar
Prompt:
Thanks for meeting today!
Here’s what we heard from your team:
You’re looking for a tool that lets us do explainers and on screen demos
You need a better way to scale seller scenarios
You’re interested in custom branded video templates
Your biggest current challenges are:
Breaking your team’s “PDF habit”
You have only one person on staff who’s comfortable making videos
Next steps
On the Zodio side: Tom will get budget info from leadership
On our side: We’ll share pricing and more AI avatar examples by this Friday
Raw video output:
Notes:
Pretty good first-draft results. Video stayed true to the script provided and visuals were suitable for the messaging. We made a few adjustments to text to speech on pronunciation (e.g. “demo”) before we downloaded the video file to get the fully lip-synched output.
Sales Enablement
Vibe: Informative
Format: Overview
Layout: Talking head – Circles
Prompt:
(talking points based on a Vyond template video)
Create an example video for sales development representatives at Zodio, showing how they can talk to prospects about Zodio’s employee engagement platform. The speaker’s name is Brad Jackson, a sales representative at Zodio.
Brad introduces himself
Employee engagement has a huge impact on your organization’s success.
Engaged and connected employees help nurture a collaborative work culture, which results in innovative outcomes.
Zodio believes employee engagement can be fun, which is why we baked fun right into our internal communications platform.
Zodio is a unique employee engagement tool that personalizes each employee’s experience based on their zodiac sign.
In addition to all the features you expect of a robust employee engagement system, Zodio offers the fun sense of self that comes from astrology.
You can participate in weekly mindfulness activities based on your zodiac sign.
Create engaging surveys.
Organized virtual events and games and more.
Zodio also provides an engagement tracking feature that analyzes how employees are connecting and engaging over time.
Want to learn more?
Schedule a personalized demo with me to see how your company and Zodio are a match made in the stars.
Raw video output:
Notes:
Good result and usable as-is, though we might want to bring it into Vyond Studio to add screenshots of the product, Zodio. The template nicely added chapter titles.
Marketing (Social Media)
Vibe: Playful
Format: Announcement
Layout: Narration
Prompt:
(Actual script)
We’re heading to LearnCon!
And we can’t wait to see you at Booth 213.
We’ll be showcasing our new instant video creation platform.
And customer support experts will be making amazing videos on the fly, just for you.
Plus, on Sunday at 6 PM, join us for adult beverages and music at our mixer.
Hope to see you there!
Raw video output:
Notes:
A good foundation. To make it more engaging and relevant, would bring it into Studio, add a title card with the company logo to start and add photos of the company’s actual booth and a visual that syncs with the mixer. Start to finish, a 10-minute job.
Embrace the future of video creation with Vyond Go
As AI continues to shape the landscape of content generation, the key lies in integrating the tools that help create business-relevant, customizable, and on-brand videos Vyond Go leads the charge by seamlessly integrating AI with creative control, transforming your ideas into captivating visuals. Dive into the possibilities with a free trial of Vyond Go.
Try Vyond for Free
Frequently Asked Questions
What’s the best way to create AI videos from a text prompt?
AI tools have made it easy to create videos in a variety of styles with a simple text prompt or even an exact script. Vyond Go, Vyond’s AI-powered instant video maker, is unique because the output you’ll get is fully editable, unlike many other AI video tools on the market. Vyond Go also offers you the flexibility to make videos in any style you need, easily and instantly.
What’s the best AI text to video tool for business?
Many AI video tools excel in just one or two areas. This forces companies to purchase multiple one-off video tools in order to meet all their needs. Vyond’s all-in-one video creation platform is different. Its broad toolkit and powerful AI capabilities can help you make videos in any style you need — like animated, mixed-media, AI avatar or anything in between — easily and instantly.
What’s the best AI avatar video generator?
When it comes to AI avatar vendors, you might have heard names like Synthesia, known for their avatar-only offerings. But AI avatars work best alongside versatile style options.
Vyond is the best AI video generator with human avatars, offering 1,300+ avatar options from industry-leading vendors HeyGen and Tavus, plus templates and simple integration with other video styles for a custom look. Vyond also features AI translation tools and ultra high-quality AI voices that make translation quick, smooth, and nearly instant.
Can I make my own templates for Vyond Go?
Yes! Vyond’s product team can help you create custom templates for Vyond Go (and Studio) to ensure your instant videos are always on brand. They can also create custom assets like characters, outfits — even mascots! Give us a shout to learn more about custom add-on package options.
#### Providence Health: Creating award-winning training content with Vyond
Imagine you develop training solutions for a large healthcare company. Leadership is significantly revamping the company’s services, and you need to train thousands of managers to prepare for these changes.
That’s the challenge the learning professionals at Providence St. Joseph Health faced when the company launched “Health for a better world”—a plan to dramatically transform and enhance the company’s core services by 2022.
To educate thousands of managers in just three years, Providence’s learning professionals knew that relying on traditional classroom training wouldn’t be enough. They needed solutions that were both highly engaging and accessible—across different locations and schedules—to ensure that every manager was ready for Health for a better world.
That’s why Providence used Vyond and the AR app Zappar to create a dynamic, innovative training program.
Developing an award-winning AR training program
Prior to creating AR, video-based training, Providence taught their employees through Instructor-Led Training (ILT). In a classroom setting, managers would listen to and read scenarios and role-play to learn about a workplace topic.
“The modalities we used were passive and not especially captivating,” said Johnny Hamilton, Senior Learning Designer at Providence. “Managers, for example, during role-playing, didn’t always use a lot of emotion, so the scenarios lost their impact.”
To captivate its managers, Providence used Vyond and Zappar to create two types of training content: scenarios and job aids.
AR-enhanced scenarios: The teacher in an in-person lesson distributes an image card. Managers “zap” the image (scan the image with their smartphone) using the Zappar app, and it plays an animated Vyond scenario between a caregiver (employee) and their manager.
AR-enhanced job aids: To teach managers outside of a classroom setting, Providence displayed a flyer about best practices for managing caregivers. Managers scanned the card to watch a Vyond video about how to run 1:1 meetings with their caregivers.
Providence used the design and delivery cycle to create this training content. The process starts with identifying a business need—training thousands of managers as a part of Health for a better world—and then brainstorming how employees might be trained to address that need.
In the design phase, Providence’s learning team was especially eager to use Vyond to create animated videos because the medium has been shown to engage learners.
“Animated videos support story-based learning design, which is a proven methodology to increase comprehension and retention of course material,” said Hamilton. “With animation, you can place the course content into a workplace context with characters and props, so learners can readily relate.”
Winning awards and increasing engagement with AR videos
From research to delivery, the work behind Providence’s video-based AR training paid off. The program received multiple awards from the learning and development community.
Providence won the Brandon Hall Group Excellence in Learning Silver Award for their AR training solution.
Elearning! Magazine ranked Providence #7 in their list of the 50 Top Learning Organization awards for 2019 for their AR, video-based training solution.
Providence is in good company—other winners include companies like Dell, UPS, Bank of America, and Domino’s. But beyond this recognition, their training proved to be a success internally. Managers gave positive feedback on the training: 80% agreed that the AR scenarios made the training content easier to understand and helped them apply the lessons to their work due mostly to video’s ability to hold their attention.
The AR-driven job aids were also received well by managers with an 80% play rate and a 78% engagement rate.
Providence Health hosts its videos in Wistia.
Learning professionals at Providence were pleased to see these strong results of the AR training program.
“Managers found this new training modality highly engaging and were extremely focused on the content,” said Hamilton. “This was a big win for us as we wanted learners to stay focused and energized during this activity, and they showed high rates of engagement and retention.”
Identifying ways to improve future training
Though the training was positively received, Hamilton and others on the team used tracking data to identify ways to improve future training content:
Keep your videos short. 75% of viewers watched up to two minutes of the job aid training video. The percentage of viewers drops off significantly after the two-minute point, so Providence plans to cap videos at two minutes in the future.
Blend approaches. While many managers enjoyed using the AR technology, engagement data showed that they still prefer to access training through traditional methods, such as clicking a link. For future training, both AR and conventional links will be used to reach as many employees as possible.
Track engagement to cater your delivery of training content to employees. Most views happened on Wednesdays, so the company is going to email future training videos mid-week from now on.
With these insights, Providence is ready to build more AR video-based training that leads to even greater comprehension and retention than their first program.
Planning more AR training initiatives for managers
Given how successful the job aids and scenarios were, more AR training programs are in the works at Providence:
Zappable name cards: Managers scan the back of their name tag with Zappar, and the app shows them Clinical Value Improvement (CVI) resources.
Zappable books: By zapping books in the company library, employees access videos of the author and a summary of the book.
Zappable onboarding: New hires scan objects around the office with Zappar to learn more about their new workplace and fellow employees via an AR-driven scavenger hunt.
Looking to future training programs, Providence will continue using Vyond as a part of their AR content. Hamilton notes that the tool has allowed them to create engaging lessons in a convenient, cost-effective way.
“We definitely will be using Vyond for our future training solutions. The tool allowed us to create training videos rapidly and at a low-cost point,” said Hamilton. “When the script needed to be changed, we quickly and easily swapped out the audio, changed the specific part of the scene, and republished the video – rather than having to reshoot an entire live-action video.”
Learn more about Providence St. Joseph’s microlearning and AR program in this Chief Learning Officer spotlight and click here to download the full whitepaper, This is What Happens When MicroLearning Meets Augmented Reality: An Augmented Reality Enhanced Whitepaper.
#### PRWeek Convene: Employee Engagement
In February 2020, Vyond partnered with True Global Intelligence to research what employees really needed from their internal communications. Then, everything changed.
On Wed. March 31, 2021 at 12:45 PM Eastern, we’ll be presenting updated findings on the new normal for workplace communications. Join us at PRWeek Convene: Employee Engagement, to be among the first to hear how the first year of the pandemic has transformed how we work together.
REGISTER FOR THE EVENT
What is the new normal of workplace communications?
As we approached the one-year anniversary of the COVID-19 pandemic, new questions rose to the surface about what the past 12 months might mean for workplace communications. How has the way leaders communicate with teams changed? What kind of training and support have employees come to expect? And how do we navigate internal communications in a landscape that is more fragmented than ever?
Here are a few of the questions we asked ourselves as we prepared our survey with True Global Intelligence:
Has work-life balance gotten better, or worse?
Employees that are finishing their first year of remote work have seen a dramatic shift in their day-to-day lives. How has that impacted work-life balance? How has work-life balance changed, if at all, for those still working on-site? We also wanted to better understand how work-life balance has changed for the more vulnerable groups within our workforce, including women.
What’s the most effective way for leaders to communicate with their teams?
There isn’t a leader on Earth who was fully prepared for this pandemic. How have leaders managed to keep up with shifting employee needs during these extraordinarily volatile times? What’s the best way to get a message across to their teams, and how can they encourage alignment outside the confines of an office?
Do employees feel more disconnected from their teams?
The very real risks posed by the global health crisis have, for many, made work feel less important. At the same time, our lives have shrunk considerably, and work remains a huge part of lived experiences. The competition for employee attention has never been fiercer. Have interpersonal relationships at the office suffered as a result? How does this impact team efficacy, career development, and mental health?
What We Learned
We worked with True Global Intelligence to design a comprehensive survey diving deep into these questions (and more). We then surveyed 1000+ full-time employees to better understand their attitudes, pain points, and preferences around workplace communications.
When we first analyzed our findings, we were blown away at some of the insights it offered for how we should communicate with our teams. While office etiquette seems to be relaxing, office politics seem to be getting worse. Workplace communication is more fragmented, and training employees to use the right channels—like in the video below—is increasingly important.
Use this video as a Vyond template.
Want to hear our full findings? Join us at PRWeek Convene: Employee Engagement to hear insights from Stacy Adams (head of marketing, Vyond) and Natasha Kennedy (managing director, True Global Intelligence). You can also access our full report here, and read some of our early discoveries in this resource post.
ACCESS THE FULL REPORT
About the Event
Convene: Employee Engagement is a free webcast event, brought to you by Vyond and PRWeek. PRWeek is the leading publication for professionals in the press and public relations industry. They epitomize the modern business publishing brand, spanning online, print, events and social media, incorporating a paid-for content strategy and gated website. Register today to hear brand new findings from Vyond’s research, conducted with True Global Intelligence.
REGISTER FOR THE EVENT
#### Rapport Building with Employee Introduction Videos
Think back to your first days at your current job. Was it easy to meet new team members? Or were you feeling awkward in the lunch room surrounded by dozens of new faces?
#### Reaching Presentation Zen With Video
In the world today, the ability to express yourself and communicate with others is one of the most important skills in school and in the work place. Whether you’re a college student presenting a project in class, or in the work place selling a product to a client, your ability to make engaging presentations may be the difference between success and failure.
As an expert and consultant in presentations, Garr Reynolds has been sharing his ideas of “Presentation Zen” with fortune 500 companies, as well as the everyday citizen in the form of a blog and a book.
His ideas of Presentation Zen help steer us away from the text-filled Powerpoint presentations we are used to and bored of, and helps us engage the audience effectively. Here are some important features of Presentation Zen:
Simplicity
Garr Reynolds emphasizes elegance in simplicity; don’t fill your slides with bullet points and text. Instead, you could include a picture, or a simple statistic that you can then elaborate on in your speech. In addition to editing your slides to make sure there is no un-needed text, edit your speech so that there is no unrelated or unimportant information. A good speech is like an iPod; it’s designed to be simple in both form and function, and that’s what makes it a great product.
Story & Personality
Presenting what you want to say in the form of a story, whether a personal one or not, is a great way to engage the audience and have them remember your message. Also, don’t forget to infuse your personality into your speech; give them a reason why they would want to listen to you, don’t just be a robot revising what you have prepared.
Be Conversational and Interact with Audience
Be conversational, don’t make the audience feel like you are talking AT them, talk TO them. A great way to interact with the audience is to ask simple questions related to what you’re about to talk about, multiple times throughout your speech. Be casual in your delivery as well.
Reaching Presentation Zen with Video
Well-made videos can be a great tool in any kind of presentation, and can be helpful in achieving a “Presentation Zen” style. The picture superiority rule suggests that adding a visual component, or “showing not telling”, helps the audience remember your points much better. Here is a 30 second video explaining this rule.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=cLLDUyy8utY]
A video experience takes advantage of the picture superiority rule by delivering both a visual and audio representation of your message simultaneously. More importantly, videos help us engage our audience in multiple ways. Instead of struggling to paint a picture in your audience’s mind using your words, a video can demonstrate a certain feeling or setting depending on the purpose of your presentation. Also, a useful trick is to insert a short video in the middle of your presentation; it re-engages any viewers who might’ve lost interest mid-way, and it gives your audience and yourself a short break from each other.
How to create a video
Although videos can be useful, it takes recording equipment, editing skills, preparation, and a lot of other skills that you may not possess. Fortunately, there are online tools that can help us with this task, such as GoAnimate.
GoAnimate is a suite of web applications that makes it easy to create professional animated videos. Its ability to engage the audience, whether as an official commercial or internal training video, makes it a great tool in helping us achieve Presentation Zen.
#### Record Voice Overs at Any Budget
A bad voice over can ruin your entire video project. You could film your story with Hollywood cameras or animate with the most high-end software, but your audience will hardly sit through a video with a distorted, unbearable voice over. On the other hand, narrate your story with an engaging, easy-to-follow voice over, and people are more likely to pay attention and enjoy it.
With today’s technology, recording a high-quality voice over is no longer a privilege for famous directors and animation studios. Nowadays, anyone can record high-quality voice overs regardless of their team’s budget.
Create a script to guide your recording session
Creating a great script with voice over directions is your first step. In addition to telling voice artists what to say, a voice over script usually includes notes to change the tone of voice and emphasize words or emotion during specific sentences. These notes help the voice over artist narrate videos closer to your vision.
If you have a lower budget, you’ll likely have to create your script yourself. As you write, document words the voice over artist should pay close attention to, such as those where exaggerating a word or extending a pause that would make the story more engaging.
If you have the budget, hire a scriptwriter to create one for you. They have the experience to create a cohesive and compelling script, increasing your project’s overall quality.
Choose the person to record voice overs for you
This step is pretty obvious—you need a find a person to speak your voice over. Your budget determines who that person is.
No budget: use yourself or a member of your team
The cheapest person to hire is yourself or a member of your team. You may not be a professional, but you can record voice overs with a bit of preparation and practice. For example, you can practice your lines beforehand, so you get used to enunciating each word carefully.
For a warm-up, television and voice actor Rio Rocket suggests reading ten pages of words aloud every morning. Then, when you’re done, record yourself saying, “the rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain,” to hear how well your diction holds up.
At Vyond, the majority of our videos are recorded by our in-house team. For larger campaigns and especially important projects, we hire a professional.
Small or big budget: hire a professional to record voice overs
If you have the budget, hire a professional. Professional voice over artists will take less time to produce higher quality audio than you or your colleague would. They’ve been training for years, and their final product will be better than what a novice can create on their own.
“Having a pro voice talent with a depth of experience,” says Susan, manager of the award-winning voice over team known as the Glow Girls, “will help your project run more smoothly.” And, she says, because of the rise of remote work across the industry, most artists have professional home setups to deliver high-quality audio.
Voice over artists range in price and specialty, which can make the hiring process challenging. We wrote an in-depth guide describing the process here.
Select your equipment based on your budget
The next step to recording audio is to select your recording equipment.
No budget: use smartphones
If you have no budget, the most accessible piece of equipment is the smartphone. While most smartphones come with an audio recording app, that app doesn’t give you control over critical recording settings like bit depth, sample rate, and audio file format.
If possible, lean toward paid or freemium recording apps like Awesome Voice Recorder and ASR Voice Recorder. As your budget grows, you can invest in the Rode smartLav+, a lavalier mic that plugs directly into your smartphone and increases your voice over’s quality.
Small budget: use an audio recorder or entry-level microphone
If you have a small budget, spring for a dedicated audio recorder or entry-level microphone. Audio recorders have a higher-quality microphone than smartphones, which allows you to capture more low, mid, and high frequencies. Just like high-end audio recording apps, recorders give you full control over how you want to record and export your file.
Generally, recorders cost between $40 to $400, giving you access to affordable options like the Sony PX370 or higher-end ones like the Zoom H5 4-Track Recorder. The Blue Yeti USB microphone is also a great option.
For recording on your computer, we recommend recording through Audacity. On a Mac, you also have free access to Quicktime and Garage Band.
Big budget: use a microphone in studio or studio-like settings
For those with larger budgets, invest in “proper” audio recording equipment like a high-quality microphone. Microphones capture the most sound and deliver the highest voice over quality under sound-treated rooms.
Microphones fall into two categories, USB and XLR. USB microphones are the easiest to use: You plug them into your computer and start recording, unlike XLR microphones. XLR microphones use an XLR cable, which can’t connect to any computer. To use them, you need to first plug them into an audio interface that connects to your computer. While there is extra equipment involved with XLR microphones, they are more durable and provide higher sound quality than USB microphones.
The Shure SM7B is a fantastic XLR microphone you can use to record voice overs. It comes with a built-in windscreen and pop filter to protect your voice over from the wind and plosives and is compatible with popular audio interfaces like the Scarlett 4i4 or the iD4.
Pick a room that isn’t too large or too small
Regardless of budget, pay attention to your recording room. If you have a big budget and are paying for a studio, the studio or the person you hired likely assembled the space perfectly.
If you have a small or no budget, you’ll need to make some decisions. First, pick a room that isn’t too large, like an empty team office, or too small, like an empty closet. It doesn’t matter how excellent you are at audio recording or editing; you can’t clean up the echo and distortions that small and big rooms cause.
The echo from empty, big, or small rooms happens because no objects or furniture absorb your voice. As a result, sound bounces across the walls. To avoid echo and ensure good audio recording conditions, you need furniture and objects in the room that absorb your voice: wall decorations, carpets, or, even better, sound-absorbing panels.
Some workarounds will let you record high-quality audio even if you don’t have access to the best space. For example, record under a blanket so it absorbs your voice. Of course, not everyone likes being under blankets: it can be hot or make you feel claustrophobic. Put the blanket above chairs or a desk and sit under it if you prefer.
A second solution is to record in your car. Companies do acoustic treatments to cars to minimize outside noise and control reverberation. The windshield reflects your voice, so sit in the backseat or, if there’s no backseat, face the floor or the chair to absorb the noise.
Finally, record your audio in a closet surrounded by clothing and, hopefully, a carpeted floor. Sit about a foot away from the clothes and face them, so they absorb any echo.
Adjust your audio recording settings
Your audio quality is also important regardless of budget. For those with big budgets, your studio or hired audio engineer will know what makes for a good recording. For those with limited budgets, here are the basics of recording and exporting your audio file.
Record in .wav file format
.Wav is an audio format with higher quality and less compression than other formats like MP3. .Wav files carry more audio data, too, giving you more freedom to modify your audio volume, sensitivity, and frequencies without losing a lot of quality during the editing process.
Once you edit your audio, feel free to transform it into a lower-sized audio file format. Since you edited in .Wav, your audio quality will be the highest even if you change the audio format.
You don’t need a large budget to record in .wav, as affordable voice recorders let you produce voice overs in this file format. If you don’t have a budget, free smartphone apps like Awesome Voice Recorder and ASR Voice Recorder and computer audio software like Audacity let you record in .wav at no cost.
Record in 48kHz sample rate
The sounds humans hear daily are called analog audio. Computers, however, can’t understand these sounds. So they turn analog audio signals into digital signals called samples. The sample rate refers to the number of samples your recording software processes per second. The higher the sample rate, the higher the quality sound.
Free recording software like Audacity and affordable voice recorders like the TASCAM DR-05 let you choose your sample rate. Whenever you have the option, pick a sample rate of 48kHz (48,000HZ), the standard sample rate of the audio tracks used on TV shows, movies, and DVDs. If you record your voice over in a lower sample rate, say 44.1kHz, you’ll have to convert your audio’s sample rate into 48kHz, causing distortion and desynchronization between your audio and your video.
Use a 16-bit or 24-bit depth
Bit depth is the resolution on which your recording software or gadget is capturing the sound. The higher the bit depth, the more you can edit your audio without fear of distorting or reducing the quality of your audio file.
For example, with 24-bit audio, you can increase the volume of a low-sounding recording without adding noise to your audio. Because modern smartphones, audio recorders, and laptops support a 24-bit depth, it’s easy to avoid bit depths below 16-bit.
Record your voice over
No matter your budget, recording is not as simple as pressing record and saying your lines. There are directives that any voice actor —hired and from your team—must follow to ensure a high-quality final result.
Ensure proper microphone placement
When recording audio, place your recording device close to your body in between your chin and sternum. This position helps your voice sound its best and avoid distortion, regardless of your device’s cost.
When you hold your device’s microphone too close to your mouth, the mic will pick up your voice and any sounds from your mouth, leading to exaggerated consonants like Ps and Ss. On the flip side, when you hold your microphone too far, say one foot away from your mouth, you’ll lose a lot of your voice’s base and mid-tones, resulting in lower voice quality. Be sure to hold your microphone between your chin and your sternum.
Record voice overs synchronously if your team is remote
If you need to record multiple speakers simultaneously but aren’t all in the same place, you can use an online meeting software, like Zoom, to guide speakers as each record voice overs into their recording device. For example, voice artists from teams with a small budget can sit in a clothing-full closet to record as they listen to their peers’ feedback.
Teams with big budgets, where each voice artist can access a home studio, can benefit from recording synchronously, too. Dan Mirvish, an award-winning feature film director, says Zoom is a valuable tool even when working with A-list actors. “These kinds of actors expect— and still need—solid direction,” says Mirvish. He goes on to say, “to get different takes, try improvisations, and bounce ideas off each other and the director.” An additional benefit, he says, is that when actors listen to a colleague’s section of a voice over project, so they have an easier time reacting to a scene’s emotion than if they heard a pre-recorded audio and then sent their lines.
Watch out for clips in your audio
Don’t clip your audio—exceeding the maximum volume you can record. Otherwise, you’ll distort your voice over.
For clip-less audio, the volume needs to peak between -12 and -6 decibels. Nowadays, most voice recording apps and software, regardless of their price point, will let you see when your voice clips or let you set a maximum volume to your microphone to avoid this issue.
Create a video that supports your voice over
Now that your voice over is ready, it’s time to create a video that supports your story with visuals. To do this, use the same script from the voice over to create a storyboard, a visual representation of how your story unfolds, telling your animation or video production team the scenes they should create.
Whether you want to create an animated storyboard to guide your real-life story or a compelling animated video to support your voice over audio, Vyond can help. In a few clicks, you control your story, even if you’re not a professional animator.
Start a free trial
#### Research: What Employees Want from L&D in 2024
Our latest report offers new data and expert insights to help you retain your best talent next year and beyond.
#### Secrets To A Killer Landing Page
A persuasive landing page that convinces visitors to try your product is the key to converting customers. Conversions are the lifeblood for any business website, where the ultimate aim is to attract new business. So, how do you craft a killer landing page? While there’s no surefire way to craft the perfect landing page, there are a few basic rules to follow that will dramatically increase your conversion rate.
Your landing page is a specific resource designed to convert a visitor into a customer. That means it needs to focus on no more than one or two things. Otherwise, your message may get lost and you’ll lose a potential customer.
Below are 4 key elements to remember when building a solid landing page.
1. The most important is a nice looking and eye-catching headline, the landing page headline and advertisement should compliment each other.
2. A very clear and concise secondary headline and blurb is the next important factor, this is one of the first things a visitor will read, it should be straight forward and compelling for the visitor to take a closer look.
3. A big, bright and strong call to action button that stands out, this conversion button should be placed below a call-to-action or have a call-to-action as the button.
4. Use images or videos that relates to the copy can have a very positive impact on viewers, it will give the visitor a more vivid idea of a product or service and perhaps look further into it.
Increasingly, a secret weapon of killer landing pages is the explainer video. Explainer videos are designed to help viewers quickly grasp the product or service at hand. Animated explainer videos are a great way to improve conversion rates, overall engagement, and best of all, they don’t cost the earth to produce.
Animated explainer videos work for businesses of all kinds, from e-commerce:
to technology:
Why add an explainer video to your landing page? Attention is at a premium online, so you’ve got to capture a user’s interest quickly and sustain it. If you can do that, you’re much more likely to convert that person into a customer.
Animated explainer videos hold attention for much longer than plain text or an audio file. A lot of people prefer to watch something rather than read the same thing – the majority of the population are visual learners. The visual aspect of a video keeps viewers interested and keeps them watching in order to see what’s next. Ideally, they should be between 1-3 minutes – long enough to explain the product or service, but not long enough to bore the viewer.
If you can keep people on your page for longer, that means more time for your brand message to be absorbed. And if company staff feature in your explainer video, you’ll be offering another reason for viewers to put their trust in you. Done right, adding an explainer video to your landing page can double your conversion rates.
You can increase the impact of your animated explainer video on your landing page with a little experimenting. Some viewers may respond better to a short, snappy video, while others prefer a more in depth version – it depends on your audience. And while autoplay can annoy users, it can also increase conversions.
Finally, use your explainer video to reinforce your call to action. You could have a physical cue within the video pointing toward the relevant button/link, or a voiced or written instruction urging viewers to take action. This should be presented at the end; videos do better when the user knows what to do after the video finishes playing.
Liked the look of the video examples above? They were all made using GoAnimate. Our tools make it easy to create professional quality videos for your business, with dozens of pre-made characters, backdrops, and music tracks, and you’ll have full rights to share and export your video as you see fit. Get started right away!
#### Shared Spaces
Shared Spaces is a feature available to Vyond Enterprise, Agency, and Vyond for Government plan users that makes collaborating on video projects simpler — and helps ensure compliance and content consistency at scale.
How does Shared Spaces work?
Customers can create a unique space for any purpose–whether it be for working on a particular project, or to simply share ideas and resources with a group.Users simply create a space, add group members’ email addresses, invite them to the space, and assign permission levels that range from View Only to Space Manager. Within the shared space, users can organize content by creating folders, then populate it by moving or adding videos directly or into specific folders.Members with Full Access or Space Manager roles can share videos via links, direct access, or templates, and existing sharing settings follow the videos when moved in or out of the space. Additionally, account owners can set a shared space as the default, ensuring a central hub for collaboration across the team.
Benefits of Shared Spaces
Creating a shared online space to share assets not only saves time and headaches by streamlining collaboration, it:
Helps ensure brand consistency and reduce compliance risk across teams
Helps new hires hit the ground running faster (by giving easy access to group projects)
Ensures project continuity in the event a team member leaves (because their assets are shared in a centralized spot, not their hard drive)
Improves the ability of administrators to see what’s going on within their teams
If you’d like Shared Spaces for your team but aren’t yet on an Enterprise, Agency or Vyond for Government plan, contact our sales support team or talk to your customer success manager. To see everything included in these plans, check out our Pricing page and this Vyond for Government info page.
More from Vyond
How to Make AI Videos in Minutes
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AI-Powered Instant Translation
#### Simple Perspective For 2D Animation
(This article was originally posted on eTourist’s blog. We are republishing it here with his permission for the community’s reference.)
Perspective drawing is the art of creating the illusion of three dimensional space on a two dimensional surface such as a piece of paper or your computer monitor screen. The principles of Perspective drawing are also very relevant to 2D animation – particularly when you want to move a character closer or further away from the camera.
In this series of articles on perspective I’m going to demonstrate how perspective can be taken into consideration when creating your animations. I’m going to try to keep things simple so you don’t have to remember too much when applying these concepts in your own work.
I’ll be using the GoAnimate Full Featured Video Maker to create my examples but the concepts also apply to any form of 2D animation. If you’d like a detailed explanation of Perspective Drawing then there is a great series of articles in Art Factories, Perspective Drawing Techniques for Artists.
Most people are aware of the key concept of perspective i.e. things get smaller as they move further away and bigger as they get closer. However applying that idea to moving characters can be quite a challenge. You’ll often see this kind of Perspective failure (see animation below) with new animators where a character walks unnaturally off the bottom of the screen.
The trick to applying perspective well is to begin viewing your piece of paper or computer monitor screen as more of window into another world rather than a flat surface. Imagine you could reach right into it and touch the things you see on the other side. The mistake in the above video occurs because the creator has yet to learn how to visualize correctly the space at the other side of the screen.
Simple, One Point, Character Perspective
In the GoAnimate studio the most basic camera angle is a fixed position that shows you the entire background scene – as per the scene in the example video above. Most scenes use one point perspective.
(Note that, in GoAnimate, all the Lil’ Peepz style themes use isometric perspective on many of backgrounds and props – which is problematic when trying to apply correct perspective to scenes and characters since isometric perspective has no horizon line or vanishing point).
One point perspective, at its simplest, works by drawing a horizon line across the middle of your scene and choosing a point in the exact middle of that line, which becomes your vanishing point. You then place your character in the scene at the initial size you want them to be.
Then, when you want the characters to move closer or further away from the camera in correct proportion to the scene, you just imagine some guidelines that extend from the vanishing point to the top and bottom of your characters and beyond, off the edge of the screen. (See still image below).
If these two characters now either walk towards the vanishing point or towards the camera in a straight line, perpendicular to the camera, their size should increase or decrease proportionally so that the top of their head and feet are always in contact with a guideline.
You can see this in practice in the video demonstration below which finishes with a scene similar to our original perspective failure video above, showing how the characters should correctly move off screen when walking toward the camera.
Notice that the left and right side of the scene (divided in half by the vanishing point) mirror each other. If one of these characters were to walk directly at the camera, in front of the vanishing point, they would get bigger in the scene until the middle of their stomach hit the camera.
By simply marking where the horizon line is in a scene and placing the vanishing point right in the middle of it. Then using guidelines, as I’ve shown, you can get by reasonably well with fairly convincing perspective of your characters in 2D animation.
#### Sora’s Demise Highlights the Importance of Enterprise Governance and Control for AI Content Platforms
When OpenAI pulled back Sora a few weeks ago, it wasn’t just a product flop—it was a wake-up call.
Enterprises that had built workflows around Sora were suddenly forced to confront a hard truth about relying on high-profile AI video tools built to chase hype cycles:
If their business model breaks down, your platform disappears.
Which leaves you with compromised content libraries, disrupted workflows, and an urgent need to find a more reliable replacement.
Why Sora never truly landed with the Enterprise
Most of the focus on Sora’s demise has been on its enormous back-end costs and user decline. But there was another problem:Sora was largely used by individual users paying pennies on the dollar, not Enterprise organizations with Enterprise budgets.
So why so little Enterprise adoption? Limitations around governance, brand compliance and creative control were likely major barriers.
The platform trained on copyrighted material without clear consent. It enabled problematic, hard-to-detect deepfakes. It had no brand management features. And it offered no “human-in-the-loop” visibility into its black box.
The insight for Enterprise buyers
It’s not just about creating video content faster. It’s about doing it at scale, meeting every Enterprise standard, and choosing AI platforms your teams can rely on for the long haul.
So as you weigh your next investment, make sure to prioritize Enterprise-ready platforms that are:
Built with governance in mind from the start
Designed to maintain your brand integrity
Transparent in how content is created
Reliable enough to support your needs for years to come
Learn more about Vyond’s approach to Enterprise video creation.
#### Spring 2024 Awards Roundup:
63 G2 Award Wins
We’re excited to share that G2 recognized us with 63 awards for Spring 2024. It’s an honor we consider reflective of our commitment to continuous improvement and dedication to delivering new features that help our customers communicate better.
Top 10 ranking in 14 new reports
Vyond received 63 awards across five different categories, including Video Creation, Presentation, Content Creation, Animation, and top 10 ranking in 14 new reports within the new Video Content Creation category.
Vyond is also recognized with 15 first-place awards including:
#1 Leader for Enterprise in Content Creation
#1 Best Usability for Enterprise in Content Creation
#1 Users Most Likely to Recommend for Animation
#1 Leader for Enterprise in Animation
#1 Best Meets Requirements for Enterprise in Content Creation
Also, this quarter, Vyond has again received “Leader” recognition for Enterprise in Content Creation and Animation categories for the EMEA and Europe regions.
No better reward than results
Recognition from Vyond users and sites like G2 are the ultimate confirmation of our efforts to directly help improve business outcomes — driving efficiency by streamlining workflows, relevancy through infinitely customizable props and actions, and breadth and versatility in content creation.
From training sales teams to better understand and sell into key customer profiles with 5x more efficiency, to creating micro-learning videos that help service agents answer live customer phone questions quickly and accurately, enterprise companies across the Fortune 500 are enthusiastically integrating Vyond into their communication strategy and quickly realizing real benefits.
“We’re Vyond enthusiasts. It’s a tool we really enjoy using. It’s so easy for everyone
to jump right in and it’s really fast to put together a high-quality product.”
Laurel Schulert, Senior Director of Learning Experience
Learn more about our awards and recognition on our awards web page.
#### The #1 Animated Video Maker
Bring any video idea to life in minutes with Vyond’s effortless animated video creator. Featuring industry-leading AI and a massive asset and template library, Vyond lets you create the perfect video for any audience — zero experience required.
Create an animated video
How to make an animated video
1. Log into Vyond
Sign up for a free trial to start making animated videos right now with Vyond. All you need is an email address — no credit card required.
Sign up for a free trial
2. Enter a prompt or build your video manually
Use the AI power of Vyond Go to generate a script and video on any topic using a simple text prompt in less than twenty seconds. Or use the thousands of assets, templates, and styles in Vyond Studio to build something quickly from scratch.
3. Edit your video with a few clicks
Need to make changes or updates? Editing text, audio, narration, and visuals is simple in Vyond. Tweak instantly in Vyond Go with Quick Edit or make adjustments with a few clicks in Vyond Studio.
4. Export and share your video
To share your videos, export them as GIFs or MP4s to your device. Then, upload them to your favorite video hosting service (YouTube, Vimeo, Wistia, etc.) or to a Learning Management System (LMS) like Articulate, Docebo, 360Learning, or Absorb LMS.
Simple drag-and-drop interface
Time-saving AI features
Wide variety of styles and templates
Easy to edit and translate
Try Vyond for free
Make compelling animated videos in minutes (no experience required)
Anyone can make professional-grade animated videos with Vyond.
Generate scripts and videos with a simple text prompt. Use our drag-and-drop interface and huge asset library to bring your ideas to life, as easily as creating a PowerPoint. Transform text to speech with our 600+ unique AI voices. And let our AI instantly translate your video into 95 languages.
Bring any video idea to life with the power of animation
If you can imagine it, you can create it in Vyond — no production team or video expertise required.
Our gigantic asset library, industry-specific video templates, pre-built scenes, characters, and props provide users with an incredible level of creative control. If you can’t find what you’re looking for, you can generate new objects, backgrounds, and scenes with generative AI tools like Text to Prop and Text to Image. And while Vyond is the leading animated video creation platform, you can also use it to create videos that use photorealistic stock images and videos, screen recordings, dynamic text, and more.
Scale your animated video production with the power of AI
Vyond’s built-in AI helps teams generate engaging video content in a wide variety of styles (animated, photorealistic, mixed media, screen recordings, and dynamic text, to name a few) in the fraction of the time, at scale. Vyond’s effortless, all-in-one video creation platform is helping thousands of companies communicate critical information better, and keep up with the speed of business.
Communicate and train better with the best animated video maker on the market
Animated videos are uniquely effective at grabbing people’s attention, conveying complex information in a clear, bold way, and — most importantly — getting your message to stick, no matter the audience.
With Vyond, teams of all kinds (L&D, human resources, marketing, sales, internal comms, you name it) do all of the above more effectively in far less time than ever before.
Trusted by 65% of the Fortune 500
“I’ve been using Vyond for about two years now. I researched half a dozen companies out there, tested several, and found that Vyond was by far the easiest to use in the shortest period of time. We use Vyond to create everything from communications videos to kick off new programs to videos that support our recruiting efforts.”
Frequently asked questions
How do I make an animated video for free?
Yes, there are free animated video tools. But most lack quality animations, character variations, and backgrounds, making it challenging to produce videos tailored to your business and its audience. Paying a reasonable price for a top-tier animation video tool will ultimately save you time and money, and ensure you’re producing highly engaging and professional content.
Can I customize videos in Vyond?
Absolutely. In fact, Vyond’s ability to help you create highly relevant content is one of the things our customers appreciate the most.
For a personal touch, you can easily use industry-specific templates, scan in photos of your work locations, create one-off objects, use team members’ real voices for audio, create characters that look like people you work with—and much more. Enterprise clients can also create uniforms with their company logo, request bespoke character styles, and easily manage their brand with our branding kit and custom assets.
How do I make an animated video?
With Vyond the answer is: effortlessly. You can generate videos in seconds with a text prompt in Vyond Go. Or choose from our wide range of scenes, characters, and templates in Vyond Studio to make something great in a matter of minutes. Not sure you believe us? Sign up for a free trial to see for yourself.
Can I use Vyond on my phone?
Yes! You can instantly create and download Vyond Go videos from your mobile device, access and view your existing video library, and make minor file edits like renaming, copying, and moving videos. You can also download your library videos or specific scenes. (That said, to experience the full video creation functionality and features, we recommend using Vyond on your desktop.)
#### The 10 Most Popular Vyond Video Templates for Company Communications in 2022
Creating a high-priority video can be intimidating, especially when it’s being shared with all the employees at your organization. Even if you know what you want to say, you’re often uninspired or too busy to come up with an original, engaging way to say it.
At Vyond, we offer more than 200 fully-scripted animated video templates (and counting) to help L&D, HR, and Internal Comms teams not only solve this problem but have fun doing it.
So if you’re looking for a more effective way to deliver your most critical employee messaging in the coming year, consider signing up for Vyond and using this collection of the 10 video templates for employee communications our customers downloaded the most in 2022.
#1. The Employee Benefits Overview
During onboarding and open enrollment, share the highlights of (and changes to) your full benefits package in a fresh, entertaining way.
Features a diverse group of representative employees
Includes sections that explain PTO, medical, dental, 401k, stock options, and a variety of other benefits
As with all our videos, it’s useful as is–or a good starting point for creating something new
#2. The Quiz Game Show
Want to make your next video more interactive and effective? Almost 1,500 customers did just that by using this engaging quiz show video template for a variety of training purposes.
Create any content categories you want
Includes sections for both right and wrong answers
Easy to customize with your company branding
#3. Introducing Your Team
Introduce your team to a new hire, a newly acquired department, or an external vendor with this upbeat video template.
Features a clever approach to describing your team members’ responsibilities and personalities
Includes a script for members of a creative agency as an example (account manager, photographer, writer, graphic designer, marketing manager, and accountant), but you can modify the roles and characters as needed
#4. Impact Report End of Year Video / Annual Report
This upbeat, highly-visual video template is a great way to succinctly summarize your organization’s most meaningful achievements over the past year, without the need for a narrator. Use it on its own, or as a teaser for a more in-depth version of your annual report.
Created with a combination of our whiteboard style and animated photographic elements
Features a mix of animated stats and graphs, and multiple options for transitions between sections
#5. Season’s Greetings (from a Distance)
Wish your remote employees or your company partners and vendors a happy holiday season with this short, slightly irreverent video. And if you’d like to send something more targeted at this time of year, also consider using:
Our Happy New Year template
Our Happy Chrismukkah template
Or our Noche Buena template
#6. Video to Replace PowerPoint Presentations
Need to internally sell an idea or make a business case to your leadership team? Surprise your audience by creating an engaging video pitch instead of the PowerPoint or Google Slides presentation they’re accustomed to.
Built as a sales pitch deck, but you can use this structure as the basis for all variety of presentations
Includes animated elements that compare features, demonstrate ROI, and engagingly present bonus features
#7. Ping, Ring, or Email
Considering the growing number of remote workers, and the varying communication preferences of different generations of workers, it’s wise to establish some company protocols for when to use email, a collaboration tool like Slack, or pick up your smartphone and make a call.
This video offers up some best practices in a light, approachable way.
#8. Equality vs. Equity Explainer
Our customers used this very short video last year to help explain the important differences between equality and equity, and explain concepts like allyship.
Uses a powerful visual metaphor to make the point
Perfect for including in a longer presentation related to DEIB principles
#9. What is Intersectionality?
HR and L&D pros in particular found this short video explainer useful in their diversity training initiatives.
Includes audio of a female narrator reading a short, well-researched script on the subject, which you can adjust or re-record if you’d prefer someone from your company to do the narration
#10. Supporting Employee Wellness at the End of the Year
“It’s good to remember that the season of cheer can sometimes be the season of stress.” So begins this video offering tips on how employees can practice self-care during the holidays.
Features a whiteboard-style illustration style
Includes sections for pointing employees to helpful resources
Want to play around with Vyond Studio and make your own content, for free? Sign up for our trial to get access to 200+ fully scripted templates, 200+ starter templates, and more than 2,300 scene templates.
#### The 100+ Video Creation Terms You Need To Know
Film and video experts—like cinematographers and animators—use hundreds of video production terms while planning, recording, and preparing videos for delivery, leaving those without filmmaking experience in the dark.
As with languages, you don’t need to learn all the terms to communicate. You only need a handful of words to communicate clearly with your team, freelance video creation experts, and stakeholders. Take a look at our 100+ list of video creation terms to help you get up to speed.
Jump to a Section:
AI Video Generation
AI avatarsText to imageText to videoScript to videoDocument to videoPrompt to clipPrompt engineeringAI script generatorInstant translationAI twin (or custom avatar)
Pre-Production
AnimaticsOutlineShot ListBig IdeaPacingStoryDialogueScenesStoryboardsDraftScriptVideo AssetsLocationShot
Production
Camera Terms
A-CamCraneGimbalA-RollDepth of FieldImage SensorApertureF-StopPrime LensAspect RatioField of ViewTelephoto LensB-CamFocal LengthWhite BalanceB-RollFrameWide-angle LensCamera LensFrame RateZoom LensCamera OperatorGain and ISO
Lighting Terms
Artificial LightFill LightLow Key LightingBacklightHard LightNatural LightColor TemperatureHigh Key LightingPractical LightDiffuserKey LightSoft Light
Audio Terms
Ambient SoundDecibel (dB)Polar PatternAudio LevelDialogueRoom ToneBoomDynamicSample RateCardioidLavalierXLRClippingMic CondenserOmnidirectional
Types of Shots & Camera Movement
Close-Up ShotOver-the-Shoulder ShotTiltCranePanTwo-ShotDolly Zoom or ZollyPoint of View ShotUltra-Wide ShotMedium ShotPullWide ShotMedium Wide ShotPushZoomMedium-Close ShotRule of Thirds
Post Production
Video Editing
CaptionsExportRenderingClosed CaptionsFreeze FrameRendering TimeColor CorrectionGraphicSequenceColor GradeMotion GraphicsSpecial EffectsCompressionMultimediaSubtitlesCutOpen CaptionsThumbnailDissolveProxiesTimelineEditRaw FootageVignette
Audio Editing
Audio MixFoleySound EffectsAutomated Dialog ReplacementLip SyncSoundtrackEqualizationNon-synchronous SoundVoiceover
General Terms
AnalogFHD Full High Definition (1080p)SSD – Solid-state DriveAnimationFootageStorageAsymmetryFormatSymmetryBackground NoiseHD High Definition (720p)Three Dimensional (3D)Branded ContentHDD – Hard Drive DiskTwo Dimensional (2D)ContentOverlayUHD Ultra High Definition (4K)ContrastPixelVideo ResolutionDigital SignalSD Standard Definition (480p) Disney Animation PrinciplesSignal
AI Video Generation
AI video generation is the process of creating video content automatically using artificial intelligence, where inputs like text, images, or audio are transformed into moving visuals, narration, and scenes. It combines generative models, avatars, and automation to drastically reduce production time and make video creation accessible without cameras, actors, or traditional editing tools.
What are AI avatars?
AI avatars are digital characters—either photorealistic or stylized—that can speak, move, and perform like a human presenter. They are generated and animated by AI to deliver narration, act in explainer videos, or serve as virtual hosts, often synchronized with text-to-speech or uploaded audio.
What is text to image?
Text to image is the process of generating still visuals from written prompts using AI. Models interpret natural language descriptions and create original images, ranging from realistic photos to stylized artwork, which can then be used as standalone assets or within video production.
What is text to video?
Text to video expands on text-to-image by generating full motion visuals from written prompts. AI systems transform descriptions into short clips or full videos, incorporating elements like motion, transitions, and character animation, making it one of the most popular applications in AI video creation.
What is script to video?
Script to video tools turn written scripts into polished videos by automatically pairing narration with relevant visuals, characters, and scene transitions. This workflow is widely used in corporate training, marketing, and education to speed up production without manual editing.
What is document to video?
Document to video converts existing materials—like PDFs, slide decks, or Word files—into dynamic video presentations. AI extracts key points, summarizes content, and pairs it with narration, visuals, and animations, making traditional documents more engaging and easier to consume.
What is prompt to clip?
Prompt to clip is the ability to generate specific video scenes or short segments directly from a text prompt. Instead of building an entire video, creators can request “a 10-second clip of a futuristic cityscape at night,” and the AI produces that scene for integration into larger projects.
What is prompt engineering?
Prompt engineering is the practice of crafting precise inputs—whether text, reference images, or context cues—to guide AI models toward desired outputs. In video creation, effective prompt engineering helps ensure that generated clips match a creator’s intended style, pacing, or storyline.
What is an AI script generator?
An AI script generator automatically creates video scripts from minimal input such as keywords, topics, or short descriptions. By applying natural language generation, it provides structured narration and scene outlines that can be used directly in AI-driven video production.
What is instant video translation?
Instant translation is the AI-powered process of converting speech, subtitles, and captions into another language in real time or with minimal delay. It’s used in video platforms to localize content quickly, making videos accessible to global audiences without separate re-recordings.
What is an AI Twin (or custom avatar)?
An AI twin, also called a custom avatar, is a digital replica of a specific person created with AI. It captures the likeness, voice, and mannerisms of the individual so they can “appear” in videos without being physically present, allowing for scalable, personalized content creation.
Pre-Production
Pre-production refers to all the activities and assets teams deal with before recording a video. The following is a list of terms you’ll hear during the pre-production stage.
Big Idea
The big idea refers to the vision you have for your video project—what you want to communicate or have your audience take away. It should also include things like runtime, target audience, and budget. This is the first thing that should be written before starting a project. It should be short and concise; a few sentences up to a couple of paragraphs at most.
Outline
An outline is a written idea of the characters, props, and events you’ll need to tell your story. You can use outlines to ensure that your future script and storyboard keep your goals and resources in mind. Generally, this comes after the big idea, but before the story is written.
Story
A story is the plot of your video. It can be told through a sequence of events (scenes), told by a narrator, or shown through characters. When writing a story, do not include dialog, this stage of pre-production is to focus solely on building your message and the world in which it happens.
Script
A script is a written document that contains your story’s plot alongside the characters, locations, and dialogue that are part of it. The script should be focused mainly on dialogue, with short descriptions of visuals if needed.
With a script, you’ll know the elements necessary to produce a video your stakeholders enjoy. You’ll also be able to assess whether an idea will benefit (aligned with the script) or affect (unaligned with the script) your story’s plot.
Draft
In pre-production, drafts are typically versions of the script that haven’t been revised or approved by the project’s stakeholders. They’re early versions, open to change.
Storyboards
A storyboard is a sketch of your story’s events: how scenes will look. They can also include descriptions for camera movement, character actions, and key dialogue.
Typically, you draw storyboards on a piece of paper. But you can also visualize them in animation software, like Vyond.
Animatics
Storyboards that use animation to sketch a story instead of a piece of paper, are called Animatics. However, they go a step further than storyboards; they include music and listenable character dialogue.
Dialogue
In pre-production, dialogue refers to the lines written in a script that actors or characters will say during the production stage.
Pacing
Pacing refers to the speed at which a video’s plot unfolds or the spacing between lines of dialogue.
Your video’s pacing comes mostly from the script. If your script spends too much time in a particular section, say, your introduction, the video’s pacing will be slow.
When scripts cram many events into the video but don’t give the viewer enough time to process them, the video’s pacing will be too fast.
Scenes
A scene is a sequence of continuous action on film. In Vyond, a scene refers to an individual portion of your video where a character or prop starts and finishes an action.
Location
In filmmaking, the location is the physical place where filming occurs. This can be out in real-world locations, or in a controlled studio environment.
In Vyond Studio, the location refers to the place where your characters will be and your stories’ events will happen.
Shot List
A shot list refers to a detailed list of the shots your crew must take (or animate) to tell your story. This can be done before, after, or in place of a storyboard depending on the way you like to work.
Shot
A shot refers to the framing of a subject or location. There are various types of shots, such as wide, medium, and close shots, as well as an array of many others.
Video Assets
Your video assets are all the elements you’ll use to produce your video. In Vyond, you can consider your characters, props, and soundtracks as video assets.
Production
Production refers to the group of activities you do while recording your video. The following is a list of terms you’ll hear during the production stage.
Camera Terms
A-Cam
Your A-Cam is the main camera you’re using to shoot your video. Many productions only use a single camera, but on multi-cam productions, the A-Cam is the primary camera, recording the most important footage.
B-Cam
Your B-Cam is the secondary camera to produce footage that supports or complements the A-Cam. For example, if you locate your A-Cam in front of the actor speaking, your B-Cam can capture another actor’s reactions. For large productions with many cameras, the next sequential letter in the alphabet is assigned to each camera in order of the importance of the shots it is gathering, i.e.: C-Cam, D-Cam, etc.
You can use the camera tool to move your shot in Vyond Studio. For example, you can zoom in on your shot by switching between the first camera (equivalent to A-Cam) and the second camera (equivalent to B-Cam).
A-Roll
A-Roll is all of your footage or animation that is the main focus of your video. Think people being interviewed or characters having a conversation.
B-Roll
B-Roll is anything that supports your A-Roll. In a single-camera scenario, B-roll is most commonly used to support whatever is the main focus of your video: detail shots, scenery, etc. If working on multi-cam shoots, B-Roll is the footage that came from the B-Cam.
Camera Lens
A camera lens is a camera component that concentrates light into your camera sensor. Without a lens, cameras don’t capture images.
F-Stop
F-Stop correlates to the size of a lens’s aperture. The larger the aperture opening, the smaller the f-stop number, and inversely, the smaller the aperture opening, the larger the f-stop number.
Example: f/1.4= large aperture, whereas f/16= small aperture
Aperture
Aperture refers to how much a camera lens’s diaphragm will open, impacting the amount of light that reaches the camera sensor, as well as having an impact on the depth of field.
More light enters your camera at larger apertures. So footage recorded at a larger aperture (e.g., f/2.8) will be brighter than a shot done with a narrower one (e.g., f/22).
The depth of field is shallower at large apertures – f/2.8 will have an out-of-focus background compared to a shot at f/22, where nearly everything will be in focus.
Depth of Field
Depth of field refers to how much of your frame will be in focus, both in front of and behind your main subject.
At a wide depth of field, cameras capture the elements within the frame sharply. So if you are recording a person in the park, both the person and the park behind them will be in focus. With a shallow depth of field, you are able to blur the foreground and/or background around your subject. In the previous scenario, the park behind our subject would be out of focus, but the person wouldn’t as long as they stay closer to the camera lens.
Field Of View
The field of view is how wide or narrow a space the lens can record at a given distance from the subject.
Focal Length
The focal length, technically speaking, refers to the distance between the light entering the camera lens and the camera’s image sensor. Most people, when referring to focal length, are referring to the millimeter (mm) marking of the lens. For instance, a 20mm lens is a wide focal length, 50mm is a normal focal length, and 100mm is a long focal length.
In Vyond Studio, you can add cameras and reduce the size of your frame to give the appearance of a longer focal length.
Prime Lens
A prime lens is a type of lens that captures subjects from a fixed focal length. They have wider apertures than zoom lenses, allowing them to intake more light and achieve a shallower depth of field.
Zoom Lens
A zoom lens is a type of lens that allows you to get closer to or farther from the subject without moving the camera or switching lenses. In general, zoom lenses have smaller apertures than prime lenses, thus allowing less light onto the camera sensor or film.
Wide-Angle Lens
A wide-angle lens is a type of lens that allows you to capture a broad field of view, allowing you to include more of a room or environment in your frame. You can use them to include large portions of your background in the frame. One thing to be cautious of with wide-angle lenses is they can sometimes cause unwanted distortion (warping/stretching of your image). It is best to not shoot people up close with wide-angle lenses.
Telephoto Lens
A telephoto lens is a type of lens that allows you to capture a narrow field of view, focusing on a specific subject and blurring anything around it. Telephoto lenses can also be used to see subjects that are very far away from the camera.
In Vyond, you can mimic the effect of a telephoto lens by first zooming in on a subject. Then, you can add an overlay at a lower opacity on top of your background to make it less visible.
Aspect Ratio
The aspect ratio is the width and height of your video. The most common aspect ratio for TV, movies, and web content is 16:9. Other common aspect ratios are 17:9, 2:1, 2.4:1, and 4:3. The most common aspect ratios for social media are 1:1, 4:5, and 9:16. Vyond studio has an aspect ratio tool that allows you to pick from a few common social media aspect ratios, or input your own values to create any aspect ratio you desire.
Frame
In production terms, your frame is what you see once you decide on your lens and camera placement. Your frame encompasses everything that you choose to be there.
White Balance
White balance is a setting in your camera that allows you to change how your camera reacts to the color temperature of light. This setting allows white objects to look white regardless of the location’s lighting conditions. Most modern cameras will automatically set the white balance for you, but it is best practice to manually adjust your white balance so the camera doesn’t automatically change while you are recording.
Gain or ISO
Gain, or ISO, is the camera setting used to adjust the exposure of your footage. The term ISO is most commonly seen in film, cinema, and DSLR cameras, whereas gain is generally the term used in broadcast cameras. However, they are the same.
The higher number your ISO or Gain is, the brighter your image will be. But you also run the risk of making the image noisy (a type of digital grain).
Frame Rate
Videos are sequences of images, or frames, assembled to create motion. The frame rate, measured in frames per second (fps), is the pace at which your video will show these images.
Vyond Studio exports every video at 24fps, the standard frame rate for movies. This is what most people would consider a “cinematic” frame rate. Higher frame rates, like 30fps, are used for much of television and sports.
Crane
A crane is a type of camera support rig that allows you to move the camera smoothly over larger distances. Cranes allow you to move the camera in all 4 directions – up, down, left, and right.
You can click here to learn how to do a crane, also known as a boom shot, in Vyond Studio.
Gimbal
A gimbal is an electronic camera stabilizer. It uses motors to keep the camera stable on 3 different axes. Gimbals can be used handheld, or even rigged to drones or vehicles. Camera operators can use it to record stable footage, even while they move.
Image Sensor
The image sensor is a camera component that transforms the light that passes through the lens into an image. It is the digital version of what film negatives are.
Camera Operator
The camera operator is the person who records the scenes and shots from the shot list.
Lighting Terms
Artificial Light
Artificial light comes from light sources that are controllable and off-camera. You can add artificial lights, like spotlights on top of the character, inside Vyond Studio.
Natural Light
Natural light refers to the light produced by the sun, moon, or any lighting that cannot be controlled, such as street lights or the lights of a city at night.
Practical Light
Practical lights are light sources that are visible in your scene, like a candle or lamp on top of your character’s desk. Ambient lights can be used to help light a scene, or they can be used with other light sources to add style to your scene. Cinematographers use them to influence the mood and ambiance of a scene.
Key Light
The key light is the main light source used to light your subject. Your key light can be the sun or artificial light.
Fill Light
Fill light is a light source used to fill in shadows. Generally fill lights are used when working with hard light sources, where diffusing the light isn’t an option, so fill light helps to fill in and soften the shadows created by your key light.
Backlight
Backlighting is a technique of lighting that cinematographers use, by positioning light behind, and above a subject to separate them from the background. This is also referred to as a rim light, as it creates a bright rimmed outline on your subject.
Hard Light
Hard light is a direct, undiffused light source like spotlights or the sun. This type of light creates defined shadows with hard edges, such as perfect outlines of people. Hard light is generally much higher in brightness and intensity as opposed to soft light.
Soft Light
Soft light is achieved by diffusing a light source which creates a gentle transition between light and shadow in your footage. It creates blurry undefined shadows and pleasing soft highlights. Soft light is ideal for lighting people.
Diffuser
A diffuser is any material used to scatter the light from a single-point light source, like a spotlight, flashlight, or the sun. Diffusers are mostly used to create soft light from hard light.
High Key Lighting
High Key Lighting refers to a lighting technique where everything in your scene is evenly lit, which produces a low contrast shot. Because of the even lighting, the images are usually more vivid and saturated and don’t have harsh shadows. Most sitcoms use high-key lighting.
Low Key Lighting
Low Key Lighting refers to a lighting technique where your scene is lit at different intensities to enhance or create shadows. This lighting technique produces high contrast shots where you can clearly distinguish the shot’s highlights and shadows from one another.
While Vyond Studio doesn’t let you create shadows on specific parts of a subject, you can reduce an overlay’s opacity to make some portions of your scene look darker than others—as if shadows covered them. You can also use a combination of light and dark colors to create more contrast in your scenes.
Street lights, lamps, and candles are examples of practical lights you can find inside Vyond Studio.
Color Temperature
Color temperature refers to the color of light that different kinds of light create. This is measured in Kelvin (K) and ranges from orange to blue (and everything in between). The color temperature of lights is important to know when setting the correct white balance on your camera. Mixing color temperatures is also a great way to create color contrast or complementary colors in your scenes.
Audio Terms
Dialogue
Dialogue is any audio that is spoken by actors or characters. It is usually the main audio in any kind of video or movie.
Ambient Sound
Ambient sounds provide the context of the scene’s location, like car honks in a highway scene or weights hitting the floor in a gym scene.
Room Tone
Room tone is the combination of sounds that naturally occur in an environment when no one is moving or speaking. Room tone can refer to sound from both indoors and outdoors.
Decibel (dB)
A decibel is the unit of measurement for sound. For example, a whisper is around 30 dB, while a movie theater can produce sounds of 90 dB.
Audio Level
The audio level refers to the volume at which you are recording, which is measured in decibels (dB). Generally, you want to keep your max level around -12dB to -6dB. Hitting 0dB or higher will cause your audio to clip, which creates distortion in your audio that cannot be fixed.
Clipping
Microphones and speakers can’t process the sounds at every audio level while maintaining their quality. Clipping is a distortion that occurs when your audio reaches or surpasses 0dB.
We suggest you keep your audio levels between -6 and -12dB to avoid clipping while recording.
Sample rate
Computers can’t understand the sounds the human ear captures. So they turn sound into digital signals they can process. These signals are called samples and are measured in hertz (Hz) and kilohertz (kHz).
The sample rate is the speed at which your recording device or software processes samples. The higher the sample rate, the more data from your audio sources you’ll capture, resulting in higher audio quality. For video, a sample rate of 48kHz (48,000Hz) should be used, this will ensure the audio stays synced with your video.
Another common sample rate you might see is 44.1kHz (44,100Hz) which is used primarily for audio-only applications (podcasts, music, etc.) This sample rate can be used with video but will become slightly out of sync over longer durations.
XLR
An XLR is the industry standard cable connection for microphones and recorders. These cables are robust and are able to not only deliver audio signals but also power the microphone, eliminating the need for batteries.
Mic
A mic, or microphone, is a sound capturing device. Most mics need to be plugged into an audio recorder, computer, or camera, to actually record your audio.
Polar pattern
A microphone’s polar pattern describes the directions (e.g., front, back, sides) from which the microphone can capture sound.
Boom
A boom or boom arm is an adjustable arm used to mount microphones, lights, or cameras. You can use them to get microphones close to sound sources, put lights directly above talent, but still out of frame, or get cameras into places that tripods cannot reach.
Condenser
A condenser is a type of microphone that is extra sensitive to sound, meaning it is easier to distort your audio if your voice or sound from your surroundings is too loud. On the flip side, they’re better at capturing delicate sounds and voices than dynamic microphones.
We recommend you use condenser microphones while recording the voiceover for Vyond Studio.
Cardioid
A cardioid microphone uses a polar pattern that mostly captures the sound coming from the front and sides of the microphone. So it’s ideal for shots where a single person is talking, and you want to avoid sound from the rear side of the microphone.
If you are recording a voiceover, we recommend you use a cardioid microphone to capture your voice without background noise.
Dynamic
Dynamic is a type of microphone that captures loud noises without generating distortion. They’re perfect for recording music and loud sounds.
Lavalier
Lavaliers are a type of small microphone that can be clipped to an actor’s clothing, or taped to their body under their clothing to be completely hidden. They are perfect for recording audio from moving actors when you don’t have a boom operator capturing audio, or if the frame of the camera is so wide that having a boom mic is impossible. They are also perfect for interviewing multiple people to ensure everyone’s audio level is the same.
Omnidirectional
Omnidirectional is a polar pattern microphone that captures sounds from all sides of the microphone. You can use them for scenes with multiple speakers or where you need to capture ambient noise or room tone.
Types of Shots & Camera Movement
Close-Up Shot
A close-up is a shot of your subject in which they fill most of the frame, hiding most of the background. You can use close-ups to highlight an important line from a character, to emphasize a character’s reaction, or to show important details of a prop in a scene.
In Vyond Studio, you can zoom in to a character’s face as it shows an expression in order to do a close-up.
Medium-Close Shot
A medium-close shot focuses on the character’s face but includes a portion of the background and the actor’s body—typically from the chest up.
Medium Shot
A medium shot is a type of shot that shows a subject, usually from the waist up, and a portion of the background.
Medium Wide Shot
A medium wide shot is a type of shot that sits between a medium and a wide shot. It includes a more significant portion of the actor’s body—from the knees up—and more background elements.
In Vyond Studio, you can zoom in to a character’s upper portion of their body to mimic the effect of a medium-wide shot.
Wide Shot
A wide shot is a type of shot that includes the entire actor’s body and a large portion of the background.
Ultra-Wide Shot
An ultra-wide shot is a type of shot that is commonly used for establishing shots of locations or environments. They can include actors, or just be the location itself.
Over-The-Shoulder Shot
An over-the-shoulder (OTS) is a type of shot where the camera operator frames a subject from behind another actor, with part of their shoulder and/or head on the side of the frame, with the main actor in the middle or opposite side of the frame.
Point of View shot
A point of view (POV) shot is when the footage shows what an actor sees. This type of shot lets viewers live the story from a character’s eyes.
Two-Shot
A two-shot is a type of shot where the camera operator includes two characters in the frame.
Pan
A pan is a camera movement where you first fix the camera in a position—like with a tripod—and then rotate the camera horizontally to capture left to right (or vice versa).
Tilt
A tilt is a camera movement where you first fix the camera in a position—like with a tripod—and then rotate it vertically to capture a scene from top to bottom (or vice versa).
You can click here to learn how to tilt in Vyond Studio.
Crane
In reference to a type of shot, a crane (or boom) is when the camera is physically moved higher or lower on a crane or boom arm.
You can click here to learn how to do a crane, also known as a boom shot, in Vyond Studio.
Pull
A pull is a camera movement where your camera operator moves the camera away from your subject without modifying the focal length.
You can click here to learn how to pull in Vyond Studio.
Push
A push is a camera movement where your camera operator moves the camera closer to the subject without modifying the focal length.
Zoom
Zoom in or zoom out is a camera technique performed with a zoom lens, where you get your shot closer to or farther from the subject without moving the camera.
You can click here to learn how to zoom in Vyond Studio.
Dolly Zoom or Zolly
A dolly zoom, also known as a zolly, is a camera movement where your camera operator first zooms and then moves the camera in the opposite direction. So if they zoom in, they’d have to dolly away from the subject to perform a zolly out, and vice versa for a zolly in. This creates the effect that your character stays the same size in your frame while the background shrinks or grows behind them. You can use dolly zooms to make your scene transmit unease.
Rule of Thirds
The rule of thirds is a technique where you use two horizontal lines and two vertical lines to divide your frame into thirds. You then position the most critical elements of your scene at the intersection of the thirds.
You can use the rule of thirds grid overlay inside Vyond Studio to position essential characters and props.
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Post-Production
Post-production, in the world of video production, refers to all the processes teams should consider or do after recording a video and/or audio. The following is a list of terms you’ll hear during the post-production stage.
Video Editing
Edit
Editing is done to piece together your final video after you’ve finished recording. In the editing process, you modify the image, story structure, and sound to get to a finished video.
Raw footage
Raw footage can refer to 2 things. The first can be footage no one has edited. Raw footage can also refer to footage shot in a RAW format, an unprocessed acquisition format that allows you to change things in editing, like your ISO and White Balance. RAW formats for video require high-end computers capable of handling the processing power for editing.
Cut
A cut occurs between one shot and another. It’s when you go from one scene to the next, without a transition.
A cut is also the action of dividing a single clip into multiple clips on your timeline.
In Vyond Studio, you can’t cut scenes, however, you can cut audio by hovering over the audio clip on the timeline, right-clicking, and then choosing cut.
Dissolve
A dissolve is a transition effect that can be used to fade to or from black or another color. You can also use the dissolve effect to transition from one scene to another.
Timeline
The timeline is a horizontal area in animation and video editing software where you build your video. You can add, delete, cut, rearrange, and preview visual and audio assets during the editing process.
Vyond Studio offers a collapsed and expanded timeline where you can control the timing of your project’s assets.
Sequence
A sequence can be a few things.
In animation, a sequence is a combination of still images that produce an animated moving one.
In video and film, a sequence is the assembly of multiple shots to create a scene — a sequence of events.
In Adobe Premiere Pro, a sequence is their term for your timeline, the working space in which you edit your video.
Color Correction
Color correction is the process of adjusting your video’s colors to get to a neutral point – the goal is to remove any strange color-casts and have anything that is supposed to be white, actually look white. This process is vital, as the location and lighting you record with can affect how your camera captures color.
Color Grade
Color grading, which takes place after color correction, is the process of adjusting your video’s colors to create a specific aesthetic. In color grading, the goal isn’t realism, but style.
Vignette
A vignette is a visual effect where the video’s frame is darkened around the edges. Vignettes are used to bring focus toward the middle of a screen and are generally applied during the color-grading process.
Freeze Frame
A freeze-frame is when you pick one frame—a still image—from your video and extend its length so your footage is motionless.
Graphic
Graphics are visual assets you add on top of your footage, or as stand-alone images in your video.
In Vyond Studio, you can choose from over 2,000 props to visually support your message, as well as the ability to upload your own graphics in the form of .jpg and .png (.png allows for a transparent background – perfect for logos!).
Motion Graphics
Motion graphics are visual assets—like text or shapes—that move. The term encompasses moving elements from a scene that don’t tell a story but support it.
In Vyond Studio, you can use motion paths to animate props or text.
Special Effects
There are 2 types of special effects in video production.
Practical effects are effects that are real and done at the time of filming. Think real explosions or a car flying through the air.
Digital effects or CGI (computer-generated imagery), are visual effects that are done in the post-production stage. Think of a spaceship flying through hyperspace or a dragon breathing fire.
Multimedia
The term multimedia refers to a communication format that results from mixing several communication formats into one.
In the case of Vyond Studio, the end product would be a multimedia format that results from mixing video, audio, images, and animation.
Proxies
Proxies are lower-resolution versions of your camera’s footage that video editing software creates so you can edit your video despite not having a professional video editing computer.
Rendering
Rendering is a way of processing your video files inside of your editing software so you can see a real-time preview of how your edits look. This is an alternative way to preview high-resolution video files on a computer that is not fast enough to play the footage on its own.
Rendering Time
The rendering time is the amount of time it takes your computer to render your video.
Export
Exporting is the process of processing your edited footage or animation into a format others can see, like .mov or .mp4.
In Vyond Studio, you can export videos in 720p HD, 1080p Full HD, or as animated gifs.
Compression
Compression is the process of reducing an audio or video file size while maintaining quality. The more compression you apply to your files, the smaller the file size will be, but you run the risk of lowering your quality as well.
You can compress audio and video files to reduce the amount of storage space necessary to save your files.
For importing video, audio, or images into Vyond Studio, it’s helpful to know how to compress files to the required size – 15MB for audio and images, and 100MB for video files.
Captions
Captions are words displayed on a video that allows people to read what actors are saying. Captions can also add context to a scene’s sound—like mentioning that a song is playing, or calling out specific sound effects. Captions are meant to make the video more accessible for those with hearing impairments.
When videos include subtitles in the same language as the spoken words, they are called captions—not subtitles.
Closed Captions
Closed captions allow the viewers to turn the captions on or off. Often you will find subtitles for other languages other than the primary language of the video available as closed captions.
Open Captions
Open captions are captions viewers can’t turn off. Open captions are a great option if you want to stylize your captions to meet brand standards, or if you know people might be watching your video without the audio turned on, like while scrolling through their social media feeds.
Subtitles
Subtitles are words displayed on a video that translates the video’s original language into another. The most common use for subtitles is translating dialogues, but you can also translate audio descriptions that describe other audio in a scene.
Thumbnail
Thumbnails are still images for your video that appear on video hosting platforms and streaming services before a person plays your video. You can use thumbnails to introduce a potential viewer to your video’s content.
Audio Editing
Audio Mix
The audio mix is the level at which individual audio tracks are mixed together in the editing process. It is the balance between dialogue, room tone, music, ambient noise, and sound effects. In Vyond Studio, you can look at and reassemble the audio mix using the timeline at the bottom of the interface.
Equalization
Audio files are composed of sound waves that have different frequencies from across the audible spectrum. Equalization is the process of adjusting the loudness of these different frequencies to change how an audio file sounds.
Voiceover
A voiceover is a dialogue audio track that is only heard in a video or film, but the person speaking is rarely, if never seen. Voiceover could be coming from the narrator of a story, or it could be that we are hearing a character’s thoughts. Voiceover is also perfect for tutorial and onboarding videos where seeing examples of what the voiceover is saying is more important than seeing who is speaking.
While voiceover actors typically record voiceovers, you can learn how to record one in this article.
Automated Dialog Replacement (ADR)
Automated Dialog Replacement is the process of re-recording an actor’s dialogue scene after the footage has already been recorded. ADR is usually done to record a higher-quality version of an actor’s lines to replace their original audio in the editing process. This is done by having the actor listen to their original lines and repeat them at the exact same pacing and tonality as the originals while re-recording.
Foley
Foley is the technique of creating sounds during the post-production stage to include in the video—like recording the sound of footsteps on a sidewalk, or someone knocking on a door. In a controlled recording studio, foley artists watch the video or film in real-time and perform the actions at the same speed as the actors to create sound effects that match up perfectly to the action on screen.
Lip Sync
Lip sync is when an actor or animated character’s mouth moves along with the audio that someone else (e.g., voice artist) has recorded.
In Vyond Studio, you can have any character lip-sync to your voiceovers.
Non-synchronous sound
A non-synchronous sound is any sound that occurs at a different time than the visual asset it’s trying to accompany. Out-of-sync sounds and visuals can produce a jarring effect that destroys the realism of a video but can be used for the effect of unease or disorientation.
In Vyond Studio, you can drag and drop audio files on the timeline to ensure they occur at the same time as your visuals.
Sound Effects
Sound effects are audio tracks you add on top of your footage to enhance or support the mood or message your video is trying to convey.
In Vyond Studio, you can choose from 318 sound effects to enhance your story.
Soundtrack
A soundtrack usually refers to a compilation of every musical audio track in a film.
General Terms
The following is a list of terms you might hear during any stage of the video-creation process.
Signal
A signal is a sound data-carrying electric current that passes information from one device to another.
Analog Signal
An analog signal is a type of signal that continuously varies in voltage. For example, earthquakes, humans, and audio recording devices produce analog signals.
Digital Signal
A digital signal is a type of signal that doesn’t have a continuous variation in voltage. For example, computers and digital phones produce digital signals.
Footage
The footage is the multimedia material cameras capture. The term typically includes all the individual videos the crew recorded.
Animation
Animations are rapid sequences of different drawings that move when combined.
Thanks to today’s technology, animators no longer have to draw frame by frame. Instead, they can use built-in features—like Vyond’s motion paths—to give life to still graphics.
Format
A format, or file format, is a form of data storage. The format of your audio and video files influences their size, quality, and the devices that can play them.
Video Resolution
Video resolution is a measurement of a video’s image quality based on the number of pixels used to produce a video. Pictures and frames with more pixels have a larger resolution, file size, and overall better quality.
SD – standard definition (480p)
Standard definition is an older video resolution made with 720 pixels of width and 480 of height. Because of this, it has an aspect ratio of 4:3 (for old square televisions) as opposed to modern wide screens with an aspect ratio of 16:9.
HD – high definition (720p)
High definition is a video resolution made with 1280 pixels of width and 720 of height, with an aspect ratio of 16:9.
In Vyond Studio, you can download videos in a 720p resolution.
FHD – full high definition (1080p)
Full high definition is a video resolution made of 1920 pixels of width and 1080 of height, with an aspect ratio of 16:9.
In Vyond Studio, you can download videos in a 1080p resolution.
UHD – ultra high definition (4K)
Ultra high definition is a video resolution made of 3840 pixels of width and 2160 of height, with an aspect ratio of 16:9.
Storage
Storage refers to a software or device where you save images, sound, or multimedia assets for future use or reference. File sizes are most common in Kilobytes(KB), Megabytes (MB), Gigabytes (GB), and Terabytes (TB). Thanks to the metric system, these sizes are easy to remember!
1,000KB=1MB
1,000MB=1GB
1,000GB=1TB
HDD – hard drive disk
A hard drive disk is a data storage device that saves data on a platter—a spinning “plate” of magnetic material. HDDs are now inexpensive and widely available; however, they are less reliable and much slower than SSDs.
SSD – solid-state drive
A solid-state drive is a data storage device that saves data in integrated circuits instead of a disk. As a result, solid-state drives are smaller and more expensive than HDDs. They’re faster, too, making them a better storage device than HDDs.
Asymmetry
Asymmetry refers to a situation where, if you divide a scene into two side-by-side halves, your scene’s right and left sides look different.
Background Noise
Background noise is any undesired sound that makes it into the footage, typically without the film crew noticing.
Branded content
Branded content is information a company or individual creates so another person can consume it and link it to its creator.
In Vyond Studio, you can brand your video by including your logo, commonly used fonts, and your companies’ brand colors.
Content
Content is information a company or individual creates so another person can consume it.
Contrast
Contrast is the design principle of varying your visual asset’s colors, brightness, textures, shapes, and sizes.
Disney Animation Principles
Disney animation principles refer to 12 principles some of Disney’s most renowned animators shared to help others create lifelike animations.
You can learn about each principle and how to apply them in Vyond here.
Overlay
An overlay is a visual asset placed on top of another visual asset. You can include overlays in your video to make it less monotonous.
Pixel
A pixel is the tiniest part of an image, making images a combination of pixels.
Symmetry
Symmetry refers to a situation where, if you divide a scene into two side-by-side halves, your scene’s right and left sides look the same. You can use the term when talking about the framing of a scene.
Three dimensional (3D)
Three-dimensional (3D) is a term to describe visual assets that have breadth, length, and depth. Objects in 3D can be moved on the X,Y, and Z axes.
Two dimensional (2D)
Two-dimensional (2D) is a term to describe visual assets that have breadth and length. Objects in 2D can only be moved on the X and Y axes.
Test yourself with Vyond Studio
Now that you are more familiar with the video production jargon, how about testing your knowledge with Vyond Studio? Our dynamic and powerful tool can be used to apply your style and your vision to some of the concepts covered in this article, particularly those related to camera movement and viewable aspect ratios.
Get creative and start your film project with a free trial of Vyond Studio by clicking the button below.
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#### The 5 Mantras These CLOs and L&D Experts are Living By in 2024
In our recent roundtable discussion, forward-thinking L&D execs and thought leaders Heather Stefanski, André Martin, Sarah Cannistra, and Jonathan Halls joined us to unpack results from our employee survey report and share their advice for L&D teams looking to make a big impact this year.
The discussion spanned employee retention, learner engagement strategies, measuring success, L&D governance models, AI, and more.
Here are the five development mantras the group is carrying into 2024 and their guidance for fellow L&D leaders.
Watch the replay
1. Middle managers’ roles are really hard — and really important — right now
Our middle managers are underwater right now, André says. As of a few years ago, we were asking our managers to delegate work and maybe coach and inspire their people.
Today, as we’ve seen even more clearly how important good managers are for employees’ success, our expectations for managers have gotten higher. On top of their jobs, now we want them to be career coaches and development centers for their team members.
“I just think we have to have a lot more respect for what managers don’t know, what they don’t have, and the support they actually need to do these really big, really complex, really hard jobs right now,” says André. “And so I hope we all can walk away having a great deal of empathy for managers.”
And for L&D’s part, André says there’s huge value the function can provide to help make this important “development triad” of L&D + manager + employee work well.
2. Learning budgets aren’t shrinking — they’re just edging closer to P&L
While there’s buzz that learning budgets are shrinking, it’s not necessarily true. The money that was traditionally given to corporate L&D teams is just getting fragmented and pushed closer to the P&L (profit and loss centers), André says.
“There’s still learning happening in the business every single day,” André says. “You can’t drive the kind of transformation we’ve seen the last handful of years without investing in growth and learning. It’s just that a lot more teams are popping up inside of the business, driving learning that has a very pragmatic and close relationship to the P&L.”
André says rather than feeling victimized by this change, corporate learning teams can start to think about what role they can play to continue maximizing the value of all the people doing learning in the organization—and there’s some real opportunity there.
Dr. André Martin: “Learning and budgets are moving closer to P&L”
3. For meaningful training, simulate employees’ experience
At McKinsey, Heather’s team focuses on designing training experiences that simulate employees’ actual environments and keeps them actively engaged throughout.
“We’re doing a ton around simulations. Where you have to read this information, pull this together, do an interview with somebody. It simulates the environment. That is real learning. And as a learner, I can’t really be on my phone or multitask when I’m doing something like that,” Heather says.
There’s so much opportunity for us in the L&D world to use different methodologies to help colleagues engage, and think, and process information, she says.
“If we use our tools well — the videos, the presentations, the simulations — what we’re actually doing is creating experiences for people to practice and get reflection, time, and feedback,” says Jonathan. “Those are all key for real learning, which is a process that happens in the learner’s head, not in our tools.”
Watch the replay
4. To keep your employees, empower them to succeed anywhere
Sarah says that a key part of retaining our best employees is bringing career coaching into the workplace. How do we educate our leaders on how to have better career conversations instead of just performance conversations? Providing this level of attention and investment signals that we value our people.
“At the end of the day, our employees really want to feel that they’re being developed so they can do their job well, feel more stable, know that they’re contributing, and also, in the event that they’re laid off, they have the skills to be competitive out there in this type of job market,” says Sarah.
The more that managers can help employees understand their career trajectory — not just focus on in-the-moment performance — the better we’ll do on retaining that talent and guiding them towards their goals.
Sarah Cannistra on career AND performance coaching
5. There’s never been a more exciting time to be in L&D
Challenges aside, the optimism around L&D’s potential is clear.
“This is the time to be in L&D. I could not be more excited by what’s in front of us and the opportunities that are available,” Heather says.
The group said they find inspiration everywhere for what L&D can become.
Jonathan: “I get inspired by people and seeing how they have the potential to change the world. And it sounds cheesy, but when you see it in action, you just gotta sit back and go, ‘wow.’”
Sarah: “I read a lot of non-L&D books and take inspiration from places like marketing and strategy and operations and things like that. How do I bring more of the business into L&D versus just hyper-focusing on L&D as its own thing?”
Heather: “I get inspired by our new hires in their learning programs. And seeing the world open up for them. That always inspires me. So whenever I’m in the doldrums, I go off and I teach a program to brand new hires, and then I feel great the next week.”
André: “I study people that have mastered crafts: dancers, artists, chefs. These individuals that have never been in a classroom in their life. But they’ve managed to create this depth of capability that is just astounding. I think we could learn a lot from the way that they learn and go about getting better at their craft. And if we study them, we’re gonna find a lot more mechanisms for better corporate learning in the future.”
For more inspiration and “aha” moments from the webinar, How to Retain Your Best Talent in 2024, watch the full replay.
And if you’re inspired to start creating engaging training content with Vyond, try it out now — for free or chat with us about getting a trial for your whole team.
Resources referenced on the webinar and speakers’ work
Research report: What Employees Want from L&D in 2024
Book: Power to the Middle: Why Managers Hold the Keys to the Future of Work
Book: Wrong Fit, Right Fit: Why How We Work Matters More Than Ever
Book: Confessions of a Corporate Trainer
Organization: Association for Talent Development (ATD)
Organization: The Learning Guild
Podcast: The L&D Career Club
Publication: Training Magazine
#### The 5-Minute Guide to Video Marketing
In 2019, marketers at all types of businesses, small or large, can make video work for their budget and goals.
You can shoot a complete 4K video right from your smartphone. And even if you don’t know how to edit videos, there are user-friendly, professional-grade video editing software options for all levels of content creators.
We created this 5-minute guide to help you get started with video marketing. This guide is filled with stats, examples, checklists, and more to enable you to start planning your own video strategy.
Let’s dive in.
What is video marketing?
At its core, video marketing is promoting your brand and products with video. That definition, though, is expanding and becoming more complicated as video technology evolves.
Video marketing had its advent with a television advertisement 80 years ago. In 2019, the potential for businesses to connect with their customers through video marketing is much wider.
Today, there are dozens of platforms—YouTube, Snapchat, Facebook Live—where companies can share their online videos with leads and existing customers. With so many spaces for sharing, video marketing could be anything from Super Bowl ads to Instagram stories to user-generated content.
Why use video marketing?
More and more companies are embracing video marketing. The number of businesses using video increased from 63% in 2017 to 81% in 2018. Here are a few reasons why:
High ROI:
Buyers are 64% more likely to make an online purchase after watching a product video.
83% of marketers agree that video has a strong ROI for their business.
People who see a product demo are 1.81 times more likely to make a purchase than people who don’t.
The cost per lead is 19% lower for marketers using video than those who don’t.
High engagement:
Video ads have a click-through rate of 1.84%—the highest of all digital ad formats.
More people watch videos fully—completion rates increased by roughly 10% from 2017 to 2018—so businesses know that they are getting their messages across.
Social media videos on average have 1200% more shares than text and images combined.
Video drives these metrics as a powerful, emotional medium. Using visuals and audio, video can speak to buyers’ interests and goals at a deep level. Understanding how your brand can help them, viewers are driven to make purchases and stay connected with your company.
Building a video marketing strategy
To build stronger customer relationships and boost your bottom line, your video marketing needs to be backed by planning.
Build a video marketing strategy with this simple six-step checklist. Each action item links to a resource with more information on completing that step.
Define your video marketing goals.
Create a budget for video marketing.
Plan out topics that you want to cover.
Decide who will be involved in video production, as well as the production needs for each video.
Form a video distribution plan.
Measure your video marketing results.
With a strategy set, you’ll have a repeatable, reliable system for creating engaging video content.
8 types of video marketing
From promotional video commercials on TV to organic social videos on Instagram, there is a wide range of videos you can create as a marketer. With so many varieties of video, you can speak to the unique needs of your target audience as they move down the sales funnel.
We’ve listed 8 types of videos to show you when they should be presented to leads and customers throughout the sales funnel. This targeting keeps you on track to create videos that capture viewers’ attention and attract them to your brand, no matter what part of the buyer’s journey they’re at.
Top-of-funnel videos
The top-of-funnel (ToFu) stage is an opportunity to show leads why they should be interested in your company. Present them with high-level content—your brand’s mission, the purpose of your product—that pique their curiosity and encourage them to learn more about your products.
Video is the perfect medium for this lead generation. The medium combines a number of elements—music, visual effects, bright colors—to build that initial emotional connection with potential customers.
Attract ToFu leads to your company with these four broad video topics:
Brand mission videos explain the “why” of your company—its history, its mission, its goals. Place the video right on your landing page so new visitors immediately see how your company helps others.
Product explainer videos show the purpose of your product with a general explanation of how it works (more specific details are covered in a demo). By covering the broad details of your product, explainer videos let viewers know how your product can help them without overwhelming with too much information.
Product video ads cover the perks of your product in less time than an explainer, usually in 30 seconds or less. With a shorter time span, product video ads tend to focus on just one idea to keep viewers’ focus. They’re great for quickly introducing ToFu leads to your product or showing existing customers your new products.
Educational videos teach ToFu leads about an industry-related topic. Centered around your target audience’s interests, educational content attracts leads to your company’s site so they can explore your brand more.
Covering your brand and products on a high-level, these videos will spark ToFu viewers’ interest in your company without overwhelming them with information.
Middle-of-funnel videos
A middle-of-the-funnel (MoFu) customer is just beginning to seriously consider your product. You’ve built their brand awareness and communicated that your company can help them. To move them closer to purchasing, share content that shows how your product could help them.
For this middle-of-funnel (MoFu) content, videos are both engaging and convincing. Video can capture the visual details of your product in action, so MoFu leads quickly understand how it works. Beyond product features, MoFu videos can highlight your current customers’ experiences to show how your product has helped others.
Move MoFu leads closer to making a purchase with these two types of videos:
Customer testimonial videos push MoFu leads closer to purchasing by showing success stories from people just like them, your target audience. Your MoFu viewers will be able to see the expressions and hear the tone of your customers, so the testimonial feels authentic and persuasive.
Product demos show how your product or service works on a detailed level, so MoFu customers understand exactly how your product can help them.
Between demos and testimonials, your MoFu videos showcase your product experience to build viewers’ trust in your brand even further.
Bottom-of-funnel videos
At the bottom-of-the-funnel (BoFu), customers have seen enough content to evaluate your product. More information probably won’t help at this late stage—they need an incentive from your sales team to make a purchase. Examples of this final push include a free trial offer or a follow-up call.
While sales is responsible for converting BoFu leads, marketers can still nurture customers who make it past the bottom of the funnel with content. Present these buyers with content that improves their product usage to build their brand loyalty. They’ll appreciate your company for continuing to help them and, as a result, will stay connected to your brand.
Here are two types of videos that provide value to existing customers and encourage them to continue making purchases:
Product webinars are online lessons to help existing customers build their skills with your product or service. By teaching your buyers with product webinars, you help them to find more value in your brand and encourage them to remain a customer.
Live Q & A sessions are live videos for your employees, such as sales reps, to connect with customers in real-time and answer their questions about your product or service. These days, there are lots of great web-based platforms for live streaming your sessions.
With these product assistance videos, you ensure that the people who made it through your funnel stay happy with your product and continue making purchases.
Embrace marketing videos to win more customers
Video marketing is becoming increasingly popular across businesses—more brands are realizing how it benefits their bottom line, and technological advances are making video easier and cheaper to create. There’s never been a better time to create a video marketing strategy if you haven’t already.
Using the foundational knowledge in this guide, brainstorm what you want to achieve and create for your business through video content marketing. Once you set a plan and start creating videos, you’ll be on your way to engaging more of your target audience and driving more purchases.
About Vyond
Vyond allows people of all skill levels in all industries and job roles to create dynamic and powerful media. With features that go beyond moving text and images, you can build character-driven stories or compelling data visualizations that engage audiences and deliver results.Start making your own videos today. Sign up for a free trial.
Make a video
#### The 6 Design Principles That Will Help You Create Better Business Videos
A compelling narrative script and storyboard are the foundation of an engaging video or animation. But even good stories can fall flat if the backgrounds, characters, colors, props, and scenes you use to tell your story are uninteresting. To keep the viewer engaged, the visual elements you choose must be as appealing as the story they are supporting. Design principles are basic rules that experts from the creative industry consider the foundation of great design.
Movie films, documentaries, and professional company videos follow one or sometimes all of the next six design principles to create captivating videos.
1. Contrast
Contrast means varying the shapes, sizes, and colors of the different elements of your scene.
When a scene is confusing or uninteresting, it may result from a lack of any differentiation between your video’s elements. If everything looks the same, viewers can’t distinguish where a character or prop starts and where it finishes. You can ensure that your viewers can appreciate every pixel of your video by adjusting the colors and size of each element.
The image on the left has two green values. While a long stare may help you distinguish between two people and a chart, it doesn’t benefit you to challenge the viewer. There are two ways to fix the left image’s contrast issue. You could stick to a monochromatic look but vary the shades, tints, and tones. Alternatively, you could follow a more audience-friendly approach and change the background, characters, and props’ colors to create clear boundaries between them, as you can see in the right image.v
The color wheel is an interactive, easy way to understand the relationships between colors. Depending on each color’s position inside the circular arrangement of colors, matching it with one hue or another can lead to an aesthetically pleasing scene or an unappealing one.
Image by StudioBinder
Colors opposite each other in the color wheel, known as complementary colors, stand out without clashing. Analogous colors and triadic colors are two other ways of combining color. To create contrast with analogous colors, stick to using three colors that are next to each other. Their closeness makes them share similar traits, so they complement each other. Amazon used a blue, light blue, and yellow hue to generate contrast in one of their Alexa tutorials. In the case of triadic colors, choose three colors that are evenly spaced across the color wheel. Wistia took advantage of triadic colors—pink, yellow, and blue—to develop a vibrant video to promote their brand.
Your ability to judge an image’s contrast levels will improve as you pick more colors for your videos and dive deeper into color theory. However, you can use color palettes to achieve perfect contrast from the moment you produce your next video. You can find 20 ready-to-use palettes, regardless of your company type, in this article.
2. Proportion
Proportion is the relative size of a character, prop, or background compared to other elements in the same scene. In its most basic form, proportion communicates relative measurement—a realistic shot would feature a golf ball smaller than a grapefruit, a grapefruit smaller than a soccer ball, etc. But proportion can also communicate levels of importance.
Hitchcock’s Rule, coined by Alfred Hitchcock, summarizes the principle of proportion by claiming that a visual element’s size should be proportional to its influence on the frame. If a chart, text, or character is crucial to understanding your story, it needs to have a size that makes it instantly recognizable.
In our Why Social Distancing Works template, we utilize the principle of proportion by featuring a header that is more than twice the size of the rest of the text. Your eye naturally goes to that element.
You can produce videos compliant with the proportion principle by writing down the most critical elements of your scenes before shooting. Then, you can direct the viewer’s eyes to them by increasing the size of the elements or zooming into them so they become more prominent.
3. Balance
Balance is a structure-based principle that encourages producers to create visual harmony by carefully choosing each element’s placement in relation to the entire composition.
All your design choices will affect how the viewers perceive your video’s scenes. Balance helps determine the exact position to place an element through grids and the concepts of symmetry and asymmetry.
Symmetrical and asymmetrical scenes are two ways to arrange your pieces to achieve balance. In symmetrical scenes, you envision an imaginary center line and evenly distribute all the elements from your composition across both sides. Layering symmetrically visual assets builds a sense of balance that helps viewers navigate your shot easily. Asymmetrical balance strives to reach the same level of balance but without placing the same elements on each side.
Wes Anderson and Stanley Kubrick are two film directors known for their excellent use of symmetry in their shots to maintain balance.
Grids are a simple way to achieve balance through symmetry in your video. One of the most popular grids in filmmaking, design, and photography is the rule of thirds, where you divide the scene into a three-by-three format and place the most important elements at the crosspoint of the grid. Since the lines aren’t centered, you can’t achieve symmetrical balance. But you can still create an asymmetrical composition that’s easy for the viewer’s eyes to scan.
4. Emphasis
Emphasis means making sure that the vital elements of your scenes stand out. Without emphasis, viewers can’t tell where they should be spending the most attention. As a result, they will likely miss relevant scenes or visual cues, affecting the overall understanding of your video.
When it comes to emphasizing people, you can place the main subjects at the center of the frame to draw the viewer’s attention. You can also push back support characters and props to keep your protagonists in the spotlight.
You can achieve emphasis through multiple actions depending on what you want the viewer to see. If you want to emphasize text, adding a box behind a statement or changing the headline’s font will help you achieve that. Those scenes filled with actors or animated characters can highlight their cast’s actions by blurring the rest of the stage or even dressing them in vibrant colors that nobody else is wearing.
5. Repetition
Repetition is the idea of replicating a pattern, color, body peculiarity, typeface, or detail across one or multiple scenes. Repetitively presenting the same visual detail helps video producers project a consistent level of importance and design so that viewers can navigate their video project easily.
Companies use the repetition principle whenever they follow a brand or video style guide. By using the same fonts, colors, animation style, or actors, their audience can associate visual elements with their brand. Repetition applies to maintaining a meaning or narrative, too. In the Harry Potter series, most members of the wizard school wear dark robes in nearly every movie. Repetition helps distinguish them as students and communicates when they’re in school versus the human world.
Before you start your video, ask yourself which elements need to remain consistent or which ideas should be reinforced. Take these elements and show them multiple times across the same project or projects.
6. Whitespace
Whitespace is the visually empty portion of your video’s scene. These sections either don’t have any elements or feature a clean background: the sky, a wall, or a marble block. By leaving parts of your frame empty, viewers can easily navigate your video instead of being overwhelmed with a crowded space.
We used whitespace in our Greenhouse Gases template to limit the number of ducks to what was strictly necessary to share a message. As seen in the screenshot on the right, the result was a video that is easy to scan and comprehend. Alternatively, the image on the left tries to fill every corner of the piece, leading to an unbalanced, hard-to-understand frame.
Crafting an engaging frame is as much about removing elements as it is about adding the right ones. Whenever you are ideating your set or your animation project, question the number and distribution of the elements you use to convey an idea. Remove some, if necessary, so that the world can appreciate your scene.
Follow design principles to create outstanding videos
Whether your video will have a mix of real-life footage and animation or be fully animated, Vyond’s set of tools allows you to follow the pillars of great design easily. You can ensure repetition by sticking to one of our animation styles—contrast by choosing between millions of color values, symmetry by moving objects using our grids and margins, and more without previous experience.
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#### The 7 Cs of Education: Captivate Students with Video
Research firm Tripod Education Partners is credited with developing the 7 Cs of Effective Teaching, an increasingly favored framework popularized by the Harvard Kennedy School. In it, Tripod lays out seven simple principles for more engaging instruction:
Challenge: Insist that students persevere and do their best work
Classroom Management: foster orderly, respectful, and on-task classroom behavior
Care: show concern for students’ emotional and academic well-being
Confer: encourage and value students’ ideas and views
Clarify: help students understand the content and resolve confusion
Consolidate: help students integrate and synthesize key ideas
And finally:
Captivate: spark and maintain student interest in learning
As any educator will tell you, that last point is much more easily said than done. In our increasingly digital world, how can today’s teachers defeat distractions and fully captivate their students?
That’s where video comes in. With today’s technology, it’s easy for any educator to develop engaging multimedia learning experiences that capitalize on the power of video.
This year at Vyond, we’re dealing you into a full deck of communication tools by sharing 52 unexpected use cases for video. Here are four ideas for captivating students and improving education with media you make yourself:
Language Learning Videos
Children’s Educational Videos
Clarifying Complex Concepts
Introducing Tools & Software
4 Ideas for Video in Education
Language Learning Videos
Language learning makes one of the strongest cases for more captivating classrooms. Rote memorization and writing exercises pale in comparison to more engaging educational experiences. By creating your own language learning videos like the one above, you can support your own curriculum and encourage immersion, all while sparking a genuine interest from your learners.
Children’s Educational Videos
Video is a language that everyone can understand, and you can create compelling content for any age. Just take a look at this French-language video created by Big Bang Science to teach young children about exotic fruits! Creating videos with your audience in mind is the best way to captivate learners, from kindergarten to college and beyond.
Clarifying Complex Concepts
There’s a reason Clarify is one of the 7 Cs, and when it comes to clarifying complex concepts, there’s no better medium than animation. Video is a proven, brain-backed way to break down abstract ideas into easy-to-understand content. Just look at the above example, which explains our not-so-simple economy in just 48 seconds.
Introducing Tools & Software
These days, Classroom Management is as much a digital skill as it is an interpersonal one. Every day, it seems, there are new tools and technologies available to educators. Video is a great way to encourage easy adoption of those tools by teachers and students alike, as exemplified by the above training video created by Brandman University to train the trainers on using Blackboard.
Create captivating educational experiences.
Spark engagement with teachers and students alike with Vyond Studio: the platform for creating your own animated videos. Bring dynamic, captivating content to your classroom with media you make yourself. Vyond’s drag-and-drop online studio and robust customization features make it easy to build any kind of animation, no matter your experience with video. Try creating your first video with a free trial of Vyond Studio.
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#### The Benefits of Video for Food Safety Training
For organizations that deal with food—restaurants, catering businesses, grocery stores—safety should be a top priority. Food safety is essential for customer health, and it’s also top-of-mind for consumers when choosing a food product. 69% of consumers are even willing to pay more if a product has a food safety certification.
By training staff in food safety techniques and procedures, you’ll reduce the chance of exposing your customers to foodborne illnesses or accidental allergic reactions. Along with protecting your customers, food safety training is required by law. Providing this education protects your customers and safeguards your business against steep fines, lawsuits, and the loss of your business license. There are many pre-made food handler certification programs available, but it’s also important for employees to understand the specifics of food safety at your business.
And while it may seem complicated to create custom food safety training for your company, it doesn’t have to be. With video, custom food safety training is as easy as pie.
Why use video courses for food safety training?
Video courses are a great supplement to in-person training. They can be more effective for some use cases, too—especially when it comes to food safety. Training videos help you visualize procedures and are more sustainable to create and reference on an on-going basis. Learn2Serve uses Vyond animation in the video below to explain why food safety training videos are important for any restaurant:
Demonstrate procedures
While basic food safety training is required by law before employees start working for you, it won’t train them on the procedures specific to the equipment you use. By demonstrating equipment-specific procedures, employees will better understand how you stay compliant with food safety laws and ensure the safety of your customers.
With video, you can explain and demonstrate procedures with visuals to help employees learn by example. Unlike in-person learning, video training allows employees to replay demonstrations to reinforce their understanding of the material. Video training also reduces the amount of time needed for shadowing, which gives managers greater bandwidth.
The animated video below explains cleaning and sanitizing policies. Animated videos are typically easier to create and update than live-action videos.
The example above—created in Vyond Studio—is available to Vyond customers as a customizable video template.
CUSTOMIZE THIS FOOD SAFETY TEMPLATE
This next video shows safety procedures specific to this kitchen. By placing the employee in a familiar environment, they’ll understand the order and location for each procedure from the moment they arrive.
Refresh employee knowledge
Every food handler must follow dozens of procedures to ensure food safety, including personal hygiene, sanitation, cross-contamination prevention, proper cooking and cooling procedures, and how to serve and store food—just to name a few. It’s worth having regular refresher training with your employees so that food safety stays top of mind.
It can be cumbersome, though, to set up face-to-face training every time employees need to refresh their knowledge. Video training is easy to reference and access when employees need it.
And compared to shooting live video, creating animated video training saves time and resources. You can easily update videos in animation software instead of needing to reshoot film when procedure details or laws change.
Save money
Once you create a video course, your organization can use it continuously. When employees need to brush up on a knowledge gap or learn a new skill, you can refer them to your training videos as a first step.
And if you use an animated video software like Vyond, you’ll be able to create and update food safety training videos at a fraction of the cost compared to hiring or purchasing. You also won’t need to pay for film equipment, props, and other live video expenses.
3 tips for creating food safety training courses
There’s quite a bit that goes into making an effective food safety training course. Consider these best practices when you start planning your videos.
Gather your resources in advance
Before you make your video, look up any local laws you want to reference. For example, you may need to refer to laws on specific meat-cooking temperatures, filling a customer’s reusable container, hygiene, or expiration-date marking. If you want to use a case study to illustrate the importance of food safety, now is the time to confirm you have all the details. Collect any existing written procedures that you want to demonstrate as well.
With all your resources gathered in advance, you can script your video, storyboard your scenes, and record or animate quickly.
Get buy-in from employees
If you force unwilling employees to comply, the training won’t necessarily be effective. If team members understand the importance of the training, they’ll be more likely to use the principles they learn on the job.
Consider explaining why food safety training is important at the beginning of your video. You might use stats on the prevalence of food allergies or foodborne illness. Or, share a real-life example of the consequences of not following food safety protocol.
This video illustrates a real-life botulism poisoning incident using custom animated drawings.
The video explains how inattentiveness to proper food safety procedures resulted in 10 people getting botulism poisoning and caused one young father to lose his life. Using a specific example clarifies the importance of food safety protocols and encourages buy-in from employees.
Use a learning management system
To host your training courses, learning management systems (LMSs) are available in a wide range of pricing models for your budget and use case. An LMS will serve as a host for your food safety training courses. Some learning management software also lets you assign courses to employees and organize them in a central, accessible location.
Make sure you choose an LMS with an assessment feature. Food safety information is very detailed, so employees may struggle to retain everything they learn. Assessments help you identify knowledge gaps so you can assign additional trainings as needed and ensure employees are retaining food safety information to keep your workplace safe. If you need to test the waters before selecting a more robust paid plan GoSkills and EduFlow both offer free options for smaller businesses.
Create food safety training videos with Vyond
Vyond’s animated video software makes it easy to create professional-quality food safety training videos—no prior video experience needed.
Speeding up video creation, our templates and prebuilt scenes include a wide range of character outfits and actions that suit the food industry. Update videos in minutes if any procedures or laws change; there’s no need to record or re-animate from scratch.
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#### The Best Text-to-Video AI Software for Creating Professional Videos
Existing and emerging text-to-video AI tools are making it easier than ever to create video content. And they’re only getting better. Here’s a look at the types of AI tools that exist now and what’s coming soon, the leading players, and the benefits of text-to-video generators.
What is text-to-video AI software?
A few years ago, software advertising itself as “AI-powered” and capable of transforming text to video entered the market, promising faster and easier outputs. These offerings generally fall into two categories:
The first are video makers that match keywords in a text prompt you provide to a random assortment of stock photos, music, and video clips that are tagged with similar keywords. The result: videos–usually geared for social media—that can feel stylistically inconsistent and generic.
The second are platforms that allow you to create videos narrated by a selection of human-like avatars that will say whatever text you provide. The result: “talking head” content that, despite advances in the technology, still comes off as stiff and less than genuine.
However, as of 2023, a new, far more powerful category of AI video creation tools is emerging. Unlike keyword matchers and avatar creators, this software is powered by generative AI (think ChatGPT and DALL-E 2) that has the potential to help companies create high-quality video content that’s both original and easily edited.
Let’s take a look at how these exciting AI-powered text-to-video makers work; which are available now and which are coming soon; and how they promise to change the way you make professional-grade videos.
Learn more about AI powered video
Leading AI text-to-video generators
Emerging text-to-video AI tools are being developed by both well-regarded brands adding generative AI functionality to their platforms and new companies working to bring their first product to market. Here are some of the main players.
Vyond Go
Even before the launch of Vyond Go in June 2023, Vyond’s animated video creation software was loaded with AI-powered features like Instant Video Translation, Photo to Character, Visual Content Search, and Speech Enhancement that help users automate time-consuming tasks and create content more quickly.
With the release of Vyond Go, the company became the first in the video creation industry to offer an AI-based script and video creator, capable of creating a script and high quality, editable video content, based on a text prompt, within seconds.
Once a first draft has populated, users can quickly polish the video within Vyond Go using a simple text-based editor, or take it into Vyond Studio for fine-tuning.
How Vyond Go Works
1. Enter a prompt or drop in content you want it to respond to.
Vyond Go creates video scripts with the help of ChatGPT, which is integrated with the platform. ChatGPT draws upon its vast Internet-based learning model to generate a script based on your prompt.
Or, if you include a sample of information in your prompt you want it to incorporate, it will generate content based primarily on that sample.
Learn more about ChatGPT video scripting from Vyond’s CEO
2. Choose the vibe, format, and location you want for your video
The Vyond Go platform allows you to choose from a multitude of locations (like Home, Abstract Background, Open Office), vibes (like formal, informative, casual, or playful), formats (like announcements, rants, and overviews), and layouts (like conversation or talking head).
3. Edit the video with Quick Edit—or refine it in Vyond Studio
After typing in your prompt and making your other selections, Vyond Go delivers a script and a starter video in seconds. You can then adjust text and voice-over content within Vyond Go. Or by clicking on the edit icon, you can fine-tune it within Vyond’s standard video creation platform, Vyond Studio–for example, swapping out characters, changing backgrounds, and instantly translating the video into 95 languages.
Pros:
Vyond Go is the only product like this on the market, and it’s available as of June 28, 2023.
The script and video output created with a text prompt is editable and in a unified style
All the AI tech exists right in the Vyond platform; there’s no need to use multiple tools to generate or edit content
Cons:
Vyond Go doesn’t yet have the ability to generate brand-new animated content based on a text prompt–but that functionality is coming soon
Thus far, you can use Vyond Go to create content in Vyond’s Business-friendly style, but not their Contemporary or Whiteboard styles
Watch Vyond Go’s Launch Webinar
Adobe Firefly
For more than five years, Adobe has been integrating Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) technology across its platform to automate tasks and boost creativity–technology they call Adobe Sensei.
In April 2023, Adobe entered the generative AI market with the launch of the beta version of Adobe Firefly, its new suite of creative generative AI models. As of June 2023, their offerings include the ability to generate original images, color variations, and other visual effects with a text prompt—elements producers can use to create videos. But soon Adobe hopes to also offer video producers the ability to make edits to already-recorded video, like changing color schemes, time of day, and even the seasons with a simple text prompt.
Pros:
Like Vyond, Adobe Firefly offers a variety of AI and generative AI functionality all in a single, already popular content creation and editing platform.
Cons:
Though the goal of Firefly is to make design projects simpler, Adobe products are still targeted towards designers. So non-designers may still face a learning curve.
Text-to-video AI tech still in R&D
A handful of tech companies are developing models that will soon make it possible for companies to create high-resolution video clips of scenes based on text prompts. While they’ve not yet brought a product to market as of June 2023, the research papers and sneak peeks they’re providing online make clear the huge potential for this technology.
Nvidia, a longtime leader in AI computing, is sharing its research on generating high-resolution video clips with latent diffusion models. Their website features samples of short, funny video clips they’ve been able to generate from text prompts, including ones of a polar bear playing a bass, a lion surfing, and a koala playing the piano.
Meta is previewing their Make-a-Video tool, which aims to create short video clips from both text-based prompts and static image prompts.
Newcomers like Runway.ml and Opus.ai are also sharing their research, and providing glimpses into what may be available in the near future.
Pros:
Once this class of text-to-video AI technology is more refined and user-friendly, it will be possible to create high-quality video content more easily than ever before.
Cons:
None of these companies are yet offering a viable product.
Most of the video clips these tools can create thus far are very short, lower-resolution GIF-length clips. As is, these outputs aren’t likely to be useful to companies looking for video content that fits their brand style.
Business reasons for using generative AI text-to-video tools
Faster video production
Generative AI text-to-video makers make it possible to create business-friendly, first-draft video content faster than ever before. Specifically:
L&D teams tasked with creating a high volume of training video content can turn around requests in less than half the time they’re used to
HR teams can use text-to-video tools to ensure they’re communicating effectively about policies or business changes in a timely manner
Sales departments can use generative AI text-to-video tools to keep up with the demand for creating highly personalized, tailored versions of general sales video content to share with prospects
Marketing teams can use generative AI text-to-video tools to respond immediately to urgent news or trends with right-time, right-place video content
Cheaper, more accessible video production
With these text-to-video AI tools in place, companies will be able to dramatically reduce their reliance on expensive video production vendors, and make it possible for anyone who has a good idea to create engaging video content, not just the design and video production teams on staff.
More imaginative content
Very soon, this technology will make it possible for an infinite number of creative ideas to be realized in seconds, simply by typing in a text prompt.
The future of text-to-video AI tools for business
This cutting-edge tech category is undeniably exciting. But what will ultimately determine the commercial success of these text-to-video AI tools is their ability to create business-friendly content that’s relevant, editable, and brand-compliant.
As of June 2023, only a few companies have brought such a product to market. But in the months and years to come, as the technology evolves and improves and the market provides feedback about its needs, more is sure to follow.
And video creation as we know it will never be the same.
To take Vyond Go for a spin: sign up for a free trial today.
Try Vyond for Free
#### The Big List of Video Marketing Statistics from 2015
It’s finally 2016! And if you’re like us then your marketing plans are in full swing for the upcoming months. But the question is: is video a part of your marketing efforts for 2016?
We think it should be.
One of our big focuses for the year is to help our fellow video makers understand why video is an important part of their marketing efforts. In an effort to convey this message we found ourselves looking for every possible video marketing statistic. (Because ya know, stats are a marketer’s best friend).
So if you find yourself looking to convince a colleague, friend, or anti-video maker why they should embrace more video in the New Year, share some well researched stats with them.
Video Marketing Statistics from 2015
Source: Forbes
“59% of viewers will watch a video to completion that is less than one minute.” – Wistia
“92% of mobile video viewers share videos with others.” – Invodo
“39% of executives have called a vendor after watching a video.” – Forbes
Source: Forbes Insight
“When marketers included a video in an email, the click-through rate increased by 200% – 300%” – Forrester
“The average internet user spends 88% more time on a website with video.” – CodeFuel
“300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute.” – YouTube
“64% of consumers are more likely to buy a product after watching a video about it.” – comScore
Source: Socialmouths
“Visitors who view videos stay on web sites an average of 2 minutes longer than those who don’t view videos.” – comScore
“Homepage videos are shown to increase conversion rates by 20% or more.” – ReelSEO
“Using video on landing pages can increase conversion by 80%” – Unbounce
“Mobile makes up almost 40% of global watch time on YouTube.” – YouTube
Source: Brainshark
“6 billion hours of video are watched monthly on YouTube.” – YouTube
“1.8 Million words is the value of one minute of video.” – Dr. James McQuivey, Forrester
“Only 24% of brands are using online video to market to consumers.” – Kantar Media
“Last year the amount of video from people and brands in Facebook’s News feed increased 3.6x year-over-year.” – Facebook
Source: Brainshark
“Social Media Examiner recently asked marketers which forms of content they most want to learn about in 2015. Creating original visual assets took first place, followed by producing original videos.” – SME
“In 2014 the use of video content for B2B marketing increased by 8% to 58%, while the use of infographics topped the adoption list increasing in usage by 9% to 52%.” – DemandGen Report
“The popularity of whitepapers as a B2B content marketing format is actually declining in relation to more interactive, easily digestible formats such as video.” – B2B Content Marketing Report
“93% of marketers use video for online marketing, sales or communication.” – Brainshark
Source: Eloqua
“B2B and B2C marketers all over the world say video is one of the top 3 most effective social media marketing tactics.” – Brainshark
“65% of video viewers watch more than 3/4 of a video.” – Syndacast
“Videos appear to be more prominent as they contain an eye-catching thumbnail image encouraging more clicks.” – Syndacast
Source: CMI
“69% of smartphone users say videos are a perfect solution for smartphone viewing as it offers a quick way for consumers to grasp an overview of a product.” – Syndacast
“45.4% of Internet users view at least one video online over the course of a month.” – comScore
“75% of executives told Forbes they watch work-related videos on business websites at least once a week.” – Forbes
“78% of people watch videos online every week.” – MWP
Source: Vidyard
“16 minutes and 49 seconds – how much time the average user spends watching online video ads every month.” – comScore
“50% of executives watch business-related videos on YouTube.” – Forbes
“55% of people watch videos online every day.” – MWP
“More than 80% of senior executives watch more online video today than they did a year ago.” – Forbes
Source: Digital Information World
“54% of senior executives share work-related videos with colleagues at least weekly.” – ReelSEO
“69% of marketing, sales and business professionals have used video marketing and another 31% are planning to.” – Demand Metric
“A massive 81% of people feature their video on their brand website.” – Demand Metric
“96% of B2B companies are planning to use video in their content marketing over the next year.” – Merchant Marketing Group
Source: Socialmouths
“67% of marketers found video marketing somewhat successful. 18% found video marketing very successful.” – Demand Metric
“48% of the most successful video creators have five or more years of experience creating videos. In contrast, only 25% of less successful creators have five or more years of experience, and 48% have fewer than three years.” – CMI
“45% of marketers said they use a combination of outsourcing video production and creating videos in-house.” – CMI
“94% of those who are currently creating videos say they will either increase or maintain their video creation budget during the next 12 months.” – CMI
So there you have it. Video marketing made a big splash last year and is set to see an increase in adoption in 2016. However, companies are still tasked with the challenge of successfully incorporating video as a part of their marketing plans.
That’s why we partnered with the Content Marketing Institute to develop a custom research report on how marketers can start smart, scale up, and stand out by using video as an intelligent piece of a content marketing approach.
Download the report for free now!
Have more statistics on why video is an important part of marketing? Share them with us on Twitter or Facebook.
#### The Complete Guide to Microlearning Videos
Video is Ideally Suited for Microlearning
Across industries, companies want workers to regularly build their knowledge. But traditional learning methods—textbooks, lectures, online courses—are often too time-consuming to fit in busy work schedules. According to The Association for Talent Development (ATD), organizations must be prepared to facilitate a learning experience at a moment’s notice to capitalize on motivational windows before they close.
To that end, we recommend training employees with microlearning videos.
Some of the benefits of using microlearning videos include:
Takes less time to source, produce, maintain, and consume than traditional classroom sessions or longer-form e-learning
Fits perfectly into a continuous diet of email, messaging, and social media usage to engage learners
Respects working memory limitations and gives people the time to reflect on material and connect it to what they already know
To help you take full advantage of microlearning videos, we’ve built a five-part video series, blended with six detailed blog posts, to give you everything you need to start creating.
Learn more
#### The Importance of Video & Animation in Remote Training
Training a team isn’t always easy, but creating remote training courses for a distributed workplace brings up a whole new set of challenges. Your team might be dispersed across multiple locations or time zones, technology can present hurdles, and attention is often elusive.
Fortunately, there are a number of tools at your disposal, including eLearning, to make remote training more tenable; eLearning makes it possible to train your employees no matter where they are.
But remote training isn’t as simple as creating a Google Doc or downloading a few courses online. Trainers need to implement the right elements within eLearning to ensure that your team can pay attention and glean the right information from the materials. But first, what’s the deal with a remote environment?
The Challenges of Remote Training
While telecommuting offers great flexibility, remote environments come with some unique challenges. These challenges, most of which relate to not physically having your team in front of you, often make remote training especially difficult.
No face-to-face interaction
The lack of face-to-face interactions can make remote training, and remote work in general, difficult for many workers. It’s easy to lose the attention of your audience when you’re simply speaking to people during a video call. This is why it’s important to give people a chance to provide feedback, be it via email, chat, a call, etc.
One-on-one requires employee effort
In a traditional office setting, it’s easy for you to see if someone’s struggling, at which point, you can bring them into your office for a one-on-one session. Remote environments make it more difficult to discern who is doing well and who is stressed, lost, and so on.
This can be remedied by giving your team a private channel for providing feedback, asking questions, or simply venting. If possible, create more than one channel. For example, you could offer a place for feedback within your eLearning courses and also make sure people know your digital door is always open via email, Slack, or any other online communication tool you use.
Too much tech
Remote working tools are vital but can lead to technical hiccups and headaches for employees. Streamlining training and removing any unnecessary technical tools makes this process easier.
It’s also important that you give people the chance to ask any questions they may have about the tools you’re using, because many people may be using these tools for the first time.
Stage fright prevents questions
When everyone is in the same physical location, it’s often easier for people to raise their hands and ask questions. In remote environments, it’s easy to skip over people or make it difficult to ask questions. Some people may also feel uncomfortable asking questions because their face is generally center stage when speaking. Much like the challenges we mentioned above, this can be remedied by giving people a private channel for feedback.
The above challenges are only a few of the many hurdles that arise with a remote environment. But with proper training and a bit of patience, all of these challenges can be overcome. Now, how exactly do you go about training in a remote environment?
How is Remote Training Different From In-Office Training?
It should come as no surprise that training in a remote environment is different from learning in a traditional workspace. With your team spread out and connected online, traditional training methods simply won’t work.
There are several key areas where remote training methods differ from in-office training.
Communication
The office gives you the benefit of making a personal connection, having a straightforward exchange, and seeing your team in the halls or around the workplace.
The remote environment leaves communication at the mercy of technology, which often means employees have to take the initiative to manage up and ask questions because it’s difficult to visually gauge if people are looking flustered or lost (and it leaves leaders in the position of having to reach out if they think there’s an issue).
To open this template video in your account, sign into Vyond Studio or start a free trial and simply click here. Then learn more about how to use Vyond video templates.
The ability to reach all types of learners
Not everyone likes to read; others may not enjoy videos. It’s already difficult enough to effectively teach various types of learners. Remote training is especially nuanced because you’re left with fewer options (you can’t hand out training flyers or meet in person, for example).
Tracking performance
A big part of training is knowing where problems exist. Tracking performance in an office is slightly easier because you can see if people are working, gauge their attitudes, note whether they’re turning work in on time, and so on.
Remote environments require more diligence. You need to set up systems that allow for numerous touchpoints, ensuring that your team is producing quality work at every stage. This will allow you to look for problem areas and create training that encompasses those areas.
Time differences
When you’re a remote team, you’re exactly that — remote. That means you can have people in very different time zones, which can rule out live training.
This makes eLearning, animations, and videos even more viable because multiple live training sessions for various time zones aren’t always possible or practical. This also leaves your employees with reference material they can return to again and again.
How to Use Video and Animation in Remote Training
Video and animation can make remote training methods more engaging, entertaining, and effective. But there are some best practices to keep in mind when using video and animation in your remote training.
Tell a story
Animated videos are a great way to tell a story. When writing an article on a topic, it can take hundreds of words to drive home the point of a subject while also telling a coherent story. Animation, especially when coupled with audio, makes it easier to deliver your message while also telling a story at the same time.
For example, watch the mock cybersecurity training video below. The video immerses the learner in an animated story while teaching a valuable lesson about the importance of password security:
To open this template video in your account, sign into Vyond Studio or start a free trial and simply click here. Then learn more about how to use Vyond video templates.
Include interactivity in your animation
Animated vides are even better when they’re interactive. Interactivity turns an animated video into more of a game or a choice-based story, which can be especially engaging. While you shouldn’t use this approach for every animation or video you make, it’s a great format to use when covering any kind of situational topic. For example, if you’re training your team on how to navigate a sale, you can make an interactive animation that allows your team to reenact a sale.
Take a look at this list of interactive video examples for inspiration. There are several examples of using animated video with Articulate’s Storyline. There’s also an example from The Game Agency where turned a video about handling sales objections into a game. Watch the video example and play the sales game now.
Keep in mind that video isn’t a substitute for a teacher
Video and animation can make complex topics easier to understand and can be entertaining to boot. But it’s still important you have a strong teaching element in your training process. This allows you to have a dialogue with your team, answer questions, gauge whether they’re learning, and more.
To cover your bases, have your resident expert on the topic present in the eLearning as well. By doing this, you’ll have a real person who is available to field questions your team may have and can offer further insight on the topic. Video doesn’t entirely replace other forms of training—it can be used in combination. For example, video can be included as a follow-up to online training or it can be used to start the conversation. You can include a message at the end of a video that tells your team to contact a company representative or online resource if there are any additional questions.
In this example, the human resources representative explains the Families First Coronavirus Response Act and encourages colleagues to contact HR if they have further questions.
To open this template video in your account, sign into Vyond Studio or start a free trial and simply click here. Then learn more about how to use Vyond video templates.
Use a proper mix of content formats, not just video
There’s no denying that video and animation are great, but a blend of content types ensures that you’re reaching all kinds of learners. Include articles, quizzes, audio, eLearning, and video for good measure. This wide variety of content types will engage multiple learning types, keep your team from getting bored with the training, and help with comprehension.
Video and animation can make training fun and effective, especially when used properly. With the tips above, you’ll be well on your way to having a course that hits all the right beats with your team. But there’s more to remote training than video.
Additional Tips for Remote Training Courses
Remote training is different from traditional training and, as such, requires a different approach. The following tips will help ensure that your team is getting as much from remote training courses as possible.
Train on remote training
Many people may be working remotely for the first time too. Remote work has benefits, but it also comes with challenges. With proper training, you can help your team feel more at ease in their new style of work. Here’s one video idea to help onboard new team members with tips for excelling at working remotely for the first time:
To open the video in your account, sign into Vyond Studio or start a free trial and simply click here. Then learn more about how to use Vyond video templates.
Always follow up after a training session
If you’re hosting any kind of live training or webinar, follow the presentation with a transcript and summary of what was covered. This will ensure that learners who prefer reading have what they need to succeed, and those that may have missed something can fill any knowledge gaps.
Pair people with a mentor
It’s easy for people to feel alone in a remote environment, especially if they’re new to working remotely. Pair people with a mentor or onboarding buddy. This will help ensure that they don’t have any knowledge gaps, since they’ll have a designated person who can questions. They’ll also know they can rely on this person, which will help with any feelings of isolation.
Hold regular lunch-and-learn sessions
Lunch-and-learn sessions are 30-minute learning sessions, during which a member of the team can educate others on a certain topic during the traditional lunch hour. These allow people to learn a variety of skills, take ownership, teach, and keep people engaged in a remote setting.
Have a tracking system in place for eLearning progress
Ideally, you should be using a feature-rich learning management system (LMS). An LMS will allow you to house your eLearning courses in one place, track the progress of your team, and see if certain courses aren’t be completed or are taking too long to complete.
Remote, but Completely Successful
Your team may be remote, but with quality eLearning material, you can bring your team together and ensure that everyone gets a quality education. And don’t be afraid to reach out to your team to see how training is going; feedback is always valuable, especially in a remote setting where you don’t have the benefit of random small talk. Take your time, develop a nice blend of content, and don’t be afraid to experiment with new ideas.
Add Vyond to your list of remote working tools. Start a free trial.
#### The moment we are facing right now
This is a time of great stress, and we hope you are all keeping well.
We have been sheltering-in-place for a couple of months now, living with the fear of contracting a dangerous virus.
In the midst of all this, another virus has had a resurgence—the continuing injustice perpetrated against people of color in this country.
The saddest thing you can do today, and we encourage you to do it, is type “Death of George Floyd,” “Death of Ahmaud Arbery,” “Death of Breonna Taylor,” etc. into Google and then click the “People Also Searched For” link. You end up scrolling through a long list of faces pushed out of this life against their will. Many were household names for a news cycle or three, then forgotten, replaced by newer victims. Google does a fine job at bearing witness.
As a company—not just a business but a company of people—our vision is one where we enable richer communication, engagement, and understanding between individuals and communities. This vision should and will guide our support for marginalized communities and condemnation of anti-Black and all forms of racism. Why are we lifting “anti-Black” out of the collective “all”? Because when you scroll through the list of those who unwillingly gave their lives on a sidewalk, in their homes, in the back of a police van, walking or jogging down the street—it is primarily Black faces looking back. That is the moment we are facing right now.
It is also a moment in which to ask, what action can I take today to help prevent senseless deaths tomorrow? With that in mind, Vyond is making a donation to the Center for Policing Equity, and will also match employee donations to this organization, dollar for dollar.
This page on President Obama’s site has other good resources for information, contribution, and engagement.
Stay safe,
Gary Lipkowitz, Vyond CEO
No Black community has ever taken to the streets demanding that White people would just love us more. Communities march to stop the killing. Racism is about behaviors, not feelings.
– Phillip Atiba Goff, PhD
Co-Founder and President of CPE
It is up to men to stick up for women, straight people to stick up for gay people, and white people to stick up for people of color. This is not an issue for black people to solve. It is an issue for the rest of us to work on because we are the ones perpetuating it.
– Dr. Valerie Williams Goss
Updates
Vyond will also match employee donations to Black Lives Matter and Causa Justa, an organization local to our Bay Area office.
Juneteenth is a company-wide holiday.
Pride month and intersectionality.
#### The Mysterious Disappearance of Stories: How Rance Greene and Vyond’s Taylor Morgan Put It All Together
Rance Greene, the author of Instructional Story Design and founder of the School of Story Design, has been coaching talent development professionals for years on how to incorporate storytelling techniques into their training that help employees better comprehend new concepts–and take action.
Before he was a full-time author and speaker, Rance was an L&D practitioner himself–and it was in his role as compliance training director at Blue Cross and Blue Shield that he became a big fan of Vyond’s animated video creation software. When we asked Rance to create and present a Vyond Masterclass earlier this year, he decided he wanted to take a fresh approach that would highlight all the great things Vyond Studio can do, especially when paired with Adobe Premiere Pro: “I prefer not to be a talking head, I like interacting with people, so I decided to create a movie instead.”
With the help of Taylor Morgan, one of our expert video producers, Rance created the 30-minute-long The Mysterious Disappearance of Stories – a video masterclass that incorporates live-action footage, all varieties of animation, music, and more—and showcases his most powerful ideas about incorporating story elements into eLearning.
Watch the Storytelling Masterclass
The response to The Mysterious Disappearance of Stories was incredible, garnering rave reviews from the 2,000+ people who attended. Since many attendees asked for a peek behind the curtain, we asked Rance and Taylor if they’d provide a breakdown of their collaboration, from start to finish. And being helpful guys, they said yes.
Brainstorming the Concept
For Rance, any story used for training needs two important elements: strong conflict and relatable characters. To illustrate this point he decided to ground the video in a fun, over-the-top story that imagined a future world in which bad eLearning content had caused stories everywhere to go missing…and the only person who could bring them back was you, the viewer.
As for relatable characters, he decided to feature three different Rance characters: Rance 1, his real, live-action self; Rance 2, a business-friendly guy with a stubbled jawline who added some light-hearted comic relief; and Rance 3, a serious news anchor type.
“I wanted to show the different styles Vyond was capable of and introduce a little comedy. Also, practically speaking,” Rance added, “there just wasn’t the time to involve anyone else with the voiceover work.”
Together, this intrepid trio would investigate the story-less world of eLearning and hunt down answers on how to solve the problem. And Taylor’s technical wizardry on Vyond and Adobe Premiere Pro would combine all three characters’ journeys to seamlessly interact with one another on screen.
Animating yourself is easy with Vyond
If you’d like to create an animated version of yourself–or other real people–for use in your training videos, Vyond now makes it easier than ever before. With our brand-new AI-powered Photo to Character feature, you can now upload a photo of yourself, and VyondAI will automatically generate a character which can then be edited or combined with different elements and outfits. And if you prefer to start from scratch, Vyond’s Character Creator feature also provides a huge range of options for customizing every aspect of your characters.
Shooting the Live-Action Video
After Rance had the big idea in place, he started writing the script and created a basic storyboard. To make sure viewers would stay invested in the story, he incorporated a lot of dialogue between the three Rance characters and ensured the action of the story took place in a variety of locations, both real and virtual.
When it came time to film live-action footage, Rance enlisted his family, friends, and students to serve as actors. Impressively, he was able to capture everything he needed with only an iPhone, a tripod, and the help of his wife, who stood behind the camera holding cue cards for him to read. For the footage of other live-action characters, Rance used his iPhone with a gimble and stitched the short video takes together using iMovie.
Throughout the recording process, Rance also took care to ensure the footage he shot and the audio he created for his animated selves would be easy to work with in post-production:
“I filmed the characters one at a time, so I didn’t need to worry about switching between Rance, the serious news anchor-type guy, and the funny business-friendly one. I said my lines for live-action Rance 1, then in my head, I said Rance 2’s lines and reacted. The challenging part was making sure there was no delay between the spoken lines.”
Use a high-quality lavalier mic
Unwanted background noise can ruin great takes. Rance avoided this problem by using a
TrackE wireless lavalier microphone from Tentacle. With the TrackE he was able to record high-fidelity audio directly into the device, which Taylor was easily able to sound engineer and sync with the video footage in post-production.
Keep it chatty
According to Rance, “In eLearning, you need to gear it towards dialogue as much as possible. It puts you in the moment, it’s the most powerful form of storytelling.” So when you’re creating your script, avoid long stretches of single-person narration. Instead, communicate information using a back-and-forth between characters. Then, to ensure the dialogue sounds natural, read it out loud.
Putting All the Pieces Together
Once all the raw footage and audio for “The Mysterious Disappearance of Stories” was compiled, and Rance had finished creating the animations in Vyond, he handed the baton to Taylor, who added a few extra animation elements, edited the audio and attached it to match his characters, finessed the timing a bit, and added music and sound effects as needed.
“I marked on my script where I wanted two characters on the screen at once and Taylor worked to make a seamless back-and-forth,” Rance says.
First Taylor combined the audio from the animated sections with the recordings of live-action Rance, creating a single, easier-to-manage audio track. Taylor then exported this file into Vyond where he added the animations so they matched that audio.
“Almost all the Vyond videos I make, I’ll make the audio first, then start building the scenes. I’ll edit the audio in Premiere, and export it as one single-track file that has the timing I want. That way, when I bring it into Vyond, it’s just one file and I can build scenes and move them around and it doesn’t change the timing of the audio. It makes everything a lot tidier.” – Taylor Morgan
In only a few instances did Taylor have to slow down live-action Rance’s footage to leave enough time for his alter egos to say their lines in between his own. “Taylor stitched the videos together beautifully. He made the animation and the live-action videos seamless”, said Rance.
Be strategic about sound
Adding sound effects and a musical score to your video can help create a sense of continuity and create powerful emotional effects at key storytelling moments. Taylor used music found within Vyond Studio and from a subscription service called Artlist.io, which provides access to tens of thousands of songs along with the licensing rights, so you can use them however you want to.
The Finished Project
While it’s unlikely most L&D content producers will routinely find themselves making a video of this length and complexity, Rance and Taylor hope their video will inspire them (and video creators of all kinds) to try a few new techniques, and think outside the box in how they present information.
Rance estimates he spent 90 hours total perfecting the dialogue, shooting scenes, and editing clips–and Taylor estimates that he spent about 40 hours editing and producing the final product. But to put this effort in perspective, Taylor estimates that if he were doing editing for a 30-minute live-action video, the process would have taken almost 10 times as long. And Rance says he hasn’t found anything else that would have allowed him to make something this creative, in as short an amount of time as Vyond did.
“I’ve been a Vyond fan for a long time, and as far as I’m concerned, it just keeps getting better,” Rance said. “It’s efficient, it’s easy to use, and, most importantly, when I need to bring one of my stories to life, Vyond is the tool I reach for most often.”
Join the 2,000+ attendees who watched and loved Rance’s Masterclass, The Mysterious Disappearance of Stories by clicking on the link below.
Watch the Storytelling Masterclass
To see how using Vyond can help you meet your communications goals, sign up for our free trial.
Or for more inspiration and step-by-step video production guides, check out the Vyond Producers Hub.
Rance Greene
Rance’s background is in theater, film, and choreography. But it was while working in New York City that his passion for storytelling flourished. “I’m from the North Carolina mountains, teaching inner-city kids from the Bronx and Spanish Harlem. I needed help establishing trust with them. Stories were our connecting point.” Years later, Rance first stumbled across Vyond when it was still called GoAnimate. He instantly became a fan–and has created L&D content with Vyond’s easy-to-use tools for years.
Rance’s training solutions have been recognized by ATD, The eLearning Guild, Training Magazine, and The Telly Awards. He is also the best-selling author of Instructional Story Design, an invaluable reference tool for learning how to craft effective, story-based corporate training courses, complete with downloadable templates and practice activities.
Taylor Morgan
Taylor has nearly 12 years of experience in video and sound production. From a young age, he’s always loved stories: “I grew up during a time before the Internet. I was in the Boy Scouts camping a lot and the evening entertainment would always revolve around stories. For years I did live-action video production, so Vyond was my first introduction to storytelling using animated characters–which was a whole new ballgame and something I’ve loved doing ever since.”
#### The Right Way to Use 2D Animation in Email
Using 2D animation in your brand’s email newsletters is a great way to help your company stand out. Not only are animated images aesthetically pleasing, but they can also increase the chance of a person clicking on the link. That click can boost website visitors, increase your number of social followers, or generate more sales.
While there are many benefits of using 2d animation in email, you need to make sure that you do it right. This guide will walk you through seven things you need to keep in mind when creating eye-catching animated graphics for your email marketing campaign.
1. Align your CTA and the animation
Every email you send to your audience should have a goal. That goal is generally to get your subscribers to click on a link so they can visit your blog, a sales page, or something else entirely.
From the subject line you use through to the copy, and the animated graphics, every element of your email should support that goal of getting someone to take action. Consider the following example:
The animated graphic of an ice cream melting supports the time-sensitive special offer in the image above. The use of imagery aligns with the overall messaging.
Another way to generate this sense of urgency is by using an animated email countdown timer driving customers to your Call To Action (CTA).
When selecting animated images for your email marketing campaign, consider how the image supports your goal. Don’t use images just for the sake of it. Get specific by creating custom graphics with a 2D animation maker like Vyond Studio.
2. Stick to your brand voice
Your company should have a clearly defined brand voice. Your brand voice is the lasting impression that you want to leave with your audience. In the example I shared earlier with the dripping ice cream, the brand uses cartoon imagery. That type of friendly imagery is used throughout all of Headspace’s marketing material.
For example, here’s a screenshot of the company’s homepage.
The type of imagery they use on the homepage aligns with the animated graphic in the email. That’s important because coherent branding enables people to recognize marketing material produced by your company quickly.
You need to ensure your animation is synchronized with your brand voice. For example, if your brand doesn’t have a quirky or humorous vibe, avoid humorous memes.
Consider the following example of Chanel, which used this in their email newsletter to promote their Triple Row Watch. The animated graphic looks simple and classy. Those are two of the main characteristics that embody its brand voice:
If you’re thinking of using animated graphics in your email, ensure it aligns with your brand voice. Not doing so can make it appear out of place and leave customers confused.
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3. Create customized GIFs
Customized GIFs, in particular, are an excellent option for your company’s marketing email. With a bit of time and a good concept, you can create an attractive animated image for your email that grabs the attention of your audience.
Consider the following example of Hawthorne, a cologne company. In one of their emails, they leveraged interest in the Netflix show Stranger Things to promote their new scent.
The above image is a perfect example of a customized animated email message. The company used a hit show to promote its new product. It’s enticing and makes you want to click on the link.
The custom animated graphic Hawthorne created for this campaign looks great. You can imagine people sharing this image online with friends and family.
4. Consider the image size
Image size is important in emails. The larger your image, the more time it takes for the graphic to load in your inbox. If it takes too long to load, people won’t wait for the message to open and might even instantly delete the email.
That’s bad news for your email delivery rates.
When adding animated graphics to an email, make sure to consider the file size. Your image should be a lot less than one megabyte. Ideally, it should be under 500kb. You can use compression software to optimize the animated image size while maintaining quality.
5. Ensure the animation is embedded properly
If your animation is not embedded properly into your emails, it’ll fail to make an impact on your target audience. Not to mention, it’ll look aesthetically displeasing as well.
To avoid problems, make sure to test your email before sending it off. This is straightforward. Most email marketing platforms allow you to test an email before sending it to subscribers.
When adding images to an email, use alt text so readers with visual impairments.
Moreover, if you’re choosing to opt for brand-specific, customizable videos in your emails, you must ensure they are perfectly embedded as well. Videos can positively impact email open and Click Through Rates (CTR). Many studies have found that the adoption of video animation in email marketing can lead to open rate increases of 6 percent.
One last note. It is essential that your email reaches the receiver in the first place, so make sure to use an SPF record checker to ensure your domain’s safety.
6. Know your target audience
If you’re going to run a marketing campaign, you need to understand your target audience. Most companies do this by creating audience personas. An audience persona is a profile of your ideal customer and mentions their characteristics.
The audience persona includes information about demographics, age, gender, and occupation, among others. You should also try to define pain points and interests.
The following image is an example of an audience persona:
Understanding your target audience is important in email marketing. The better you understand your audience, the more likely you are to create marketing material that they find interesting. For instance, if you have a target audience aged 50 plus, but you’re using pop culture GIFs or memes in your email newsletters, chances are they might not resonate with them.
7. Animate only a part of the image
It’s important for you not to overdo your images and only animate a part of them. Remember that less is more. Flixel, which is a tool to create customized cinemagraphs, carried out research and concluded that using cinemagraphs in content helped produce 5.6x higher click-through rates when compared to still images:
If you’re looking to highlight a specific part of your email, cinemagraphs are your best bet. Not only will they create a seamless looping effect, but they will also instantly grab your readers’ attention.
In addition to live-action cinemagraphs, you can reach for 2D animation makers like Vyond to create custom GIFs and videos.
Here’s a nice example below from Harry’s:
I like the image in the campaign. However, notice how your eye is drawn to the clock.
In this instance, the animation doesn’t support the goal of the email. Animating the box to reveal the free shipping offer, for instance, might have been a better use of animation in this instance.
Bottom Line
When looking to use animation in email, it’s pivotal for you to understand its do’s and don’ts. Remember, it’s about quality rather than quantity when it comes to animation in email marketing. Overcrowding animated videos or images will confuse your customers. They won’t know what message you’re trying to get across to them.
Align your animation with your CTA, keep it simple yet intriguing, and make sure it’s worth looking at. Make sure it’s relevant to your target audience as well, as this will make your emails speak personally to them.
The more your animation attracts your readers, the more they’ll be willing to click on your CTA and purchase your products and services. Good luck!
About the Author
Sam is part of the marketing team at Mailshake. Sam’s goal is to inspire people to not just “hang in there” but to thrive. When Sam’s not publishing or promoting new content you can find him playing sports and cooking up a storm in the kitchen.
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#### The Telly Awards: 10+ Winning Videos Created in Vyond
Vyond is honored to announce that our team took home 10 wins at the 42nd Annual Telly Awards, including Best Social Video for Education & Discovery.
We’re really proud to be recognized for our content, especially by one of the leading industry awards for excellence in video. The list of our fellow Telly winners include some of the biggest brands, studios, and agencies around including Netflix, Condé Nast, Adobe, and The Walt Disney Company.
We’re prouder still that all our award-winning videos were created in Vyond Studio.
Vyond Studio is an online animation platform that allows anyone to create award-winning videos. Just look at Southern Company Gas’ internal communications video, created with this Vyond video template!
Here’s a quick round-up of all our videos that were recognized at the 2021 Telly Awards:
Black Characters in Children’s Books
Mental Health in the Workplace
Vyond Templates for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
Discovering Vyond with Prakriti
The Agile Mindset
The Hero’s Journey
Supporting Local Food Banks
Adjusting the Audio Balance
Gender & Pronouns
Nurture Nature
Vyond’s Telly Award-Winning Videos
Black Characters in Children’s Books
Gold Telly Award: Social Video for Education & Discovery
Video Producer: Sofala Ntweng-Knapton, Vyond
Manager, Video & Design: Shahrzade Ehya, Vyond
Marketing Communications Manager: Kevin Doherty, Vyond
Use this award-winning video at your own organization! If you’re a Vyond customer, you can use this video template to create your own version.
USE THIS VIDEO TEMPLATE
Mental Health in the Workplace
Bronze Telly Award: Non-Broadcast Video for Employee Communications
Manager, Video & Design: Shahrzade Ehya, Vyond
Director of Marketing: Amanda Morgan, Vyond
Video Producer: Prakriti Rai, Vyond
Independent Scriptwriter: Karen Kostrinsky
Voiceovers: David Dolan, Shahrzade Ehya, Amanda Morgan, Taylor Morgan, Sukriti Rai, Marco Sevilla
If you’re already using Vyond, you can create your own version of these videos. Head over to the Vyond Template Library and search “mental health” to find these templates and more.
VISIT THE TEMPLATE LIBRARY
Vyond Templates for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
Bronze Telly Award: Branded Content Campaign for D&I
Director of Marketing: Amanda Morgan, Vyond
Head of Marketing: Stacy Adams, Vyond
Manager, Video & Design: Shahrzade Ehya, Vyond
Marketing Communications Manager: Kevin Doherty, Vyond
Independent Filmmaker: Taylor Morgan
Video Producer: Prakriti Rai, Vyond
Video Producer: Sofala Ntweng-Knapton, Vyond
Video Producer: Lye Cwan Ng, Vyond
Video Producer: Roshni Champaneri, Vyond
Video Producer: Daniela Rizzo, Vyond
Vyond customers have access to all these video templates and more. Browse the full Template Video Library to quickly create customized DEI videos.
BROWSE VIDEO TEMPLATES
Discovering Vyond with Prakriti
Bronze Telly Award: Social Video Series for Products & Services
Video Producer: Prakriti Rai, Vyond
Manager, Video & Design: Shahrzade Ehya, Vyond
Director of Marketing: Amanda Morgan, Vyond
The Agile Mindset
Bronze Telly Award: Branded Content with a Budget Under $100,000
Speaker: Ahmed Sidky PhD, ICAgile
Marketing Communications Manager: Kevin Doherty, Vyond
Independent Filmmaker: Taylor Morgan
Senior Director of Marketing: Elisia Choi, ICAgile
Marketing Manager: Ashley Kraner, ICAgile
Manager, Video and Design: Shahrzade Ehya, Vyond
The Hero’s Journey
Bronze Telly Award: Branded Content for Education
Story: Ricco Lam and Lily Ho, Vyond
Producers: Animation Team, Vyond
Scriptwriting and Voiceover: Isobel McKenzie, Vyond
Director of Design & Video Lab: Emily Chau, Vyond
Tailor this video by using it as a template in your existing Vyond account.
TAILOR THIS VIDEO
Supporting Local Food Banks
Bronze Telly Award: Branded Content for Social Responsibility
Marketing Communications Manager: Kevin Doherty, Vyond
Video Producer: Prakriti Rai, Vyond
Head of Marketing: Stacy Adams, Vyond
Director of Marketing: Amanda Morgan, Vyond
You can support your local community with a customized version of this video and use this video template in any existing Vyond account.
USE THIS VIDEO TEMPLATE
Adjusting the Audio Balance
Bronze Telly Award: Branded How-To/DIY Content
Scriptwriting & Voiceover: Isobel McKenzie, Vyond
Story: Joe Lui, Vyond
Producer: Joe Lui, Vyond
If you’re a Vyond customer, you can import this video into Vyond Studio as an editable video template.
EDIT THIS VIDEO TEMPLATE
Gender & Pronouns
Bronze Telly Award: Branded Content for D&I
Marketing Communications Manager: Kevin Doherty, Vyond
Video Producer: Prakriti Rai, Vyond
Director of Marketing: Amanda Morgan, Vyond
You can customize this training video by importing it into an existing Vyond account.
IMPORT THIS VIDEO TEMPLATE
Nurture Nature
Bronze Telly Award: Branded Animation Content Campaign
Story: Rex Law, Vyond
Producer: Rex Law, Vyond
Vyond customers can customize these videos to create their own branded content.
CUSTOMIZE THESE VIDEOS
Make award-winning video content.
Videos created with Vyond Studio swept with more than ten awards from the 2021 Telly Awards, and all of those videos were created in part by everyday employees. You, too, can communicate with industry-leading content. With Vyond Studio, anyone can make media that moves, even if they don’t have any experience with video production. Give it a try by creating your own video with a free trial of Vyond. (Who knows? Maybe you’ll win a Telly for it…)
FREE TRIAL OF VYOND
#### The Ultimate Guide to AI-Powered Video: What It Is and How to Best Use It
AI is changing the way companies create video content. Find out which categories of AI-powered tools can help you create videos faster, the pros and cons of each, and the many ways using this technology can help you meet your business goals.
Table of contents
What is AI powered video?
Examples of AI video maker tools
Generative AI video tools: the pros and cons
The business benefits of using generative AI
The future of AI video maker tools
What is AI powered video?
While smartphones, webcams, and simple video editor apps have made it incredibly easy in the past few decades to create simple video content for personal use, creating professional-grade videos at scale has remained, for many companies, a serious logistical challenge.
Fortunately, that’s about to change. With the arrival of powerful new generative AI technology—including advanced AI chatbots, text-to-image and text-to-video generators, AI avatar makers, and AI-powered animated video creation software, content creators have more tools at their disposal than ever before to help them create business videos quickly and affordably.
There’s a difference between what AI tools and humans can create, of course. Generative AI models are able to mine the gigantic datasets they’re trained on to create content that reproduces linguistic and visual styles that people have spent centuries perfecting. However, AI text generators are still unable to come up with original ideas, reason through difficult puzzles, and often serve up answers that are categorically false. And image and video generators often struggle to translate text-based prompts into content that both reflects the requester’s intentions and is of a high enough quality to use as is.
Still—even in its infancy, Generative AI tools are already making it much easier for professionals with limited video production experience to create professional videos. You don’t need years of design, directing, and editing experience to get started: all you need is an idea…and a prompt.
Examples of AI video maker tools
From text-to-audio synthesizers to video generators that transform visuals from one style to another, there’s a huge range of AI tools out there. Here is a quick breakdown of the types of tools that today’s content creators can take advantage of.
Text tools for creating AI videos
To create an engaging video, first you need a great script. Text-based AI tools like ChatGPT and Bard are advanced LLMs (Large Language Models) that can quickly generate scripts based on text prompts you provide. The prompt is processed by the AI’s deep learning algorithm which formulates a response for the user based on the Internet-sourced data set it’s been trained on–-or based on proprietary information the user feeds it.
As an AI video tool, ChatGPT can help with research, creating a script’s structure, writing on-screen captions, and even suggestions for visuals (though that’s not one of its strengths–yet). Whatever tool you use, it’s now possible to generate a script in a fraction of the time it used to.
Watch “Write Better Video Scripts Faster with ChatGPT” On-Demand
Image tools for creating AI videos
Video creators can use AI-generated static images to quickly create storyboards, or even use the elements directly in their final videos.
AI image generators like Dall.E 2, or Stable Diffusion Online and MidJourney draw on the internet’s rich source of photos, illustrations, and graphics to produce new imagery in response to a user’s prompt. Dall.E 2 also allows you to fill out or extend the area around your preferred image (outpainting) and fill in missing or incomplete areas by evaluating the existing imagery and formulating content that matches the content and style (inpainting). While this feature isn’t offered within MidJourney and Stable Diffusion Online as of mid-April 2023, you can import images created on those platforms into Dall.E 2 and manipulate them there.
Also, both Dall.E 2 and Midjourney now allow you to upload your own images and include them as a reference in your prompt. This allows you to also ask for variations of existing, preferred reference images, instead of having to only work with outputs created based on text prompts.
Audio tools for creating AI videos
Need a voiceover but don’t have the budget to hire voice talent and book a recording studio? Some AI tools can step in to generate a realistic sounding voiceover in a variety of languages by collecting text input and delivering a synthesized audio stream in a process known as “text-to-speech.”
Other AI tools can remove background noise from recordings, or even create background music from scratch. Simply choose the genre, mood, length and tempo for a video with a unique, royalty-free soundtrack.
AI video generation software
Some AI video tools apply a similar approach to those for text, image and audio, taking either text or visual input and generating an output of original video content.
Meta’s Make-a-Video creates video from both text-based prompts and static images. Phenaki uses proprietary technology to create longer videos when given a sequence of textual prompts.
Other AI-powered tools offer the ability to use human-like avatars to deliver scripts directly to the camera. While these tools allow you to generate content at volume, it’s worth noting that most deepfake human avatars suffer from the ‘uncanny valley’ effect: people register that what they’re seeing and hearing is close to, but not quite human, which can be off-putting.)
Lastly, AI-powered animated video software platforms like Vyond provide a more holistic solution, using multiple AI-driven features (like Photo-to-Character avatars, Text-to-Speech generator, Visual Search for assets, and Speech Enhancer) to help teams quickly create engaging, professional-looking animated videos that never suffer from the “uncanny valley effect,” since most animation isn’t meant to look photorealistic.
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Generative AI video tools: the pros and cons
AI powered video tools are revolutionizing the workplace but they aren’t without their faults. Here are some of the benefits and limitations of AI tools used to create text, video, images and audio.
“It’s inspiring that AI is making its way to all corners of society, with many applications large and small.”
Andrew Ng, Founder and CEO of Landing AI
While there’s no doubt AI is going to transform the economy, it still has limits and specific use cases. It can’t do everything. And it may not always be the right tool for a business.”
Marketing AI Institute
Benefits of AI-powered text tools
Helps you brainstorm ideas. When you’re staring at a page with no idea where to start, an AI chatbot can be a lifesaver. While these won’t produce the final copy, they’re great at providing you with a first draft to play around with.
Saves serious time. Writing good copy takes time, and with research, writing, and editing, that time quickly adds up. With an AI text generation tool, simply enter a prompt and you’ll have output to start editing and developing in seconds.
Can imitate a wide range of styles. In your text prompt, you can add direction on style and tone and include proprietary copy you’d like it to learn from and imitate. This capability can help you with creating “on-brand” content, and can help spark ideas for new ways to solve creative problems.
Limitations of AI-powered text tools
ChatGPT is only trained on information found on the Internet prior to October 2021. As a result, its responses don’t reflect the most up-to-date information on topics, especially those that evolve quickly. This is another reason to always review its output before you hit publish.
They don’t understand your audience like you do. AI will never be able to understand your audiences’ needs and preferences the way you do – what makes them tick, or pushes their buttons. This is another reason it’s so important to review and adjust their output.
For more information, check out our guide on how to use ChatGPT to create business video scripts.
ChatGPT Prompts for Business Videos
Benefits of AI-powered audio tools
Generates narration quickly and affordably. There’s no need to hire a voice actor, source expensive equipment, or book recording time. With a high-quality AI-powered audio tool you can generate realistic audio with a quick turnaround.
Many include instant translation features. Sending copy to translators before you can get your video to a global audience is now a thing of the past as AI tools can instantly translate audio in a huge selection of languages and dialects.
“You can’t have somebody producing a new audio version of one article every time it’s updated. But with […] synthetic language, there’s hardly any additional cost to production at all.”
Andy Webb, head of product for the voice and artificial intelligence team at the BBC
Limitations of AI-powered audio tools
Some AI-generated narration sounds…off. Emotions can be hard for an AI audio tool to replicate. While output is constantly improving, humans generally still possess more range.
Accent choices are often limited. Many AI audio tools can’t offer you as many accents and dialects (spoken by people of various genders and ages) as you might like.
Vyond’s AI audio capabilities
Vyond’s text-to-speech AI feature provides 600 AI voice options across 71 languages, in male and female varieties–and, as of May 2023—allows you to adjust the audio track so it reflects the emotion you want conveyed. Vyond’s Instant Translation features also allow you to instantly and automatically translate all the text in your videos, including scene text, dialog text entered for text-to-speech, and recordings, into every one of those languages.
Try Vyond for Free
Benefits of AI-powered image and video tools
Anyone can be a creator. Whether you’re a professional designer or someone who can’t draw a stick figure, you’ll be able to generate useful images and video content quickly.
Inspires fresh ideas. When you’re struggling to visualize an idea, AI image generators can provide options that help you clarify what you want.
Easy to replicate visual styles. From Van Gogh to Andy Warhol to [fill in your favorite artist here]—with a simple prompt (containing either text or a combination of text and image references) you can imitate an incredibly diverse set of styles
Limitations of AI-powered image and video tools
Their output doesn’t always hit the mark. When the visual delivered to you doesn’t match what you were imagining in your mind’s eye, you have the option to keep prompting for other alternatives. And if you’re using Dall.E 2–you can try adjusting its output with its inpainting or outpainting tools. Even so, these efforts may not give you exactly what you wanted.
They’re not reliable for creating “on-brand” visuals. For the reasons above, you’re likely not going to be able to lean on these tools to create visual content that perfectly aligns with your company’s brand style—yet.
There are ethical concerns around copyright. While an artist’s work may be accessed freely on the internet, it’s unlikely they gave permission for their art to be used in the AI’s learning model. Currently, in the US, AI-generated work isn’t copyright protected because it isn’t technically made by a human.
The business benefits of using generative AI
Companies of all kinds can reap the benefits of using an AI tool to create professional videos. Here are a few of the most common:
Support your company’s employee retention goals
The simplicity and time efficiency of AI video helps L&D professionals keep up with industry changes and internal demands for new or updated training materials for their entire workforce.
This is especially valuable because timely, effective training is proven to have extremely positive effects on retention. According to a LinkedIn study, 94% of employees say that they would stay at a company longer if it invested in better training.
Create mission-critical content more quickly
While we know that L&D teams regularly create videos to engage their workforce, they aren’t the only department that can benefit from the speed of AI-powered video tools.
HR teams can use AI-powered video tools to ensure they’re communicating effectively about policies or business changes in a timely manner
Sales departments can use generative AI video tools to keep up with the demand for creating highly personalized, tailored versions of general sales video content to share with prospects. (As we know from both academic and industry research, personalized strategies are more effective.)
The speed of AI-powered video tools can help marketing teams keep up with the demand for engagement-boosting video content for blog and social media posts–and respond instantaneously to urgent news or trends with right-time, right-place video content. Additionally, the time saved in creating videos from scratch also frees up marketing teams to spend more time A/B testing their video content and making tweaks to boost engagement.
Empower all your employees to communicate better (and have fun doing it)
AI-powered video tools are becoming so easy to use, even employees with no writing and design capabilities now have a way to create engaging video content quickly.
Not surprisingly, when creating videos is easy, it’s also more fun. In fact, many of our customers have said that using Vyond has made creating videos one of the most enjoyable parts of their job, instead of a time-consuming and intimidating chore.
The future of AI video maker tools
Sure, today’s generative AI video tools still have some kinks to work out. And as always happens when a new kind of technology hits the market, some tools will hit big and flourish, while others will drop off the radar.
But as the landscape continues to evolve, one thing is for sure: creating high-quality business videos has never been easier, and the world of content creation will never be the same again.
To get started making great animated business videos quickly and easily, join 20,000 companies already using Vyond. Sign up for our free trial or book a demo to get access to 200+ fully scripted templates, 200+ starter templates, more than 2,300 scene templates, and all of our time-saving AI features.
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#### The Ultimate Guide to Social Media Video Specs
Table of Contents
Facebook videos
Twitter videos
Instagram videos
TikTok videos
LinkedIn videos
YouTube videos
Bonus: Sizing your own Vyond video for social media
How to make a square Vyond video + square template
How to make a portrait (vertical) Vyond video + portrait template
Landscape video template
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Imagine a customer scrolling through their LinkedIn feed. They come across a product video that your company posted and stop to watch it. There’s just one problem—the top and bottom portions of your video are cropped out, so the video isn’t watchable. Confused and disappointed, the customer moves on to other content.
This scenario is a nightmare situation for video marketers. When presented correctly, social media videos are a powerful marketing tool. In a Wyzowl report, 77% of buyers reported that they a video persuaded them to buy a product or service. Specifically with social, 70% of people said that they have shared a brand’s video via social media.
This guide will help you capture this engagement by creating an optimal viewing experience for your social media viewers. For each social media channel, we’ll cover these specs:
File size: The minimum and maximum file size of a video that you can upload
Aspect ratio: The ratio of width to height on a video
Video orientation: The most frequently used aspect ratios (square, landscape, vertical) on social media platforms
Resolution: The number of pixels being shown horizontally and vertically
Video length: The maximum duration of the video
Understanding the latest social specs, you’ll be set to create videos that are engaging and watchable on all channels and devices.
Facebook videos
Facebook is one of the most valuable platforms with more than 2.3 billion monthly active users covering almost every demographic. Marketers should consider taking extra time and effort to understand the different video options available, and to create videos in the most effective formats for your audience.
Feed and Marketplace Video Specs
File size
Max of 4 GB
Aspect ratio
9:16 to 16:9
Video Orientation
Landscape, portrait, square
Resolution range
No max resolution
Video length
1 second – 240 minutes
Pro-tip: Take advantage of these videos’ minimal spec requirements—no resolution range, several supported aspect ratios—by choosing the format that fits your target audience’s device usage (square for mobile, and landscape for desktop).
In-stream video ad specs
File size
Max of 4 GB
Aspect ratio
16:9 to 9:16 (16:9 recommended)
Video Orientation
Landscape (recommended), portrait, square
Resolution range
No max resolution
Video length
5 to 15 seconds
Pro-tip: In-stream videos (mid-roll ads) have to be short, so be sure to convey your main message quickly in the first few seconds of the video.
Messenger Home Specs
File size
Max of 4 GB
Aspect ratio
9:16 to 1.91:1
Video Orientation
Landscape
Resolution range
No max resolution
Video length
1 second – 240 minutes
Pro-tip: Keep in mind that only landscape videos are permitted for the Messenger home feed.
Instagram Video Specs
With a strong base of teen and millennial users, Instagram is an especially valuable space to share videos if your target customer is young. It’s also a simple video publishing space for marketers to navigate with just two types of videos.
Feed video specs
File size
Max of 4 GB
Aspect ratio
1.91:1 to 4:5
Video Orientation
Landscape, portrait (only 4:5), square
Resolution range
No max resolution
Video length
1 second – 60 minutes
Pro-tip: Opt for square videos—they’re very popular on Instagram and look great on both desktop and mobile.
Story video specs
File size
Max of 4 GB
Aspect ratio
9:16 to 16:9 to 4:5
Video Orientation
Landscape, portrait (excluding 2:3), square
Resolution range
No max resolution
Video length
1 second – 15 seconds
Pro-tip: You can publish videos that are longer than 15 seconds. The caveat is that Instagram will clip it and publish multiple 15-second stories.
Story ad video specs
File size
Max of 4 GB
Aspect ratio
9:16 to 16:9 to 4:5
Video Orientation
Landscape, portrait (excluding 2:3), square
Resolution range
No max resolution
Video length
1 second – 60 minutes
Pro-tip: If you’re publishing a promotional story, Instagram recommends that you leave roughly 14% of the top and bottom of the video without text or logos in case you want to add a call to action or profile icon there. Vertical videos are recommended for both IGTV and story videos.
LinkedIn video specs
With its professional tone and focus on job searching, LinkedIn is a powerful space to post videos that boost your employer’s brand. Use the specs below to create LinkedIn videos that show job seekers your business’ culture, mission, and other key details. If you’re at a B2B company, consider creating video ads as well since so many potential leads—startup founders, and corporate executives—actively use LinkedIn. Here’s an example of how we promoted our London Vyond Community Meet-up on LinkedIn with a Vyond video:
Pro-tip: Opt for square videos—they’re very popular on Instagram and look great on both desktop and mobile.
Video ad specs
File size
75 KB to 200 MB
Aspect ratio
16:9
Video Orientation
Landscape
Resolution range
360p to 1080p
Video length
3 seconds to 30 minutes
Pro-tip: Be sure to create a horizontal video ad—at this time, LinkedIn permits vertical videos for organic content only.
Organic videos
File size
75 KB to 200 MB
Aspect ratio
1:2.4 to 2.4:1
Video Orientation
Landscape, portrait, square
Resolution range
256×144 to 4096×2304
Video length
3 seconds to 10 minutes
Pro-tip: Though LinkedIn supports both horizontal and vertical formats for organic videos, we recommend opting for a vertical format since 57% of LinkedIn users are on mobile.
Twitter video specs
Like Instagram, Twitter is an especially great video platform for businesses that cater to younger customers. The platform’s target audience is in their 20s, and posts typically have a punchy, fun tone. Using these spec guidelines, create Twitter videos to provide quick company news updates, promote your blog content, or share industry-related news.
Organic and ad video specs
File size
Max 512 MB
Aspect ratio
1:3 to 3:1
Video Orientation
Landscape, portrait, square
Resolution range
32×32 to 1280×1024
Video length
5 seconds to 140 seconds
Pro-tip: Consider taking advantage of their recently introduced square format. 93% of Twitter videos are viewed on mobile, and square videos provide an optimal mobile viewing experience.
Vyond Pro -tip: Twitter is the only social media platform that supports GIF format. Use Vyond to export your videos as GIFs.
TikTok video specs
Feed video ad specs
File size
Max 500 MB
Aspect ratio
9:16, 1:1, or 16:9
Video Orientation
Landscape, portrait, square
Resolution range
Must be greater or equal to:
≥540*960,
≥640*640, or
≥960*540.
Video length
Up to 3 minutes
Pro-tip: As the premier platform for short-form video, TikTok recommends ads with a length of 9 to 15 seconds.
Feed video specs
File size
Max 287.6MB
Aspect ratio
9:16, 1:1, or 16:9
Video Orientation
Landscape, portrait, square
Resolution range
Must be greater or equal to:
≥540*960,
≥640*640, or
≥960*540.
Video length
5 seconds to 60 seconds
YouTube video specs
YouTube is an ideal video platform for marketers. Users enjoy watching longer, more in-depth content on YouTube, so you can create videos that spend more time conveying your brand messages. Technically speaking, it’s also easy for marketers to format videos for YouTube since its player accepts various video sizes.
Organic video specs
File size
Max 128 MB
Aspect ratio
Native aspect ratio
Video Orientation
Landscape, portrait, square
Resolution range
No min or max
Video length
Max of 12 hours
Pro-tip: Be sure to upload videos as close to their original format as possible. Your video will remain at its highest quality, and YouTube’s player can automatically frame the video for optimal viewing.
Third-party video ad specs
File size
Max of 10 MB
Aspect ratio
16:9 or 4:3
Video Orientation
Landscape, portrait (4:3)
Resolution range
n/a
Video length
Max of 6 minutes (skippable ads), 15 seconds (non-skippable ads), and 6 seconds (bumper ads)
Pro-tip: If you’re interested in showing non-skippable ads, keep in mind that YouTube has shortened the maximum length from 30 seconds to 15 seconds.
Bonus: How to size your videos in Vyond
Though Vyond videos are automatically compatible with all social media channels, our platform also makes it easy to reformat videos for optimal viewing on each platform. Here are several tutorials and templates that quickly show how to create square, portrait, and landscape videos in Vyond.
Square videos
Square videos are ideal for any platform with a feed, specifically Facebook and Instagram, as they take up more room and grab users’ attention. As a plus, a square orientation is also mobile-friendly.
Here is a tutorial to learn how to make a square video in Vyond:
Portrait videos
Portrait videos, or vertical videos, are mobile-friendly, so they work especially well on phone-driven platforms like Instagram. They’re also an ideal choice for video ads since the height leaves room for a call to action at the top or bottom.
Here is a tutorial to learn how to make a portrait video in Vyond:
Landscape
Videos in a landscape — or horizontal — orientation are ideal for desktop viewing, given the wider screen. They’re also optimal for YouTube since YouTube’s player automatically displays in landscape orientation.
Solidify your social presence with the right video specs
Video is no longer a novelty—it can be found in all types of businesses on every social platform today. With that said, watchability is a basic expectation of your viewers. Use this guide to make sure that your videos can be optimally viewed across all channels. With the right presentation, your brand gains credibility points, and viewers can fully enjoy your content.
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#### The Ultimate List of 67 Video Tools & Resources
The Ultimate List of Video Tools
Thirty years ago, you couldn’t make a professional video unless you had a big budget, a big crew, and years of production expertise. Today, it’s way different. There are hundreds of accessible, affordable video tools to help anyone—regardless of their production experience—quickly create a professional video. Using just your phone, you can film an entire movie!
We’ve rounded up the best video tools to cover every area of production, from video sizing to music scoring. Whether you’re making your first or hundredth video, this guide includes a variety of tools you can use to put together a high-quality, engaging video.
Every tool on this list has been tested and approved by Vyond customers and/or members of our team. Click to jump to each section:
Audio Editing
Closed Captions
Equipment
Freelance Sites
Hosting
Miscellaneous
Music Libraries
Production Resources
Screen-Recording Tools
Stock Video Footage
Translation and Localization
Video Authoring (eLearning video course creation)
Video Editing
Voice overs
Please note: this post includes two affiliate links and Vyond will earn a commission if you make a purchase.
Audio Editing
A video occasionally has complex audio needs—multitrack mixing, de-noising—that a standard video editor isn’t equipped to handle. If you need to make advanced adjustments to your audio files, edit them separately using one of these audio-specific editing tools.
Audacity
Cost: Free
Experience level: Intermediate
Core features: Audio recording, basic audio editing features, audio clip analysis, support for plugins, open-source
z-Maestro
Cost: $29.99
Experience level: Beginner
Core features: Audio editing, music composition with instrument and drum parts, adaptive audio parts, effects, multi-track recording
Adobe Audition
Cost: $20.99/month
Experience level: Advanced
Core features: Recording, editing, and mixing audio (including multitrack sessions), waveform and multitrack modes
Garage Band
Cost: Free (for Mac)
Experience level: Intermediate
Core features: Audio editing and recording, a sound library for instrumental composing, audio effects
Closed Captions
Uncaptioned videos exclude a number of disabled audiences, including viewers who are deaf, hard of hearing, or autistic. Along with disabled audiences, there are also viewers who would prefer to watch a video with captions instead of listening to audio. Make your video more accessible by using one of the following closed caption services.
YouTube
Cost: Free
Description: Automatic captioning; sometimes inaccurate, but you can edit for incorrect parts and download the corrected file to use in other locations.
Wistia
Cost: $2.50/minute
Description: 99% accuracy, wait time is 4 business days (or $4/minute for one-day), need Wistia account
Rev.com
Cost: $1.25/minute
Description: 24 hour turnaround time, 99% accuracy
Amara.org
Cost: Free
Description: Free captioning and subtitling platform to create your own captions. Amara also offers quality translations at a cost.
GoTranscript
Cost: $1.04/min
Description: Offers a 6 hour turnaround time.
3Play Media
Cost: Custom
Description: If your needs are more custom and likely to be recursive, 3Play Media might be your solution. They offer plans in up to 16 languages on their premier plan, and their pricing quotes are bespoke.
Equipment
Though you can make an entire video with just a computer, many professional videos involve additional equipment. Our pro tip: consider renting expensive equipment—such as lenses; they’re constantly being updated and quickly lose value. Here are a number of sites to buy or rent different types of equipment for video production.
B&H and Adorama are two of the most popular and well-respected sites for professional photography and video equipment.
B&H
Cameras
Lenses
Lighting
Audio
All professional video equipment
Adorama
Cameras
Lenses
Lighting
Audio
All professional video equipment
All professional equipment rentals
BorrowLenses.com
Camera rentals
Lens rentals
Lighting rentals
Audio rentals
Support equipment rentals
Amazon
Digital cameras
Lenses
Lighting
Microphones
Freelance Sites
Fiverr
Twine
Upwork
Hosting
Once your video is created, you need a host—a place where the video will live. It’s better to find a hosting service than to use your own site as a host: Video files are large, so they will take up a lot of space on your server bandwidth and possibly cause viewing glitches. We’ve highlighted a number of video-hosting sites to help you find one that fits your needs, whether you’re looking for a free option or a more premium tool with reporting.
YouTube
Cost: Free
Description: Receives lots of traffic, plays ads with videos, limited customization options for the video player
Wistia
Cost: Free to $99/month
Description: Customizable player, simple embedding and sharing, advanced video analytics, software integrations, and much more. Vyond has used Wistia since 2011.
Brightcove
Cost: Starting at $199/month
Description: High-quality playback, client-side interactivity, lead capture and conversion tools, viewer analytics, and much more. Vyond has a partnership with Brightcove.
Vidyard
Cost: Custom
Description: Customizable player, simple embedding and sharing, advanced video analytics, integrations with other software, and video personalization campaign options. Vyond has a partnership with Vidyard.
Vimeo
Cost: Freemium. $7/month to $75/month
Description: Player customization, no ads, video analytics, and quick customer support. Vimeo was originally a place designated for creatives to share their work. While that’s still at the heart of Vimeo’s mission, they have greatly grown their business offerings recently to mirror other professional hosting services: teams, security features, live streaming, galleries, portfolio sites, review and approval tools, marketing integrations, custom calls-to-action, and more.
SproutVideo
Cost: Starting at $49/month
Description: A full suite of video marketing tools including lead capture, video SEO, social sharing, and more. The ability to design and publish a video portfolio, secure portal, or marketing site. SproutVideo allows you to develop your own solutions with a platform API or a Javascript Player API, and their embeddable player is customizable, which allows you to generate responsive embeds, email embeds, or a lightbox embed.
Miscellaneous
HandBrake
Cost: Free
Features: Compress your video file to save space, and more
Music Libraries
Music builds an emotional connection with viewers, directing their feelings as they watch your video. Whether you need strings to emphasize a dramatic moment or you want a lighthearted tune for a happy explainer video, we’ve gathered a number of music libraries to help you find the right tracks for your video.
Envato Music Market
Cost: Varies by track
Description: Over 800,000 tracks and songs, free music, and sound engineering tutorials
Premium Beat
Cost: Varies by track
Description: Royalty-free music, search by genre or mood, limited editing availability
Artlist
Cost: $199/year
Description: Royalty-free music library; unlimited use, commercial or non-commercial, for a single yearly price (This is what we use at Vyond to supplement our music library)
Filmstro
Cost: $49.89/year to $99.89/year
Description: Royalty-free library of background music; the ability to adjust the momentum, depth, and power of each clip
Vyond
Cost: $299/year (Essential plan), $649/year (Premium plan), $999/year (Professional plan)
Description: Video editor for animated videos; comes with a library of up to 100 royalty-free songs available to use on Vyond videos only
Production Resources
It’s never been easier to learn about video production. The internet is full of blogs, tutorial videos, podcasts, and more that cover everything you need to know about filming and editing videos. We’ve highlighted the top production resources that our video producers have found most helpful over the years.
Linkedin Learning
LinkedIn Learning, an online course site, offers 1988 courses for learning about video production.
Iconlogic
IconLogic, an online training site, offers several courses on creating videos with Adobe Premiere and Vyond.
NoFilmSchool.com
NoFilmSchool.com is a professionally curated website full of video production knowledge. The comments section on each post holds an active community discussion around each topic.
Vyond’s Help Center Library
For Vyond customers, our help center library covers every aspect of video making in Vyond Studio. The resources section of our site shares video knowledge for learning and development experts, marketers, HR professionals, small businesses and sales teams.
Screen-Recording Tools
Screen-recording tools, as you might have guessed, capture the contents of a screen. With this “footage,” it’s easy to explain how to complete a task on a computer, phone, or tablet. Whether you’re creating a demo for a software product or an educational tutorial, screen-recording tools are a valuable video resource.
Camtasia
Cost: $249.00/user license
Experience level: Intermediate
Core features: Offers a variety of capture tools with additional editing features
Soapbox
Cost: Freemium to $300/year
Experience level: Beginner
Core features: Screen recording, webcam recording, view switching, built-in transitions, link sharing
Loom
Cost: Free
Experience level: Beginner
Core features: Screen recording, webcam recording, built-in transitions, link sharing
Quicktime
Cost: Free (comes with Macs)
Experience level: Beginner
Core features: Screen recording
VIDYARD
Cost: Free
Experience level: Beginner
Core features: Screen recording and webcam recording
CINCOPA
Cost: Free
Experience level: Beginner
Core features: Screen recording and webcam recording
Stock Video Footage
Some video projects—such as social media videos—are created on a tight schedule, with little time for filming. In that case, stock video footage is a great alternative to filming on your own. We’ve highlighted several sites that make it easy to find stock footage with clear categorization and powerful search engines. Stock video can be imported into Vyond and combined with animation.
Artgrid
Cost: Unlimited download plans ranging from $25 – $50/mo
Core features: Artgrid focuses on providing a simplified licensing experience for high-quality video footage from today’s best cameras.
Shutterstock.com
Cost: Starting at $29/month for photos and $79/HD video clip
Core features: 247 million images available with 150,000 added each day, one of the largest libraries of stock video available.
Discount: Vyond customers get 10% off their first purchase with code VYOND10
Adobe Stock
Cost: $79.99/HD video, $199.99/4K video
Core features: Royalty-free HD and 4K videos in multiple categories, including lifestyle and sports
Envato Elements
Cost: $16.50/month for unlimited downloads
Core features: Over 92K stock videos and motion graphics, search by resolution and frame rate
VIDEVO
Cost: Free
Core features: Over 12,000 free stock videos and motion graphics—no sign-up required. Most downloads are royalty-free and some require a <! a href=”https://www.videvo.net/blog/how-we-license-our-footage-on-videvo-net/” target=”_blank” rel=”noopener noreferrer”>Videvo Attribution License.
Pexels
Cost: Free
Core features: Library of high-quality stock footage with easy search function
Videezy
Cost: Free
Core features: HD and 4K stock footage in multiple categories, such as nature and travel videos
Dissolve.com
Cost: Starting at $10/photo and $29/HD video
Core features: A popular site for professional videographers with over 2.5 million stock photos and videos
Translation and Localization
There are a number of ways to make your video available to watch in different languages. The simplest solution is using a translation service to write subtitles in your international audiences’ languages. For a more immersive viewing experience, use a localization service to record your narration and dialogue in a different language and with some, even adjust the lip-synching to match the new speakers.
In What Language
Cost: Get a quote
Description: Professional translation and localization in one centralized location. InWhatLanguage helps save you time and money by leveraging phrases stored in translation memory.
LinguaLinx
Cost: Request quote
Description: Hires voice over talent to re-record dialogue and narration in other languages, subtitle creation
TransPerfect
Cost: Get a quote
Description: Records voice-over talent; film editing to adjust timing and lip synchronization
Amara.org
Cost: Get a quote
Description: Professional translation service
Video authoring (eLearning course creation)
E-learning professionals don’t need a background in production to create video course content. There are plenty of simple, user-friendly learning management systems available that make video-course creation easy for all types of users. Here are a few options to help e-learning professionals get started with video-course creation.
Lectora Inspire
Cost: Starting at $2,595
Description: Learning interactivity features for videos, course templates, video and audio recorder, and editor, Camtasia for screen recording
Articulate 360
Cost: Starting at $499/year
Description: Content library of 3 million+ course assets (templates, videos, icons, and more), includes authoring apps Storyline 360 and Rise
Adobe Captivate
Cost: $29.99/month
Description: Interactive learning features, 360 video support, HD screen, and webcam recording, mobile course creation
WireWax
Cost: $708+/year
Description: Interactive editing (hotspots, in-video navigation, camera switching, branching, etc.)
BranchTrack
Cost: Varies
Description: Create playable branching scenarios, compatible with Storyline 360, Lectora, and Captivate
Video Editing
It doesn’t matter how incredible your footage is—if your video isn’t edited well, it’s not going to look polished. To help you turn your video into a finished product, we’ve highlighted a wide range of editing tools for beginners and seasoned filmmakers alike.
Adobe Premiere Pro
Cost: $20.99/month
Experience level: Intermediate to advanced
Core features: Color grading, intelligent audio cleanup, edit vector graphics, Motion Graphics templates, team collaboration
Reviews: SoftwareHow
Final Cut Pro
Cost: $299.99
Experience level: Intermediate
Core features: 360-degree VR editing, video noise reduction, timecode window,multi-cam editing, motion graphics templates
iMovie
Cost: Free with a Mac
Experience level: Beginner
Core features: Animated titles, special effects, 10 filters, built-in sound effects and soundtracks, voice-over recording
DaVinci Resolve (blackmagicdesign.com)
Cost: Free app or $299 for the pro version
Experience level: intermediate to professional
Core features: Even the free version includes a powerful video editor with professional coloring tools, an audio editor, motion graphics, 3D animation tools, and more.
Vegas Pro Edit
Cost: $299.00
Experience level: Advanced
Core features: 360 editing, motion tracking, proxy editing, smart upscaling, multi-cam editing
Reviews: SoftwareHow
VideoStudio Pro
Cost: $63.99
Experience level: Beginner
Core features: Split screen video templates, lens correction, 360 video editing, stop motion animation, 3D title editor
Vyond (Animation)
Cost: $299/year (Essential plan), $649/year (Premium plan), $999/year (Professional plan)
Experience level: Beginner
Core features: Drag-and-drop animation editor, animated templates, character creator, props, music library
Reviews: G2Crowd
Voice Overs
Professional voice-over recordings take a narrated video to the next level. A trained actor will bring emotion and depth to your video content. Not to mention, a professional voice-over will have a polished sound quality that lends credibility to your video. We’ve highlighted a number of online markets for voice-over talent, so you can easily find a trained actor to narrate your video.
BUNNY STUDIO
Cost: Varies by actor
Description: Average turnaround time of 6 hours, quality screening
Voiver
Cost: Varies by actor
Description: Delivery typically 24 hours or less, free revisions
Voices.com
Cost: Varies by actor (pricing estimator)
Description: Free audition process, hire in one click
Learn more about adding voiceovers to your video with our resource, “Record Voice Overs at any Budget.”
Create professional videos with the right set of tools
From editing software to closed-captioning services, there are numerous video-creation tools available to everyone, regardless of their production experience. Using this guide, you can find tools that match your experience level, fit your budget and have the features you need to make a professional, high-quality video.
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#### The Value of Vyond Community: 4 Members Share Their Stories
Every day, Vyond customers create engaging video content that drives real business results. They help L&D teams close critical training gaps, sales teams ramp new reps faster, compliance and operations teams transform dry SOP materials into videos employees will actually watch — and much more.
For many customers, though, Vyond isn’t just a video creation platform. It’s also the thriving worldwide community of creators, learning professionals, and communicators who use it.
The Vyond Community provides access to exclusive templates and tutorials, a direct line to the product team, and a supportive space to exchange ideas. Here, members can share works in progress, get feedback from peers and Vyond experts, and find inspiration for future projects.
Join Vyond Community
Here’s what four active members say they value most about being Vyond Community members.
Adam BloomfieldLearning Design ManagerQBE Insurance
Kennedy WashingtonManager, Program EffectivenessSan Jacinto College
Star PetersonSenior Instructional DesignerMcKesson
Rance GreeneFounder School of Story Design
What are a few examples of tips, feedback, or shared resources from the Community that have made your work easier – or better?
Kennedy: I’m the only person in my department with a subscription to Vyond. Being the sole user can be isolating, especially when I find myself in a creative rut. The “Learn and Share” space has helped me numerous times by prompting me to rethink my approach to a Vyond project. Likewise, the Studio Sessions and Community Office Hours have helped me feel more connected to the team that makes the magic happen.
The Vyond staff maintain a strong and helpful presence within the Community, which makes me feel like I can be a better champion for Vyond and have more of a voice in the product’s future development.
Adam: One of the biggest benefits of the Community has been seeing how other creators approach storytelling and learning engagement. It’s easy to become focused on the way you build videos, but seeing examples from people working in different industries can spark new ideas.
Specifically I’ve picked up tips around camera movement, scene composition, AI-powered features and workflow enhancements that have improved both the quality of my videos and the speed at which I can create them. More recently I’ve enjoyed the discussions around Text to Video and Document to Video. Seeing how others use these features gave me the confidence to experiment with my own projects and rethink part of my development process.
Star: I love the templates — especially the e-Learning template that was shared recently. I also appreciate the Learn and Share section of the Vyond Community. I get so much inspiration from other Community members’ videos!
Rance: I really like reading through people’s feedback — the features they’re hoping for, wishing for, and even the problems they’re having. It’s a great place to commiserate a little bit, but it’s also exciting because there are always new things coming down the pike. It’s a fun way to see what’s important to other creators and what might be coming next.
What are the most memorable or impactful Vyond projects you’ve worked on–and why?
Rance: One of the most recent projects I’ve done — and one I’m really proud of — is a video I produced using the new Storybook characters. Finding backgrounds that really matched those characters was a lot of fun, and I think the style communicates really well to an audience where there had been a bit of a gap before. I’m really glad Vyond filled that gap and gave us this new style to work with.
I’ve gotten a lot of traction on that video from my intended audience, which is salespeople. It’s been really rewarding to see that it’s making a difference in my own business.
Kennedy: My most impactful Vyond project helped promote a corporate giving campaign benefiting United Way. The organization I worked for is consistently among the top donors to our local campaign, and it was important that we maintain that level of giving as the 2024 campaign approached.
To support this goal, I created an explainer video detailing how employees could support United Way through our various giving opportunities. Vyond provided unique ways to visualize how the cost of everyday activities could be translated into meaningful impact for United Way beneficiaries. Through this video and other campaign efforts, the company was able to make the second-largest donation (4 million dollars), despite having significantly fewer local employees than the other top-ranking corporations that year.
Star: I’ve created videos sharing the personal stories of members of the LGBTQIA+ community. Using Vyond’s animation allows people to remain anonymous. I hope that other members of the community feel more understood and less alone hearing from people experiencing things similar to what they experience. I’ve used these videos in LGBTQIA+ diversity training.
Adam: As a learning professional in the insurance industry, many of my projects involve helping people understand complex processes, compliance requirements and customer conversations. One of the most impactful projects I’ve worked on involved creating simulated frontline interactions to help teams develop confidence before taking live calls. Rather than telling people what to do, we created realistic situations where learners could see behaviors, decisions and outcomes play out.
The impact came from making learning feel authentic and relatable. Feedback consistently showed that people valued seeing realistic scenarios that reflected their day to day work.
Join Vyond Community
What platform features do you find the most helpful in the flow of work?
Kennedy: The text-to-speech voice options. There was a time when I had to use external AI voice-generation tools to create studio-quality audio and then import it into Vyond. Now that these capabilities are available within the platform, I can develop content more efficiently.
Adam: Text to Video has had the biggest impact on my workflow over the past year. Being able to take a script and rapidly create a visual first draft dramatically reduces development time – and helps stakeholders see the vision much earlier. More recently, I’ve been impressed by Document to Video and AI avatars. Together they create opportunities to transform static content into something much more engaging.
From a day to day productivity standpoint I also love smaller enhancements such as Copy and Paste Camera across scenes. Features like this might sound simple but they save valuable time and help me stay focused on the story rather than repetitive production tasks.
Rance: A recent update I’m absolutely crazy about is Camera Copy & Paste. I love that feature! My students at the School of Story Design had been asking for it for a long time, and now we have it. Thank you so much!
Star: I love that Vyond added the asset view. It makes it so much easier to select elements that are underneath other elements.
If the Vyond Community disappeared tomorrow, what would you miss most?
Star: I would miss interacting with others in learning and development who share my passion for educational videos!
Adam: Absolutely the people and connections. There’s something genuinely valuable about being part of a community where people are willing to share ideas, showcase their work, celebrate their successes and help each other improve. The community reminds me that we’re all ultimately trying to create better experiences for our audiences, whether that’s training, communications, marketing, or education. There’s always something new to learn from someone else’s perspective.
Kennedy: The other users. As mentioned, I rarely encounter other Vyond users despite it being such a powerful tool and one of the best on the market. Without this space, finding opportunities for knowledge sharing and collaboration would be much more challenging.
Rance: My peeps! My fellow Vyond producers. I love staying in touch with people throughout the week and seeing what everyone is working on. That’s what I’d miss most. So…don’t take it away. 🙂
Join Vyond Community
#### Three Takeaways from Rance Greene’s Vyond Masterclass for L&D Instructional Designers
Recently, Rance Greene, storytelling expert and author of Instructional Story Design, teamed up with Vyond to create a video masterclass on how instructional designers can create story-based training and why they should do it.
As a longtime user of Vyond’s video animation software, Rance decided it would be fun and instructive if he created a movie that both highlighted many of the storytelling effects Vyond’s software makes possible–and shared his most useful strategies for integrating storytelling into common L&D eLearning formats.
To bring his big idea to life, Rance joined forces with Taylor Morgan, an expert video producer here at Vyond. The end result was a one-of-a-kind masterclass experience called The Mysterious Disappearance of Stories that multiple participants have told us was one of the most memorable and effective presentations they’d ever seen.
Watch the Storytelling Masterclass
We highly recommend you watch the whole thing (maybe during a lunch break, or on your phone during your commute). But in the meantime, here are a few selected takeaways from Rance Greene’s masterclass:
1. Storytelling in instructional design is proven to boost engagement and retention
The London School of Economics found that when an audience is presented with information using a story, they retain 65% of the information. Take the story away, and they’ll remember a mere 5%.
As Rance elaborated in his presentation, two of the reasons stories engage us are because they encourage critical thinking and help demonstrate the relationship between isolated facts, in a way that helps us to remember them for a long time.
“Stories are hugely important in our lives – shouldn’t they be important in eLearning too?” – Rance Greene
2. To create stories that motivate your audience, get to know them a little first
Bridging the gap between story and action are two essential elements: conflict and relatable characters. But for these elements to work convincingly and effectively, you need an in-depth understanding of your learners (the audience) to effectively elicit their empathy and sympathy for the characters in the story.
To get to know your audience, Rance suggests meeting with a few representative members of that audience and asking questions like:
What do you value?
What are your current circumstances at work?
How are you reacting to those circumstances?
What do you fear?
What do you do in your spare time?
3. Help subject matter experts get beyond “being aware”
Helping learners be aware of–and understand–important ideas is not automatically going to yield action on their part. This is often where subject matter experts start, but you can help them get beyond “understanding,” “being aware of,” or “avoiding,” and drill down to observable actions.
Instruction is implemented by your learners in real-world situations. So the story for instruction you design should be centered around driving changes in behavior (which are observable).
For example, if you’re creating a manager course meant to increase empathy and understanding between managers and their employees, don’t stop at telling them to “be aware of employee situations” or “understand where your employee is coming from” and call it a day.
Ask the subject matter expert, “What does someone who understands where their employee is coming from actually do?” Help the subject matter expert unearth observable actions, like “Schedule a meeting,” “Ask the employee what’s working well for them and what’s challenging for them,” and “Listen to their side of the story.” Record these observable actions and construct an action list. These are the actions learners should be able to practice within the course and continue to do after the course.
Watch the Storytelling Masterclass
We hope these takeaways from Rance Greene’s Masterclass are helpful in developing highly engaging and effective L&D courses. Also, If you watched the masterclass, were inspired by the video’s imaginative production (created with Vyond!), and want to learn more about Rance and Taylor’s creative process, check out this behind-the-scenes story of the making of The Mysterious Disappearance of Stories.
To see how using Vyond can help you meet your communications goals, sign up for our free trial .
#### Thriving in Chicago: Celebrating Vyond’s New Office in Fulton Market
In late 2022, Vyond opened its doors in Chicago with a pilot team of three in a modest office space in Fulton Market. A year and a half later, our Chicago footprint has expanded to 40 employees and we’ve moved into a spacious new office space just up the street, at 401 N. Morgan Street.
Chicago is an incubator for emerging tech. It’s the perfect environment for our continued innovation around our core generative AI product, Vyond Go. And it puts us closer to many of our customers.
(l–r) Vyond CEO Gary Lipkowitz; Alexandra Mattison, SVP Sales at Vyond; Kevin Willer, Vyond board member and founding CEO of 1871 Tech
“We strongly believe Chicago will only continue to grow as a leading tech hub as it has for the past decade,” says our CEO, Gary Lipkowitz. “We’re scaling the generative AI revolution for video creation. We need the right people, office space, and surrounding ecosystem to support our business and technical vision. Chicago and Fulton Market specifically have proven to be the perfect Midwestern hub to support our growing customer base here and on the East Coast.”
On March 21, coinciding with our 17th anniversary, we welcomed local leaders and customers to cut the ribbon and help us make the new space official. Vyond CEO Gary Lipkowitz and Alex Mattison, Vyond’s Chicago-based Senior Vice President of Sales, along with Chicago economic leaders Abin Kuriakose, Chief Strategy and Innovation Officer of World Business Chicago and Claude Cimeus, Director of Platform & Experience, P33, reflected on Vyond’s continued growth and commitment to being a great corporate citizen in the Windy City.
Tribute to our grand opening event March 21, 2024 from Vyond’s own Alex Seminary
Claude Cimeus of P33 (left) and Abin Kuriakose of World Business Chicago (right) hold the ceremonial ribbon for Vyond CEO Gary Lipkowitz (center)
Thank you for the outpouring of support this week. The growing Chicago team is eager to drive even more innovation and success as Vyond continues to lead the AI-video-creation revolution. Onward!
#### Tips for Backing up Video Projects
The importance of video backup may not be obvious, especially if you’re new to video making. Typically, backups become a primary priority after losing footage you’ve worked so hard to create.
In the modern business landscape, video is a potent marketing tool. Studies show that at least 54% of consumers want to see videos, and marketers often get about 66% more leads through videos. Therefore, it’s essential to back up your video files and avoid unnecessary problems.
Use Quality Drives with Enough Space
While cheap drives can be enticing, using them to store your video projects may be inappropriate due to the high chances of disk failure. But if you are running on a tight budget and need to cut costs, ensure you buy a drive with a reputation for reliability.
Ideally, Solid State Drives (SSDs) are ideal for your video projects. Besides transferring files faster, they are stable and easier to work with. Unlike their HDD counterparts, SSDs don’t have spinning parts. However, there are different types of SSDs, and they are more expensive than HDDs.
Personal Cloud Storage
There are numerous benefits of using a cloud storage solution, but accessibility is the main advantage. Cloud-based storage and backup allow you to access your video files by logging into your account using any internet-enabled device. Cloud storage also supports seamless file sharing through links. This sharing feature is quite helpful, especially when dealing with huge video files that may not make sense to share manually.
Good Cloud storage solutions can eliminate any chances of losing your hard work. Typically, cloud storage is not prone to malfunctions or other issues that face an external storage drive. Since modern cloud services come with sophisticated data protection features, it technically safeguards your video projects from unwanted access.
Online Storage Services
When considering options for storing and backing up your video projects, cloud-based video storage software is a great solution. And since there are numerous options available, you can find a solution that fits your needs.
Online storage services are convenient because it makes it possible for your team to access the files from anywhere using any device. This capability is vital, especially for remote work situations, which have become popular in most businesses.
Additionally, online storage solutions are scalable, meaning you can choose the appropriate storage capacity and upscale it as your needs grow. They also provide an added layer of security, reducing the risks of data leakage, loss, and corruption.
Most online storage service providers allow you to schedule automated backups. This is a great option, especially for people who make constant changes to video files since you don’t need to back up the project every time you edit your work.
Maintain Three Copies of Your Video Files
It is highly recommended to have at least three copies of your videos in two different locations and work with only one.
The first copy should be the one you’ll be working from. Regardless of the device you are using, make sure to host the files on a RAID. This means that even if one of your drives on the RAID is compromised, you won’t lose your work. Whenever you use a single drive for your video projects, you risk losing all your work in case something happens to that drive.
Typically, a RAID is a collection of several hard drives designed to improve reliability and speed. If you have three drives on a RAID system, drive one should contain the entire project, while drives two and three hold half of your data. If your primary drive fails, you have a backup on drives two and three.
Your second copy should be an easily accessible backup of the video files on your primary working copy. The third copy is usually a long-term copy stored offline. While nobody wants to think about it, the truth is that misfortunes can happen to your online storage solutions. Calamities like tornadoes or fire, and while it’s unlikely that such events will destroy the infrastructure and compromise access to your data, it’s still possible.
Conclusion
Backing up your video project ensures that your files are safe and readily available whenever you need them. If your work involves lots of video editing, repeating the process after losing your files can be frustrating. However, with multiple backup options available, you can eliminate the chances of data loss and finish your project on time.
Create Your Own Animated Videos
There’s a reason why Vyond is the leading platform for creating your own videos. Robust and powerful customization features are all wrapped into our simple, easy-for-everyone studio that comes fully loaded with everything you need to build engaging video experiences.
See where your creativity can take you with a Vyond free trial; no credit card required.
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#### Tips for Creating Animated Microlearning Videos
Ready to create animated microlearning videos?
Microlearning has powerful applications in today’s fast-paced workforce, providing employees with a flexible and accessible way to learn new information at their own pace. (Read more about microlearning’s benefits for employees)
Videos are particularly effective channels for microlearning. Video engages a viewer on multiple levels and in doing so can increase knowledge retention.
If you’re ready to take the plunge and create microlearning videos for your company, start by crafting a plan. Check out our articles on getting started, scripting, and creating a storyboard for your video. There are a few best practices that apply to every animated video, whether you’re hiring an outside studio or using a tool like Vyond.
Keep it simple.
One of the best parts about animation is all the bells and whistles you can add in, at little to no additional cost. In Vyond, you can introduce new characters, props, and settings with a click of the mouse. You can add audio narration or background music or visual on-screen text.
But remember that learners can only process a certain amount of information at a given time. Richard Mayer’s Coherence Principle holds that “people learn better when extraneous words, pictures, and sounds are excluded rather than included.”
Vyond pro, Keith Anderson, who previously managed eLearning at Orchard Supply Hardware (check out some of the company’s animated microlearning videos here) and now works at Sears Home Services says, “the human brain filters out 90% of what you’re watching. Only put things on the screen that are relevant.” For example, Anderson makes sure that his videos have a consistent template (primarily whiteboard-based, with some colorful add-ins from Vyond’s Business Friendly animation style, and that his slides always move in the same direction to minimize distractions.
For more on effective visual instruction, watch this video by Michael Zielinskie, National Learning Specialist at Advanced Behavioral Health. And read more here.
(GoAnimate is now Vyond)
Prioritize auditory narration over on-screen text.
Again, less is more! It can be tempting to try to emphasize your main points with on-screen text in addition to graphics and spoken narration. However, Mayer’s Redundancy Principle says that combining graphics, narration, and on-screen text is actually less effective than just including graphics and audio narration.
“The flow of language is important, too,” says Anderson. “Humans typically process up to 150 words per minute, so we try to limit our videos to that amount of narration.”
Give the viewer an idea of where the video is going next.
“Every video we make starts exactly the same way,” says Anderson. “Having the same introduction signals the viewer that it’s time to enter ‘learning mode.’ It’s like the opening sequence to a TV show.”
According to Mayer, signaling — i.e., providing viewers with cues as to how the information in your video is organized — can lead to a more meaningful learning experience. In addition to consistent intros, signals like headings, vocal emphasis on keywords, and nonverbal character actions can help encourage learners to direct their attention to the most important parts of your video, and better follow the logic of the lesson.
Invest in audio.
High-quality audio and clear vocals will make a big difference in your final product. If you’re on a tight budget or just getting started, Vyond provides free text-to-speech capabilities in 58 languages and counting. However, a friendly, human voice will more effectively engage viewers.
There are plenty of services that make it easy to hire a professional voice artist to record your voice-over. VoiceBunny and Voice123 are a couple of options. Or, if you have access to a USB mic with a pop filter, record someone from your team using a with an audio program like Audacity or GarageBand.
Read about finding the right voice-over talent for your video from voice-over artist, Laura Schreiber.
Whether you plan to hire a professional or record on your own, do so towards the end of your project to avoid having to re-record when you inevitably make changes to your script. We recommend using Vyond’s text-to-speech feature as a placeholder until you’re ready to record. Then make final timing adjustments to your video once the voice-over is in place.
Don’t forget about music and sound effects either. Just like in the movies, sound can add mood and atmosphere to your animated microlearning videos. Vyond offers royalty-free music and sound effect to accompany any narrative. You can also purchase and upload specialized music and effects into Vyond to create an even richer viewing experience.
Get started!
One of the best parts about creating animated videos is the low barrier to entry. Sure, you’ll hone your style and perfect your execution as you gain more experience, but even a newbie can create effective animated microlearning videos in Vyond. Try it out with our free trial. For guidance, once you’ve started, attend one of our weekly webinars. If you’re already using Vyond, and looking to take things to the next level, watch one of our more advanced on-demand webinars.
Creating Animated Microlearning Videos
Once you have a plan in place, the next step is to actually create your video. Many organizations turn to animation to create multiple or one-off videos. Animation is a rich, engaging, and cost-effective medium that offers all the benefits of traditional video — with far fewer resource requirements.
Animated video isn’t just for kids either, says Karen Kostrinsky, eLearning Developer at mortgage lender Ellie Mae. “Some people think animated videos are childish. They can be, but they don’t have to be.” Kostrinsky, who uses Vyond to create her animated videos, does sometimes use “fun” themes — think superheroes, zombies, and country western — for internal meetings, but more often she tends to create realistic characters in office settings. “My people look like people… I like that they look current. It’s still fun, but professional.”
Watch an excerpt from one of Karen’s animated microlearning videos:
Don’t miss the previous articles in this series:
What Is Microlearning? 5 Key Benefits for Today’s Employees
Why Your Company Should Create Microlearning Videos
4 Initial Steps to Creating a Microlearning Video
How to Script a Successful Microlearning Video
Why You Need a Storyboard for Your Microlearning Video, and How to Create One
About Vyond
Vyond allows people of all skill levels in all industries and job roles to create dynamic and powerful media. With features that go beyond moving text and images, you can build character-driven stories or compelling data visualizations that engage audiences and deliver results.
With Vyond, it’s easy to create video for your social media marketing. Start a free trial and sign up for our weekly webinar.
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#### Tips For Using Video Advertising To Drive New Business
If you’re a small business looking to reach new customers, you need to advertise where your potential new customers spend their time and devote their attention. Increasingly, that means digital video.
People spend more time online watching video than they do on social media and the average time spent watching video has increased more than 3x from 39 minutes to almost two hours in just the last four years.
Image Source: eMarketer
Below are some tips for getting started in video advertising and making it perform for your business:
4 Tips For Using Video Advertising
1) Make a good video and keep it short
Not surprisingly, a successful video advertising campaign starts with a good video. Make it engaging or educational or funny or quirky, but make it something you would want to watch.
“Good” does not have to be expensive. There are a number of platforms and services out there that will help a marketer with little or no experience create a quality video at relatively low cost.
This video was inexpensively produced by Bellacor using GoAnimate.
You also need to keep your ads short: 15 or 30 seconds. Television has trained all of us to expect 15 or 30 second ads and that expectation has carried over to the web.
There is a place for longer videos that fully explain your business, showcase your best work, or tour your facility. Save those for your site.
2) Be clear about what you want the viewer to do
Unlike on television, digital video advertising allows the viewer to take immediate action – to click to your site, to buy something, to fill out a form for more information. You want the viewer to take action in response to your video.
Your video needs to be clear about what action you want the viewer to take and make it easy for them to do so. In some video formats, the best you can do is include a call to action in the last frames of the video and make the video clickable. Other formats include standardized or customizable call to action buttons and some allow for short text descriptions and links.
Look for a format that makes it easy for viewers to act: the easier it is, the more will take the action.
One of the formats that allows you to do more with your video is the “video ad card”. This format is growing in popularity and is often seen on sites like Twitter. You can turn any video into a video ad card using tools like Reelcontent.com.
3) Put your video where potential customers will see it
Once you have a video you are happy with, you need to decide where and how to run it so that you are targeting your video to those people most likely to respond to it.
Youtube and Facebook are popular places to start. There are also platforms that can distribute your video across thousand of targeted sites and apps. Here is a quick primer on these 3 options:
Youtube
Youtube is the biggest player in the video space and has been for a long time. It is also part of Google and shares the Google search DNA – among other things, this means that it offers better content targeting than Facebook and the other social networks.
Another advantage that Youtube has is that it is exclusively for the consumption of video. Youtube users are more likely to be watching videos with the sound on and so more likely to hear your ad. Youtube offers a number of relatively low cost options.
One of the knocks on Youtube is that it is not easy to use effectively. There are no fewer than six different advertising options. Because of that, because it is not new, and because it was built to work for sophisticated “power” users, the Youtube interface is more complicated.
Also, despite being more complicated, it does not allow for the same brand customization and clear calls to action that some other platforms do.
Facebook
Facebook has very quickly become the main challenger to Youtube’s video prominence.
Like Youtube, Facebook offers virtually unlimited scale. Unsurprisingly given the wealth of data Facebook has about its users, Facebook supports unmatched granular user targeting – you can reach exactly the group you want to reach.
Facebook has conditioned its users to “like” and “share” and that behavior carries over to ads as well: generally speaking your ad will get shared more on Facebook than on Youtube.
Facebook’s interface is less complicated and makes it easier to get started than Youtube’s. However, if you want to keep your costs down, you will need to spend considerable time to become an expert at using it to optimize and revise your campaign targeting.
You have heard the old adage “you can have it done fast, good, and cheap, pick any two.” With Facebook – you can have scale, targeting, and low cost; pick any two.
Reelcontent
One thing that Facebook and Youtube are not good at is putting your video ad in context. On Facebook people are looking at updates from friends and family. On Youtube they are, by and large, watching videos for entertainment.
Reelcontent on the other hand, helps you target your video ads in highly relevant context across the web. The Reelcontent video ad card formats are compatible with virtually any site or app and Reelcontent’s targeting enables advertisers to run these ads only on sites and apps that feature content relevant to your product or business. So, for example, if you have a product for travelers, your ad can run on many travel-related sites rather than just on Facebook or Youtube. In addition, you can add branding, a customized message, and a call to action.
Reelcontent also lets you use any video hosting platform to host your ad. This means you can leverage existing video hosting capabilities and make use of any built-in analytics features.
An added benefit is that Reelcontent is very cost-effective. Similar to YouTube’s Trueview program, you pay only when someone watches your video. There is also no bidding involved to have your ad shown to viewers.
Using Reelcontent can complement your existing ad strategy with Facebook or YouTube to reach a wider audience and help drive conversions.
4) Track Everything, Optimize, Repeat
As with any campaign, you want to track the key metrics for your video campaign including views, completed views, audience retention, engagements and conversions. Some platforms make it easier than others for you to do this and/or to do this using your tool of choice.
It does not need to be complicated – look for a clear visual depiction of your campaign:
Similarly, some platforms make it easier than others to optimize to your KPI. The principles are the same as for any campaign – figure out what is working and do more of it; stop doing the things that are not working.
Wrapping It Up
These are just some of the tips to help you get started with video advertising.
With a little effort video ads can become an important and cost-effective business driver. Just create great video content, have a clear call to action, share your ads on relevant channels, and measure ad performance.
Video is how people are spending their time online, so start taking advantage of this rich medium and develop your own video advertising strategy.
#### Top 3 Explainer Video Software Tools
If you were asked to describe your company you could probably go on for hours about the details and benefits of your product or service.
But if you had to do this in less than two minutes and hold the attention of a very distracted Internet user, you may find yourself hard pressed to squeeze in all the information. For many entrepreneurs, the solution comes in the form of an explainer video. These short animated videos present viewers with a snapshot of your offering to help ease the decision making process.
The concept is easy enough. If you’ve ever given an elevator pitch or quickly shown a friend what you do, the same ideas can be applied to a video. It’s in the production stage, however, that a glitch can occur. Most full-time businesspeople don’t have the opportunity to take up video production as a hobby.
Hubspot recently reported that over 70% of Internet users will watch a video online in 2012. So whether you’re a multimedia maven or not, it’s critical to find a way to get your message out in video form.
While it may seem that this demand is working against those with a less technical or artistic background, there are groundbreaking opportunities for even the most inexperienced video maker.
The explainer video software on today’s market can turn busy professionals into video production superstars. Turning the question “How am I ever going to make video?” into “Which software is best for my business?”
Adobe After Effects
Animation is one of the two most popular ways businesses are spreading the word about their products and services. When it comes to creating high-quality animated videos, Adobe After Effects doesn’t disappoint.
Feature films like Sin City and Avengers have utilized the software. And for the average Joe, it can quickly bring text to life or create an animated stage for presenting information.
The Upside: Business owners’ abilities to create animated videos are virtually boundless with After Effects. From the “puppet tool” that gets still images moving to its flexible layer system, you can start small and go big.
The Downside: It isn’t the simplest explainer video software on the market and takes quite a bit of time and experience to get used to. After Effects’ extensive “bells and whistles” can be great for the avid editor, but for newbies, it can complicate an already nerve-racking production process.
If time is on your side, you can create a stunning animated video the likes of which many rushed business owners won’t be able to compete with. For those looking for an animated explainer video, After Effects provides amazing diversity. You just have to be prepared to spend a lot of time getting to know the software.
Camtasia
Another popular way to develop an explainer video is with screenshot recording software. As the name would suggest, a creator shows their audience a product or service by capturing a computer screen view of it in action.
If you are trying to produce a straight forward tutorial, a screenshot video can show the exact process of using a product. Often companies with complex processes will use this technique to make it easy on their customers to get started or troubleshoot.
The Upside: Clients get to see the exact way to use your product or service without the distraction of comic characters and cutesy effects. Camtasia provides a number of features that help make onscreen actions easy to view and follow.
The Downside: Screenshot videos tend to lack pizzazz. If you’re interested in creating something that viewers will remain captivated by from beginning to end, it can be a struggle to spice up screen recordings.
Screenshots can undeniably serve the “explainer” function for your video if you want cut-and-dry facts delivered to your viewers, but if you’re looking to have some fun, you may struggle to find it here.
GoAnimate
Let’s face it, big screen quality animation sounds great and screen recording videos seem practical. However, maybe you just need something that allows you to show some sass without requiring years of video production experience.
What you need is a blend of screenshot simplicity and advanced editing appeal; something that can add life to your explainer video while making it the process painless. GoAnimate makes it easier on users to create videos that deliver information clearly in a visually captivating way.
The Upside: Companies that want to start their explainer videos quickly, won’t have to battle a huge learning curve or settle for a slightly boring recording.
The Downside: Businesspeople can struggle to focus their message properly with thousands of character and prop possibilities at their disposal.
An explainer video should represent your brand, deliver a clear and effective description of your product or service, and be interesting enough to captivate viewers from start to finish.
Make sure the software you’re using to create your company’s presence in the online video world fits your needs and abilities across the board.
#### Unlimited Creativity: Vyond’s Amazing New AI Tools in Action — 3 Takeaways
Our recent webinar, featuring School of Story Design’s Rance Greene and Vyond’s Taylor Morgan and Jeniffer Strub, explores how you can deliver more tailored, believable storytelling in your videos and walks through some clever use cases for Vyond’s new AI features.
Watch the webinar replay for all the insights. And in the meantime, here are three ideas that stuck with us.
Watch the Replay
Animated videos rock for engaging and educating people
Video producer Taylor Morgan says that animated videos are a great way to engage and educate employees. Live-action production is time- and resource-intensive: it can take months, depending on project size and how much post-production work it needs. Animated videos, on the other hand, let you combine all production stages into one easy-to-control workflow.
What’s more, Taylor says, with animated videos you’re not limited by budget or the physical world around you; if you can imagine it, you can make it. And animated videos are far easier and less expensive to update than live action videos. “With animation, I can easily swap in new characters, update text, re-record voiceover or use text to speech, and I’m done,” Taylor says.
Taylor Morgan on why animated videos rock for engaging and educating people at work
Relatable characters and strong conflict are keys to good storytelling
The ultimate goal of employee communications and training is to get your audience to take action. Stories can be a powerful catalyst for action, because stories access our intellect through the backdoor of our emotions, says Rance. But how do you draw a clear line for your audience from your story to the desired action?
Rance says that to nudge your audience to action, your stories must have two elements: relatable characters and strong conflict. When those are paired, your viewers get a desire for resolution: they want to see the characters get out of the situation and succeed. That desire for resolution opens up your viewers to take action, whether that’s to receive instruction or hear your message.
To create those relatable characters and strong conflict, you need to know your audience. If it’s a new audience, create a profile for them. What circumstances are they in? What are they feeling as they enter the training or receive your message? What do they fear, what do they value? Who are they as people? Then get clear on what you want them to do as a result of the training or your message.
Rance on the two keys to good storytelling
AI helps make your animated video characters more relatable
If we want our video scenarios to resonate with our audiences, the characters in those scenarios need to be good actors, Rance says. Whatever the scene, they should be able to call upon a wide range of believable actions and reactions, from big and sweeping to small and subtle.
Vyond’s AI-powered Video to Action feature means that if you’re looking for an action that doesn’t yet exist in the library, you can simply create it. Just upload a video of yourself (or a willing subject) performing the action you want to animate into Vyond, and within seconds, the action will be ready for you to apply to a character.
Rance shares his tips for recording a useful video clip for Video to Action
For a deeper dive into Vyond’s Text to Prop and Video to Action features, watch the webinar replay. And if you haven’t yet tried these features for yourself but would like to, try Vyond for free — sign up is simple and there’s no credit card required!
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#### Unlock the Power of Video Animation with a Free Trial from Vyond
Take your video creation to the next level with Vyond, the ultimate platform for crafting professional animated videos. Trusted by 65% of the Fortune 500 and millions of users, Vyond helps forward-thinking business leaders ensure their mission-critical messages cut through the noise and motivate their stakeholders to take action.
And now Vyond Go, the industry’s first AI-powered script and video creator, takes you from prompt to video in seconds: you’ll get an editable first draft of your video instantly.
Try Vyond for Free
Why You Should Try Vyond for Free
Vyond offers a wide array of tools and features to help unleash your creative potential. Striking videos leave a lasting impression, and Vyond’s intuitive platform makes it possible for anyone to create a professional video — no video production experience required.
Vyond Go: The Industry’s First AI-Powered Script and Video Creator
We’ve taken video creation from easy to instant with Vyond Go. Enter a prompt or drop in your own content. Then watch as Vyond creates a script and video in seconds. Polish your video in the simple text-based editor, then deploy it as-is or take it into Vyond Studio for fine-tuning.
Vyond Studio: A Powerful Drag-and-Drop Video Creator
Get full video creation and editing capability with our powerful, drag-and-drop, timeline-based video creator. Hundreds of premade templates, 40,000+ props, and a fully featured character creator provide the detail and relevancy to build the exact video you need for any industry or use case.
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About Vyond
Vyond is a game changer for professionals across all industries and job roles. With its AI capabilities, Vyond Studio and Vyond Go allow you to tell character-driven stories and present data in visually compelling ways. The platform is fully loaded with everything you need to build engaging video experiences in minutes.
Today’s stakeholders (prospects, customers, employees, and communities) have a higher threshold for engagement and are more video-native than ever. Vyond enables you to quickly create relevant, engaging videos that motivate today’s overloaded, distracted audiences to take action.
You don’t even need a credit card: see where your creativity can take you with a Vyond free trial.
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#### Updating Your Company’s Sexual Harassment Training
In a perfect world, every employee – and those who interact with your employees – would conduct themselves appropriately at the office. You wouldn’t need to address workplace bullying, there’d be no HR guidelines for acceptable social media posts, and no one would have to attend a sexual harassment seminar.
Sadly, though we’ve come a long way in terms of managing these types of behaviors, we can’t throw out internal training programs just yet. Experts have found that sexual harassment in particular is still pervasive – it’s just become more difficult to notice.
As defined by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), sexual harassment includes any:
“… unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, and other verbal or physical conduct of a sexual nature when the conduct explicitly or implicitly affects an individual’s employment, unreasonably interferes with work performance, or creates an intimidating, hostile, or offensive work environment.”
While this definition may bring to mind especially aggressive or obvious behaviors (like those on, say, Mad Men), today sexual harassment at work can be as “subtle” as:
speaking in aggressive terms about someone outside the office
an off-hand double-entendre comment in the breakroom
or even a Facebook post or email that leaves room for innuendo or interpretation
The cloaked nature of these types of incidents makes it difficult to recognize sexual harassment as it happens. But recent stats reveal that it’s still a widespread and pressing problem.
The Issue by the Numbers
In a 2015 survey, one in three women had experienced sexual harassment in the span of their careers and 71% of these women did not report the incident(s). Of the 29% that did report the issue, only 15% felt as though it was handled fairly.
In terms of prevalence, the EEOC revealed that just last year there were 6,862 charges filed through their organization for sexual harassment. When combined with the submissions from Fair Employment Practices agencies nationwide, the annual reports typically total in the tens of thousands per year. Around 18% of the cases in the past year were filed by men, and the plaintiffs in 2014 saw monetary benefits of $35 million (excluding monetary benefits from litigation).
With respect to the industries most affected, the fields with the highest reported levels of sexual harassment include the food and hospitality industry (42%), and retail (36%). Closely followed by STEM, arts and entertainment, and legal (at 31-30% respectively).
Needless to say, the problem of sexual harassment still exists. The real question is whether your business is prepared to be proactive, or suffer real consequences.
Repercussions for Your Business
Sexual harassment in the office isn’t just a problem for employees (causing distress and damaging a victim’s overall well-being), but it’s often the case that employers shoulder the responsibility for the behavior of the offenders.
Since the addition of Title VII of the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964, any employer with 15 or more workers can be held responsible for sexual harassment.
What many companies don’t realize, however, is that the harasser doesn’t necessarily have to work for your company for you to be held liable. That is – depending on the situation – you may be responsible for third-party agents.
Regardless of the harasser, your company is responsible for:
taking all claims of sexual harassment seriously
escalating issues to the appropriate company channel
conducting an investigation, and
once the behavior has been confirmed, the onus is on the business to prevent it from happening again
Of course, there’s also the potential cost of addressing sexual harassment claims before they go to trial. As the Fiscal Times reports, although many cases are settled pre-court:
“Federal law caps settlements for large companies at $300,000 (not including lost wages and legal fees), but state laws are often more generous to the accuser. If a judge finds egregious behavior, a seven-figure settlement is not out of the question.”
Then there are the financial costs beyond legal proceedings, including employee turnover and reduced productivity. It’s been found that 24% of victims attempt to avoid their harasser by booking time away from work; 10% leave their jobs entirely.
So how can you be proactive?
The Historical Approach to Training
Education is the best way to address sexual harassment; some states are especially strict with regulations.
California, Maine, and Connecticut are currently the only 3 states requiring mandatory sexual harassment training with differing levels of specificity. Nonetheless, every state has laws against harassment in general, so training – though varied – is still strongly recommended.
The education most companies provide comes in the form of live seminars with an instructor, or courses employees can take online. Some HR departments even offer sample communication packets that senior leaders can distribute to employees. These communication packets include implementation checklists and standardized introductory emails for broaching the topic.
However, when you think of standard sexual harassment training, you think of outdated video assets. Over the years the videos used in sexual harassment training sessions earnestly attempted to showcase the subtle and not-so-subtle aspects of the issue in scenarios or skits, but many of the videos are cringe-worthy. This is not just because of the inherent tension or discomfort – but rather because the videos are notorious for poor production value, outdated cultural norms, and laughable acting.
These training videos don’t necessarily age well and are often inadvertently humorous (making them ineffective in conveying the seriousness of the issue). Unfortunately, because certain companies only provide the training on an occasional basis, new videos aren’t created and the old ones become the standard and easy to mock. Take for example the video Walter Reed Army Medical Center allegedly used to train employees up until 2010.
Updating your sexual harassment training material
As a preferred content format, your employees see video assets in their social news feeds daily, and have thereby come to expect it – especially in educational content.
Video helps your audience retain information, and it’s a great training method when it comes to harassment. It’s simply a matter of updating your content so that you don’t belittle or easily dismiss the issue because of an outdated script or poor video quality.
When updating (or initially creating) your library of internal training content consider that the best way to approach the issue of harassment is through a lens of empathy. Showing genuine emotion in your videos can help convey your stance on sexual harassment in a positive light to your employees.
For example, you could show employees a video full of statistics about harassment (illustrating the problem), or you could also create a video (or series of videos) in which the audience sees a scenario of an employee facing a difficult time at work as a result of sexual harassment.
However, be mindful of the context in which you showcase the problem. That is – rather than display an employee subjected to continuous (hokey) sexual advances (as outdated training videos often depict), try to craft a compelling and empathetic story about a victim of harassment; showcasing their increasing dread or fear of coming into the office, and the legitimate reasons they feel conflicted to speak up or seek help. Perhaps the story reveals the victim can’t quit his or her job because of responsibilities in their home.
If you showcase the real consequences of the problem of sexual harassment via storytelling and maintain self-awareness while doing so, this type of training material can prompt the empathy needed to address the issue.
If you focus on telling an authentic story and remember to be empathetic in the way you tell it, your updated training material will make the impact needed.
Why DIY?
While you could outsource your HR training to a third-party organization, the barrier to entry for creating a video is lower than ever. Not only is creating your own content potentially more budget-friendly in the long run, but third-party training programs are not one-size-fits-all. Today’s workplaces have increasingly unique cultures and if a third party is unable to speak to your employees in a transparent and genuine way, you risk training irrelevancy.
Additionally, if you create the content and host it on a video hosting platform, there’s an opportunity to get feedback. That is – you can track individual employee consumption of content, which can help you determine whether employees have watched the content to its full duration, and – by association – if they’ve mastered the policies you’re trying to communicate.
For example, you could create a series of videos as part of an e-course on sexual harassment, and trigger notifications to the HR team whenever employees complete the content in full. This ensures the message gets distributed, and that you provide appropriate and comprehensive training.
With an ever-increasing focus on providing a safe environment for those you are responsible for – whether that’s employees of your organization or even attendees at your industry events – it’s important you have a plan to educate on the topic of sexual harassment.
#### Use Video to Boost Trade Show Engagement and ROI
Investing in a trade show is worth your company’s time — 50% of marketers say their primary reason for attending events is to generate leads and sales. When a business knows how to engage their booth audiences, conferences become an opportunity to meet larger goals, such as raising awareness and gaining leads.
In 2018, video is a key engagement tool at conferences. Like a memorable trade show booth, videos are a way to visually illustrate why people should care about your brand and buy your products.
Using this powerful medium, companies that integrate video throughout their entire conference experience — before, during, and after the trade show — leave a strong impression on conference attendees. Crafting their video messages to align with their conference goals, companies can spread brand awareness and win new customers through trade shows.
Why Use Video?
Imagine your ideal trade show attendee: they’re prompted to visit your booth, they find your presentation engaging, and, afterward, they’re motivated enough to reconnect and make a purchase from you.
Winning over a conference attendee like this doesn’t happen by accident. You have to connect with the attendee in a way that’s memorable, convincing, and lasting. A standard PowerPoint presentation or brochure won’t create this level of engagement — but a video should do the trick.
Along with showing videos at your booth, you’ll want to engage with attendees through video before and after the show as well. Connecting with attendees throughout the conference experience ensures that you’ve grabbed their attention, increasing the likelihood of converting them to customers. Here are the three stages of trade show videos:
Pre-trade show videos: Capture attendees’ attention before the show to highlight your booth and encourage them to visit.
Trade show videos: Make your booth stand out amidst the rows and rows of companies with a captivating video that draws in visitors.
Post-trade show videos: Reconnect with attendees so you can prompt them to engage with your business and eventually make a purchase.
Adding video to your trade show marketing, you’re able to engage with attendees in a powerful, captivating way and eventually convert them to customers.
Pre-Trade Show: Create Hype
Conference attendee conversions have been shown to rise up to 50% when a pre-show promotion was used by exhibitors. Sending attendees a pre-show video about your company’s attendance serves as a marketing touchpoint to get attendees ready to meet your business and start a conversation about what your company does.
To get started, here’s what you should promote in your pre-show video and how you should distribute it.
What to promote
Your pre-trade show video gets attendees excited to see your company at the conference and provide the information they need to find you there.
If you’ll be hosting a booth, a great pre-show video idea is to describe what you do, who will be there, and what you’ll be offering. With this primer, attendees are going to be motivated to visit your booth and learn more about your business. To create this video, here are a few tips:
Describe what demonstrations you’ll be doing. Narrow in on key takeaways from the lessons — that way attendees know exactly why visiting your booth or your conference sessions will be beneficial.
Identify ways to get in touch. Should attendees set up a meeting with you in advance? Are you hosting a networking event or happy hour? It’s best to overview this in the video, and provide additional context on your landing page and in your email.
Include your team in real life or in animation. People like working with people they know. Use video to provide that connection ahead of time.
Curious about how this all comes together? Here’s a video we made to promote our booth for the ATD International Conference.
Beyond promoting your booth, you can also create a pre-show video to promote talks or sessions your company will be hosting at the conference. Highlighting the takeaways of the presentation will compel viewers to attend and hear more from your company. To create this video, here are a few tips:
Start with a problem. Begin your video by reminding viewers of the problem your conference session is going to address. With this intro, viewers immediately understand how beneficial your presentation will be when you later explain how you’ll be offering solutions in your talk. For example, Karen Kostrinsky in the video below begins with the problem of boring, stale training content to promote her Learning Solutions conference presentation.
Use images to illustrate the most valuable lessons of the session. Forget bullet points — visuals are a more engaging, memorable way to highlight the takeaways of a lesson. For example, in the video above, screenshots are used to illustrate the video editing skills that will be taught at the session.
By watching your pre-show video, attendees are excited to meet you at the conference. They understand what you’ll be offering, so they’re ready to interact and gain insights from you and your team.
Where to promote
Creating a high-quality pre-trade show video is meaningless if you don’t distribute it strategically. For your video to have the most impact on your conference experience, you’ll want to share it with attendees through social media and email.
For social media, Facebook and Instagram ads are powerful ways to share pre-show videos. Both platforms are visually-focused — Instagram is almost entirely images and Facebook feeds are loaded with pictures— so users are ready to watch content like your pre-show video as they scroll through.
Instagram and other visual channels are useful platforms for pre-show videos because they enable ad targeting, so you can direct your video to appear for prospective attendees.
For advice on setting up this ad targeting, check out this helpful guide.
Another way to promote your conference attendance is sending your pre-show video through an email. People are compelled to open their emails since they’re directly addressed to them, so emails are a great way to spread the word about your trade show appearance.
To ensure your pre-show video email is being opened, target your message to prospective conference attendees. If you think that your customers will be attending the conference, send the video to your list of client emails. Some trade shows give you the option to purchase attendee lists in advance as well. When you’re sending a video via email, try giving your open rate a boost by using the word “video” in the subject line. Here are some tips for sending videos via email.
Distributing your pre-show video through email and social media sets your company up for a successful conference. Attendees will be prepared and excited to meet your business after watching your video, so you’ll have plenty of opportunities to spread awareness of your brand and gain new customers.
At the Trade Show: Using Video to Attract Attendees
Adding a video to your booth is a way to remove some of the sales pressure people may feel. With an understanding of your business from video helps attendees feel ready to approach you with questions.
From a distance, without audio, in a crowd of people, your trade show video has to be both captivating and informative. “A monitor with a great video…showing your logo, top products and key messaging can create movement and tell a complete story, especially when your staffer takes the time to explain the content to visitors,” says Sofia Troutman of Skyline Exhibits.
Here are a few tips for creating and setting up a video for your trade show booth.
What to include
Your trade show video is a pitch — through images, facts, and storytelling, it shows attendees why they should care about your business. Having watched your video, a booth attendee should understand:
What problem your business is solving
How that problem affects their own life
How your products solve that problem
The style of your trade show video all depends on your product and customer preferences. A business with a technical product may want their video to have clear facts and statistics. They know that their audience cares about the nitty-gritty details of their product, so they show their product’s value in the video with loads of information.
On the other hand, a business with a non-technical product might expect their audiences to lose interest if they present too much text and data. Instead, they focus on images and use music in their trade show video to engage customers and keep their attention. The personality assessment company Extended DISC, for example, primarily uses animation and voice-over narration to convey the key points of their product in the video below.
Whiteboard animation is another popular way to catch attention at a trade show. The hand drawing motion does an especially great job of grabbing attention from a distance.Watch Accessplanit‘s trade show explainer video below.
Pick a style that aligns with your audience’s preferences, and your video will engage plenty of potential customers at your booth.
How to set up
Beyond its content, your trade show video has to be highly visible and easy to access to attract conference attendees. A basic way of ensuring that your video is easy to watch is setting up a large, elevated TV where your video can play.
With this TV setup, attendees will be able to see your video from a distance.
A large, elevated, TV is great for attracting people outside of your booth, you’ll want to make sure multiple attendees are able to comfortably watch your video from inside your booth and from a distance, without blocking out you next door neighbors.
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Post-Trade Show: Follow-Up
Conference shows are an investment — you have to pay for the business cards and merchandise to hand out, the set up fees, travel expenses, lodging, and more. All of that money, though, goes to waste if you don’t follow up on your prospects.
Make your investment worthwhile by reconnecting with attendees through video. After hearing so many presentations and pitches at the show, they may need a refresh to remember what your business is about. Sending an email with a video reminds attendees of your conversation at the show.
Here are a few ideas for a follow-up video to send to booth attendees.
Invite prospects to a webinar
Booth attendees provided their email to you because they liked your company — your team’s presentation showed them why your product is useful and how it can help them in their jobs. Continue showing how you can provide them with value by introducing them to your educational content.
An easy first step in doing this is emailing prospects a video to invite them to a webinar, if your company hosts them. Like your pre-show video, this invitation should highlight the valuable lessons and skills you plan to teach. Briefly highlight the takeaways so viewers know why they should attend, and clearly explain in the video how they can sign up for the event.
As an example, the webinar hosting company GotoWebinar created this video for a webinar we hosted together. Their team did a great job succinctly explaining the key lessons and sign up instructions..
After receiving your webinar invitation, conference attendees are more likely to become your customers. Here at Vyond, we’ve found that 10% of our weekly webinar signups turn into paying customers.
Providing prospects with value, the webinar invitation video doesn’t just educate conference attendees — it also gives them a glimpse of the excellent service you provide your customers so that they feel ready to make their first purchase.
Send a video of trade show testimonials
Emailing footage of the conference is another powerful follow-up video to send. Seeing clips of the trade show reminds attendees of their visit to your booth and how they enjoyed hearing about your brand.
Don’t use general conference footage though — keep the focus on your company and your customers. As an example, here’s a video of a customer testimonial from a conference. Note: GoAnimate is now Vyond. Learn more about the changes.
In the eyes of prospects, a trade show floor testimonial makes a convincing case for your business. They get to hear a real person’s candid views, rather than an advertisement.
Whether it’s a testimonial, webinar invitation, or other helpful piece of content, your follow-up video is a powerful reminder to prompt conference attendees to reconnect with your business and eventually become a paying customer.
Make Your Booth Memorable with Video
A candy bowl at your trade show booth isn’t enough to turn an attendee into a client. For the conference to lead to conversions, your business has to engage with attendees before, during, and after the event with captivating, memorable content. To achieve this engagement, video is the medium to use.
Driving opens, clicks, and orders, eye-catching videos are the key to a successful trade show experience. They show attendees why they should visit your booth before the event, why they should care about your product once they’re at your booth, and remind them to reconnect with your business afterward. By carefully curating videos for each stage of the conference experience, companies can make the most out of trade shows — winning new customers and spreading brand awareness.
About Vyond
GoAnimate is now Vyond. Learn more about the changes.
Vyond allows people of all skill levels in all industries and job roles to create dynamic and powerful media. With features that go beyond moving text and images, you can build character-driven stories or compelling data visualizations that engage audiences and deliver results.
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#### Using a Variety of Styles Boosts Video Engagement
In a screen-first world, it’s no surprise that video remains the most engaging medium. But if you want your videos to stand out — and actually help your audience retain information — you need every edge you can get.
One factor often overlooked?
The engagement and retention advantages of using a variety of visual modes (or styles) in your videos.
Why videos with “media richness” work better
Variety isn’t just the spice of life — it’s a proven way to boost engagement and learning.
Research shows that “media richness” — using multiple formats and presentation styles — improves both engagement and retention.
A 2023 study found that “media-centric” and “balanced” video styles enhanced engagement across disciplines, while single-mode,“speaker-centric” videos did not.
An eLearning study showed that combining text, images, animations, and video increased learner engagement and preference.
And according to this paper on maximizing learning from video content, varying visuals, voice, and interactivity helps manage cognitive load and sustain attention.
Tl;dr: Mixing visual formats doesn’t just entertain — it helps viewers process, store, and recall information more effectively.
Key benefits of videos with visual variety:
Reduces content fatigueAttention naturally fades over time. Changing out formats or visual styles restores novelty and sustains focus.
Improves content relevance and effectivenessDifferent messages call for different media. Animation may clarify complex ideas, while a narrator suits step-by-step guidance. Having options ensures the right fit for each topic.
Supports different learning stylesSome learners connect better with visuals, others with audio or a story. Combining animated elements, avatar narrators, motion graphics with audio, and live action footage keeps everyone engaged.
Strengthens comprehension and retentionPresenting a concept in varied ways builds multiple neural pathways, boosting understanding and recall.
Makes videos feel bespoke and high-valueVisually rich, layered videos signal high effort and relevance — driving higher attention and completion rates.
Vyond helps you create effective, “media rich” videos
Vyond’s all-in-one video creation platform was designed to make it easy to create highly effective, visually varied business communications and training. Choose from a range of styles and formats, including animated, AI avatars, screen recordings, motion graphics, generative AI images and video clips, and more. Connect with any audience and drive real business results.
Learn more about the many formats and styles available in Vyond.
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#### Using Vyond for Internal Communications Videos
If you think video is a vital part of internal communications, you’re not alone: 98% of companies say video is useful for improving communication and employee training.
Why use video for internal communications, though? Video is, traditionally, one of the most expensive and time-consuming media to produce. With today’s tools, however, it’s easier than ever to make your own videos to keep employees informed with dynamic and engaging internal communications.
Why use video for internal communications?
How can internal communications be improved in the workplace? With the amount information is shared in a workplace on any given day, video can be a game-changer in terms of how employees access and retain knowledge at work.
Video appeals to multiple learning types.
Presenting information through video helps address the different learning styles of your employees:
Visual learners will benefit from watching videos, as opposed to reading an article or sitting through a workshop.
Auditory learners will benefit from a voiceover explaining a video’s contents.
Those who learn through reading/writing will also benefit from text or motion graphics added to a video.
Why use video for internal communications? Because video is one of the best ways to meet the needs of all your employees in a single format.
Creating videos has never been more affordable.
Videos are more cost-effective to make than ever. Equipment and software have become more affordable and accessible, so anyone can make a video with the right combination of tools. There are also many budget-friendly platforms that offer easy, web-only video-editing services.
Take Vyond, for example. A subscription to our platform costs between $299 and $999 a year. Compare that to a single TV commercial, which, on average, costs $2,000 to $7,000 to produce (assuming you have a small crew).
But by using Vyond to create a suite of animated videos, Cottingham & Butler saved over $600,000 in production costs and saved their clients more than 2,000 hours in unproductive meetings.
Anyone can create videos.
To make videos a few decades ago, you would have needed the skills of both a professional videographer and video editor. The software and equipment were both complicated and expensive to use — two things that put amateurs off from creating their own content.
Video-making software is far more accessible today with drag-and-drop editing and other user-friendly features. The knowledge barrier is shrinking, thanks to the many tutorials available. You can find tutorials for everything regarding video creation on platforms like Skillshare and YouTube. Some video-editing platforms also offer templates that make the video creation process even easier.
5 Ways to Use Video for Internal Communications
Creating video is easier than ever, so dream big when thinking about how you’ll use video for your internal communications.
From employee spotlights to DEI training, video can be used in a number of key ways to educate employees and strengthen your culture.
Recruit Talented Job Candidates
Stand out from competing employers by bolstering your Jobs page with video. Instead of just using text, add videos of your employees and office space to get candidates excited about your company:
Job Description Videos
Communicate key details about a role with visuals to reach and appeal to a wide range of possible candidates. You can also use this format to showcase company values. This Fiverr video uses plain language to invite viewers to apply to the company. The narrator’s straightforward descriptions of what’s happening in the video are comedic and keep viewers engaged.
Company Profile Videos
Create anticipation for potential hires through a company profile. Use this format to show company values, history, an office tour, and any other interesting parts of your company. Google used their popular video to showcase their office, work culture, and company values through the eyes of their interns.
Employee Spotlight Videos
Showcase your current employees and their stories by highlighting them with video. This video humanizes our marketing specialist Asia by sharing her interests and background. With a friendly voice and animation, potential hires can get a feel for company culture.
Onboard New Hires
Video is a great tool for onboarding because it allows you to communicate the vast amounts of information new hires need to know. Instead of using long blocks of text, highlight the meaning of company policies with visuals and audio. Engage your new hires with videos that make their onboarding a smooth, enjoyable process.
Workplace Orientation Videos
Show new hires internal tools, processes, security policies, and any other general information employees need to know to do their work. Consider depicting scenarios to get your point across. For example, this video uses animated characters and engaging dialogue to illustrate what you shouldn’t do on a conference call.
Leadership and Team Welcome Videos
Have leadership and team members create short videos introducing themselves to new hires. They can share their work history and company values to offer a lens into company culture. This leader at Intuit uses video to share their history with the company, company values, and expectations of new employees.
Showcase Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI)
Rather than explaining DEI values in a block of text, video allows you to show what diversity and inclusion mean within your organization. To become an inclusive organization, you need to demonstrate what it looks like in practice. Use video to demonstrate common scenarios and give a voice to underrepresented team members.
Video is also a great tool to keep your team updated on DEI best practices within your organization by combining moving images, text, and audio to illustrate important information:
DEI Company Policy Videos
Show your organization’s commitment to DEI by sharing videos that explain what initiatives are in place to support minorities within the company. Google did this with their Women at Google video, in which female employees lend credence to the company’s DEI commitment.
DEI Education Videos
Some DEI concepts may be newer to some employees and hard for them to understand. Video helps make these concepts more concrete and understandable. This video by PDT Global uses animated characters, text explanations, and a voiceover to introduce a nonbinary gender identity.
Communicate Health and Wellness Policies
Using video to share health and wellness is a great example of how internal communications in the workplace can be improved. You can use images and text with a voiceover to explain why different health practices—like exercise—are important, or perhaps you’d show scenarios to demonstrate healthy behaviors:
Health Awareness Videos
Create videos addressing health issues that employees might be susceptible to. This video breaks down precautions employees should take due to COVID-19, using animated characters, text, and voiceover.
Mental Wellness Videos
In Summer 2020, we found that 45% of employees regard training on mental health a key concern for workplaces as many continue to work—and feel isolated—at home. This video uses a scenario to explain how viewers can take charge of their mental health and also covers the employer’s initiatives for managing mental health.
Conduct Employee Training
Include video when training employees. Doing so can boost the quality of the training sessions, especially in remote settings. It’s a great tool for demonstrating key concepts with formats like motion graphics or animated videos in play. You can use scripted scenarios or whiteboard animation to convey information.
Self-led Training Videos
Our research found that employees mostly preferred self-led online training, like video, to instructor-led training. Use this medium to explain concepts, allow viewers to understand and digest the topic, and ask questions where necessary. This format is used by Microsoft Enable in their series on gaming accessibility. This video uses examples from actual games as well as a voiceover to explain how to set clear goals for players.
Microlearning Videos
When explaining new concepts, consider creating microlearning videos that break down complex topics. This video (and the whole series) by Orchard Supply Hardware uses a consistent template in bite-sized video format to explain different training topics.
Continuously collect input to improve internal communications videos.
Not everyone will receive changes to internal communications in the same way, so make sure to follow up with your employees. It’s important to understand, too, what the communication needs of internal and external stakeholders are. However your organization adopts and implements videos, consider sharing employee engagement surveys to learn how your videos are performing.
This feedback can help you understand where video does and doesn’t work and how effective it is in your internal communications.
With easy-to-edit videos made in Vyond, you have the ability to create engaging videos that can be continuously improved. Start making internal communications videos in an iterative way, and try Vyond free.
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#### Using Vyond Templates
With our new templates, you can make 10x more videos, 10x faster and more efficiently.
Companies have valuable information to communicate to their stakeholders —customers, employees, communities, and prospects. Employees are remote or hybrid, and often distributed globally, making it even more difficult to communicate with them. Each successive generation of the workforce has a higher threshold for engagement and is more video-native.
So how do you cut through the noise and truly get your stakeholders engaged and motivate them to take action? The only answer is video! According to Insivia, audiences retain up to 95% of information conveyed through video.
Traditionally, making a video is hard. It requires expertise, time, and money. With Vyond’s video animation software, creating videos is 10x faster and more efficient than creating live-action videos. And when you use our new starter templates, with pre-loaded props, backgrounds, scene transitions, and more, the process becomes even faster and more efficient.
Building a video using our new starter templates is simple!
Three Template Types
Video Template Library
The video template library is located on the main Vyond website and has 200+ fully scripted templates to choose from. Looking to create a video for your new DEI initiative, a sales enablement video, or an explainer? The video template library allows you to get a head-start on your video creation, potentially saving you hours of time.
Starter Video Templates
These almost 200 templates appear when you click “Create a new video.” These video templates are an ideal place to get started on creating a video. They’re not fully scripted but have many commonly used and requested layouts. Want to create a video to thank your employees? Want to create a simple course introduction? Here’s where to start.
Scene Template Library
Did you know that we have 2300+ individual scene templates to choose from, all pre-populated with backgrounds, animated effects, props, and characters? From a scene set in an office to metaphors set in space or on a pirate ship, the scene template library has scenes that will make your video shine. When editing your video, click on “Scene” in the top-left corner to access the scene template library, or select “choose template” after clicking “add scene” on your timeline.
Creating by using Vyond Templates
Both scene and video templates can be quickly and easily used to create videos of your own. Choose scenes you like from other videos, modify them with your own props, actions, and voiceovers, and mix and match with scenes you’ve created yourself – or modify a whole video from the video template library. The opportunities to quickly and easily create your own videos from pre-existing templates are endless.
Start using our templates today with our free trial.
#### Video Advertising: 7 Ways to Create High-Performing Video Ads
Video advertising is a promotional tactic that mixes live-action footage, animation, images, and audio to increase brand awareness, reach more prospects, and attract new customers. With the appearance and popularity of social networks, video advertising is no longer exclusive to TV or subway stations. Instead, it can reach consumers wherever they are through the Internet.
Videos, unlike an image or text-based ad, allow you to quickly provide context around your product or service—and that’s not their only edge! Experts have furthermore found that videos outperform text and image-based ads in popular ad networks like Facebook.
By following these seven steps, you can create high-performing video ads and maximize your chances of seeing positive results.
1. Video advertising works best at 30 seconds long.
Google recently researched the ideal length of an ad. In their study, they showed participants 15-, 30-, and 120-second versions of the same ad. Google found that 30-second ads saw the highest view-through rate (VTR)—the number of people who watched the video in its entirety without leaving.
The template above offers a great peek into how a 30-second video ad can be structured to share a lot of information in a short amount of time. By blending scroll-stopping animations with a compelling story, you can make the most of your audience’s limited attention.
(If you’re a Vyond customer, you can create your own video ad by customizing this template!)
Create your ad in multiple lengths for maximum flexibility. If you can only produce one version, though, make it a compelling 30-second ad for the highest return on your investment
2. Focus on story, not video quality
You don’t need an experienced animator or a production team to create a video ad that sends potential clients to your website. In fact, you just need a compelling story.
Wistia found that video ads with great storytelling had a higher conversion rate than ads with much higher video quality. A high-budget film crew will inevitably make you stand out, but they can’t ensure a connection between you and your audience; genuine storytelling can.
Create a draft to test out your story with a storyboard. Storyboards are visual representations of your video ad’s scenes. They feature text-based descriptions of what will happen alongside sketches or unpolished animations of how the events will look. These cues help your team get on the same page conceptually before jumping into video advertising.
3. Encourage viewers to take action
Remind viewers to take an action, like visiting your website or buying your product. Do this with a call-to-action (CTA), such as “buy now” or “subscribe to our newsletter.”
Headspace calls viewers to “try the new Headspace” at the end of one of this ad. In addition, they’ve included icons for Google Play and the App Store, guiding viewers to the places they can go to in order to “try the new Headspace.”
A CTA tells viewers exactly what you want them to do next, and your video advertising should always end with one. Your CTA can be text on screen, a motion graphic, or a voiceover that encourages people to take action, for example: download software, hire a service, or purchase an item.
4. Test multiple versions of the same concept
Your team isn’t part of your ad’s target audience, so they can only speculate which version of an ad concept will bring the most results. To know what ad resonates the most with your audience, you should test multiple versions of the same ad. That might mean testing videos of varying lengths or with a different description, title, or thumbnail.
Webflow creates several versions of their Facebook video advertising to let the algorithm find the best combination of ad settings for their campaign’s goals.
To sum up, you can make data-backed decisions on which version of your ad is the best. Publish the same ad concept with slight variations in length, description, title, or ad elements. After a set time, stick to the ad version that brought you the most results.
5. Lead your video advertising with hooks
A hook is a scene at the beginning of your video that lets the viewer know why the ad is worth watching. But, without one, viewers may ignore your ad regardless of its high production quality and storytelling.
One of BAMSocks’ ads features a customer claiming the company’s socks are the best she’s ever tried. The claim acts as a hook, motivating viewers to watch the entire ad to discover what makes these socks different from others in the market.
A well-produced video hook gives viewers a reason to watch. For instance, they can be the highlight of your story, an unexpected datapoint, or a teaser of what’s to come. You can craft excellent hooks by following one of three simple frameworks: the preview, the question, and the problem.
6. Add closed caption links to your videos
92% of videos viewers watch videos with the sound off on mobile—that’s most of the audience. So, you’ll need to reach those viewers without sound.
Buffer, for example, adds subtitles to their staffs’ and customers’ voices during their video advertising.
You can add captions to your videos regardless of your experience with video editing software. Teams with video production knowledge can use professional tools like Adobe Premiere Pro to add captions to their videos. Meanwhile, those with less experience can achieve the same results with the caption features included with the hosting solution of their choice.
7. Retarget ad viewers over multiple platforms
Once you’ve created a video ad, it’s time to optimize your ad strategy. You can retarget your ads to only show your videos only to people who have already viewed your ads. This repetitive exposure to an ad, as Google discovered, makes viewers more aware of your brand and likely to visit your landing page. Retargeting keeps you top of mind with viewers who are already familiar with you and, therefore, more likely to purchase.
MasterClass uses retargeting ads to show their courses to people who have watched a specific course’s ad or to those who have interacted with the brand on platforms like YouTube or Facebook.
You can run retargeting ads after placing Google or Facebook pixels on your website. A pixel is a code that monitors the behavior of your site visitors and ad viewers. Once the pixel is on your website, you can set up a Google Ads or Facebook Ads retargeting campaign to remind people of your brand’s potential impact on their day-to-day life.
Take your video advertising above and beyond with custom animations.
High-performing campaigns require planning, testing, and analysis. These seven guidelines let you produce compelling videos that fulfill your marketing goals: downloads, leads, sales, among others. Video ads, however, are traditionally expensive and difficult to produce. Vyond allows you to make your own videos easily and inexpensively. Our easy-to-use animation studio is packed with tools and templates to help you get started. Try Vyond for free.
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#### Video Communication for Governments and Organizations: Examples and Tips
Businesses frequently use videos as a promotional or marketing tool. But many governments, non-profits, and health organizations aren’t yet leveraging video in their communication efforts. This is a major missed opportunity, as videos can be a great way to engage with your community and quickly communicate important information.
With 81% of Americans using smartphones, most of your community can watch your videos on the go. There’s simply never been a better time to start using videos.
How Governments and Other Organizations Leverage Video
Governments and various organizations can use videos in several ways, each achieving a different objective. Do you have important information that your community needs to see? New systems for your team to learn? Dates and times for upcoming events? You can achieve all of these objectives with video. By making the right video for your goal, you can start communicating via video in no time.
Here, we’ve compiled a list of the types of videos governments and organizations typically use, with examples to illustrate how you can translate your specific goal into the right kind of video for your audience.
Quickly Communicate New Services or Programs
Did your city or organization release a new tool for managing utilities? Or maybe a centralized hub for finding the latest city events? This is great, but unfortunately, many people will likely miss out on this new, helpful service. At least, they will if you’re not promoting it in the right ways.
Video is a great way to quickly showcase a new service or tool available to the public. With video, you can show how to use the new service, tell a fun narrative, and, best of all, promote the video online where your community can see it.
The City of Calgary Digital Portal
What is it? The City of Calgary uses a fun, animated video to tell residents about a new online portal. This portal helps users to make the most of publicly available data to save money on utility bills, understand traffic patterns, avoid crowds, and more. What makes this video especially useful is the inclusion of the actual tool interspersed with animated visuals.
Why does it matter? By the end of the video, viewers understand what the web portal is and a few ways to use it. This information would be easy to miss if it were simply included in a text-only email update. The video makes it easy to understand and much quicker to absorb.
San Diego for Every Child
What is it? San Diego for Every Child (SDEC) is a nonprofit organization that works with various local organizations to help children at a disadvantage as a result of poverty. In the animated video above, SDEC details its mission while using numerous stats and charts to show how widespread poverty and financial hardships are.
Why does it matter? San Diego for Every Child has a grand mission that could easily get lost in translation. Their video uses animated maps and charts to show the scale of the problem they’re tackling. Organizations can use this approach for several topics, from showcasing a nationwide issue to advertising a service area.
Cleveland Water Web Portal Navigation
What is it? Once Cleveland Water drove signups to their new web portal, it was time to ensure people knew how to use it. This video outlines the many functions of the web portal, helping users go from newly signed up to experienced power users.
Why does it matter? The web portal navigation video uses actual images and footage of the Cleveland Water web portal. The use of the real web portal interface makes the advice in the video more applicable than if it were represented via an animation. Coupled with an animated cursor that guides users, this video is useful for its audience.
Read more about how The City of Cleveland uses video.
Template Video: Transit Update
Use this template to share information about public services, such as transportation. The video is currently about changes in transportation service, but you can update it with text and backgrounds from Vyond’s library to make any type of announcement.
Access the template video here.
Support Public Health Communications
There are often issues that the general public needs to know about. Unfortunately, disseminating information to a broad population can be a challenge. Video is a great way to spread the word and quickly communicate public health messages to your community.
Nigeria Federal Ministry of Health COVID-19 Emergency Response
pic.twitter.com/L2Eb9iKSQR
— Federal Ministry of Health, NIGERIA (@Fmohnigeria) August 30, 2020
What is it? The Federal Ministry of Health for Nigeria relies on social media to disseminate information as public health emergencies unfold. This video was used to convey the importance of wearing a face mask in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Why does it matter? Pandemic response relies on sharing emergent and rapidly-changing information with citizens. Using easy-to-update animations and social media channels enabled Nigeria’s FMOH to reach their constituents and save lives.
Wisconsin Department of Health Services Radon Testing
Posted by Wisconsin Department of Health Services on Monday, January 27, 2020
What is it? The Wisconsin Department of Health Services puts out regular updates for their local community. This video explains that 10% of Wisconsin homes have elevated levels of radon, which can cause cancer, and goes on to explain how to test for radon.
Why does it matter? Radon is a dangerous public health issue. The video does a great job of communicating the importance of the issue and the simple steps to take against it.
NHS North West Boroughs Healthcare on Loneliness
What is it? The NHS North West Boroughs Healthcare team offers mental health support. The North West Boroughs Healthcare team created the above video to spotlight loneliness and how to overcome it.
Why does it matter? Using animation, the video drives home the importance of community and ensures as many people as possible know how to reach out in a mental health crisis.
NHS North Cumbria Integrated Care
The more I am with @GoAnimate the more I love it. #ThursdayThoughts pic.twitter.com/77UoZSle4v
— Kathryn Yglecias (@TheQuillArcher) August 22, 2017
What is it? NHS North Cumbria, a provider of community and health services in the U.K., uses live-action Twitter video with an animated overlay (note: GoAnimate is now Vyond). The short video details the effect that extended hospital stays can have on elderly patients.
Why does it matter? Health-related information can be difficult for those outside the healthcare industry to understand. This Twitter video uses animations alongside the live-action video to highlight important information and stats, which makes it easier to understand the main takeaways.
Template Video: Why Social Distancing Works
Various governments and organizations are using video to communicate public health updates around Coronavirus. The video below shares basic preventative measures against Coronavirus and explains why social distancing works. Update some or all of the template to reinforce your local public health messaging and align with your current policies.
Access the template video here.
Disseminate Updates to the Public with Informative Videos
Not everyone likes to read, and many of us lead busy lives. With a video, you can reach your audience on social media, by email, and even via text alert. This makes it possible to inform the public of any pressing matters, regardless of whether they’re out of town, they hate reading, or they’re just busy.
Wake County Board of Elections
What is it? This video from the Wake County Board of Elections shows viewers the steps that election workers go through to ensure ballots are kept safe and secure during the voting process. The video uses live-action footage of polling-place workers alongside text to drive home the narrative.
Why does it matter? The above video makes great use of mixed media, using live-action footage and text to appeal to multiple types of learners. The video also does a great job of showcasing the hard work of the election workers, while also acting as a public service announcement about voting. This shows that it’s possible to accomplish multiple objectives with a single video.
Watch more videos from Wake County.
The Laboratory of Everyday Things: Neighborhood Transit
What is it? The Laboratory of Everyday Things, a group of Florida-based architects, took first place in the Smart City Solutions Competition using the above video. The video details a feasible way to alleviate traffic congestion by taking a different approach to traffic flow, as made clear in their fun, animated video.
Why does it matter? The above video uses animation, scene transitions, narration, and text callouts to tell an interesting story that’s as educational as it is entertaining. While the video is from a group of architects, any organization or government could use the same narrative approach to inform the public of a new service or initiative.
Read more about this project.
Tennessee Valley Authority Awareness
What is it? Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) provides electricity and other services to the entire Tennessee Valley region. Their promotional video gives some of their employees the chance to shine, as they inform viewers of the hard work they did throughout the summer.
Why does it matter? Promotional videos don’t always have to sell something. The TVA video makes excellent use of actual footage to spread awareness about their company’s hard work and people, which can help brand awareness and give TVA workers pride in their company.
Santa Clarita Valley Gran Fondo Promotion
What is it? Bob Roll, a cyclist and YouTube personality, partners with SCV Gran Fondo ride in the animated video above, in which he details the ride and when it takes place. The video uses colorful animation, a lively voice-over, and live-action footage to give viewers an idea of what the event is and why they should be interested.
Why does it matter? The above video features a great narrator, who happens to be involved in the event itself. This, along with the combined use of animation and live-action footage of the event, gives the entire video a personal feel. This approach can be useful for promoting virtually any event, as it will help viewers connect with the video.
Leverage Video to Simplify Internal Training & HR Processes
As your department grows and changes, it’s vital to keep all of your team up to date. An effective way to do this is to develop an internal learning program or a series of courses that can help team members learn quickly and memorably. Videos are a great way to quickly convey complex information, and they can plug into an eLearning course or stand-alone.
City of London Corporation Customer Service
What is it? More than 9.3 million people are living in London. To better serve the community, the City of London Corporation team put together a short informational video that helps those working for the city get a better idea of customer service. It’s easy to forget that the community members are the customers, and this video serves as a succinct reminder for city staff.
Why does it matter? This video is the definition of concise, coming in at just under one minute. This short runtime, along with narration and colorful, animated scenes, makes for a quick watch that’s immediately engaging. This style of video is fantastic for internal training, public service announcements, or even event promotion.
Watch more from the City of London Corporation.
City of Houston Dental Plans
What is it? The City of Houston offers its employees multiple dental insurance plans. Insurance is often overwhelming and difficult to understand. This video avoids overwhelming by instead showing viewers relatable scenarios with scenes of people in offices looking over insurance and consulting with their dentists.
Why does it matter? Animation makes the video more visually appealing, while charts simplify information and make it easier to understand the differences between the plans. The result is a clear breakdown of the different dental plans.
Leicester Hospital Safer Surgery Checklist
What is it? Surgeries are complex and involve many people, steps, and variables. Safety is always a top concern, making a tried-and-true process incredibly important. The Leicester Hospital created a safer surgery checklist, which helps doctors and their staff keep patients safe while staying efficient. They showcase this checklist in the above video, which puts viewers right in the middle of a hospital.
Why does it matter? The above video doesn’t just talk about the checklist—it shows the checklist being used. Seeing it in use helps drive home its effectiveness while also educating audiences on how it works.
Watch more from Leicester Hospital and learn how Providence St. Joseph’s Health (a US-based hospital system unaffiliated with Leicester Hospital), uses video and augmented reality in their training.
City of Houston 2016 Enrollment Video
What is it? Dental insurance is one thing, but benefits in general? That’s an even more complex subject. The City of Houston once again uses animation to break down benefits in a digestible, fun manner. Unlike their dental video, this piece focuses on all benefit changes for 2016.
Why does it matter? On-screen text and a voice-over allow the City of Houston to cover a lot of ground quickly in several ways. This caters to all learning styles, ensuring the viewer retains the information.
Management Concepts: Merit System Principles
What is it? Management Concepts helps find and train employees for the public sector. The above video offers a quick overview of the Merit System Principles, which guide federal employees across the country.
Why does it matter? Management Concepts tackles the complicated Merit System Principles in less than two minutes, using a narrator and text. This quick approach is great for eLearning and can be especially useful for tackling one-off concepts—like the Merit System Principles—or even a new regulation.
RNLI: Safeguarding Awareness Training
What is it? The Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) has the big responsibility of ensuring those under their watch are safe. They make this message clear in their in-depth eLearning video on awareness training. The video uses animation, narration, and text to guide readers through the many safety issues to be aware of.
Why does it matter? The RNLI safeguarding awareness video is lengthy, clocking in at more than 20 minutes. But it covers a wide breadth of material by using animation, narration, characters, scene changes, and formatted text. You can use this combination to cover virtually any topic for internal training, making this approach great for eLearning.
Taking your communications to the next level
The above examples are only scratching the surface. Videos can help your government or organization in any number of ways. You can even pull inspiration from marketing videos, which often do a great job of grabbing viewers’ attention. Video is flexible and, thanks to animation software, affordable.
With the right inspiration, you can create videos that your audience watches, learns from, and even enjoys.
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#### Video Hero Spotlight: Megan’s Vyond & Articulate Storyline Tips
Animated videos complement eLearning design and development training exceptionally well. Our latest Video Hero is Megan Creegan, an eLearning Developer at Equity Residential. To develop their course interactivity, Equity Residential uses Articulate Storyline. Then, Megan creates the Vyond videos that they upload throughout the training.
Most of their videos are not available for external viewing. But, Megan created an example training for the Storyline and Vyond communities to show how the two applications work together. Take a look below.
We also interviewed Megan to learn more about her process of integrating animations into Storyline.
How do you use Vyond?
MC: We want to make our online learning content fun, engaging, and memorable. I’ve been using Vyond videos in my eLearning in two ways:
1) To break up information. This works great for course introductions with a lengthy explanation. Instead of listening to a voice recording while text bullets fade onto a screen (so boring!), we can show a realistic animated video to help the learner visualize the information.
2) To break up interactions. Videos make the course fun and engaging. Incorporating them into scenario based questions allows the learner to see something happen, answer a question based on what they saw, then get feedback based on how they answered the question.
It eliminates the need for text or plain audio feedback telling them exactly what they did correct or incorrect.
I always found basic text/audio feedback to be so monotonous (“You got it in/correct because blah blah blah…”). Then I thought, what if we created the scenario by showing them a video, rolled out a question, then used video to show feedback?
A similar method is used when you play most video games. When you achieve something you typically see the feedback in action, rather than have the program tell you what you did or didn’t do correctly. It makes feedback much more powerful and memorable this way.
Talk us through your start to finish process for making a video and how you test in Storyline.
MC: We start with a very basic storyboard and script that covers the bare minimum needed to lock down the content.
After our subject-matter experts (SMEs)/business partners review and approve the content, we finalize the script with the right tone and transitions.
I’ll start my video creation by plopping the characters or props into the video and adding text-to-speech for our rough script.
Then I’ll insert the rough videos into Storyline (with rough interactions and other content I loosely developed in Storyline) and send the combined project for the first review (usually our SMEs and/or business partners, plus a handful of our target audience).
From there, we update the course (and videos) based on reviewers’ feedback. Sometimes we need only two iterations and sometimes we could have up to five iterations depending on the scope of the project.
I always put a rough video in the first iteration just so the reviewers can get an idea of how things will flow along with the script.
To give you an example of what a rough video is, I will add the character and he won’t move or change his expression. The scene doesn’t change and I usually have a note that reminds reviewers that I will add animations, audio, etc. on the final version. The rough video piece shouldn’t take long to create (think minutes instead of hours) since it will change after content is locked down.
I do not add any animations or professional audio until everything has been approved and we’re on our final version.
Then I download the videos and insert them into Storyline as an .mp4 file.
What do you do recommend to others creating videos for their eLearning?
MC: First I’d recommend that you lock down the content before you invest too much development time.
If the video will be part of an interaction (for example, you are playing a video, then stop for a question, then continue the video based on how the user answered the question), you should make separate videos for each stopping point.
Make sure the end of the video, right before the question rolls out, and the feedback video(s) pick up with the same exact scene. That will make it look like a continuous video in your eLearning course.
What resources do you recommend for eLearning trainers to make themselves better at creating videos?
MC: This might sound a bit odd, but I’ve been watching a ton of animated nursery rhyme videos on YouTube with my two-year-old twins. They love them! I’ve been paying close attention to how pan and zoom is used (similar to the camera movement tool in Vyond) and have gotten a ton of creative ideas on how to animate objects on the screen.
I also recommend paying more attention when you watch television or movies. I never realized the amazing detail that went into camera movements until I started using Vyond and paid attention to what I was watching. A lot of things are happening with the camera that are not noticeable, but make the viewing experience seamless.
What is the single biggest reason you would recommend Vyond?
MC: I’ve tried a ton of animated video makers and nothing compares to the quality of the assets (characters, props, templates, etc.) in Vyond. Plus, it’s incredibly easy to use and the interface is very intuitive and fast (especially now with the Vyond Studio).
About Vyond
Vyond allows people of all skill levels in all industries and job roles to create dynamic and powerful business and training videos. With features that go beyond moving text and images, you can build character-driven stories or compelling data visualizations that engage audiences and deliver results.
Start making your own videos today. Sign up for a free trial and check out our latest webinars on Vyond’s capabilities, use cases, and how to get the most out of Vyond.
#### Video Landing Pages:
A User’s Guide
When people think of landing pages, they typically think of long-form sales copy and a suspicious sign-up form. However, if you need landing pages but don’t want to saddle visitors with 900 words of design-challenged sales copy, there’s a more profitable option: video.
In December 2021, Wyzowl surveyed just under 600 people, including marketing professionals and consumers. The company found that 88% of people bought a product after watching a video related to it. The same survey asked people how they would like to learn about a product: 73% said they preferred to do it through short videos, while only 11% said they favored text-based pages.
Any company can quickly create profitable video landing pages using the right tools, videos, and video player styles. Excluding videos from your sales page will leak top- and mid-funnel traffic to competitor sites using the format consumers want to watch the most: video.
3 styles of landing page video players
How visible your video is on the page affects whether someone will click on it and get persuaded to buy your product. After all, potential customers won’t understand the benefits of your product if they can’t find the video explaining them.
It’s most effective to use one of three tried-and-true video player styles. Each has its benefits. Choose the one most appropriate for the type of customer you are trying to reach.
1. Shy
A shy video player is small in relation to the rest of the elements on your landing page. The landing page revolves around traditional landing page content like copy, and the online video supports the sales page’s argument. Since the video doesn’t dominate the page, you can display other data points about the product’s efficacy or offer social proof like testimonials.
Slack uses a video to explain what a Slack channel is. The video is below the fold, appearing after Slack has shared the benefits of using channels. Anyone who scrolls to the video’s position wants to learn about channels. As a result, video viewers will carefully listen to the product’s value propositions and consider trying it.
2. Forward
The forward video player appears as soon as visitors enter your website, above the fold. It is prominent and stands out from other page elements. Copy, tables, and images are below the fold, tackling common objections and providing further context.
This video player style gives readers flexibility. They can see the benefits of your product on the page and use the video for more context. Since the video player is above the fold, readers know where it is as soon as they load the page and can play it whenever they want.
360Learning embedded a video on its homepage that presents a common situation in which its learning management system is helpful. The video is next to a subhead that says, “Discover the LMS for collaborative learning.” This message encourages visitors to click on the video without forcing them to watch it as a full-screen video would.
3. Bold
The bold video player persuades visitors to buy your product without help from comparison tables, testimonials, or other landing page elements. The video player takes up the entire screen, and the rest of the landing page disappears when people click the video.
This video player style works best for companies confident in writing a script, designing a storyboard, and producing a video so engaging it can single-handedly turn viewers into customers. Without many elements to look at, visitors can watch the video and go straight into buying your product.
Dolby embedded a full-screen video on a landing page promoting its Dolby Atmos: a technology that makes songs sound clearer and more immersive. The video auto-plays when visitors reach the landing page to grab their attention and persuade them to watch testimonials from Dolby Atmos users.
3 video landing page creation tools to build your sales page
Landing page creation tools provide tips and templates to help you drive visitors to buy from you. They build their templates based on existing profitable pages, and you can copy them in just a few clicks. Using tested designs will raise the odds of running a successful sales page.
1. Unbounce
Unbounce offers dozens of customizable video landing page templates. Its team runs conversion tests on templates before launching them. As a result, you will almost certainly increase your conversion rate.
You can sign up for a free trial to try templates before committing to a premium plan, starting at $81 per month. Also, you can choose between over 200 templates created by others in the ThemeForest marketplace.
2. Leadpages
Leadpages is a simple-to-use landing page creation platform for those willing to test many templates or their own landing page structures. Its conversion guidance feature predicts how likely your page is to convert potential customers and suggests tweaks to improve its performance. You can confidently edit any template without fear of affecting your chances of being profitable.
You can sign up for an account to browse all the templates it offers. These templates include video landing pages for sales, webinar registrations, email opt-ins, live events, and video course series.
3. HubSpot
HubSpot has a marketplace with video landing page templates customers can use on their projects. Each design comes with conversion rate data based on past performance. So, even if you don’t use the templates, you can copy portions of their style to boost your page’s conversion rate.
Landing page templates are part of HubSpot’s CMS Hub and Marketing Hub products, starting at $23 and $45 a month. You can request a demo to see its features.
3 best practices to create the perfect landing page video
The traits of a successful landing page video aren’t intuitive. A video that converts users on social media might not convince landing page visitors to buy your product. You need to design your landing page video for the right audience. There are three traits your embedded video should have to raise the odds of running a good sales page.
First, they should be shorter than two minutes because a visitor’s attention span is short. You should be able to make a case for why your product is worth buying without losing the reader’s attention. According to Google, the ideal length for a video ad is 30 seconds.
Your video should also present the most relevant information at the beginning: features, benefits, and results. This helps the reader understand the value of your product right away, which will make them interested enough to keep watching.
Finally, make sure your call to action is visible throughout the video or immediately after it ends. While videos that take over the screen help viewers stay focused on your video, you can lose customers if visitors can’t find your CTA.
Those who use CTAs that appear and disappear on the screen within a few seconds should present them in the middle of the video. According to Wistia, this position leads to the highest conversion rates.
Create a video for your landing page using Vyond
There are several ways to incorporate video into your landing pages to supplement or replace long sales copy. You can use it to present your value propositions, present case studies, or show typical use cases of your product.
Vyond helps you create an engaging video for your landing page without previous animation experience. Our set of animation tools lets you include the characters, charts, and props necessary to prove why your product is the leading solution in the market.
Create your first video
#### Video Resume Tips to Help You Land the Job
Remember the scene in Legally Blonde when Elle’s video resume gets her into Harvard Law School? Hers was so different from the usual application that the enrollment committee decided to accept her, despite her less-than-impressive credentials.
In much the same way, your own video resume, or video cover letter, can make hiring managers sit up and take notice — and give you a shot at that coveted interview.
The internet has made finding job openings a lot easier, but it also makes getting those jobs harder because you’re usually competing with hundreds of other applicants. No wonder hiring managers spend an average of 6 seconds perusing each resume. If you want to get more interviews, you’ve got to find a way to stand out, and a video resume will do just that.
Videos engage hiring managers
Even the best resume doesn’t have the “pop” of personality that video adds. Videos share your body language, expressions, and tone of voice, factors that are missing from a paper resume. Drafting a resume with those non-verbal cues in mind can make it easier to tell a story with your video.
Note that your video doesn’t have to be complicated to be well done. Consider this simple but professional-looking video resume. It doesn’t rely on fancy visuals — only a blank background, some text, and a well-rehearsed script. Saji’s video here is a strong sell for her knowledge and experience. She showcases her presentation skills without going overboard on video production.
Video resumes are particularly useful if you’re in a profession that requires strong communication skills. Job hunters in creative professions can also gain a considerable advantage from a good video resume because it gives them an opportunity to demonstrate their creative talents.
However, a badly done video resume can backfire by instead demonstrating your lack of artistic talents. And once your video resume hits the Internet, it will be there for all future employers to see. You must be sure that both your content and your video style are appropriate for the occasion before you send your video resume to anyone.
What should you put in a video resume?
Think of your video resume as a mini job interview. Your clothing, demeanor, language, and subject matter should be interview-appropriate. In other words, don’t send a video of yourself surfing unless you’re applying for a job in the surfing world.
Tell a story. A video resume is a great way to showcase something from your background that’s sure to impress the hiring manager, especially if you tell it in the form of a story. If you’re having trouble deciding what to talk about, write an outline detailing your background and think about how your experience is connected. What have you learned in the past that would make you a great fit for this new position?
Be brief. Limit your video resume to no longer than two minutes — anything longer than that is asking too much of the hiring manager. 60-90 seconds is ideal. Read your script out loud, or better yet, record yourself reading the script, and then play back the recording. Hearing the words makes it easier to home in on the most relevant and interesting bits of your background.
Be specific. For a truly compelling video resume, create a custom video for each job you apply to. You’ll be able to point out how your background makes you a perfect fit for that specific job, and you can even work in a line or two about why you want to join the company. For instance, if a job posting says they want someone with project management experience, talk about a project you managed.
Add a call to action. End the video with a call-to-action, a sentence or two that spells out the next step and motivates viewers to take it. For example, you might ask the hiring manager to visit your LinkedIn profile to see the rest of your employment history. A good call-to-action makes all the difference between a video that gets results and one that does nothing more than entertain the hiring manager.
In this video, Kendall uses Vyond to tell her story with an animated video. She also includes her email and phone number as a call-to-action at the end.
To open this video and make your own edits, sign into a paid Vyond account or free trial and then click here to open this video template in Vyond Studio. You will be able to download videos on a paid subscription.
To make sure you look your best on camera, wear the same kind of outfit you’d choose for an interview with the employer you’re interested in. Place the camera so that the lens is just above your eye line and tilt it down a bit to get the most flattering angle. Don’t position yourself directly under a bright overhead light or you’ll end up with distracting shadows on your face. Finally, choose a professional-looking background — preferably a blank wall or backdrop in a neutral color.
If you’d rather not be on camera, animation is a great option. With animation, you have the ability to bring any concept to life with ease, and it’s easier than you may think.
Here’s a simple template to help you showcase your skills.
To open this video and make your own edits, sign into a paid Vyond account or free trial and then click here to open this video template in Vyond Studio. You will be able to download videos on a paid subscription.
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In this animated video resume, Michelle points to specific examples from her experience to prove her qualifications and uses animation to amplify her narrated story. She also added her video to Wistia so she could include a clickable call-to-action at the end to link directly to her LinkedIn profile.
Using your video resume to get interviews
Once you’ve finished making your video resume and have reviewed it for flaws, your next task is to get it in front of the hiring manager.
Of course, before you can send anyone a link to your video, you’ll need to post it somewhere. YouTube is a popular choice but may not be the best option for video resumes because of the ads and suggested videos that you can’t control. Vimeo and Wistia are more professional-looking options and are designed for business purposes. These tools give you control over your video’s appearance and give you analytics on your video so you’ll be able to see just how viewers are reacting to your video resume — for free.
It’s also always a good idea to include a video about yourself on your LinkedIn profile. LinkedIn is the preeminent business networking site, and embedding your video in your LinkedIn profile helps get you in front of hiring managers.
You also have the option of emailing the video resume directly to the hiring manager but don’t try this unless you’ve already started a dialogue with that person. Otherwise, the hiring manager will probably pitch out your video without bothering to look at it or even read the email.
Other ways to use video for job-hunting
Job hunters can leverage video for purposes beyond landing interviews. You might also craft a video as a post-interview thank you note, a tool to lobby for a promotion at your existing job, or a way to ask for help with your job search.
Sending a thank-you note after an interview is a great way to impress hiring managers. If you’re going to send a thank you email, video can make you look even better. You can attach a video to the thank you email or include a thank you GIF in your written email. Here’s an example for you to copy.
To open this video and make your own edits, sign in to your Vyond account or free trial and then click here to open this video template in Vyond Studio. You will be able to download videos on a paid subscription.
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Finally, a video can be the perfect way to ask for a professional favor, such as a job reference. And once you start your job, using video is a great way to introduce yourself to your new team. At Vyond, each new team member creates a video in their first week to introduce themselves to the company. Here’s one example:
Regardless of its purpose, keep your video brief and on point. The video’s purpose is not to lay out every possible argument in your favor; it’s to highlight your most important points in an engaging, distinctive way.
Don’t discount the power of video
Your video resume will help you establish an immediate personal connection with hiring managers and can give you a significant advantage over other applicants. It’s a great way to cut through the noise, whether you email your video or include it on a resume website. With the right video resume, you’ll be on the fast track to landing a job you love.
About Vyond
Vyond allows people of all skill levels in all industries and job roles to create dynamic and powerful media. With features that go beyond moving text and images, you can build character-driven stories or compelling data visualizations that engage audiences and deliver results.
With Vyond, it’s easy to create videos for your training. Get started making your own videos today. Start a free trial.
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#### Video translation 101: From captions to localization
Video translation is a powerful way to engage your audience and authentically connect with them. Whether using video for staff training and development purposes, or to market to clients and prospective clients around the globe, video translation is essential.
Given today’s diversified, international workforces, as well as the potential for clients to come from anywhere in the world, video translation is more important than ever before for organizations of all sizes. Translating your videos increases their visibility and accessibility, showing both your customers and employees that your organization has an inclusive, global mindset.
You can translate videos in a number of ways depending on your budget and time constraints. We’ll break down why video translation is valuable and explain several methods to help you find the best translation option for your organization.
How to translate your videos
The translation process all depends on your budget, time constraints, and target audience. An organization that can only spend $100 to $200 on translation will most likely need to opt for subtitles. On the other hand, if 50% of an American company’s workforce speaks Spanish, for example, the organization might want to invest in a high-quality localization service to connect with these learners.
To help you find the best method for your organization’s needs, we’ve broken down three types of video translation.
Subtitles, or captions at the bottom of a video that translate the dialogue and/or narration. This method is the most simple and cost-effective translation process.
Audio, or a recording of voice actors reciting your translated narration and/or dialogue. This method is somewhat costly and time-intensive as you’ll likely need to hire a company to professionally record the voice-over artists and properly lip sync your video.
Localization, or a translation that takes into account local, cultural, and regional relevance. Whereas translation directly converts content from one language to another, localization adapts the content when necessary to ensure it remains relevant to readers of the translated language. So, for example, units of measurement in an American English script would be adjusted from “inches” to “centimetres” when localized for a British audience, and “muffins” might be localized to “croissants” for a French audience. A localization service will translate your narration and/or dialogue, record voice actors reciting the adapted script, and edit the new audio into the video. This is the most costly and time-intensive method, but also the most comprehensive and effective.
Over the next three sections, we’ll cover how to complete each method and the pros and cons of each translation type.
Subtitles
If your video budget and schedule are both tight, subtitles are probably the best translation method for you. They’re cost-effective and translation services can quickly produce them. As a plus, they make your video accessible for hearing-impaired audiences in other countries. The downside of subtitles is that they disrupt the viewing experience by filling the bottom of the screen.
The easiest and fastest way to create subtitles is by using a translation service. These companies will take your video file, translate your script, and create caption files for you to add to your video. Here are a few services to consider:
Rev.com
Overview: Quick turnaround time and affordable but has a somewhat limited language selection. We use Rev.com for our subtitles.
Price: $1.00-$7.00 per minute, depending on the language
Delivery time: 24-hour turnaround time
Accuracy: 99% accuracy
Languages: 15+ languages: Spanish, Dutch, Korean, Arabic, French, Polish, Chinese Simplified, German, Portuguese (Brazil), Chinese Traditional, Italian, Russian, Czech, Japanese, and Turkish
GoTranscript
Overview: Supports a large number of languages but is more expensive and takes more time.
Price: Starts at $7.50 per minute
Delivery time: 1-3 day turnaround
Accuracy: 99% accuracy
Languages: 30+ languages: Albanian, Arabic, Bengali, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Filipino, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indian (Gujarati), Indian (Hindi), Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Luxembourgish, Malay, Nepali, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian , Simplified Chinese, Somali, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Thai, Traditional Chinese, Turkish, Ukraine, and Vietnamese.
These subtitle services give you accurate captions within a few days or less, so global audiences can watch your video in no time.
Audio
Along with subtitles, re-recording your video’s narration and dialogue is another way to translate your video. Compared to subtitles, translated audio makes for a more seamless viewing experience, as your audience can watch the entire video screen without needing to pay attention to text. That said, lip syncing your video to match new audio can be challenging.
Unless you know someone who speaks the target language and have good quality audio recording equipment, you’ll probably need to hire voice actors to professionally re-record your audio. There are a number of reputable online voice-over markets that make it easy to discover actors who speak your target language:
VoiceBunny
Overview: VoiceBunny represents over 28,000 actors who cover more than 50 languages.
Price: Varies by actor (check out their price estimator)
Delivery time: 6 hours, on average
Voices.com
Overview: Allows you to request auditions for free and can secure voice recordings in over 100 languages.
Price: Varies by actor (check out their price estimator)
Delivery time: Typically a few hours
If you opt to create an audio translation, keep in mind that these voice talent markets will not translate the text for you. If you don’t have a new transcription, you’ll need to use one of the subtitle companies to translate your text first.
Voiver
Overview: Based on actors’ individual rates rather than a bidding system or quotes.
Price: Varies by actor
Delivery time: Typically 24 hours or less
Vyond audio translation tip: When you upload your translated audio to your video, you can lip sync your Vyond characters to the new recording with just a few clicks. Animated characters in Vyond can lip sync to any language.
Localization
Localization is the most comprehensive way to translate your video. Beyond just making your video understandable in another language, localization generates a translation that accounts for nuanced cultural and regional references.
Because it’s such an in-depth process, localization is typically carried out by professional translation companies. These services will translate your script, manage the re-recording process, and edit your video as needed to match the new language and the location of the intended audience.
Localization is a significant investment, so most organizations plan whether they’re going to use a localization service before creating their original video. If you plan on using a localization service, here are a few production tips to keep in mind:
Refrain from using cultural references and/or jokes that won’t ‘translate’ into other cultural or geographic contexts.
Refrain from, or limit, using on-screen text. Asking your video localization company to replace this text is a time-consuming and costly process.
Consider using only voice-over narration, or more voice-over narration than on-screen dialogue. This will minimize issues with dubbing.
Limit the amount of speakers in your video in order to keep costs down.
Once you’ve created your original video content, the next step is to find the right localization service for your organization. Here are a few recommendations to guide you through the selection process:
Research localization companies with an eye for services that specialize in your industry. Here are a few localization service suggestions:
Translations.com. A subsidiary of one of the biggest names in the translation services industry (TransPerfect), Translations.com is a leading provider for translation and localization services, with 90 offices worldwide and voice-over talent in over 170 languages.
APT Transtelex. Headquartered in the UK, APT is a full-service translation agency with specialist linguists for every major sector of industry.
InWhatLanguage. With customized translation services ranging from machine translations to expert human translations, InWhatLanguage may be the most budget-friendly translation provider on this list.
Write a descriptive brief that outlines your localization criteria for your video. Submit this brief to localization services so they can estimate how much the video translation project will cost. To create Vyond’s explainer video, for example, our company let localization services know that we wanted the pronunciation of ‘Vyond’ to remain the same across all languages. We also included that we wanted a peppy, yet professional female speaker.
Finalize your project terms in writing. Review and sign a contract before any work begins to make sure you’re committing to the right projects.
Request samples from voice artists before any recording begins. Even if you don’t understand what they’re saying, you might have input on the tone or clarity of the actor.
Here’s an example of one of our localized videos:
English
Italian
Beyond these steps, the service you choose will handle the rest of the localization process—translating the text, recording and engineering the audio, and integrating the audio into your video. Watching a fully translated video created through localization, foreign audiences will be able to deeply connect to your company’s content.
Vyond localization tip: As a Vyond customer, you can reduce the cost of localization by handling several aspects yourself. Vyond Studio makes it easy to integrate new audio, rotate your cast, and update locations.
Connect with audiences through video translation
Organizations are equipped to build global followings. At the same time, organizations everywhere are finding it necessary to provide content that meets the needs and languages of their globalized workforces. With audiences forming all over the world, video translation is more important than ever before. Find a video translation method with this guide that fits your organization’s needs. Using our breakdown of processes, you can find a way to translate your videos that matches your unique budget and time constraints.
#### Vodafone Transforms Dry System Trainings into Fun & Interactive Learning Modules
Summary of Success
Vyond animation, coupled with Articulate Storyline’s interactivity, made it possible for Vodafone to create training for their biggest SAP software update in two decades—in only two months.
The fun and informative recurring character, S4 Hana, helped employees quickly recognize software training materials and made them something employees looked forward to.
Splitting training into smaller, interactive video modules helped Vodafone employees easily digest the information.
The Challenge
Vodafone is one of the largest telecommunications companies in the world. With nearly 100,000 employees spread out across more than 20 countries, Vodafone faces a number of common hurdles with training: distribution, ensuring the material is easy to digest, translation, and nimbly creating content to address an array of questions and needs. Vodafone has more than 440 million customers and providing the best training for the employees serving these customers is a top priority.
To help Vodafone’s team better serve their growing customer base, the company prepared to implement their largest SAP update in two decades. The update, called EVO S4, would streamline many of Vodafone’s day-to-day activities and make it easier than ever to help customers. But EVO S4 would be a major change and would also entail extensive training.
With the incoming release of Vodafone’s biggest SAP update in 20 years and 100+ pages of dense documentation to transform into eLearning in a few months’ time, Vodafone had to find a way to prepare their global team, and fast.
The Solution
Vodafone had previous experience with Vyond, so they knew exactly which tool to use for video creation. But they still needed to cover the right information in a way that made it accessible to thousands of employees around the world.
The Learning Developer team began by partnering up with the process experts and System Integrators to get a better understanding of what the new system would do. With the right background knowledge, the team was ready to create the basic structure for 10 complex eLearning modules. This stage of the process took two weeks, leaving them two months to create 20+ training videos.
Leveraging their Vyond experience, the team created Vodafone-branded video templates, which the team could then use to quickly create videos on different training topics while keeping a unified brand and style throughout the training. They’d then use their completed videos in conjunction with Articulate Storyline—an interactive course-creation platform—to merge the videos and interactive units together.
EVO S4 Introduction
Along with the templates, the team created the character, Hana, who would be the face of EVO S4. The team used Hana in every video, making the training videos immediately recognizable as being related to the forthcoming SAP update. The team then took things a step further and used Hana in all EVO S4-related communications. This included their ongoing video series, “Hana’s tip of the week.” Their videos are distributed in their LMS with videos available on the internal “VodafoneTube” and within their Internal Facebook communication tool.
“Hana’s character always has good advice. It’s pretty useful and I’ll definitely keep following the S4 Hana Workplace channel to get to know more.”
— Vodafone Employee.
The Results
Vodafone’s Vyond account paid off tenfold during their implementation of EVO S4. Through careful and calculated use of templated videos, Vodafone was able to create strategic learning paths. These videos allowed them to guide their many employees through the process of understanding a new system.
Engagement with the videos has been a success as well, thanks in part to Vodafone’s use of storytelling and character development of S4 Hana. By using Articulate Storyline, Vodafone was able to break information into smaller modules. These modules made it easy for users to quickly learn pieces of essential information while avoiding any kind of information overload.
HANA Tips: Setting up Your Substitute on EVO S4 Launchpad
“I really liked that the learning was divided into smaller sections, so it’s easy to continue with another section or even skip those parts which were not applicable for me.”
— Vodafone Employee.
Ultimately, Hana was the star of the show. Her character and advice became a mainstay at Vodafone and was something employees looked forward to and benefited from.
Their training also didn’t stop when they covered all the original information. The team still creates videos anytime they encounter a frequently asked question. This allows Vodafone to ensure employees are never in the dark and helps the team get the most out of the EVO S4 update
#### Vyond + SCORM: A Powerful Combination
SCORM has long been the standard for creating, tracking, and delivering eLearning content. And now with Vyond’s SCORM package export, you can do all three seamlessly within a single workflow.
What is SCORM?
SCORM (Sharable Content Object Reference Model) is a set of standards that ensures eLearning content works across different learning management systems (LMSs). It defines how courses are built and how they communicate with the LMS.
While SCORM isn’t technically required, it’s widely relied upon globally by instructional designers building training, development, and compliance content because it allows for that content’s interoperability across different LMS platforms.
The Convenience of SCORM
SCORM is the widely used international standard for larger organizations across all industries — from manufacturing and hospitality companies to government agencies. In addition to LMS flexibility, it also enables tracking and reporting of learner data — such as progress, completion rates, and scores — making it easier to measure training success.According to a Software Advice survey, 62% of businesses use SCORM-complaint courses for training in their LMS. In particular, SCORM 1.2 and SCORM 2004 have become the most popular technology standards.
Simplify Your Workflow with SCORM and Vyond
With Vyond, you can export your video as a SCORM package and upload it directly into your LMS, no special conversion tools required. Without this, you’d first need a separate authoring tool like Articulate or iSpring to add tracking before uploading.
As part of the SCORM package download, you can also add completion criteria directly within Vyond. This is one of the most common metrics and it’s another way Vyond can help instructional designers simplify workflow.
Vyond supports both SCORM 1.2 and SCORM 2004.v4, and you can export the format you want to create the course tracking and analytics you need. To learn more about the differences between the two formats, check out this page.
When You’re Making Learning Content, Nothing Beats Vyond
Creating effective training videos that you can easily port into your LMS is easy with Vyond.
Vyond offers:
All the video creation tools you need in one place — no more juggling platforms
Easy video creation with templates, Vyond Go, and the drag-and-drop simplicity of Vyond Studio
A wide range of styles, including mixed media, avatars, animation, screen capture, and more
Seamless integrations with Google Docs, Zapier, Slack, and other tools
Vyond + SCORM: The Best Content Creation Meets the Best Tracking and Analytics
Vyond makes it easy to create standout training videos that capture attention and drive learning. Our new SCORM export takes it one step further — letting you share those videos directly in your LMS, complete with tracking and analytics. The result: content that’s both engaging to watch and easy to deliver and measure.
Try Vyond for Free
More from Vyond
How to Make AI Videos in Minutes
Prompting AI: Getting the Best Results from Vyond Go
AI-Powered Instant Translation
#### Vyond 2022 Fall Release: Vyond is Getting Smarter
We are excited to introduce the 2022 Fall Release of Vyond Studio! By pairing our unmatched content library with Artificial Intelligence (AI), we’re making it faster and easier to create relevant videos for business-critical eLearning, HR, Internal Communications, Sales, and Marketing communications. The new release extends the strength of our enterprise video creation software with more relevance, speed, and power. Vyond is getting smarter!
For more information about the new features, visit our webinar on Wednesday, November 9, 2022, at 2 pm EST / 11 am PST/ 6 pm GMT. Register here to see the new features in action!
Fast
With Vyond – and the power of VyondAI – thousands of users can create 10x more videos 10x faster than with traditional video production. Instantly generate characters, localize videos, and more.
Powerful
Vyond’s robust security, easy branding options, and snappy, responsive interface make it powerful enough to scale throughout even the largest organization.
Relevant
With over 32,000 unique assets (and growing) representing every job role and industry – and the ability to upload your own – it’s easy to create exactly the video you need.
Jump to a section:
AI-Driven Features
Photo to Character
Export & Import Text
Instant Video Translation
Built for the Enterprise
Notes Panel
Brand Guidelines
Event Logging
Unmatched Content Library
Advanced Charts
New Assets
SVG Import
AI-Driven Features
With the new power of AI in the Vyond Studio Fall Release, users will experience up to 10x improvements in speed and efficiency with abilities to instantly create characters, localize videos into 71 languages, and find props faster.
Photo to Character
Plan type: All
Create a character in a matter of seconds! Just take or upload a photo and VyondAI will automatically generate a character which can then be edited or combined with different outfits.
Help Center Article
Instant Video Translation
Plan Type: Professional and Above
No more translation houses or tedious updates. Instantly translate all text in your video – Text-to-speech, on-screen text, and dialog scripts – into any of 71 languages.
Help Center Article
Export & Import Text
Plan type: Professional and above
Quickly export text in your video, make changes, and import the new text. This feature makes it easy to review and make quick changes to text throughout a video without the reviewer needing a Vyond account.
Help Center Article
Built For the Enterprise
Vyond Studio has always been built for enterprises – but with our new updates, it’ll be even easier to scale Vyond throughout even the largest organizations. The Fall Release makes it easier to keep track of what’s going on inside your team, simpler to review and leave notes, and puts your company’s all-important brand guidelines right at the fingertips of your entire organization.
Notes Panel
Plan type: All
The Notes Panel allows you to keep notes alongside your video. These notes will be visible to anyone your video is shared with, making for easy collaboration and feedback.
Help Center Article
Event Logging
Plan type: Enterprise
Knowing what’s going on in your team is important. With Event Logging, account administrators can receive logs of any actions taken within their team’s account – ideal for security compliance, account usage monitoring, and more. Reach out to your CSM for more information on how to start the process.
Brand Guidelines
Plan type: Enterprise
Communicate and share brand guidelines across your team with our new branding feature. Our team will work directly with you to generate branded templates including fonts, logos, characters, and props branded to your organization, then share them across your team for easy access. Reach out to your CSM for more information on how to start the process.
Unmatched Content Library
Vyond’s content library is getting even more relevant. We’ve made additions to our over 32,000 unique assets with content and templates for HR, Instructional Design, Marketing, Insurance, Whiteboard, and Technology. Display data in a more visually appealing way with advanced charts, and import your company’s own creative assets by importing Scalable Vector Graphics (SVGs).
Advanced Charts
Plan type: All
Advanced Charts will provide many new styles for users to easily present data and charts. This will benefit users who are looking to add more charts and data to their videos. 32 new charts: Area Chart (3), Bar Chart (6), Funnel Chart (4), Line Chart (3), Pie Chart (4), Radar Chart (4), Radial Chart (6), Scatter Chart (2)
Help Center Article
SVG Import
Plan type: All
With our 2022 Fall Release, users can now import their company’s SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) assets to Vyond – complete with the ability to change colors! Upload an SVG file and enjoy all of the features of a native prop!
Help Center Article
New Assets
Plan type: All
We’re always working with our customers to expand our library of assets. In our Fall Release, you’ll find hundreds of new assets, characters, and actions – and brand new scene and video templates for HR, Instructional Design, Marketing, Insurance, Whiteboard, and Technology.
HR
Instructional Design
Marketing
Insurance
Whiteboard
Technology
Vyond will also demonstrate its new 2022 Fall release of Vyond Studio at a webinar on Wednesday, November 9, 2022, at 2 pm EST / 11 am PST. Register here to see the new features in action!
Register now
#### Vyond Advanced Camera Techniques Explained by Taylor Morgan
My name is Taylor and I’m the newest member of the Vyond Team, with the role of Video Producer. I’ve been creating videos for over half of my life and working professionally for just over 8 years now. Here’s the first video I made with Vyond, I hope you enjoy!
Great Audio and Sound Effects
The very first thing my favorite instructor in film school taught me was “a good video with bad audio, is a bad video.” He couldn’t have given me any better advice to immediately impact the quality of the videos I created. Bad sound will pull you right out of a video, maybe even make you stop watching it. Aside from music, the use of sound effects and sound design can dramatically enhance the impact of your videos. Whether it’s to bring a viewer into the scenes and environments by adding ambient background audio, or to draw attention to certain actions with sound effects, having good audio will draw your viewer in and engage them even more.
For this video, I used a combination of sound effects from Vyond and a sound library I purchased some time ago, but there are also thousands of great (and free) sound effects on the internet if you just take the time to search. Vyond allows up to 3 audio tracks at once, which I primarily used to create the atmosphere and background noise of the scenes. I used Premiere Pro to layer the remaining sound effects so I could be extremely precise in the timing of them, down to the very frame. If that’s not as important to you, you can upload your own sound effects straight into Vyond. I matched up sound effects to the actions that I really wanted people to notice.
Motion Blur in Adobe After Effects
Objects that have motion blur is how our eyes actually see in the real world. The faster something moves, the more blurry it appears as it passes in front of our eyes. I wanted to add motion blur to the cars in my video to simulate the speed at which they actually pass and give the viewer the same feeling. This effect can be achieved by more experienced video creators that are familiar with Adobe Photoshop and After Effects.
Finish your Vyond video (without the props you want to motion blur) and export an HD version.
Screenshot any Vyond prop on a solid color background to which you want to add motion blur.
Import the screenshot into Photoshop and remove the background so the prop is now on a transparent layer.
Save as .psd (or .png with transparencies enabled)
Import the transparent layered file and your Vyond video file into After Effects, and add both to a new composition.
Give the prop a motion path by keyframing in position, enable motion blur for the prop’s layer, then enable motion blur for the composition.
If you’re not quite sure how to do all that, but would like to give it a try, check out these tutorial links from YouTube.
Creating Transparent Backgrounds in Photoshop
Creating Motion Paths in After Effects
Creating Motion Blur in After Effects
Adding motion blur to certain movements can add new layers of excitement to the motion in your videos.
Advanced Camera Techniques
One of the first features I fell in love with inside Vyond is the Camera Movement tool. I wanted to zoom out to reveal the setting in which my character existed while matching the framing of my character from the previous scene. I figured out a way to do this, by making my character very, very small in the scene of the lake, then started with the camera WAY zoomed in to match the frame size and position of my character in the previous scene. This way, I was able to make a match-cut between scenes and then zoom out to reveal where my character had moved to. Here are some screenshots to help clarify.
Character framing at end of first scene…
…matches character framing at beginning of the following scene
Beginning of scene camera placement
Zoom out the camera tool to reveal a larger scene
#### Vyond Appoints SaaS Industry Veteran Scott Ernst as Chief Executive Officer
Gary Lipkowitz transitions to Vyond’s Board of Directors as the company expands its AI-powered enterprise communications platform and accelerates its next phase of enterprise growth
SAN MATEO, Calif., June 1, 2026 — Vyond, a leading enterprise video creation and communication platform, trusted by more than 17,000 customers worldwide, today announced the appointment of Scott Ernst as Chief Executive Officer. Scott succeeds Gary Lipkowitz, who will transition to Vyond’s Board of Directors and continue to play an active role in guiding the company’s long-term strategy.
Scott brings more than 20 years of experience leading and scaling high-growth SaaS and technology companies from early stage through IPO and exit. He has built and transformed organizations across product innovation, go-to-market execution, and operational performance, including chief executive roles at Compete, Macromill and Drift. Throughout his career, Scott has helped companies accelerate growth, strengthen operational discipline, and navigate periods of significant market and technology change.
This leadership transition marks the next chapter in Vyond’s evolution as the company accelerates its enterprise strategy and expands its AI-powered enterprise communication platform. Vyond has helped organizations create over 40 million videos across training, HR, sales enablement, compliance, customer education, and internal communications.
“Scott is exactly the kind of leader Vyond needs for its next phase of growth,” said Matt Melymuka, Managing Partner at PeakSpan Capital and Board Member at Vyond. “He combines operational discipline with deep enterprise SaaS experience and a strong understanding of how to scale organizations through transformations. Just as importantly, Scott recognizes the incredible foundation Gary and the team have built over the last eight years. We believe his leadership will help guide Vyond through its next era of innovation and growth.”
Under Gary Lipkowitz’s leadership, Vyond evolved from a B2C animation platform into a trusted AI-powered enterprise solution used by organizations around the world to power training, onboarding, enablement, and communication workflows. During his tenure, the company significantly expanded its enterprise footprint, product and agentic capabilities, and operational scale.
“I’m looking forward to this next evolution of Vyond,” said Lipkowitz. “I am deeply committed to Vyond’s future and incredibly excited about the opportunities ahead. Scott brings the operational leadership, enterprise mindset, and scaling experience needed for our next chapter, and I look forward to partnering closely with him and the leadership team from the Board.”
Ernst said, “What drew me to Vyond was the combination of a proven customer base, a platform genuinely embedded in how large organizations operate, a strong team with deep experience and a product roadmap with real AI-driven upside. The next wave of enterprise AI isn’t just about creating content — it’s about helping organizations operationalize knowledge and workflows at scale. That’s a specific and executable opportunity, and I’m focused on translating it into durable growth.”
The announcement comes as Vyond continues to expand adoption among enterprise customers and accelerates investment in AI-driven innovation.
About VyondVyond is an enterprise video creation and communication platform that helps organizations create engaging, impactful visual communication at scale. Trusted by enterprises worldwide, Vyond enables teams across learning and development, HR, sales enablement, compliance, and communications to transform information into engaging visual experiences.
For press queries, please contact Kate Barron at kate.barron@vyond.com or 917.647.1885.
#### Vyond at ATD21
Vyond is heading to Salt Lake City for ATD21, one of the world’s biggest events for L&D professionals! We look forward to connecting with members of the Vyond Maker Community—and beyond—from August 29 to September 1, 2021.
Connect with Vyond at ATD21 HQ
Visit the Vyond Booth
Connect with members of the Vyond Team, including our sales team and experts in all things video. Swing by Booth 257 for special limited-edition swag and an intro to Vyond Studio
VIEW OUR EXHIBITOR PROFILE
Attend Our Session
Join us Monday at noon for a conversation with instructional design expert and leadership coach Rance Greene as we explore how to bring storytelling into everyday work. Early attendees will have a chance to get a free copy of Rance’s book, Instructional Story Design!
About ATD21
#### Vyond Employee Highlight: Lye Cwan Ng, Manager of Customer Success
Welcome to Vyond’s employee highlight series. This is a series aimed to highlight the talented individuals that work at Vyond across all departments and offices.
Meet Lye Cwan Ng, Vyond’s manager of customer success from the San Mateo office. As the manager of customer success, Lye Cwan manages the Customer Success team and helps them give our Enterprise customers the best Vyond experience.
What was your journey to becoming the manager of customer success?
Growing up in South East Asia, the professions that were thought of as most ‘ideal’ for kids to aspire to were being a doctor, lawyer, or engineer. My parents are both doctors and I honestly did not realize there was anything else out there until I went to Melbourne, Australia for college. I ended up studying IT but I graduated during a time where IT jobs were extremely saturated. I decided to go home to Malaysia for a while and my brother’s friend happened to work at a media company that needed salespeople. I ended up selling for a free-press street culture and nightlife magazine for 5 years and realized that I was good at account management. I loved client-facing roles because I really enjoyed working with so many different people. I then worked at a creative ad agency in China for a couple of years before moving to the Bay Area where I discovered Customer Success at Vyond and it’s exactly the right balance and fit for my personality.
What does your position entail?
I manage the Customer Success team and help them give our Enterprise customers the best Vyond experience.
Where is your hometown? What brought you to The Bay?
I’m from Penang, Malaysia, and went to Melbourne, Australia for college. I ended up living there for 8 years and then moved to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia for my first job. I then moved to Beijing and Shanghai for a few years with my then-boyfriend/now-husband. His job moved him to the Bay so that’s where we are now!
Share an interesting fact or story about yourself.
I was a competitive swimmer in high school. I ended up representing Malaysia in a couple of competitions within Asia. Nothing brings out patriotism like seeing your country’s flag being raised on the medal podium.
What is your favorite thing to eat?
My favorite all-time food is Char Koay Teow and it is Penang’s signature dish. I have not found anything close to the original although I’ve tried many South East Asian restaurants here. I don’t have a favorite local restaurant but my family, especially my kids, really enjoy Mediterranean food.
Char Koay Teow
What are your hobbies?
I love reading, specifically fantasy books. I haven’t had time to read as much as I would like these days because I have 2 little kids but my favorite authors are David Eddings and Terry Pratchet. Reading these books brings me into another world that I find just so extraordinary and creative.
Why do you love Vyond?
I love the culture and I can honestly say that I enjoy working with all the people here. I have awesome colleagues! More importantly, though, my job involves me teaching users how to create fun and engaging videos and I love that I get to do that every day.
What is your favorite feature in Vyond and why?
Continue Scene. It makes creating fluid scenes so simple and it also ends up making it easier to edit your videos.
There are various pathways that lead to careers at Vyond. Explore our current openings.
#### Vyond Employee Highlight: Prakriti Rai, Video Producer
Welcome to Vyond’s employee highlight series. This is a series aimed to highlight the talented individuals that work at Vyond across all departments and offices.
Meet Prakriti Rai, one of Vyond’s video producers from the San Mateo office. As a video producer, Prakriti creates video content for Vyond’s multiple channels including blog and resource posts, templates in the template library, and social media.
What was your journey to becoming a video producer?
Growing up, I had a limited idea of the scope of visual media as a career primarily because the Nepali education system didn’t have courses on subjects like photography or video production. However, I was fascinated with cameras ever since I was a kid. Eventually, my fascination turned into a passion for photography and later extended to video production. In a way, I have always felt a sense of fulfillment whenever I could create something. So, I self-taught myself all the technicalities and started doing internships to sharpen my skills. Then after a few years of gaining experience in video production, I applied for the position of Junior Video Producer at Vyond. Vyond stood out to me because it helps foster creativity among people and enterprises with its easy to use video creation platform. I could completely resonate with the company’s values and hence wanted to be a part of their team.
Where is your hometown? What brought you to The Bay?
I am from Kathmandu, Nepal. About three years ago, I moved to San Francisco after completing my undergrad in New Delhi, India. I had to move here because it was my family’s decision. Like many immigrants, my parents also wanted me and my sibling to have better opportunities. Moving away from my hometown was challenging at first, but now looking back, I feel blessed to have lived in all three places, experienced three unique cultures, and gained valuable life lessons through them.
What’s an interesting fact or story about yourself?
I spent a vast amount of my time in college singing as a part of the college choir! We sang Indian classical songs as well as western a capella and participated in choir competitions around India.
What is your favorite thing to eat?
I love MoMos, which are Nepali dumplings. Dancing Yak on Valencia Street in The Mission and Yeti Restaurant in Glen Ellen are two of the best options around the Bay Area for some delicious Momos. You can also find delicious variants of Momo. For instance, try ‘Jhol Momo’ at Everest Kitchen in Albany, or ‘Chilly Momo’ at the Asian Momo House in Sunnyvale. Thank me later! 🙂
Why do you love Vyond?
Vyond is a fantastic tool because it allows anyone to be creative by removing the technical challenges that usually comes with the conventional method of animating.
What is your favorite feature in Vyond?
Asset View and Global Edit have to be one of my favorites, as it saves me plenty of time while editing multiple things at once.
Learn more about the Global Edit feature here.
What are some of the bigger projects you are working on now?
I am working on a series of short tutorials called “Discovering Vyond with Prakriti,” specifically for our Instagram and YouTube audiences. Also, working on creating template videos around the topic of “Remote Working” to aid our customers with more training videos for their remote teams.
See more videos from Prakriti and updates from the Vyond team on our Instagram.
#### Vyond Employee Highlight: Queenie Lee, Senior UI Designer
Welcome to Vyond’s employee highlight series. This is a series aimed to highlight the talented individuals that work at Vyond across all departments and offices.
Meet Queenie Lee, Vyond’s senior UI designer from the Hong Kong office. As a senior UI designer, Queenie’s role is to create user interfaces that are able to facilitate a user-centric experience and communicate the interactions smoothly.
What was your journey to becoming a senior UI designer?
My interest grew in graphic design when I was still in high school, but it was being a communication design major in university that gave me the opportunity to deepen my learning in typography, illustration, and publication design.
Soon after I graduated, I joined Vyond as a visual designer. It was never really my ‘plan’ to go into UI design as I was never trained specifically for it. However, I came to understand that developing visuals for a videography/animation platform and honing its interface for users are hardly separable. I went on to pick up the skills needed by reading related books and resources online and learned a lot from my colleagues along the way. Turns out there is common ground between what I have learned in school and this ‘new’ design realm that I am venturing into. Overall speaking it was definitely a fun journey.
What does your position entail?
My role is to come up with user interfaces that are able to facilitate a user-centric experience and communicate the interactions smoothly. I closely collaborate with UX designers to improve the product and bring exciting features to our customers. To keep the design consistent across the platform, I also help manage and maintain the design components library.
Where is your hometown?
I am from Hong Kong and have been living in this city since I was born. Hong Kong is a densely populated city and famous for its fast-paced lifestyle. Growing up in this city forces me to adapt to rapidly changing situations quickly –– live fast, eat fast, and walk fast.
Share an interesting fact or story about yourself.
In my childhood, I thought letters, words, or a phrase have their specific colors and the color relationship cannot be violated. Later, I found out it’s known as synesthesia, experiencing one of your senses through another and blending two perceptions together. Synesthetes can “see” music as shapes or “see” words as color. Do you also associate a color to a particular letter?
What is your favorite thing to eat?
I love a good plate of freshly cooked fried rice and one of my favorite places that serve this is ‘Yuk Kin Fast Food’ in Sheung Wan. My teammates brought me there when I first joined the company. Yuk Kin does a wide variety of fried rice so you will never run out of options. The shop also has an outdoor dining area where we can all have an enjoyable meal under the sun.
What are your hobbies?
I am really into Japanese comics, animation, and music. With Japan’s unique history and culture, the traits of all the book covers, character design, and music videos are aesthetically pleasing to look at. I always found it inspirational in many ways when reading manga, background settings broaden my imagination, character development touched my heart, and the storyboard compositions were outside the boxes!
Why do you love Vyond?
I was fascinated by the amount of content provided by Vyond! You can compose a story from scratch or get inspiration from the templates. With countless character actions, you can animate many scenarios to convey a message. I really enjoy applying different colors, customizing characters’ outfits, moving around all the props to build an original scene.
I learned the importance of diversity and accessibility from Vyond. I love how Vyond recognizes and cares about those aspects when designing features or creating content. Hoping the product can attract customers from different countries or cultures, and be able to enjoy the same delightfulness from making animated videos.
What is one feature in Vyond that you think customers should know about?
Asset View and Global Edit! With a few magical clicks, you can update the props’ color or replace assets across scenes. It saves a lot of time and effort to update the assets one by one.
Check out how to use global edit here.
There are various pathways that lead to careers at Vyond. Explore our current openings.
#### Vyond Employee Highlight: Reid Horimoto, Customer Success Associate
Welcome to Vyond’s employee highlight series. This is a series aimed to highlight the talented individuals that work at Vyond across all departments and offices.
Meet Reid Horimoto, one of Vyond’s customer success associates from the San Mateo office. As a customer success associate, Reid engages with Vyond’s customers to ensure they make the most of the platform through onboarding and workshop sessions. He also presents at conferences to promote Vyond Studio.
What was your journey to becoming a customer success associate?
I pivoted from risk management and fraud prevention in financial services to customer success at Vyond last year.
Pivoting into a new function was tough, as I had to learn new terminology and pick up new techniques. I knew I wanted to do something new, and I enjoyed training people and answering questions for clients. I met Michael Klonoff, who handles Vyond’s business partnerships, as we’re part of the same MBA cohort. He told me about the opening at Vyond.
My team has played a huge role in helping me get acclimated to the customer success world. For me, the biggest difference between the two industries (and something I mentioned during my interview process) is that customer success and risk management feel like opposite sides of the same coin; in risk management, you’re using your product knowledge to minimize negatives for clients, while in customer success, you try to maximize positives.
Where is your hometown? What brought you to The Bay?
I was born and raised in Honolulu, Hawaii, but then I moved and attended college at Santa Clara University in the Bay Area.
Honestly, the Bay Area is pretty similar to Hawaii in that there are a lot of different cultures coexisting together. I much prefer the weather here, as it can get pretty humid in Hawaii and I sweat easily. Aside from my family, the main thing I miss about Hawaii is getting to eat my favorite food in the world, Curry House Coco Ichibanya.
What’s an interesting fact or story about yourself?
I’m an Eagle Scout. Actually, due to the timing on when I submitted my application, I was the first Eagle Scout on Oahu in 2007!
What are some of your hobbies?
I like videogames. I’ve been playing them since I was “knee-high to a samurai.”
As an only child, I had to learn to entertain myself from a young age. I remember playing the original Nintendo (Duck Hunt and Super Mario) at my grandma’s house with my Dad. I’d say I really got into gaming once I got the original Gameboy with Pokemon Blue. Currently, I’m playing Valorant on the PC, as well as various games on the Nintendo Switch (Animal Crossing, sports games, and I just finished Outer Worlds).
I’m also going to get back into music production once I finish up my MBA, as I enjoy making beats!
Reid with several members of the Vyond team on an island together in Nintendo’s Animal Crossing game.
Why do you love Vyond?
I love Vyond because I get to work with wonderful people every day, helping to build a product that helps others all over the world.
Everyone I’ve met at Vyond is knowledgeable, which is great, but also considerate, which is excellent. It’s common nowadays to encounter an individualistic mentality, where a person’s sphere of concern stops at themselves. Being able to work with a team that emphasizes collaboration and unity allows me to fully invest in my work and the work of those around me, as we’re all working toward the same purpose.
What is your favorite feature in Vyond?
I always urge customers to use the continue scene feature and camera tool! For ideas that you can use in your next video, check out our new template library as well.
Check out our new template library here.
What are some of the bigger projects you are working on now?
I am currently developing templates for our new template library related to the financial services industry.
The primary challenge related to this project is the specific information that needs to be in the training. However, I think it will be a big help to any financial service company, as the concepts are mandatory but the training is usually presented in less exciting ways (i.e. a PowerPoint vs. a short animated video).
#### Vyond Employee Highlight: Santhini Nambiar, Product Manager
Welcome to Vyond’s employee highlight series. This is a series aimed to highlight the talented individuals that work at Vyond across all departments and offices.
Meet Santhini Nambiar, Vyond’s product manager from the Hong Kong office. As a product manager, Santhini’s role involves guiding specific product initiatives that add value to both Vyond’s customers and its business.
What was your journey to becoming a product manager?
With an engineering background, I’ve had enriching stints across mobile, consumer electronics, and automotive domains with a particular focus on innovation and R&D. I worked with teams globally to launch some amazing product offerings in various markets. I am passionate about blending technology and design to create easy-to-use software that adds value to the customers. I am inspired by Vyond’s mission to put the power of video in everyone’s hands and I am really excited to be part of that journey.
What does your position entail?
The PM role involves guiding specific product initiatives that add value to both Vyond’s customers and its business. I help in setting goals, defining success, motivating the team, and being responsible for the outcome of new feature offerings on the platform. I interact with the leadership team, engineering, designers, quality, and other PMs to ensure that these new initiatives help to convert Vyond’s mission into a reality.
What are some of the bigger projects you are working on now?
I am the product manager for the Vyond Mobile app and all the AI-based initiatives that are being developed on the Vyond platform. I focus on how these two product offerings can add value to our customers and help them make their videos efficiently.
Where is your hometown?
I am based out of Hong Kong. Originally from India, I have lived and worked in Sweden, China and Singapore before moving to Hong Kong.
Share an interesting fact about yourself.
Growing up, I had a keen interest in acting. I had secretly auditioned for a TV series and later had to reject the offer as my parents wanted me to focus on academics.
What is your favorite thing to eat?
My favorite cuisines are Thai, Italian, Sri Lankan, Nepalese, and of course Indian! I recently tried a restaurant called ‘Pici’ and their truffle pasta and Tiramisu are amazing. If you ever visit Hong Kong, I highly recommend you to try it. I have a major sweet tooth and can literally eat anything sugary 🙂
What are your hobbies?
I love being outdoors. Hiking is a hobby that I’ve picked up in the last few years. It calms my mind to be with nature after a long busy week and the climb is always worth the view. HK has some of the best hikes, do check them out if you get a chance. Since I like being active, I try adventure sports like bouldering sometimes.
Why do you love Vyond?
I love Vyond’s products for their versatility of content and ease of use – practically anyone with any skill level can create a video within minutes using the platform, how amazing is that? We are a fun bunch of mission-centric people who push the limits every day to make the product better for our customers. Having said that, we take time to celebrate every little win along the way. After all, work should also be fun, right?
2021 Xmas celebrations at the Vyond office in Hong Kong
What is one feature in Vyond that you think customers should know about?
I love all the AI-based features that we recently launched. Using the Visual search feature, you can search for a prop, background or template based on a photo that you upload. The color detection feature will auto-detect all the dominant colors from a picture that you upload.
But one of my recent favorites is the remove background feature. It will magically remove the background of any uploaded photo making it transparent to re-use in your video. How cool is that? Give it a try and let us know your feedback.
There are various pathways that lead to careers at Vyond. Explore our current openings.
#### Vyond Employee Highlight: Shari Bryant, Director of Program Management
Welcome to Vyond’s employee highlight series. This is a series aimed to highlight the talented individuals that work at Vyond across all departments and offices.
Meet Shari Bryant, Vyond’s director of program management from the San Mateo office. As the director of program management, Shari provides localized support for process development and optimization.
What does your position entail?
I provide localized support for process development and optimization and also coordinate and manage programs that affect the company as a whole. For example, Vyond’s information security and privacy programs are both managed by the Program Management Office. As social justice is a personal passion of mine, I also chair the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion @ Vyond program.
What are some of the bigger projects you are working on now?
Information security is definitely our primary focus most days. One of the core tenets of our program is “continuous improvement.” This means we’re always looking for ways to enhance our existing controls to better account for the ever-changing landscape of security.
Where is your hometown? What brought you to the Bay (if you are not from here).
I grew up in Orlando and moved out to the Bay for a job opportunity (and to be closer to my sister). I’m still a Florida girl at heart, but the Bay is truly my home.
Share an interesting fact or story about yourself.
Though my day job largely focuses on data security, my original areas of study in college were studio art and Japanese language. I love drawing portraits – I even did caricatures at Walt Disney World for a summer job – and I recently opened a small art studio in San Carlos.
Other than that, I played bass guitar in a small rock band for a few years. The drummer was my twin sister!
What is your favorite thing to eat?
I love Japanese food and Southern food. Thankfully there’s an abundance of the former out here in the Bay, though sadly not the latter. Yakitori Kokko in downtown San Mateo is great for yakitori and tapas, and Yuzu on 37th Ave is a fabulous little sushi joint. For Southern food, so far my favorite restaurant has been my own kitchen!
What are your hobbies?
I freely admit I have entirely too many hobbies. But I love writing, creating art, making music, and watching movies.
Why do you love Vyond?
One of my favorite things to do in Vyond Studio is to create gifs. It’s super quick to piece together a short vignette to spruce up an otherwise standard communication. Included are a few gifs I created a little while ago as part of a weekly book club reminder:
What is one feature in Vyond that you think customers should know about?
As an artist, my favorite feature is the character creator. There’s so much variety in the clothing and design, I love recreating my friends and family in the studio.
Learn more about Character Creator.
There are various pathways that lead to careers at Vyond. Explore our current openings.
#### Vyond in 2023: Big Advances in Applied AI and Accessibility, More Happy Customers
2023 was truly a banner year for Vyond.
This year, we brought generative AI technology into our platform that makes it quicker and easier than ever to make exactly the video content you need. We built new features and functionality in response to your top requests, including accessibility features like open and closed captioning. And we teamed up with a powerhouse partner, Shutterstock, to expand your creative options even further.
At a number of conference speaking engagements this year, our CEO Gary Lipkowitz talked about a future state where creating great video content will be as easy as saying, “Vyond, make me a video.” In 2023, we took a giant step closer to making that a reality.
Here’s a more in-depth overview of what Vyond made possible for our users this year:
Create scripts and rough-cut videos instantly—with Vyond Go
In June we launched Vyond Go—the industry’s first AI-powered script and video creator.
Vyond Go revolutionizes the way business communications are created: now you can build professional video content from scratch, in seconds, using the power of generative AI.
The Vyond Go interface is incredibly simple. You enter a few short prompts, and choose your preferred scene and tone. Then, in a matter of seconds, Vyond Go delivers a script and an editable output that combines script, storyboard, and first-cut video all in one. Use the video as is, or make edits within Vyond Studio. And that’s it!
Bring your creative vision to life, faster—with Video to Action and Text to Prop
Text to Prop
Can’t find the exact prop you need in our content library? No problem. Now, with the fall launch of our automatic asset creator, Text to Prop, you can now generate any prop you can imagine with the click of a button—all in Vyond’s native style.
Learn more
Video to Action
You can now automatically bring your Contemporary-style characters to life just by uploading a sample video and applying those actions to your character. This new feature is already saving video creators significant time, and enhancing their storytelling abilities by making it easier to create realistic character actions and reactions.
Learn more
Create more accessible video content
Closed Captioning, with VTT and SRT Export
With our new Closed Captioning feature, you can make your videos accessible to the widest possible audience. Automatically transcribe your voiceover, then export TTS and audio to an SRT or VTT file for use with courseware authoring tools, an LMS, or video-hosting providers. These captions exist as a separate file and can be turned on or off.
Open Captioning
In addition to SRT/VTT file generation for closed captioning, you can now add open captioning (captions “burned” directly into the video file) directly from the Vyond workflow—no manual typing or third-party vendors required!
Enjoy the benefits of our latest integrations
Shutterstock
In addition to our own ever-expanding library, Vyond customers now have access to over 3 million of Shutterstock’s library of images and videos right in the Vyond platform.
See how Vyond helped Enterprise customers reach their 2023 goals
As excited as we were to bring a bunch of helpful new features to market in 2023, the measure of our success as a company is ultimately whether we help fuel our customers’ success. Here’s how the L&D teams at a few big-name companies solved critical communication challenges with Vyond this year.
Whole Food Market reduced average video production time by 75%
“There’s not a day we don’t use Vyond,” said Bryan McElroy, Senior Team Lead of Change Enablement. “The ability to create something great in a day that used to take three, four, five days to complete–has been a game changer for us.”
Learn more
American Express created videos 25% faster using Vyond
“It’s much easier for me to use and has features that make the resulting videos a better quality,” said instructional designer Chuck Field. “We’re all saying, ‘this is a tool we can use more.”
Learn more
Cargill boosted engagement with their compliance content by 30-65%
“Using a tool like Vyond to present our content in a more creative and engaging way helps us maintain and enhance our relationship with employees, and we’ve been very successful in that regard,” said Christopher Annand, Director of Programs and Governance.
Learn more
To see why more than 20,000 companies used Vyond to communicate and train better in 2023, sign up for a free trial or contact one of our Enterprise sales reps directly.
#### Vyond Launches Vyond For Government: Now, Best-In-Class Video Creation Is Available For Federal Agency Use
We’re thrilled to announce that Vyond has officially achieved “In Process” status from the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP®)—and is now listed in the FedRAMP Marketplace.
Featuring unparalleled security assurance, and industry-leading ease of use, Vyond for Government is the perfect solution for federal agencies and contractors looking to quickly transform their critical information into powerful videos for employees, partners, and constituents — effectively and at scale. Connect with our team to learn more.
Accelerate your business outcomes
Vyond for Government unites powerful tools including proprietary visuals, a brand management suite, and team collaboration tools into an easy-to-use, comprehensive solution that lets Federal agencies:
Create engaging, business-relevant videos at 10x the efficiency, cost savings, and scale compared to legacy video production methods
Empower users across their organization to create videos with our easy-to-use software that puts a powerful production studio at their fingertips
Achieve measurable results — Vyond customers have seen 130%+ increases in engagement rates, an 80% reduction in onboarding course times, and millions of dollars of savings
Rest secured
Rest secured, that with Vyond for Government, your data is protected under the FedRAMP framework, which:
Requires passing a comprehensive security assessment
Establishes stringent federal government standards for security requirements
Relies on an independent third-party assessment to ensure the controls are implemented in adherence to FedRAMP standards
Subjects Vyond for Government to rigorous continuous monitoring
High speed, low drag video creation
Vyond for Government brings drag-and-drop simplicity to make video creation as easy, if not easier, than creating a slide presentation — with a far more engaging and professional result. Anyone, regardless of experience, can start creating videos within minutes. Users can even jump-start videos with hundreds of templates that cover almost every situation, quickly editing any of them to make it their own.
Application for nearly every situation and use case
You have critical information to communicate, and with Vyond for Government, you can quickly and easily create videos for any situation or use case. Choose from a vast array of characters, over 40,000 props depicting nearly every job role and situation, and thousands of animated actions and expressions. Even create character-free videos with dynamic charts and visuals, or your own uploaded assets. Our expansive visual versatility means you’re sure to find yourself creating videos across use cases.
Our world-class support is with you
With Vyond customer satisfaction scores consistently greater than 94% and NPS scores in the impressive mid 60s, your team will gain the valuable support of the most creative, supportive and experienced team on the block. Get access to:
Extensive Resources: create content quickly and easily with access to a variety of tutorials and resources through a dedicated Vyond for Government Help Center
Help Where You Need It: industry-recognized support from knowledgeable customer support specialists via email & chat
Dedicated Point of Contact: teams with 10+ seats will be on a first-name basis with a customer success expert
Ready to get access to Vyond for Government? Contact us.
#### Vyond leads G2’s Momentum Grid®
Think all tools are created equally? Well, think again. With so many video platforms on the market today, it can be hard to pick out the best animation software.
That’s where G2 comes in.
G2 only accepts reviews from verified users so they can offer a credible, neutral, and authoritative view of the latest software. Then, to help shoppers spot the top tool, they publish quarterly reports. These reports are perhaps most famous for the G2 Momentum Grid® contained in each report.
Best Animation Software of Winter 2022
Vyond Studio is the best animation software according to G2’s Winter 2022 Momentum Grid® for Animation. And, this is the second time running that Vyond claimed the top spot!
How does G2 calculate its Momentum Grid®?
G2 aims to score software as accurately as possible. So, they created a number of complex algorithms to take every significant factor into account. Scroll on to learn more about how Vyond was scored as the best animation software of Winter 2022, and click here to read more about G2’s methodology.
Momentum Score
G2 calculates momentum by looking at each platform’s year-over-year growth. This accounts for company growth, prevalence on social media and the web, and the number of reviews received.
Vyond’s chart-topping Momentum Score for Winter 2022 is 83. That’s 6 points higher than Animaker, and 16 points higher than Biteable!
Satisfaction Score
G2 calculates satisfaction based on reviews from verified users. In other words, this score accounts for factors like Net Promoter Score® (NPS), popularity, and satisfaction with the tool’s features.
In Winter 2022, Vyond achieved a near-perfect satisfaction score of 95 on G2. Other animation tools—like Moovly (85) and Biteable (41)—lag behind.
Momentum Grid® Score
G2 uses momentum and satisfaction scores to position each tool on the Momentum Grid®. Then, they translate that placement into a Momentum Grid® Score. After that, shoppers, analysts, and reporters from around the world use these scores as a benchmarks for software excellence.
Vyond’s Momentum Grid® score is 87 in G2’s latest Animation report for Winter 2022. That’s 9 points higher than Powtoon, and 18 points higher than Moovly.
Create videos with the best animation software around.
It should be easy, impactful, and satisfying to bring your ideas to life. So, if you’re looking for the best animation software around, pick Vyond. You can try Vyond Studio with our free trial—no credit card required.
TRY VYOND FREE
#### Vyond Named Best Video Creation Software by Customers on G2: 35 New Awards in Total
We are so honored to announce that Vyond earned 35 news awards from G2, a popular B2B software review site, as part of its Winter 2023 awards. Wow – thank you, everyone!
G2 compares the best business software and services based on user ratings and social data, and utilizes collective, authentic knowledge – incorporating peer-to-peer, customer-driven reviews – to help buyers find the right solutions for their business needs. Users rated Vyond highly across numerous categories as part of G2’s Winter 2023 awards, bestowing us with the following honors:
#1 in Results, Implementation, and Usability – the top spot in three Animation categories and awards for “Best Results,” “Best Usability,” “Most Implementable,” “Fastest Implementation,” and “Users Most Likely to Recommend”
Five (5) Enterprise category awards – including “Leader” awards, as well as “Best Support” and “High Performer” honors
Ten (10) Overall “Leader” awards – including the “Leader” award for Animation, Content Creation, Video Editing, and Presentation; as well as “Momentum Leader” for Animation, Presentation, and Video Editing
Vyond was also an overall winner in the “Users Love Us” category. Our CEO Gary Lipkowitz said, “These latest G2 awards illustrate how our relentless focus on customer success makes Vyond even more relevant and compelling in today’s economic climate. We’ve done well because Vyond helps customers meet their learning and development objectives with AI-powered video that engages and educates while remaining cost-efficient. Our team is absolutely thrilled with these latest awards from G2 because they’re real customer rankings. I want to thank our customers and partners for their support as we continue to define the video-based learning sector.”
More details on our recent G2 awards can be found on our awards web page.
#### Vyond Named to G2’s Best Software of 2026 List
We’re thrilled to share that Vyond has been named to G2’s Best Software 2026 list — placing us among only 0.63% of the 179,500 companies listed on G2.
Specifically, Vyond has been named to G2’s Best Design Software Products 2026 roster — a direct reflection of the creativity and satisfaction of our users, and the value Vyond brings to companies and teams around the world.
This isn’t Vyond’s first G2 honor — we’ve garnered quite a few of them recently — but it’s a milestone we’re incredibly proud of, especially considering the fact that G2’s rankings are based directly on authentic customer feedback.
It’s a testament to what our community already knows: with Vyond, anyone — regardless of experience — can quickly create engaging, results-driven videos at scale.
From training and compliance to sales onboarding and customer outreach, Vyond helps teams turn static content into compelling, branded videos in minutes. And organizations are seeing real impact — from increased engagement in learning content to more revenue velocity for sales teams.
But what truly sets Vyond apart is its enterprise-ready approach to data security, AI governance and brand control. (This spring, we also received Enterprise-specific G2 badges for Most Implementable, Easiest Setup, and Best Relationship.)
Find out more about Vyond’s enterprise-ready security, or visit our Trust Center.
And big thanks again to G2 and all the Vyond customers who share the feedback that makes us better and fuels our growth.
#### Vyond Opens Chicago Office
Our Momentum Continues: Vyond Opens Chicago Office, Headed by CMO Van Diamandakis
We’re excited to announce the opening of our new Vyond Chicago office, located in the Windy City’s dynamic tech hub, Fulton Market. Our new location at 159 North Sangamon Street will accelerate our regional growth, with over 20 new hires planned in sales, marketing, and customer success. The expansion brings us in close proximity to our growing customer base of more than 50 local organizations.
Leading our new office will be recently-appointed Chief Marketing Officer Van Diamandakis, a tech industry veteran who previously led marketing and sales at WANdisco, Persado, Sage, Joyent, and Riverbed Technology, among others.
“The Midwest and the Chicagoland area represent a huge market opportunity for Vyond because we provide a solution that makes business-critical content stick,” commented Diamandakis. “Whether that content is for eLearning, HR, internal comms, or sales and marketing, Vyond’s intelligent, AI-driven video creation solution helps enterprises deliver compelling video that drives engagement and retention. As a Chicago native, I’m excited to lead the team that will not only support and grow our business in the region but will also integrate Vyond’s brand into the local business community.”
Board member Kevin Willer, partner at Chicago Ventures and a personal investor in Vyond, thinks that Vyond’s new presence in the Midwest will reap significant rewards.
“Chicago is one of the world’s most dynamic and exciting cities for business,” said Willer. “Our region is home to numerous enterprise companies that truly need Vyond to accelerate their video-based learning programs for training, education, and employee development. We are expecting great things in terms of growth, and our firm is looking forward to collaborating with Vyond as their solution is embraced by customers throughout the Midwest.”
The Vyond Chicago office opens on December 5, 2022.
#### Vyond showcases their new tools and technologies at DevLearn 2022
Last week, our team took the DevLearn 2022 Conference & Expo by storm in Las Vegas. We joined a diverse community of over 3,500 tech movers, shakers, and e-learning professionals to celebrate where “learning comes to life”, and showcase Vyond’s latest fall release to the world.
DevLearn is where folks in the L&D field get to discuss the business-critical issues facing our industry right now, and the awesome technologies and products being developed to solve them. Featuring 150+ sessions spread over two days, attendees could take their pick from a diverse range of topics including: Contextual Microlearning, Gamify Your Course Design Process, and The Art of Storytelling.
“The export option for review is my fave. Can’t wait for you to add layers so overlaid objects are easier to manage. Keep the features coming!”
Ray Handley, Senior Learning Designer at Downer New Zealand
Keynote speakers included renowned physicist Michio Kaku, brain scientist Cori Lathan, Kevin Bethune, author of reimagining design, and chemistry professor, Dr. Kate Biberdorf.
During her explosive keynote, Vyond’s sponsored speaker, Kate the Chemist, put on some entertaining experiments to help explain the importance of representing diversity in education. Our growing library of relatable and customizable characters is key to the success of Vyond’s video templates – improving employees’ ability to learn through connecting with animated characters.
“[Vyond is the] Best 2D animation tool”
Abdul Rafay, Creative Designer at Landster
Discussions around the evolution of e-learning were high on the agenda, with presentations like The Future of the Mind, The Power of Transformative Design, Technology Trends That Will Enhance Human Performance, and Blowing Up Stereotypes in Learning.
CEO Gary Lipowitz talks Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and content creation
Gary Lipkowitz, Vyond’s CEO, took to the DevLearn stage to discuss: AI and the Race for Intelligent Content Creation, touching on how supercomputers could “surpass the abilities of any human”, and how “The Singularity” concept points to a day when AI could teach us, humans, instead.
He demonstrated bringing digital personas to life in animated videos with VyondAI – the stuff of science fiction. Utilizing the smartest AI and ML capabilities and time-saving technologies, he detailed how the technology allows you to create high-quality, relatable “real-life” videos.
Attendees of Gary’s talk came away fully versed in Photo to Character, Instant Video Translation, AI Prop Generation, and other ways to build amazing animated videos for different customer types. A lucky few also bagged the much-coveted Vyond hoodie. Don’t worry if you missed Gary at DevLearn though, our fall release blog will bring you up to date. (But no more hoodies left, unfortunately!)
“Vyond was something that everyone was talking about.”
Ronny Lohuis, Senior Consultant at The Courseware Company
Vyond’s stand-out show
We loved sharing our learning technologies with other DevLearners, and showcasing Vyond’s game-changing video creation products. As well as VyondAI, there was also plenty of buzz around the Import/Export copy feature and Instant Translation – real-time savers for today’s busy professionals.
“[Vyond’s stand] on the exhibit floor generated so much enthusiasm.”
Ronny Lohuis, Senior Consultant at The Courseware Company
“That’s a good-looking booth!”
Adam Perry Vice President of Product Marketing at Folloze
Fall Release Launch Party
On Wednesday night, a select number of guests enjoyed Vyond’s invite-only Fall Release launch party, complete with live music and custom cocktails.
After some heartfelt words of thanks to our customers, we toasted Vyond’s latest capabilities with a Vyond Gimlet. And congratulations to our raffle winner – enjoy the Oculus VR headset. Can’t wait to see everyone at DevLearn ‘23!
Vyond is the enterprise-grade agile video creation software that’s reinventing business communications. Helping your organization to quickly create relevant, engaging videos at scale without making a costly production out of it.
If you’re wondering whether Vyond can help your business, start making videos today with our free trial.
#### Vyond Spring 2023 Release: Introducing Vyond Go, Plus New Features and Content
It’s no exaggeration to say that our Spring 2023 release is the biggest, most transformative product release in Vyond’s history.
Not only have we added many new powerful customer-requested features to Vyond Studio, our award-winning video creation platform, we’re also thrilled to announce the launch of Vyond Go, the industry’s first AI-based script and video creator.
What is Vyond Go?
Vyond Go will revolutionize the way business communications are created, making it possible to create professional video content from scratch, in seconds, using the power of generative AI.
The Vyond Go interface is incredibly simple. A Vyond user enters a few short prompts, indicating the video they want. Then, in a matter of seconds, Vyond Go delivers a script and an editable output that combines script, storyboard, and first-cut video all in one. Users can use the video as is, or make edits within Vyond Studio. It’s as simple as that.
Vyond Go will be available to all customers midyear. Want to be the first in line to try it out? Sign up for our waitlist here!
Join the Vyond Go Waitlist
2023 Spring Release Features
When our customers share their ideas for improving Vyond Studio, we listen. Our Spring 2023 release delivers on our customers’ top five feature requests, providing more relevance, speed, and enterprise-grade functionality—and adds a new focus on accessibility.
These are the new features and capabilities, available now or being delivered to customers this summer.
Available Now:
Global Search
Available to all plans
Vyond’s new global search feature helps you more easily locate the assets you need, including assets you’ve previously used within the platform. Our expanded search box now delivers all the scenes, props, charts, text, audio and uploads from our library related to keyword searches from previous projects, all in one place.
New Content
Available to all plans
We’re always creating new content! In this release, we’ve delivered new industry-specific content for healthcare, office, home, manufacturing, food & outdoor, and learning & development,complete with new props, characters, and templates.
Coming Very Soon:
Closed Captioning
Available to all plans
You can now make your videos accessible to those with hearing impairments by adding closed captions. Automatically transcribe your voice over audio, then export TTS and voice over audio to an SRT file for use with courseware authoring tools, an LMS, or video hosting providers.
Text to Speech (TTS) Enhancements
Available to all plans
Text to Speech is getting a much-requested update. With our Spring Release, you’ll be able to control voice pitch and speed, as well as add emotion to voices. You’ll also be able to preview voices before adding them to a character, saving valuable time.
Asset Organization
Available to Professional and above
Save valuable time by easily organizing your favorite assets and creating your own collection. Organize and save your assets for easy search. Create branded collections, save your favorite props and characters, organize audio files and uploaded content, and create videos faster than ever before.
Bulk Audio Edit
Available to all plans
Save time by editing multiple audio tracks at once. Edit volume, fade, assigned character, and TTS settings at the same time, ensuring consistent sound across your video.
Instant Preview
Available to all plans
Tired of waiting for your previews to load? With this new update, you’ll be able to preview your videos almost instantly.
This update currently only applies to the Contemporary Style – but more instant preview updates are coming soon!
Want to see these exciting new features in action? Sign up for our free May webinar, Vyond’s Spring 2023 Release: The Future of Video Is Here.
Vyond’s Spring 2023 Release: The Future of Video Is Here
#### Vyond Spring 2024 Release: Unlimited Video Styles, Total Brand Control
With our Spring 2024 release, we’re excited to bring you better AI tools that help you improve business outcomes, drive efficiency, streamline workflows, and create more meaningful, relevant content for your audiences. Plus, an entire Brand Management Suite gives you more control over your brand and helps ensure brand continuity across teams.
You can watch the following brand management and AI features in action in our Spring 2024 Release Webinar.
Sign Up Now
Protect Your Brand With Vyond’s Brand Management Suite
Plan type: Enterprise and Agency
Your brand is critical to your business: ensure that it shows up cohesively across your video content with our suite of brand management features. Quickly and easily share brand assets, create watermarks, and even require approvals to distribute content — with Vyond, brand management is built in.
Brand Kit
Help creators represent your company consistently across videos by uploading your company logo, fonts, and other assets into a single brand kit that all of your company’s users can access.
Company Watermark
Turn your logo or other branded image into a persistent visual element within your videos. Account owners can create watermarks for easy access to users across teams.
Approval Management
Prevent brand erosion from improperly branded videos with our new Approval Management feature. Account owners can add an additional layer of brand protection by restricting video download and distribution to approved videos only.
Color Shuffler (coming soon!)
Achieve color coordination at the push of a button! Color Shuffler adds instant brand personalization by applying up to five brand colors to any of our video templates — even shuffling them to achieve the exact look you want.
Try Vyond for Free
Vyond Go Gets More Powerful And Easier To Use
Availability: All plans
Manual is so last year. Enter a Vyond Go prompt in any of 95 languages and this latest evolution of our AI-powered video maker will generate visuals for your videos inherently and dynamically — you might say, automagically. (Multilingual translation available to Professional plans and above.)
Even More Character Styles
Vyond Go’s template library continues to grow, with fresh options for diverse character styles, non-animated charts and infographics, narration, and Shutterstock templates.
Auto-Adjust Scene Duration
Don’t give changes a second thought. Now, scene length is automatically adjusted to fit any edits you make to a character’s TTS, thanks to our AI-powered Auto-Adjust Scene Duration feature. Getting your video script *exactly* how you want just became even easier!
Try Vyond for Free
Simplified Character Creation And Editing
Plan type: All plans
Quickly and easily create more diverse characters directly within Vyond Studio! Now you can update the color and tone of characters’ skin and clothing without having to create them first in Character Creator! Currently available for Business Friendly and Contemporary character styles.
Making Accessibility More Accessible
Plan type: All plans
Direct Caption Editing
Edit and update captions directly within your workflow, reducing editing time and improving accuracy.
Caption Language Selection
Get more accurate captions in other languages by specifying the output language first. See our complete list of supported languages here.
If you’ve been meaning to give Vyond a whirl, now’s a great time! Try it now, for free and explore many of these new enhancements. Want to get your whole team involved? Try it as a group! Chat with us about a team pilot.
#### Vyond Spring 2025: Best-in-Class HeyGen Avatars, More Versatility, and More Efficiency
Ready to meet the new faces of Vyond? Excellent, because we’re super excited to show them to you! We’re talking, of course, about our brand new, best-in-class AI avatars, courtesy of our friends at HeyGen – providers of the highest quality avatars out there. Along with a whole bevy of new tools, integrations, and platform enhancements, they’re part of our Spring 2025 release – giving you more of everything you need in a video creation platform.
More Avatars
Our theme this spring is, “Because video can be more,” and nothing exemplifies that thought like our huge new HeyGen offering of over 1,300 avatar options. This includes 120 unique, high quality HeyGen avatars (combined with our existing selection of Tavus avatars, you now have a diverse selection of 200+ AI avatars to choose from), plus an enormous selection of backgrounds, outfits, professions, angles, and aspect ratios.
See Our Avatars
More Visual Versatility
Vyond now gives you even more ways to enhance your avatars to perfectly fit your needs:
Custom backgrounds – Expand your options and add relevance – an office, a warehouse, a forest, a street – whatever image most suits your needs
Transparent backgrounds – Layer your avatar over any style or background without the need to frame it with a border
A dozen new presenter templates – Drop your avatar spokesperson into one of these premade photorealistic and mixed media templates for customized communications
Custom avatar enhancements – Easily create your own avatar from within your Vyond workflow, and use our privacy controls to oversee and monitor usage of your avatar
These enhancements give you the ability to choose, create, and customize avatars to suit your one-of-a-kind needs. They also let you effortlessly merge your avatars with our many other styles, from photorealistic and mixed media to generative AI, animated, and dynamic charts and graphs, making it easier to create compelling, targeted videos that move the needle.
Try Vyond Now
More Creative Efficiency
By putting every tool you need at your fingertips, Vyond’s all-in-one platform reduces your tech stack, helps you more efficiently craft content, and reduces your production time and costs. And we’re always curating and innovating the best new tools to give you even more ways to effortlessly create something great.
More Integrations
We’re helping you work smarter outside of our platform as well. New integrations with Slack, Google Docs, and Zapier now make it possible to create videos inside your favorite productivity and content apps, in the flow of work. So now you have even more pathways for creating amazing content.
Slack: Use Vyond’s text to video in Slack to instantly take your concepts from prompt to screen. Learn more.
Google Docs: Use document to video to effortlessly turn your Google doc into an engaging video. Learn more.
Zapier: Automate your video creation workflow by pairing with 7,000+ productivity apps and tools in Zapier. Learn more.
See All of Our Integrations
More All-in-One
Efficiencies abound with the newest updates to our all-in-one platform, including:
Vyond Studio Updates
Enhanced text to speech – Now you can download your TTS to use in media, see your TTS history, and generate longer TTS segments.
Easy tools access – Quickly find the most popular video creation/editing tools on the homepage or click “View All” for quick access to all of our tools
Group cropped and masked assets – If your video is asset-heavy, this will save you a lot of editing and updating time
Vyond Go Updates
Attachment summary – Save what you’ve generated by getting a storyboard/preview of how Vyond Go will treat the material you’re inputting and exclude extraneous information
Swap character and TTS before generating – Get more customization and save editing time by changing the characters within any Vyond Go template before you generate
At Vyond, we’re constantly offering you more ways to quickly and easily create videos that get the job done. Because at Vyond, we know videos can be more.
How many AI avatars does Vyond offer?
As of its Spring 2025 update, Vyond now offers over 1,300 avatar options, including 120 high-quality HeyGen avatars and a diverse selection of 200+ AI avatars overall. This variety allows you to choose from multiple backgrounds, outfits, professions, angles, and aspect ratios to create more personalized and engaging videos.
Can you make custom avatars in Vyond?
Yes. Vyond’s latest release makes it easier than ever to create a custom avatar directly within the platform. You can tailor your avatar’s look to match your brand or message and take advantage of new features like custom backgrounds, transparent layers, and enhanced privacy controls to oversee usage.
What software does Vyond integrate with?
Vyond offers seamless integrations with popular productivity tools like Slack, Google Docs, and Zapier. These allow you to turn text prompts into videos directly in Slack, convert Google Docs into engaging videos, and automate workflows with 7,000+ Zapier-connected apps. Here’s a more complete list of Vyond integrations.
Can you create custom or branded videos in Vyond?
Yes! Unlike other AI video creation platforms, Yyond enables fully custom or branded video creation using a combination of built-in tools and professionally designed assets. This is one of the reasons Vyond is so popular with brand-conscious Enterprise companies. Specifically:
Vyond also makes it easy to create custom, individualized characters — including custom AI or animated avatars — with varied clothing, facial features, body types, and ethnicities to reflect your brand identity.
Vyond’s design team can develop custom assets for branding: tailored characters, backgrounds, props, scenes, and branded templates (including custom avatars with company logos or staff likenesses), all aligned with your brand guidelines.
Vyond offers Brand Kits for Enterprise and Agency plans; these allow you to upload your brand color palette, custom fonts, images, logos, and approved assets into a centralized collection.
#### Vyond Studio Keyboard Shortcuts
You need video, fast. We get it, and we want to make it as simple as possible. Keyboard shortcuts are the easiest way to ramp up your production speed. With the launch of the Vyond Studio (beta), there are now a plethora of keyboard shortcuts to help you create videos quickly and efficiently.
What are Keyboard Shortcuts?
A keyboard shortcut is a key, or group of keys, that perform a specific function in the Vyond Studio. Each shortcut can save seconds, or potentially minutes, of extra time clicking and dragging. Use keyboard shortcuts to copy, paste, preview, perfectly position assets, and more.
How to Use the Most Popular Shortcuts
The video and brief script below will help guide you as you explore the most popular Vyond Studio shortcuts. Download the complete list of shortcuts below.
Download the Shortcut Reference Guide
Here’s how to use the most popular shortcuts (from the video above):
First, copy and paste. Instead of re-creating new elements that you already have, you can duplicate them instantly. Highlight an asset on the stage or a scene on the timeline and use your keyboard to press ctrl + c on a PC, or command + c on a Mac, to copy a clip or asset. To paste a copy of that asset, press ctrl or command + v. With copy and paste, you can turn a single tree into a forest in seconds.
Want to copy and paste more than one item at a time? Hold down Shift and click to select multiple assets on the stage.
There’s also undo, the shortcut for when you make a mistake and want to reverse the last command you performed. Press ctrl or command + z to undo your last action. To redo, press ctrl or command + shift + z. With these shortcuts, you don’t need to waste time erasing or re-creating content.
To quickly edit your arrangement of characters, scenery, and props, there’s move forward and move backward, the shortcuts for changing the layering of assets in your scenes. Move your assets to the exact layer where you want them by pressing ctrl or command and the arrow key that matches the direction you want them to go. Press ctrl or command +↑ to move forward or press ctrl or command +↓ to move back. Using the keyboard lets you reach the perfect position instantly instead of spending extra time clicking and dragging. To move an asset all the way to the front or all the way to the back, use ctrl+shift+↑ for bring to front and ctrl+shift+↓ for send to back.
To quickly enter preview mode to review your video, press Ctrl + P. Press ctrl + P again to exit preview. Like what you’ve created so far? Press Ctrl + S to make sure and save your work.
All Vyond Studio Keyboard Shortcuts
Take a look at all of the essential keyboard shortcuts in Vyond studio.
Download this guide
About Vyond
GoAnimate is now Vyond. Learn more about the changes.
Vyond allows people of all skill levels in all industries and job roles to create dynamic and powerful media. With features that go beyond moving text and images, you can build character-driven stories or compelling data visualizations that engage audiences and deliver results.
Start making your own videos today. Sign up for a free trial and attend our weekly tour of the Vyond Studio.
#### Vyond Unveils Vyond Go at ATD ICE 2023
More than 9,500 professionals from 80+ countries rely on ATD’s annual conference to learn about trends and best practices, discover new tools and solutions at the largest EXPO for training and development practitioners, and share ideas with peers who are committed to helping create a world that works better.
Last week, the Vyond team took the ATD23 conference by storm in San Diego. We joined a diverse community of over 13,000 e-learning professionals and gave visitors a preview of our new spring release features, including our soon-to-be-released AI-based script and video creator, Vyond Go. More than 9,500 professionals from 80+ countries rely on ATD’s annual conference to learn about trends and best practices, discover new tools and solutions at the largest EXPO for training and development practitioners, and share ideas with peers who are committed to helping create a world that works better.
Keynote speakers included Organizational Psychologist Adam Grant; Vyond’s sponsored speaker, the strategic advisor Priya Parker; and Tony and Grammy Award winning artist Leslie Odom Jr.
During her keynote, Ms. Parker hosted a dynamic event grounded in concepts about meaningful group experiences found in her book, The Art of Gathering. In this insightful, highly interactive event, Priya Parker broke down the anatomy of what makes for transformative gatherings and encouraged attendees to use some of her strategies to connect with others in real time during the session.
Vyond highlights
CEO Gary Lipowitz talks about Applied AI for the Enterprise
Gary Lipkowitz, Vyond’s CEO, took to the ATD23 stage to deliver a presentation called Applied AI for the Enterprise: Relevance, Brand Compliance, and Safety that explained how companies can use AI to create content that’s relevant, brand compliant, and secure.
Vyond unveils its Spring 2023 Release, including Vyond Go
Thousands of attendees stopped by our booth to see what’s new with Vyond, and get a glimpse of our new AI-based script and video creator, Vyond Go in action. The response was enthusiastic, to say the least—and got us even more excited to officially launch Vyond Go at the end of June.
Beyond Vyond Go, we showed off new Spring Release features like Global Search, new industry-specific content, Bulk Audio Edit, Closed Captioning, Instant Preview, and more.
Good times at Petco Park
Vyond team members joined conference attendees on the field at the Padres stadium Petco Park, where they enjoyed hot dogs and 80s classics from Los Angeles arena rock band, Wayward Sons.
VIP Cocktail Reception
On Monday night, over 100 guests enjoyed Vyond’s invite-only VIP Cocktail Reception, complete with live music and custom cocktails.
After some heartfelt words of thanks to our customers, we toasted Vyond’s latest AI capabilities. And congratulations to our raffle winner – enjoy the iPad Pro. Can’t wait to see everyone in New Orleans for ATD24!
#### Vyond Wins 36 New G2 Awards, including “Best Results”
We’re proud to announce that Vyond earned 36 new awards from G2, the renowned B2B software review site, as part of their Spring 2023 awards!
Based on user ratings and social data, G2 compares the best business software and services. Using collective, authentic knowledge and incorporating peer-to-peer customer-driven reviews, they help buyers find the right solutions.
Vyond’s capabilities shone across the Video Creation, Presentation, Content Creation, and Animation award categories. We received the following honors:
Eight #1 Leader Awards
#1 Leader for Best Results
#1 for Leader for the Enterprise
#1 for Best Usability
#1 for Best Estimated ROI for Animation
#1 for Most Implementable Animation Presentation
Our 36 badges reflect our unique applicability for enterprise-grade, self-service video communications; four of our leader awards were in the enterprise category, including one for the best enterprise support.
World-class customer success has always been one of Vyond’s top priorities. Based on this Q2 Spring Report and Vyond customer satisfaction and NPS scores that consistently outpace industry standards, it’s clear that our efforts are paying off.
“Great tool – very easy to use.”
Neil, Verified Vyond User
“Grateful for Vyond.”
Rachel, Verified Vyond User
Our CEO Gary Lipowitz said: “Once again, we’re thrilled with these latest awards from G2 because they’re real customer love letters. Thank you to our customers and partners for their support as we continue to define the video-based learning sector.”
“Customers love Vyond because we make it easy for them to transform mission-critical (but often boring) content into vibrant business communications that engage their employees, customers, and partners —and deliver positive business outcomes,” he added.
More details on our recent G2 awards can be found on our awards web page.
#### Vyond Wins 39 G2 Awards, Including Best in Estimated ROI, Usability, Results, and Support
While there are already so many reasons to love Vyond, we’re excited to announce we’ve added 39 more from G2 as part of their Summer 2023 awards!
G2 compares the best business software and services based on user ratings and social data to help buyers find the right solutions for their business needs. Vyond received high marks across the Video Creation, Presentation, Content Creation, and Animation categories and was recognized as a “Leader” and “Best” in class with ten #1 awards:
#1 for Leader for the Enterprise in Animation
#1 for Leader for the Enterprise in Content Creation
#1 Leader for Best Results
#1 for Best Usability
#1 for Best Estimated ROI
#1 for Most Implementable (Overall)
#1 for Most Implementable (Small Business)
#1 for Fastest Implementation (Overall)
#1 for Fastest Implementation (Small Business)
#1 for Users Most Likely to Recommend
Our 39 badges reflect our unique applicability for enterprise-grade, self-service video business communications. Enterprise awards in Easiest Doing Business With, Best Relationship, and Best Support are also reflective of our commitment to world-class customer success as a business priority and customer satisfaction ratings that consistently outpace industry standards.
“Vyond is for those who want to get exceptional results”
Punam, Verified Vyond User
“Vyond has streamlined video creation”
Jessey, Verified Vyond User
“Recognition by G2 and the G2 community with 39 awards is both inspiring and humbling,” said Vyond Chief Operating Officer, Mark Deaton.
“It’s inspiring to see how much our customers love to talk about the real impacts that using Vyond has on business outcomes. And, it’s humbling to see the recognition and gratitude that is given to Vyond for a world-class product with award-winning customer service and support. Thank you G2 community. I am grateful.”
More details on our recent G2 awards can be found on our awards web page.
#### Vyond Wins at the 2021 Killer Content Awards
We’re thrilled to announce that Vyond took home the Finny Award for Best B2B Sales Enablement content at the 2021 Killer Content Awards!
The Killer Content Awards—organized by Demand Gen Report for B2B Marketing Exchange—honors the best in B2B content from all kinds of industries. We’re proud to be in great company alongside 27 other Finny winners like Dell, Forbes, and HP.
This win comes right on the heel of our 10 wins at the 42nd Annual Telly Awards. While it’s certainly nice to add another trophy to the shelf, we’re most excited for what this recognition means for the Vyond Maker Community.
More than ever, award-winning content comes down to powerful storytelling that engages audiences. You don’t need to have a big budget or production studio in place to start creating compelling, industry-leading videos.
We’re also proud of this win in particular for what it says about video as a powerful tool for sales enablement. In an increasingly competitive and digital world, video has an incredible way of cutting through the noise to forge meaningful connections with buyers. From introductions to follow-ups and beyond, video has unlimited applications to help land the sale.
Ready to optimize your sales funnel with video? Creating your own award-winning content and access Vyond’s robust library of ready-made, trophy-snatching templates by starting a free trial of Vyond Studio, no credit card required.
TRY VYOND FREE, NO CREDIT CARD REQUIRED
#### Vyond Wins Big (Again) at the 2023 Telly Awards
Vyond is thrilled to share some big news: our video team has recently won six Telly Awards! These prestigious accolades recognize our commitment to excellence in video production and highlight our talented team’s outstanding creativity and dedication.
The Telly Awards are one of the video industry’s most esteemed honors. Founded in 1979, the Telly Awards recognize outstanding achievements in video content production within a wide range of industries, including film and television production, online video, advertising, and more.
It’s an honor to be recognized alongside so many renowned brands, studios, and agencies in the industry. Some of our fellow Telly winners include Cut + Run, Netflix Disney Parks, Media.Monks, Paramount, National Geographic Society, Sesame Workshop, and many others.
All our award-winning videos were created using the Vyond platform. And three of these winning videos are available as templates you can use to create your own videos. Vyond empowers anyone, regardless of their level of expertise, to produce captivating and award-worthy videos.
Here’s a quick recap of the videos that received recognition at the 2023 Telly Awards:
Vyond Producers Hub Promo (Get to Know the Producers):
Silver Telly Winner in Branded Content – Promotional
Video Producer: Prakriti Rai, Vyond
Sr. Manager, Creative & Brand: Shahrzade Ehya, Vyond
Explore the Producers Hub
Spotting Ageism in the Workplace
Bronze Telly Winner in Branded Content – D&I
Video Producer: Sofala Knapton, Vyond
Sr. Manager, Creative & Brand: Shahrzade Ehya, Vyond
Use this template
Speech Enhancer
Silver Telly Winner in Branded Content – How-To/DIY
Director of Design & Video Lab: Emily Chau, Vyond
Video Producer: Kevin Kartono, Vyond
Senior Copywriter and Voiceover: Isobel McKenzie, Vyond
Voiceover: Michelle Pardini
Color Contrast for Web Accessibility
Bronze Telly Winner in Non-Broadcast – Diversity & Inclusion
Video Producer: Prakriti Rai, Vyond
Voiceover: Kyle Doan, Vyond
Sr. Manager, Creative & Brand: Shahrzade Ehya, Vyond
Use this template
Taylor Tinkers
Silver Telly Winner in Social Video – Series: Products & Services
Video Producer: Taylor Morgan (Independent Filmmaker)
Sr. Manager, Creative & Brand: Shahrzade Ehya, Vyond
Black History Month (2022)
Silver Telly Winner in Social Video – Education & Discovery
Video Producer: Sofala Knapton, Vyond
Sr. Manager, Creative & Brand: Shahrzade Ehya, Vyond
Use this template
Accessible and powerful award-winning video creation
With the Vyond platform, anyone can create captivating media—no video production experience required. Vyond’s intuitive and user-friendly interface empowers you to bring your ideas to life and tell compelling stories through animated video.
Try Vyond for yourself with a free trial: explore Vyond’s full range of features and unleash your creativity. Start my free trial
Try Vyond for Free
#### Vyond’s 2018 in Review
2018 was our best year yet. From bigger and better content to the debut of Vyond Studio, we’ve sure been busy. Here’s our recap of 2018:
JANUARY
We hit the ground running on company-wide data privacy initiatives, including GRPR and ISO 27000. We met our GDPR deadline this year and we’re working towards ISO certification in 2019.
FEBRUARY
Our team loves staying active together. In February, we celebrated with both Fit February and Winter Office Olympics.
View this post on Instagram
Our office olympians of the week. The nerf gun, paper airplane, trashcan basketball competition is getting fierce. If Kevin completes a gold medal hat trick today we’ll have a regular Shaun White amongst us. ? ? ? #olympics
A post shared by Vyond (@vyond) on Feb 16, 2018 at 10:10am PST
MARCH
Celebrated GoAnimate’s 11th anniversary.
Launched a new community platform as a place for customers to connect and learn from one another.
Introduced the new Contemporary style.
APRIL
Exceeded 200,000 total social media fans. Follow us on Instagram for all the latest.
In April, we placed a company-wide focus on stress awareness and tried to keep this video in mind for our busy month ahead.
MAY
On May 7th we rebranded from GoAnimate to Vyond. We were not acquired and nothing about our company changed. GoAnimate, Inc. is even still our legal business name. The rebrand was at least two years in the making, and we did it for two primary reasons:
GoAnimate was a great name and described exactly what we offered, but it didn’t describe who we could be in the future. Already, people are using Vyond in ways that go beyond basic animation, and we are researching and planning for opportunities to expand on that in the years to come.
We heard from some customers that “GoAnimate” wasn’t being taken seriously as a business communication tool. We hope that our rebrand and name change help dispell the idea that “animation” is just for kids.
The same day, we released the beta version of the new Vyond Studio. We spent years rebuilding to make a better, faster, easier-to-use, HTML5-based tool for you. If you became a customer after May 6, 2018 you are already using this product. If you are a Legacy Video Maker customer, we strongly encourage you to start making the switch to Vyond Studio now — it’s free to switch, you won’t lose your original videos, and the new product is better. We are still actively working on the ability to copy videos from Legacy to Vyond Studio, and we’ll have more information to share in the first quarter of 2019.
The following day at ATD International in San Diego we hosted our biggest party yet to celebrate the announcements. Thanks to everyone who attended!
We were ready for GDPR on May 25th, and are now compliant with all requirements.
JUNE
With the new Vyond Studio released, we were able to get back to sharing product updates on a regular basis. June’s product updates to Vyond Studio included:
Contemporary characters ability to turn their heads to a ¾ angle.
Better font size control.
New Contemporary hairstyles and outfits.
29 Text-to-speech languages added to Vyond Studio.
22 new templates: 12 Venn diagrams and 10 new calls to action.
JULY
July and August’s Vyond Studio product updates included:
Version history now saves a copy of your video every ten minutes.
Team video sharing.
Password protected video sharing.
2,300+ Common Craft assets and templates added for Professional and Enterprise customers.
Healthcare pack (20 templates, 2 backgrounds, 70 props, 66 actions, 24 character creator components, and 20 stock characters).
AUGUST
MP4 capabilities were introduced to Vyond Studio and we increased the file size limit from 15MB to 100MB!
August’s Vyond Studio updates included:
95 new props (landmarks, plants, household utensils).
39 new templates (concepts and titles).
74 new contemporary actions (cooking & catering, daily life, emotion, shopping, travel & working).
SEPTEMBER
After 11 years as CEO, our founder, Alvin Hung, chose to step down and replace himself with Gary Lipkowitz who had served as our COO since 2011. Alvin still remains as an integral part of our company.
September’s Vyond Studio updates included:
83 Contemporary props (animals, sports, shipping, and farming).
93 Business Friendly props (pharma and retail).
36 Contemporary actions (sports and shipping).
10 Business Friendly actions (pharma and shipping).
3 Contemporary templates (shipping).
9 Business Friendly templates (pharma and retail).
5 Business Friendly backgrounds (pharma and retail).
Content outside of the stage is now shown while editing a video.
Speech bubble improvements.
Simple shape opacity control.
Search videos on your videos page.
Thumbnail preview on your videos page.
OCTOBER
Shortly after Gary’s transition from COO to CEO he appointed Mark Deaton, our original head of customer success, as his replacement.
October’s Vyond Studio updates included:
43 Halloween actions, props, and character creator components added to the Contemporary style.
Business Friendly office pack: 15 templates, 6 backgrounds, and 17 props.
Contemporary sports pack: 12 backgrounds, 23 props, and 18 character creator components.
14 weather-related Contemporary props.
Ability to bulk change scene properties.
NOVEMBER
Sadly, our hearts broke from the news of the local fires, but we’re proud of how our team came together to make a positive impact. The Butte County community is still rebuilding, and this post shares donation resources if you would like to make a contribution.
DECEMBER
Attended our first conference in Germany.
Vyond, the L&D video solution built for microlearning, won a Brandan Hall Excellence in Technology Award.
December’s Vyond Studio update included:
Holiday content (Business Friendly and Contemporary): 28 props, 14 actions, 8 character creator components, and 8 stock characters.
180 Contemporary animals
39 props and 37 actions for cooking and catering (Contemporary).
2 “using a mouse” Contemporary actions
Global edit, or “asset view” enhancement for Professional plan customers. With this new feature, you have the ability to bulk adjust positions, size, opacity. And you have the ability to bulk swap assets, change actions, change expressions, change colors, add or change effects, and add or remove motion paths.
Our 12 days of video campaign shared all of our most useful content from 2018 and new video templates to use in 2019.
#### Vyond’s Sofala Knapton Brings the Bronze at the 43rd Telly Awards
Sofala Knapton has once again shown the world her star continues to soar, winning the bronze prize for her production of Vyond’s, “Sofala Explains It All,” in the “Social Video” category at this year’s 43rd Annual Telly’s Awards.
The win marks a year-over-year Telly’s Award-winning streak for Sofala, after taking last year’s first-place gold prize in the “General – Social Video” category, for her production of Vyond’s “Black Characters In Children’s Books.”
In “Sofala Explains It All,” she covers everything from the basics of video animation to more advanced techniques. With clear and concise explanations, Sofala makes it easy for anyone to learn how to create their own stunning videos.
In this Q&A, we had the chance to get candid with Sofala about her personal approach to creating meaningful connections with her audience, and her mission to help people tell their stories in the most effective way.
A Q+A with Sofala Knapton
What’s Sofala “Explains It All” about?
“Sofala Explains It All” is a tutorial series that walks through Vyond Studio in a fun and exploratory way. The series focuses on explaining the main functions of the Studio in greater detail, but also offers when it might be best to use certain video-creating techniques over others. These videos are for Vyond users that have been using the platform for a bit but are still learning the ins and outs of the product.”
How did you come up with the idea for the series?
“One of the main intentions of this project was to create a tutorial series that was a little more casual in explanation than our help center videos or other series that we have done in the past. We realized that our customers respond well to that type of instruction and wanted to create a learning experience that centered on that. Once we had the idea, Amanda Morgan, our director of marketing came up with the name, which is a play on the show Clarissa Explains It All.”
Which steps did you take to create these videos?
“The Vyond team is always listening to and seeking out feedback from our customers. We want all our users to master the process of creating in Vyond and to feel comfortable enough to get creative. The first step we took in creating these videos was to look at some of the pain points that users were having trouble with. Once we understood what needed more explanation, and cross-referenced it with our Help Center, we were then able to start constructing a series that focused on best practices for the video-making process.”
What are the secrets to making your audience relate to animated characters?
“I feel like we as a society gravitate towards animation because, in a lot of cases, animated characters were our first introduction to storytelling. For me personally, it’s almost second nature to feel comfortable observing and learning from an animated character. My only suggestion for creating an animated video is, when you’re doing the voiceover to lip-sync to your character, try not to sound like a robot and add as much natural personality to your voice as possible.”
Which video from the series do you like the most?
“My favorite video from the Sofala Explains It All series is probably the episode about gradients. That episode is a great example of how you can get creative with your props and colors.”
Where were you when you found out you had won a Telly award?
“Joleen Richards and I were hosting a webinar called ‘Scroll Stopping Video for Social Media,’ and Kevin Doherty who’s our marketing communications manager mentioned it while he was introducing us. It was a great way to start the webinar and made me sound more official. lol.”
Will you record a season 2 for Sofala Explains It All? What upcoming projects can we expect?
“Yes, Sofala Explains It All is an ongoing series that will continue making episodes till Sofala has nothing more to explain.”
Vyond Producers Hub
“Sofala Explains It All” is hosted on Vyond’s “Producers Hub.” This new platform is packed with instructional videos from award-winning animators like Sofala, who each produce their own series teaching how to get the most out of Vyond Studio.
From instructional videos to inspiring content, the Producers Hub has everything to create stellar videos. The current lineup includes, “Director’s Cut,” “Discovering Vyond with Prakriti,” “Taylor Tinkers,” and “Vyond + Adobe.”
Get started making your own award-winning videos with Vyond today!
Visit the Producers Hub
#### Watch: Keys to Great Training and Engagement in Regulated Industries
Vyond customers Sarah Diggs, senior instructional designer at Cognitably, a technical training consultancy, and Angie Kanak, training specialist at the Administrative Office of the Illinois Courts, joined our recent webinar to discuss high-stakes content and regulatory requirements.
They talked through some of the training and communications challenges their industries are facing today (strict standards, skills shortages, employee turnover — to name a few) and showed us how and why animated videos are helping their audiences retain mission-critical information better.
We got a mountain of audience questions and we couldn’t cover them all live. So we got Sarah and Angie to answer a few bonus questions afterward. Watch them each respond below.
Sarah’s top insights
On overcoming any skepticism about animated videos: “Before I even start to build the course I’ll pitch my ideas: why I want to use animation, how I want to use it, why I believe it gives the best opportunity for learners to learn the content. And then I’ll bring in a few people to test the prototype to get feedback from a learner point of view. So we’re all in agreement from the beginning. There’s very little pushback at the end.”
On getting knowledge from your subject-matter experts (SMEs): “Make sure that the experts all agree on what the learner needs to know. When that’s well defined, they’ll be able to send you the right images or video or previous training materials and identify information that’s relevant to the course objectives. And then: build small things, send it to your SMEs, and see if you’re on track. Busy SMEs can handle 5-10 minutes a review. As a bonus, we’ve found SMEs are much more engaged when we’re using Vyond.”
On keeping learners’ attention in asynchronous training: “I always explain the purpose of training and spell out what learners should pay particular attention to. And then I might tell them a story or use real-world examples that include challenges or situations that they’ll encounter while at work, so it makes it personal to them. I love to give learners stuff to do. So I try to make it as interactive as I can without it being weird or too clunky. And then a follow up with prompts that challenge the learners to reflect on what they’re learning. And the true test is, can they actually go out and apply that to what they’re working on?”
Angie’s top insights
On overcoming any skepticism about animated videos: “Share research about the effectiveness of animated videos. (Note: Sarah referenced this study about instructional animation during the webinar.) Suggest doing a pilot with a small-group training to gauge response from your learners. Then evaluate your feedback: ours was excellent. I’m fairly positive if you try it out, yours will be too.”
On how to get started when there’s not much direction: “The best thing you can do to get through a murky, complicated procedure or policy that you are being tasked with breaking down is to figure out, what does your learner absolutely need to know to perform their job? Talk to your experts, get those learning objectives in writing, and then focus on teaching those.”
On bringing humor to dry topics: “I like to have one character that doesn’t know anything about the topic. They’re coming in and they’re like, what’s going on here? Why are you wearing that? What is this building? They add some comic relief because their natural ignorance lightens the mood — they can say funny things and make silly mistakes.”
For more of Sarah and Angie’s insights and clever Vyond examples, watch the webinar replay.
Watch the Replay
#### We Invite You to Explore Our Vyond Community
At Vyond, we’re dedicated to helping you make great videos. We’d like to invite you to our online customer community, the Vyond Community, a forum for peer learning about how fellow Vyond users are producing professional-grade content and communicating better.
The Vyond Community
The Vyond Community is a dynamic hub exclusively for Vyond Premium, Professional, and Enterprise customers, where creativity knows no bounds. You’ll find video enthusiasts and professionals eager to share their knowledge, explore new horizons, network, and collaborate on exciting projects.
Join the Vyond Community
What awaits you in the Vyond Community?
The Vyond Community is an active and collaborative place to learn what you can do and create with Vyond. Here are some of the perks of being part of our community.
Explore Vyond Studio to the fullest: Discover the endless potential Vyond Studio offers as you delve into discussions on the latest features, updates, and tips and tricks for using Vyond Studio effectively.
Connect with fellow content creators: Network and engage with a diverse community of creators. Share your experiences, seek advice, and learn from each other’s successes and challenges.
Showcase your work: The Vyond Community is your stage! Share your content, whether it’s a creative masterpiece or a work in progress. Get feedback and insights from your peers to refine your creations.
Troubleshooting and support: Stuck on a technical snag? Don’t worry! Our community is here to help you troubleshoot issues and resolve problems.
Community events: Stay in the loop about exciting Vyond Community events, webinars, and virtual office hours. Expand your knowledge, connect with experts, and keep current on industry trends.
Success stories: Get inspired by the remarkable success stories of Vyond power users who have achieved their goals using Vyond. Learn from their experiences and embark on your own journey to success.
Feedback and suggestions: Your voice matters! We encourage all community members to contribute ideas and suggestions to improve Vyond and the community itself. Let’s build something incredible together!
Resources and tutorials: Access a treasure trove of how-to guides and tutorials related to Vyond animation. Whether you’re a beginner or a pro, there’s always something new to learn.
How to join the Vyond Community:
If you’re already a Premium, Professional, or Enterprise customer, create a community account. If not, sign up for a Vyond subscription now.
Take a moment to introduce yourself by creating a post!
Subscribe to the monthly community newsletter for a curated selection of top Vyond news, resources, and discussions.
About Vyond
Vyond is the enterprise-grade agile video creation platform that accelerates positive business outcomes. Today’s stakeholders (prospects, customers, employees, and communities) have a higher threshold for engagement and are more video-native than ever. Vyond enables your business to quickly create relevant, engaging videos that motivate today’s overloaded, distracted stakeholders to take action.
From our easy-for-everyone Vyond Studio, where you can build and customize your video to your heart’s desire, to our AI-powered script and video creator, Vyond Go, which gives you an editable first draft of your video instantly, Vyond is fully loaded with everything you need to build engaging video experiences in minutes.
See where your creativity can take you with a Vyond free trial; no credit card required.
Join the Vyond Community
#### We’re finalists in Customer Contact Week’s Excellence Awards!
We’re excited to announce that Vyond’s customer support team is being recognized as a “Best in Class Contact Center” finalist for the 2019 CCW Excellence Awards! The Customer Contact Week Excellence Awards honor, recognize, and promote individuals and teams who have made a commitment to driving superior contact center and customer experience performance.
Learn more about our customer support team and why we’ve been selected:
Team culture
Vyond’s customer support team is built on a culture of comradery and accountability. This begins with our onboarding process. Each new team member uses the Vyond platform to create a video about their life, their interests, and their history. This process introduces them to the team while giving them their first step on the road to becoming a product expert. The immediate focus on the people of our team provides a way for team members to get to know each other and find common ground among our diverse interests and backgrounds, building strong relationships from day one.
Because of our strong interpersonal connections and a shared focus on doing everything within our power to help the customer, team members step up and work together to make up for each other’s shortcomings in a way that would otherwise be impossible. This results in a culture as focused on helping our coworkers as it is on helping our customers. Our team is a tight-knit crew that builds ongoing personal relationships with our customers and we frequently recognize them by voice when we pick up the phone, celebrate milestones of professional success with each other, and even get updates on family members as they grow up. We’re proud to have the opportunity to serve our customers and assist in bringing new ideas and creations to life in Vyond Studio together.
Delivering omnichannel service on a global scale
Our team responds to inquiries through email, phone, and live chat, as well as through various social media channels.
When we’re not directly working with customers, the team spends hundreds of collective hours building resources in the Vyond Help Center, a library for customers to seek out and find detailed, step-by-step information and how-to videos, without the need for direct contact with us.
Inquiry-based problem solving
Nothing feels worse than getting a robotic, canned response when you’re looking for help building a video. Because our platform is in a creative space, not all customer concerns have questions with simple, step-by-step solutions. This requires more of a medical approach, attempting to seek out the actual problem the customer wants to be addressed, rather than simply “treating the symptoms.” This relies on empathy and people skills in addition to product mastery – a big skill to master, but one on which our team strives to improve upon every day.
Career growth opportunities
Vyond has built a passionate, committed workforce, and the customer support team is no exception. While the goals of the organization are paramount, Vyond maintains high employee retention and satisfaction with an individualized approach that takes into account the strengths, career goals, and interests of each team member.
The leader of the customer support team works with contributors to find the correct career track for them and primarily focuses on technical skills and leadership. Each contributor starts with a base knowledge of our product, company, and processes by completing our homegrown on-boarding courses. After working with customers and solidifying their skills, contributors have the opportunity to specialize in different areas such as product demos, knowledge base management, operations improvement, leadership and mentorship, and many others. Ultimately, our team members are as much invested in their success and career growth as their managers, and their extensive knowledge can lead to advancement within our team and across other departments.
Always improving
Our team operates under the philosophy of 1% improvement. Every day, we strive to be 1% better than we were the day before. Whether it’s through self-improvement, improved customer experience, or increased attention and performance at work, if every team member is always striving to become a little bit better than they were the day before, the incremental improvement will compound over time. This is something that both management and the team takes to heart – always striving to outdo the last day, the last quarter, the last year – and always getting just a little bit better.
About Vyond
GoAnimate is now Vyond. Learn more about the changes.
Vyond allows people of all skill levels in all industries and job roles to create dynamic and powerful media. With features that go beyond moving text and images, you can build character-driven stories or compelling data visualizations that engage audiences and deliver results.
Start making your own videos today. Sign up for a free trial and attend our weekly tour of the Vyond Studio.
#### We’ve Achieved Official FedRAMP® Certification
We’re thrilled to announce that Vyond is now officially FedRAMP Certified to operate and listed in the FedRAMP® marketplace at https://marketplace.fedramp.gov/products/FR2433985791. Thousands of federal agencies and government entities are now able to apply for a reciprocal ATO to use Vyond for Government.
Federal agencies can now use Vyond’s comprehensive video creation solution to craft engaging, relevant videos. With unparalleled security assurance, and industry-leading ease of use, Federal customers can quickly transform their critical information into powerful visual communications for employees, partners, and constituents — effectively and at scale.
Accelerate your business outcomes
Vyond for Government unites powerful tools including proprietary visuals, a brand management suite, and team collaboration tools into an easy-to-use, comprehensive solution that lets Federal agencies:
Create engaging, business-relevant videos at 10x the efficiency, cost savings, and scale compared to legacy video production methods
Empower users across their organization to create videos with our easy-to-use software that puts a powerful production studio at their fingertips
Achieve measurable results — Vyond customers have seen 130%+ increases in engagement rates, an 80% reduction in onboarding course times, and millions of dollars of savings
Rest secured
Rest secured, that with Vyond for Government, your data is protected under the FedRAMP framework, which:
Requires passing a comprehensive security assessment
Establishes stringent federal government standards for security requirements
Relies on an independent third-party assessment to ensure the controls are implemented in adherence to FedRAMP standards
Subjects Vyond for Government to rigorous continuous monitoring
High speed, low drag video creation
Vyond for Government brings drag-and-drop simplicity to make video creation as easy, if not easier, than creating a slide presentation — with a far more engaging and professional result. Anyone, regardless of experience, can start creating videos within minutes. Users can even jump-start videos with hundreds of templates that cover almost every situation, quickly editing any of them to make it their own.
Application for nearly every situation and use case
You have critical information to communicate, and with Vyond for Government, you can quickly and easily create videos for any situation or use case. Choose from a vast array of characters, over 40,000 props depicting nearly every job role and situation, and thousands of animated actions and expressions. Even create character-free videos with dynamic charts and visuals, or your own uploaded assets. Our expansive visual versatility means you’re sure to find yourself creating videos across use cases.
Our world-class support is with you
With Vyond customer satisfaction scores consistently greater than 94% and NPS scores in the impressive mid 60s, your team will gain the valuable support of the most creative, supportive and experienced team on the block. Get access to:
Extensive Resources: create content quickly and easily with access to a variety of tutorials and resources through a dedicated Vyond for Government Help Center
Help Where You Need It: industry-recognized support from knowledgeable customer support specialists via email & chat
Dedicated Point of Contact: teams with 10+ seats will be on a first-name basis with a customer success expert
Ready to get access to Vyond for Government? Contact us.
#### Webinar: How to Create Stellar Videos that Generate Leads With Cloud-Based Tools
Video is a key component of the modern marketing mix. Yet, for most marketers, producing a video involves getting an entire team of video experts involved. It appears to be a daunting, costly, and time-consuming project. But it doesn’t have to be that way!
In this 60-minute webinar, three cloud-based video apps team up to demonstrate how you can create videos as easily as you blog. From start to finish, we’ll create a video from scratch, edit it, and publish it to a website.
We’ll show how these easy-to-use tools are making video creating simpler so you can quickly create, edit, and publish the videos you need for your marketing programs.
Here’s what you’ll learn:
Gary Lipkowitz, our fearless COO, will show you how to make a professional animated video using GoAnimate.
Bjorn Rustberggaard, the COO of WeVideo, will show you how to edit your newly created video using WeVideo.
Kieran Farr, the CEO of Vidcaster, will show you how to embed the video on your website with a lead form using Vidcaster.
Watch this hands-on, practical webinar. We guarantee you’ll be surprised by how much you can do after this demo-packed hour.
#### What is 508 Compliance? – Making Your Video Accessible | Vyond
Creating Accessible Media
Making accessible videos is critical for all organizations. Every person should be able to watch and understand the videos you make.
Providing accessible media isn’t a choice for companies that work with the United States federal government. It’s the law. According to Section 508, all federal agencies (and those that provide them with technological services) are required to make their electronic and information technology (EIT) accessible to people with varying abilities.
The importance and purpose of Section 508 extends beyond federal agencies and the contractors that work with them. Certainly, companies that create government videos need to be aware of 508’s video and multimedia guidelines to follow the law. Beyond legality, every organization should consider using 508’s rules in their internal (and external) videos. For your company to learn and grow, video needs to be easily understood and appreciated by every employee watching.
Why Accessibility is Important to Content Creation
Videos used and distributed by the government must be 508-compliant. But for organizations that aren’t creating US government videos, 508-compliance still has value. It’s important simply because accessibility is a desirable goal in and of itself:
A significant portion of Americans in the US — 19% — have a disability. A portion of your viewers (employees, customers, etc.), then, may be excluded from learning by inaccessible videos.
Accessibility makes videos easier to watch for everyone. Compliant features, such as captioning and audio descriptions, make videos easier to understand for everyone, not only people with disabilities. Many “accessibility” features are just hallmarks of a good user experience.
At the end of the day, the guidelines in Section 508 are an opportunity to empower your workforce and customer-base by making your videos available to everyone.
The Basics of 508 Compliance
Section 508 was refreshed last year to address developments in technology. The 2017 revisions provide stronger protection by adopting the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), a global set of rules that define how to make web content more accessible to people with disabilities. Section 508 now requires agencies to conform to WGAC guidelines because they are more explicit — they have clear, specific success criteria for determining whether every type of content is accessible. Under the refresh, Section 508 requires agencies to conform to the A (minimum), AA (mid-range) WCAG levels with their content.
The revised Section 508, following WCAG guidelines, applies to a wide range of electronic content — websites, documents, blog posts, social media, and others. We’ll focus on how these guidelines apply to one type of content — video.
How 508 Affects Video
Making your video 508-compliant under WCAG guidelines depends on the type of video you’re creating:
Video-only: Only a video without additional media is presented. A silent product tutorial animation, for example.
Synchronized media: Your video has audio. A product tutorial with narration or character dialogue. This is most likely what you’re creating with Vyond.
Both types of video require three main elements in order to be considered accessible:
Closed captions
Audio descriptions
A 508-compliant player
Learn more about these elements, and other suggestions, below.
Making Your Video Accessible
Creating accessible videos can be easy if you select the right tools. Here’s a breakdown of how to add supplementary media to fulfill the requirements of 508 video compliance and make your videos accessible to everyone.
Add audio to your video
Audio in videos doesn’t just accommodate visually-impaired audiences — it makes your video come to life for all viewers with narration, character dialogue, music, and sound effects. You can add all of these things in Vyond with built-in music and sound effects, an audio recording feature, and character lip-sync.
Vyond videos export as .mp4 files where the audio plays along with the video. To create accessible videos, you need supplemental audio descriptions and closed captions that are meant to be played separately from your video.
Add an audio description
Videos should be accompanied by a description of the action happening in your video to make it possible for visually-impaired audiences to understand your content. In many cases, this means making a transcript of the video available. In the case of a more complex video, this means providing an audio description of the visuals. If your video plays with an audio track that fully describes its content, a separate audio description isn’t necessary.
Adding an audio description can be done by uploading a separate audio file to your 508-compliant video player that allows your viewer to choose between the default audio track and the audio description track. If your player doesn’t support this, you can make a separate video and/or audio track available. Here’s an example of how NASA provides additional files with their podcast recordings:
And here are additional examples of audio descriptions provided by w3.org:
audio description of visuals in video
transcript with description of visuals
Captioning your video
Captions turn the audio portion of your video into readable text. This accommodates both visual and hearing-impaired audiences by making it possible for the video content to be visually read on-screen, or for a video player to detect the caption file to read the captions aloud.
There are two types of captions:
Open captions – Words that appear automatically on your video. Viewers can’t turn them off.
Closed captions – Words that don’t appear unless you turn them on. They are separate from the video itself, and you can turn them off.
Closed Captions
To make your captions 508-compliant and accessible to both hearing and visually-impaired audiences, you’ll need to close caption your video with a separate text file. This makes it possible for the video to be read visually on-screen with the captions, and for a video player to detect the text file and read the captions aloud. You may have noticed the closed captions in the video at the top of this post. Here’s what they look like (hosted in Wistia). The “CC” in the bottom right corner is where viewers can turn the captions on or off.
There are a few ways to create a closed caption file. At Vyond, we pay a third-party company (a real person) to transcribe our videos for closed captioning. We upload the provided .srt file to our final videos everywhere we host our content – Wistia, YouTube, and Facebook. Longer videos without a script, like live webinars, can be expensive to transcribe, so we’ll take advantage of YouTube’s free automated transcription feature. We upload our video to YouTube, edit the transcriptions there, and save the .srt file to use with other players.
You can also use a tool like MAGpie or DotSub to transcribe video content yourself. Using DotSub, upload your Vyond video file to the site and add captions to your video.
Once you’re finished, you can use the DotSub embed code to add your captioned video anywhere online Or download the .srt file at the end of the DotSub captioning process and include it when uploading your video on other platforms.
Here are additional resources for captioning and transcription vendors.
Open Captions
Vyond customers who aren’t required to be 508-compliant can create “open captions” by adding text to the bottom of each scene. These are helpful for hearing-impaired viewers and those watching your video without sound.
Here’s an easy workaround for adding text boxes to create open captions. Add a text box at the bottom of each scene, type your text, and add an enter effect to each line of text in each scene. Expedite your captioning further by copying and pasting the text box to the bottom of each new scene, and edit the text accordingly.
Create a text version of your video
Sometimes captions can’t describe everything happening in a video for hearing-impaired viewers — you can only fit so much text at the bottom of the screen. To provide these audiences with more context, you can create a text description to explain your video information. Your text description should convey everything that happens in your video — narration, actions, characters, sound effects, and others.
A text description is also a potential opportunity for a blog post. If posting externally, it’s great SEO boost too. Using this medium, you can engage all types of viewers by elaborating on your points with details and exploring other aspects of your video’s subject.
Select an accessible video player
It’s best to host your videos in a 508-compliant video player that makes it easy to add captioning and audio description files. Additionally, a compliant player makes it possible to navigate video controls by keyboard, include a sign language track, display navigation with color contrast, adjust caption placement, and customize the display.
Able Player, JW Player, Brightcove, and Kaltura (among others) are all 508-compliant video players. Other video hosting platforms such as Wistia, Vidyard, Vimeo, YouTube, and Facebook offer several accessibility features as well, although they may not be entirely 508-compliant.
Accessible videos are better videos
Videos, especially educational and training videos, should be open to every single person. By taking steps to follow these guidelines, you’re creating content that can be appreciated and understood by all viewers, regardless of their abilities.
At Vyond, we’re working on adding English closed captions to every video (more languages to follow), including transcriptions on help content, and keeping various abilities in mind as we continue to create and improve. If you have other suggestions or requests for making Vyond videos, or Vyond Studio, more accessible, please let us know at community@vyond.com.
About Vyond
Vyond allows people of all skill levels in all industries and job roles to create dynamic and powerful media. With features that go beyond moving text and images, you can build character-driven stories or compelling data visualizations that engage audiences and deliver results.
Start making your own videos today. Sign up for a free trial
#### What is a Storyboard and How Do You Create One?
In this guide, we will discuss everything you need to know about using storyboards to plan out your videos. Then we’ll show you an exciting new way to incorporate AI into your storyboarding process.
What is a storyboard?
Why you need a storyboard
How storyboarding can help your business
How to create a storyboard
Go-to storyboard checklist
Popular storyboarding methods
Helpful storyboarding tips
Popular storyboarding software
How to use AI in your storyboarding process
When you make a video for your business, be it an explainer video, marketing video, sales video, microlearning video, or any short online business video, planning is extremely important. And creating a storyboard has historically been one of the most important stages of planning out your video. Let’s dive in.
What is a storyboard?
A storyboard is a graphic representation of how your video will unfold, shot by shot. It’s made up of a number of squares with illustrations or pictures representing each shot, with notes about what’s going on in the scene and what’s being said in the script during that shot. Think of it as sort of a comic book version of your script.
A storyboard is your roadmap when you make a video. Like a script, your storyboard visually guides you throughout the production process. By planning your video, you know which shots you need to create and how to create them when filming begins. You can get others’ feedback early on and make simple adjustments to your storyboard, rather than making major changes while filming.
To make a good storyboard, you don’t need to be a visual artist (though you can be). A storyboard can be anything from comic book-like rough sketches to stick figures to computer-generated drawings. To help you plan your own video, we’ll walk through the basics of creating storyboards, including:
The basic elements of every storyboard
A breakdown of two popular storyboarding methods
Understanding different ways to storyboard, you’ll be set to visually plan your own video. Regardless of your budget or design experience, you’ll be able to create a clear map that seamlessly guides you through production.
Why do you need a storyboard
Creating a storyboard is usually a key step in making a video. Here are three reasons why.
Best way to share your vision
A visual aid makes it much easier for you to share and explain your vision for your video with others.
We’ve all had experiences where we were trying to explain something and the other person just can’t see our vision. The core of this issue is that most stakeholders don’t have the experience of visualizing something off of a text deliverable, such as a script.
With a storyboard, you can show people exactly how your video is going to be mapped out and what it will look like. This makes it infinitely easier for other people to understand your idea.
Makes production much easier
When you storyboard a video you’re setting up a plan for production, including all the shots you’ll need, the order that they’ll be laid out, and how the visuals will interact with the script.
The video storyboard is a starting point or suggested through line around which you can plan your coverage (all the angles you will shoot of a scene). This really comes in handy when you’re making your video, as it ensures you won’t forget any scenes and helps you piece together the video according to your vision.
Saves you time
While it may take you a little while to put your storyboard together, in the long run, it will save you time in revisions later. Not only will it help you explain your vision to your team, but it will also make the creation process go more smoothly.
How storyboarding can help your business
Storyboarding can help you:
Get buy-in from stakeholders: While a script can help others conceptualize your video, the visual nature of a storyboard is often a more effective way to bring it to life in pre-production. Sharing your storyboard early on in the process will ensure collaborators and decision-makers understand your vision — and make them much less likely to put up a fight down the line.
Streamline production: Creating storyboards forces you to work out a lot of the details of your videos ahead of time — what shots you want, what order they’ll go in, what props or tools you need, etc. Storyboarding might also help you realize if you’re missing a key piece of logic or dialogue in your script, or whether your visuals tie together as cohesively as you thought. Identifying and working through these problems before you start creating your video will prevent wasted effort later on.
Save time: It’s much easier and less time-consuming to make revisions to a storyboard than to a video.
How to create a storyboard
Ultimately, a storyboard is a series of images representing each frame of your video. How you put the storyboard together, and how much detail you add, is up to you — you can do it on paper, in a word processing program, or using specialized software.
Here’s how to go about creating a storyboard for your video:
1) Create blank slides
The first step in creating a storyboard is to draw a series of squares on a piece of paper
Here’s an example of a blank storyboard:
Download this free storyboard template: US Letter | A4
You can also find tons of printable storyboard templates on Google). And here are more template options to help organize your frames. Don’t worry about your drawing skills — stick figures will suffice. Just make sure to leave room to jot down the accompanying text (whether it appears on the screen or is spoken by your characters or narrator) for each visual.
Creating a PowerPoint deck or simple word processing document on the computer is another easy option. Specialized software is also available if you’re looking for a more comprehensive solution (check out a few options below).
Think of these squares as the video frame. In each square, a different shot or scene will take place. You can sketch the scenes by hand, create them on a computer, or even take photographs. Make sure to leave space to write notes and lines from the script beneath or next to each frame.
2) Add your script
Beneath each picture, write the lines from the script that will be spoken in that scene and jot down some notes about what is happening.
Your storyboard should read like a comic book, so readers (coworkers, clients, etc.) can get a sense of exactly what will happen in your video.
Read more about scripting for microlearning videos. These tips can also be applied to different types of videos.
3) Sketch your story
Next, you should sketch how each scene will look visually. Note that your storyboard doesn’t have to be incredibly detailed — you don’t have to draw in all of the props or even use color. (Hint: You don’t have to be great at drawing either. Bad drawings are far better than no drawings at all.)
Just provide enough visual detail to give an impression of what is happening, which characters are in the scene, and what the general framing will look like. The script and notes will help fill in the rest of the details.
You can also make notes about camera angles and movement, transitions between shots, and other details that will come in handy during production and post-production.
Not everyone has the time or skill for such storyboards, but this level of detail is especially helpful for complex projects with a variety of stakeholders.
Whatever method you choose, be sure that your storyboard conveys what’s happening in the frame, the setting, which characters are present, any essential props, and what text (if any) will appear on the screen and where. You can also include important notes about camera angles and movements, transitions between shots, and any other production or post-production details.
If you’re creating an extensive training program with multiple microlearning videos, consider completing the scripts and storyboards for each unit before beginning production on your videos. This will ensure that all the major topics you want to hit are covered and that the videos fit together logically with minimal repetition.
As you storyboard, keep each video’s objective top of mind, and don’t be afraid to make revisions. This early stage of the process is the best time to tweak your visuals and script in order to create the most compelling and effective microlearning video possible.
Once your storyboard is approved, you’re finally ready to create a video! Read on for tips for creating an animated microlearning video.
Go-to storyboard checklist
Whether they’re drawn by an artist or diagrammed on a computer, all storyboards share the same information. They need to touch on the main actions, speech, and effects in every shot to clearly communicate how a video will appear.
Here are the key elements that every storyboard should include:
Shot images: Individual panels featuring 2D drawings to show what’s happening—actions, characters—throughout a video
Shot number: The number indicating when a shot appears according to a video’s shot list
Action: The primary activity happening in a shot
Dialogue (or narration: Any speech that is heard throughout a video
FX: Technical details that explain how the shot is created in production and post-production (e.g. aspect ratio, camera angles, camera movement, shot type, sound effects, special effects)
A full storyboard has all of the information necessary to imagine how your finished video will appear. Reviewing your images and notes for each shot, you and your team can brainstorm how your video should be adjusted and what resources you will need in production.
Popular storyboarding methods
When most people hear the word “storyboard,” they think of a professional animator quickly sketching out a cartoon feature film.
As it turns out, a storyboard doesn’t have to be a work of art—it doesn’t even have to be hand-drawn. With video production software, there are options for all types of users—regardless of their industry, design experience, or budget—to create useful professional-grade storyboards.
Hand-drawn storyboards
The classic storyboarding process is drawing by hand. You sketch out a mock-up of what each shot will look like.
As mentioned, you don’t need to be a great artist to create a storyboard—stick figures are enough. The principal goal is to convey the main action that is happening in the shot, so each frame doesn’t need to be very detailed.
A longhand storyboard cuts costs, but it’s not necessarily the most efficient option, as seen in these pros and cons:
Pro: It’s free. All you need is a pencil and paper to create a hand-drawn storyboard.
Con: It’s time-consuming. Drawing every single shot—even if they’re not detailed—will take a while considering that one storyboard frame only represents six seconds of a video. For a three-minute video, for example, you would need 30 storyboard frames. There is also a risk of losing your storyboard since your work is tied to a piece of paper.
If you hope to keep video costs low, a hand-drawn storyboard is probably the best method for you. Just keep in mind that you will need to devote at least a few hours, if not more, to complete the task, and you’ll need to scan or make copies for everyone working on your video.
Helpful storyboarding tips
Here are some tips that can help you:
Show, don’t tell. Use the storyboard as a litmus test to determine if your story is truly being visualized.
Be cinematic. Does your video do things that movies do? Do people, places, and things move or stand still? Does the camera move? Keep these factors in mind and bring them all together to create a cinematic video.
Make sure it’s logical and coherent. You’re creating a story, so the video should look visually consistent from beginning to end
Pick a theme. If you want to create a video infographic, add relevant charts and graphs. If you want to highlight a customer’s pain point, show a character on screen and take them through a journey.
Include all relevant details. Break up your script into smaller chunks and make note of important information:
What is the setting or background for the scene?
Is there a character on the screen? If so, what action is the character performing?
What props are in the scene? This should fit in with the context of the background/setting you’re using
Will any text appear on the screen? What is the size, color, and position of the text?
What message are you trying to deliver?
Popular storyboarding software
People with less time to hand-draw frames and/or larger budgets may opt to use specialized software. These programs are built with robust customization and automation features to help you quickly create your storyboards.
Here are a few options to consider for creating your storyboards:
BOORDS
Price: Free and individual plans starting at $25/month
Main features: AI storyboard generator and script generator, with access to a million-image library and text-to-image generation. Create password-protected links to share drafts with stakeholders for feedback.
STORYBOARDTHAT
Price: Free and premium plans starting at $9.99/month
Main features: Equipped with a large image library and a drag-and-drop interface. Characters and scenes are customizable.
STUDIOBINDER
Price: *Starts at $29/month
Main features: Offers plenty of customization options, such as filtering columns and changing aspect ratios. Allows you to upload images, add notes, and color-code each shot.
MakeStoryboard
Price: limited free version, with professional plans beginning at $14.00/month
Main features: Allows teams to leave comments and collaborate (provided everybody has an account), and allows you to model animated “actors.”
SHOTPRO
Price: $39.99 with in-app purchases (app price); $25.00/month (desktop price)
Main features: Allows you to create hyper-detailed storyboards at a reasonable price. It’s also mobile-friendly for users who want to use their iPad or iPhone.
STORYBOARDER
Price: Free download (Mac OS X, Windows, Linux)
Main features: Easy-to-use drawing tools, edit and save back to Storyboarder in Photoshop, print, and import paper storyboards.
VYOND
Price: Business plans start at $92/month
Main features: Vyond is a video creation platform, not specifically a storyboarding tool. But like storyboarding software, Vyond Go, the platform’s AI script and video generator, is extremely helpful in getting you from rough video concept to polished finished product. And it can get you there a lot faster than going the traditional storyboarding route. We’ll explain what we mean in the next section.
How to use AI in your storyboarding process
Especially if you’re new to video creation, the possibilities for organizing your script and visualizing your ideas can be overwhelming.
This is where AI video tools like Vyond can be helpful–by going beyond storyboarding to provide you with suggested visuals, script copy, and editing options to consider for your video project.
Using Vyond Go, Vyond’s AI instant video maker, to support your storyboarding efforts is easy:
Step 1: Enter the topic of your planned video
Type in a simple prompt — for example, “Create a video for corporate employees about best practices for hosting meetings in a hybrid work environment.” Or upload either a document with key details, or a finished script, if you have something you like. (Uploads can be in .doc, .ppt, .txt, or .pdf formats.)
Step 2. Choose layout, vibe, format, and language
In Vyond Go, layout options are Conversation, Talking Head, and Narration, in a wide range of visual styles. Vibes include Formal, Casual and Playful. Formats include Overview, How-to and Anecdote. And users can choose from more than 70 different languages.
Step 3. Hit “create video”
In less than a minute you’ll have something even better than a storyboard: a rough cut of a video, complete with scene changes, characters, dialogue, on-screen text, and music to inspire your decision-making.
Learn more about using AI for creating videos.
Want more inspiration? Keep re-prompting the AI video generator, choosing different styles and tones each time, to see what you get. Then take what’s useful to create your own storyboard.
Or–you might find you really like what AI video generator came up with! If so, you can download your new video and use it as is, tweak the script or characters in the Quick Edit panel, or bring the draft into Vyond Studio, Vyond’s video editor, to make more significant changes. Like adding new scenes, generating new assets with AI, or changing out backgrounds.
Create amazing videos faster — with Vyond
Whether you go the traditional storyboarding route or prefer an expedited AI approach, Vyond’s all-in-one platform can help you go from idea to finished video, faster than ever before.
Want to test it out for yourself? Sign up for a free trial. And watch these on-demand Vyond Bootcamp sessions for inspiration.
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#### What Is An Explainer Video? (Plus 5 Great Examples)
You want every lead to know why your product is great, but it’s hard to communicate that value clearly and quickly. There is a lot of useful product information to share—mission, prices, product details—but it’s spread out, and it’s a lot of information to absorb.
There’s a proven way to convey your product value quickly and powerfully to customers: explainer videos.
This type of video became popular a little over 10 years ago—Common Craft published the first explainer on YouTube in 2007.
Since then, companies all over the world have made explainer videos a part of their marketing strategy and have seen massive engagement from customers. Common Craft alone has gained 50 million views from their explainer videos since 2007.
If you’ve never made an explainer video, it’s time to get started. We’ll cover everything you need to know about this video type—purpose, benefits, examples—so you can create explainer videos that captivate customers and draw them to your company’s product.
What is an explainer video?
An explainer video is a short video (1-2 minutes) that introduces a new product or company to potential customers. It should answer a few fundamental questions: What problem is the product trying to solve, and why would the viewer want to use it?
An explainer video for Unroll.Me, an inbox cleaning service.
The structure of explainer videos
Explainer videos are shorter than most video content, so they’re organized in a way that ensures viewers clearly understand the value of a product.
Here’s how an explainer video typically progresses:
Focus on the pain point: “Here’s the problem.”
Introduce a solution: *“What if the problem could be fixed?”
Reveal the product as the solution: “Our product will fix everything!”
You can see this structure in an explainer video from Help4Backs, a support service for people with back pain.
It starts with a problem—the character, Mike, has intense back pain. He tries to get rid of it in a few ways, but the problem persists. The video alludes to a solution— “Can’t someone just tell Mike what’s wrong and how to fix it?”—and, shortly after, the video presents Help4Backs as the solution.
The benefits of explainer videos
The video studio TransVideo has seen a 15-50% increase in sign-ups on landing pages with explainer videos. The file-hosting service Dropbox drew thousands of extra sign-ups per month after posting an explainer video to their homepage.
The data speaks for itself. Explainer videos communicate your product’s value proposition in a powerful, memorable way that motivates potential customers to take action.
Why do explainer videos work so well? There are a few key reasons:
They’re shorter than most videos. In a world full of distractions, a good explainer video captivates potential customers with a short attention span. Short videos, like explainers, also make it easier for viewers to retain information by avoiding cognitive overload.
They’re easy to curate for your target audience. By using characters that match your buyer personas and addressing pain points of your target customer profile, your explainer video will resonate with people who are most likely to purchase your product or service.
They spread brand awareness. Explainer videos, especially animated ones, are easy to customize with your company’s logo and colors. After watching your branded explainer video, viewers are more likely to recognize your company.
They break down complex ideas in a fun way. Animated explainer videos have interesting visual effects, like whiteboard animation and motion graphics, and live action explainer videos often use humor to appeal to customers.
As a powerful form of video marketing, explainers can be shared via landing pages, social media, and more to excite people about your product and increase conversion rates.
5 examples of standout explainer videos
You might think that the best explainer videos require massive budgets and tons of explainer video production experience. Not the case! Dollar Shave Club made an explainer video for just $4,500—and it has had over 25 million views on YouTube. Many of our customers at Vyond have zero production experience, and they create animated explainer videos in a few hours.
Instead of focusing on budget or experience, you create a standout explainer video by focusing on your value proposition. Your product is what makes your company unique—communicate that value clearly and powerfully through your video and your explainer will pique leads’ interest in your product.
To show you how this works, we collected five examples of exceptional explainer videos. These companies use different types of video and a number of tactics—screenshots, humor, music—to engage potential customers and convince them that the companies’ products are great. We’ll break down their strategies to show why each video is a worthwhile explainer.
Dollar Shave Club: Delights with humor
For companies with a simple product offering, using humor is a great explainer-video strategy. There isn’t a whole lot to say about your product since it’s so straightforward, but you can appeal to customers by making them laugh.
With a basic shaving product—a set with shaving cream and a razor—Dollar Shave Club wins over viewers by being funny. They clearly mention their product’s strengths—their razor has a great blade, it’s shipped regularly to customers—but in a fun way, with a good dose of humor. The narrator makes a joke about the viewer’s “handsome grandfather” and has an impromptu dance party at the end of the video.
Snagashift mobile app: Builds trust with screenshots
If your product has a unique, less familiar purpose—industry-specific software, a specialized appliance—use your explainer video to show it in action. A viewer may not have heard of your niche product before, but they’ll realize how it can benefit them if you show it being used. Plus, showing shots of your product makes it easier for viewers to recognize your brand when they’re ready to make a purchase.
The online staffing platform Snagajob quickly shows the value of their unconventional app Snagashift—a job scheduling tool—by including many screenshots in their explainer video. Potential customers see screenshots of people scheduling shifts and communicating with coworkers to swap shifts on Snagajob, so they immediately understand the value of the app.
Snagajob created this video in Vyond. See more customer creations on our Showcase page.
Spotify: Packs a punch with simplicity
Spell out in your explainer video every reason why your product is great and you’ll overload viewers and lose their attention. Keep people engaged by keeping it simple. Focus on your core product value without any frills and potential customers will see how your product could benefit them.
The music app Spotify captivates potential customers with a bare-bones short animated video. The company uses just a few lines of text without any narration to explain their value proposition—a device-friendly app for listening to all types of music anywhere, anytime. Viewers immediately understand why Spotify is a great product and—thanks to the video’s energizing music, sound effects, and bright colors—feel excited about using it.
iScout: Engages with color
Colors have a universal impact—a sunny yellow shade makes you feel happy, while a faded blue leaves you sad. Take advantage of this effect in your explainer video by using colors that make your product captivating and memorable. For example, you might use bright shades to grab viewers’ attention, or you might use your company’s palette to build their brand awareness.
The safety-management system iScout, formerly known as HazardScout, uses color in their explainer video to show that their product is great. They use a dull black-and-white animation when describing the problem of managing safety operations and lowering workplace risks and then shift to vibrant scenery and characters as the product is described—a fun visual move to show how their software “brightens” users’ work lives.
iScout created this video in Vyond. See more customer creations on our Showcase page.
Be My Eyes: Inspires by telling a story
At the end of the day, potential customers won’t care about your product or service unless they see how it can benefit themselves and others around them. If your explainer video tells the story of how your product or service improves people’s lives, it will captivate viewers and push them to connect with your company.
The visual assistance app Be My Eyes builds viewers’ interest in the product by depicting what it’s like to live as a blind person. After watching a few scenes of blind people engaged in an activity—walking down the street, grocery shopping—viewers can empathize with the everyday struggles of people who are blind. By understanding those struggles through the video’s story, viewers are more likely to download the app to improve the lives of blind people.
Be My Eyes – Bringing sight to the blind and visually impaired from Be My Eyes on Vimeo.
Create your own explainer video today
Explainer videos are a powerful way to connect potential customers with your product. The videos are short and punchy, so they’re easy for viewers to absorb. Beyond being quick, explainer videos provide an opportunity to sell viewers on your product’s value proposition. Like the companies mentioned in this post, you can use a variety of tactics—from screenshots to emotional storytelling—to engage potential customers and show them why your product is great.
You can create a high-quality explainer video in a few hours using a video platform like Vyond. Our studio is designed for all levels of experience, so anyone can quickly and easily make an explainer video. If you don’t have an account, sign up for our free trial to make your first explainer video today.
#### What Is Microlearning? 5 Key Benefits for Today’s Employees
In this article, we’ll break down 5 key benefits of microlearning. In later articles in the series, we’ll explore why video is a particularly effective microlearning strategy, and get into the nitty-gritty of how to create a microlearning video, including pre-production, scripting, and storyboarding. Finally, we’ll share how animated video in particular can make microlearning experiences more efficient and effective.
What Is Microlearning?
You’re arguing with your parents over politics, and you pick up your phone to Google the specifics of a recent bill.
You’re on a flight to Rome. Before you land, you use an iPhone app to learn how to say “more pasta” and “double espresso, please,” in Italian.
You don’t know how to tie your bowtie before a formal wedding, so you fire up a quick YouTube tutorial on your laptop.
What do these three things have in common? They’re all examples of microlearning.
Microlearning breaks material down into short, easily digestible components (typically around 30 seconds to a few minutes in length) that tackle a single learning objective. “Microlearning allows for learners to receive the information they need, when they need it, in the relevant context,” says Lauren Freeman, M.A.
Watch the first in Lauren’s Microlearning video series below, and read her full Master’s report on microlearning.
Most of the time, microlearning experiences in our daily lives — say, watching a tutorial on how to cut a pineapple or Googling a stat to resolve a dinner table argument — go unnoticed. But as we incorporate microlearning into our regular routines, we inevitably expect it to be available to us during more formal pursuits of knowledge as well.
In particular, microlearning has powerful applications in today’s workforce, where employees “are expected to constantly acquire new information to stay current,” according to Freeman. Traditional learning experiences — think textbooks, long lectures, and even PowerPoint presentations or PDFs — are often prohibitively time-consuming and static given the fast pace of the modern workplace.
5 Benefits of Microlearning
Increasingly, companies are adopting microlearning as a core component of their L&D strategies. In a recent survey by the Association for Talent Development, 38% of companies reported currently using microlearning, while 41% plan to implement the strategy within the next 12 months. Of those organizations delivering microlearning, 63% have completely replaced formal learning with microlearning.
Microlearning offers numerous benefits, in that it is:
Flexible. Microlearning experiences are much easier to personalize for each learner’s preferences and needs. By creating short chunks of content dedicated to a single learning objective, organizations can easily swap out content for individual learners or create new modules as the curriculum evolves. This is in stark contrast to traditional training curricula, which are often expensive to create and difficult to modify without overhauling the whole program.
Accessible: Microlearning can occur during short windows of time and on a wide variety of devices (computers, tablets, phones, etc.) — no classroom required.
Just-in-time: It’s 3pm, and you need to get up to speed on pivot tables in Microsoft Excel before a 4pm meeting with your boss. Enter microlearning. A quick YouTube video can tell you exactly what you need to know, right now — without forcing you to sit through extra minutes or hours of irrelevant material.
Sticky: Learners’ short-term memory (also known as working memory) “can only retain a certain amount of information simultaneously,” writes Christopher Pappas of The eLearning Industry. Bite-sized videos and other short modules help boost knowledge retention and prevent cognitive overload, particularly when dealing with complex topics.
Cumulative: Ideally, each microlearning module has its own learning objective, but also represents “a small win on the way to a larger goal,” according to Alex Khurgin, Director of Learning Innovation at Grovo. Learners can learn what they need, exactly when they need it, while at the same time building their knowledge over time to gain mastery over the subject at hand.
In the next article in the series, we’ll discuss using video to create microlearning experiences and why it’s so effective.
Read Next: Why Your Company Should Create Microlearning Videos
About Vyond
Vyond allows people of all skill levels in all industries and job roles to create dynamic and powerful media. With features that go beyond moving text and images, you can build character-driven stories or compelling data visualizations that engage audiences and deliver results.
With Vyond, it’s easy to create video for your social media marketing. Start a free trial and sign up for our weekly webinar.
#### What is SCORM Compliance for eLearning?
The demand for high-quality eLearning material is on the rise. SCORM (Shareable Content Object Reference Model) regulations ensure that this demand is met by making eLearning courses more accessible.
The SCORM guidelines ensure that eLearning courses can be accessed on most learning management systems. Building SCORM-compliant courses can help you in the event you end up having to switch to a new LMS or if you want to sell courses to people using any number of LMS platforms.
Now, with Vyond’s SCORM package export, you can seamlessly create, track, and deliver eLearning content within a single workflow.
Before diving into the specifics of SCORM and how it can help you, it’s important to understand what SCORM is.
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What Is SCORM?
SCORM stands for “Sharable Content Object Reference Model” — a set of specific technical standards for building online learning management systems and training course content.
SCORM helps programmers design learning management systems (LMSs) in a way that content from one LMS can be uploaded and played in another LMS. It also dictates how content for the LMS is built, ensuring the content and LMS communicate properly.
While SCORM isn’t legally required, it is widely used because it ensures a smoother experience for customers looking for eLearning courses and for companies building LMS platforms.
What Is The Purpose of SCORM?
So, what is SCORM actually used for and why was it developed? SCORM was developed by the Advanced Distributed Learning Initiative (ADL), a group created by the Department of Defense in 1999 in response to the boom of the internet and the growing presence of LMSs and eLearning modules online. At the time, many companies were making courses that were shared via CDs or floppy disks. These courses were often coded using proprietary tools and would only work with the company’s platform.
As LMS platforms took off, the government noticed that a lot of eLearning materials would only work on one platform. The courses available to companies and organizations were dependent on whatever LMS they used.
SCORM compliance was born out of this need to make courses more accessible. Instead of only working on one LMS, courses can be accessed on a wide range of systems, so long as both the content and the LMS are SCORM compliant.
Who Should Use SCORM Guidelines?
If you’re creating eLearning modules, there are some compelling reasons to stick to SCORM guidelines, depending on your reasons for making courses.
If you create internal training for a company: In the event that you switch LMSs, you’ll still be able to launch and track the courses you’ve created (assuming you switch to a SCORM-compliant LMS). If you’re not following SCORM and your company switches LMSs, you could be stuck starting from scratch.
If you sell courses to third parties: SCORM-compliant courses can be sold more easily since they’re accessible on a wider range of platforms. This gives you access to a potentially larger customer base.
SCORM isn’t a cure-all for eLearning development, but if you’re in either of the above camps, you should be giving SCORM serious thought.
What Does SCORM Compliance Look Like?
To make SCORM’s mission of cross-compatibility possible, any media involved in a course is packaged into a special file, called the “imsmanifest.xml.” This file essentially tells the LMS how to handle the content within, giving instructions on what the courses are called, how they will open, and so on in the LMS.
The manifest file is only one-half of the SCORM process. The other part of the equation in SCORM development is runtime communication. Runtime communication is how the course “talks” to the LMS when it’s been opened. This communication allows the course to give the LMS commands and ensure the course is executed properly.
For example, these commands can be things like, “track the quiz score for this course” or “save user’s progress when they exit.”
The manifest file, along with any other files included in a course (animation files, audio data, etc.), are then packed into a .zip file. This file is then unpacked by the LMS, much like a CD drive reads and unpacks the files on a disc when it’s inserted into a computer.
Upon being unpacked by the LMS, the manifest will then tell the LMS what to track. Some common elements that are tracked include:
Test answers
Course completion tracking
Time spent on a course
Pages viewed
Course pass or fail
Tracking the above course stats can enable you to make courses that perform better, help learners get the information they need, and, in the case of internal training, benefit your entire company.
Do I Need Another Tool to Produce SCORM-Compliant Courses?
Some LMSs will have an integrated course builder that allows you to make content that’s immediately ready for SCORM. But, if you want to use third-party tools to create content and then import that into your LMS, you’ll likely want to use a SCORM authoring tool, a SCORM wrapper for older files, or Vyond.
A SCORM authoring tool will allow you to take the components of your eLearning course and output them in a SCORM-compliant file.
If you have older files that you want to make SCORM compliant, you can also use a SCORM wrapper. A wrapper will enable communication between the older file and the SCORM-compliant LMS. For more information, read this useful resource from iSpring.
How does Vyond work with SCORM?
With Vyond, you can export your video as a SCORM package and upload it directly into your LMS, no special conversion tools or separate authoring tools required.
As part of the SCORM package download, you can also add completion criteria directly within Vyond. This is one of the most common metrics and it’s another way Vyond can help instructional designers simplify workflow.
Vyond supports both SCORM 1.2 and SCORM 2004.v4, and you can export the format you want to create the course tracking and analytics you need. To learn more about the differences between the two formats, check out this page.
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Pros and Cons of Using SCORM
Nothing is perfect, and that includes SCORM. There are a few downsides to following SCORM.
Costly authoring tools: SCORM compliance requires proper authoring tools, unless your LMS has built-in authoring, to create the SCORM .zip file. Some of these tools can be costly to use.
Learning curve: If you’re not already using compliant authoring tools or programming in SCORM, it can take time to learn. This can slow your production process and cause some headaches early on.
The cons of SCORM shouldn’t cause you to write it off, though. SCORM has a few primary perks that can make building compliant courses worth the time investment.
Compatibility: SCORM compliance ensures courses work on any SCORM-compliant LMS platform.
Save money: SCORM compliance can save you money. If you decide to migrate to another LMS platform and you’re following SCORM with your courses, you’ll be able to effortlessly migrate to a new platform without any additional programming or revisions to the courses.
Make money: The option to move from one LMS to another also frees you up to sell your courses to more third parties, if you wish. If you’re in the business of creating eLearning courses for other companies, being SCORM compliant can keep your options open and give you a larger potential audience.
If you feel you’re a good fit for SCORM, don’t put it off. The above perks can help you now; putting off SCORM will only put you at further risk of a compatibility nightmare or block out a potential customer base.
Boost the Value of Your Courses with SCORM Compliance
The perks that come with SCORM are clear for eLearning professionals. Nobody wants to find that the courses they put so much effort into building are no longer accessible in a new LMS. Similarly, if you’re selling courses, SCORM will only help you grow your audience.
You spend a lot of time creating your educational courses. SCORM can help you find the largest possible audience for the courses you’ve spent so much time and effort building.
Once a video is created in Vyond, many trainers and course designers deploy their animated MP4 videos into SCORM-compliant platforms like Articulate Storyline, Lectora, and Adobe Captivate.
About Vyond
Vyond allows people of all skill levels in all industries and job roles to create dynamic and powerful media. With features that go beyond moving text and images, you can build character-driven stories or compelling data visualizations that engage audiences, teach lessons, and deliver results.
Start making your own Vyond videos today. Sign up for a free trial.
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#### What Makes A Great Script?
Scriptwriting for video is much different from writing long-form content. There are many factors that lead to a great video script. Read on for the top 3 things you have to think about when writing a video script.
1. Call To Action
We all have our favorite movies, and the part that makes one stand out over all the rest is how we felt at the very end. It’s because the best scripts are aimed at communicating a message that persuades the viewer to action. A great script sets up a scene and characters and leads them through a journey or over hurdles. By the closing of the video, the viewer will see a bit of him or herself in your character, and this emotional connection allows the message to take hold. Placing your call to action on top of this emotional connection prepares the script for success.
2. Characters
Solid, approachable characters are the start of a wonderful script. When they are relatable, detailed and real, the dialogue in the script will reflect this. Some writers will move about the room to act out the parts of their characters to get a better feeling about what they might do next. This sounds like a lot of work, but it can be fun and ensures a script is authentic — the script will show these efforts.
The biggest mistake rookie scriptwriters make is placing a character or event to fill up space. It’s a hasty way to fill a transition or explain a gap. A good script will take the extra time and creative process to solve these problems in the storyline.
Showing six or seven characters in a video, unless each one is serving a distinct purpose, often will confuse the audience. Generally, viewers identify with one character while the others play supporting roles. If a character was created to deliver a single line, it better be such a good one that the story just cannot do without. Cutting out the excess ensures the audience can focus on the central message.
Also, notice how fewer characters with more dialogue can build an emotional connection with the viewer — this makes them more rounded (and thus more realistic), and this keeps your script tight and to the point.
3. Structure
The structure of the story is the next facet of a great script. The most important thing, when working with a narrative, is to tell a story that flows logically from Point A to Point B, with one character facing an obstacle (a physical or mental barrier, or an opponent) and either overcoming or failing to conquer the challenge set before them. The rest will fall into place after that.
Narrative structures used in feature films include the three-act structure and the Hero’s Journey. These structures are common because they work. A story resonates with a viewer when characters endure trials and overcome hurdles. If nothing else, include a little Good vs. Evil. This is something every person can relate to and will get the audience rooting for your character’s success.
Every detail, every line of a great script comes back to the central theme. The characters and the story written in the script are the platforms on which the call to action is built. The best scripts stay focused because this single message is what viewers will remember and act on once the video is done.
Scripting for Explainer Videos?
Below, Rued Riis shares a portion of his Strong Scripts online course. Learn six strategies for explainer video scripts:
Want to create your own animated videos? Start a free trial of Vyond.
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#### What to Look for in an LMS eLearning Platform
When you’re faced with training your employees or educating an audience, you have a number of decisions to consider.
Some of the big questions include:
What kinds of eLearning materials should you create?
What topics do you want to cover?
Ultimately, what does your audience need to know?
Although you have a wealth of factors to consider, one is often easy to overlook: which learning management system (LMS) eLearning platform should you use?
What Are Examples of LMS eLearning Systems?
There are a number of LMS eLearning platforms to choose from. While many of them have similar features and selling points, no single platform is the right choice for every business.
To get an idea of what’s out there, here are several major LMS eLearning systems and details about who can benefit most from their offerings.
SAP Litmos: A partner with Vyond, SAP Litmos is an LMS platform that emphasizes its ability to scale. SAP Litmos specializes in organizational training and can support more than one million users.
Cornerstone: Cornerstone is another LMS that’s specifically geared toward corporate and employee training. Cornerstone offers a suite of programs, not just an LMS, including tools for recruiting new talent and HR management.
360Learning: A partner with Vyond, 360Learning is the first collaborating learning platform that helps fast-growing teams create, ship, and improve courses together. It allows your team to easily identify and declare learning needs and source internal subject matter experts to share knowledge . on an interactive platform. It’s a great way to train employees and customers on any topic.
TalentLMS: The LMS for all teams and any training context. It’s loved by small and midsized businesses because it’s easy to set up, easy to use, and even easier to master. Designed with adoption in mind, TalentLMS is reported as a joy to use for both training managers and learners.
Totara: Totara is an open-source platform that gives companies the freedom to customize the LMS to fit their needs. Totara offers the ability to deliver eLearning and other educational content, give performance reviews for employees, and much more.
GoSkills: A partner with Vyond, GoSkills offers a free LMS for teams of all sizes. It’s one of the best choices for small and medium-sized businesses who will enjoy how easy it is to set up and use. The award-winning LMS has no minimum user requirements and comes pre-loaded with GoSkills’ gamified, bite-sized eLearning library, so you can start training your team straight away.
Bridge: This tool offers a compliance-oriented LMS that allows companies to ensure that their employees are up to speed on the latest regulations. Beyond standard course-hosting LMS features, Bridge allows for advanced compliance reporting. This reporting makes it easier to track if employees are up to date and ready to work.
Docebo: Docebo offers a number of products, including their Docebo Learn LMS platform. Docebo Learn is an AI-powered platform that learns from user searches to offer more relevant courses as time goes on.
CourseMill: CourseMill is another Vyond partner that offers a complete LMS experience, including advanced reporting, support for 100,000 people in one instance, automated enrollment, and the ability to sell courses.
Adobe Captivate Prime: Adobe Captivate Prime is an LMS with numerous AI-powered features. This LMS gives users the option to submit their own curated content, which is then suggested to others via an AI-powered search that learns what users prefer. This LMS is also a popular choice for video authoring.
There are numerous LMS eLearning platform providers beyond our list here. The ones above are some of the more popular choices, but it’s still a good idea to do additional research to see which providers look like the best fit for your business.
While it’s important to understand the many LMS options available, it’s also important to understand how an LMS differs from eLearning and online courses in general.
What is the Difference Between eLearning and Learning via LMS?
Online courses, eLearnings, and LMS platforms are all avenues for learning. But the experiences that eLearning and online courses offer are vastly different from an LMS.
An eLearning or online course is a self-contained experience — it’s a lesson limited by the constraints of that individual course. An LMS platform essentially acts as a hub for eLearning courses. Think of an eLearning or online course as a single classroom, and an LMS eLearning platform as an entire campus.
If you’ve ever gone on a branded site and taken an individual course, that was likely just an eLearning or online course. But if you’re logging into a university platform or taking a number of training courses for work, that’s likely part of an LMS eLearning platform.
With an LMS platform, it’s possible to track course performance and student progress, giving the educator more insight into the course and its effectiveness. An LMS platform also makes it possible to gamify entire courses with badges and challenges, enable users to save their progress, and communicate with others via social features.
Ultimately, an LMS offers a better, more complete experience than a stand-alone eLearning course. But not all LMS platforms are created equal.
What Makes a Good LMS?
No two LMS platforms will be entirely the same. Some will have a certain feature that sets them apart, while others may do a little bit of everything. And some LMS platforms will simply be the wrong choice for your needs.
As with all things, it’s important to shop around before settling on an option. The right LMS can make or break the eLearning experience — for you and your audience. That is why it’s important to understand which features matter the most when choosing an LMS eLearning platform.
LMS Features to Consider
Many LMS systems will offer their own unique features that set them apart. While some of these can be nice quality-of-life features, there are still core features that any good LMS system should have, including the following:
Integrations with major business platforms: This can make it easier to sync existing employee/customer/audience data with your platform and can save you the trouble of manually entering data.
Easy data migration: Along with the ability to integrate with existing platforms, you want an LMS that allows you to migrate data into the LMS platform itself. Again, this can save you time and headaches.
An intuitive interface for your audience to use: An LMS with a steep learning curve could quickly drive your audiences away.
Gamification options: Gamification, even something as simple as badges, can encourage engagement and learning and boost productivity.
Accessible via a number of devices and platforms: Make sure your LMS can be accessed via mobile devices, a number of computer operating systems, and popular browser choices.
Extensive reporting: Course analytics are a huge part of improving the learning experience for your audience. Look for reporting that includes course completion rates, average scores, and time to complete.
Create a checklist, and include the above features. If you know for a fact that your company won’t need a certain feature from above, leave it off the list. Keep this list handy when shopping for an LMS eLearning platform, and see if you can find a solution that doesn’t force you to compromise where it counts.
Choosing an LMS Based on Your Company’s Needs
LMS features are important, but your company’s needs are even more critical. There’s no single best LMS, so think about what your company hopes to achieve and what kind of limitations you have. Ask yourself the following questions to determine what’s most important to you in an LMS.
Is this LMS eLearning platform within your budget?
Before you get too far along in your search, it’s important that you have a set budget. An LMS with every desirable feature isn’t worth investigating if you can’t afford it. Once you have your budget, the first thing you should do is check the pricing for each LMS you’re looking at so you can quickly rule out the platforms that don’t fit your needs.
Does the LMS require extensive developer input?
While many LMS eLearning platforms are easy for virtually anyone to understand, some can require a developer to make significant changes. For example, if you’re using an open-source LMS and want to change up the interface or how a course flows, you may need a developer.
If this is the case, ask yourself if you have a developer with bandwidth to spare or if you can afford to hire a developer. Keep in mind the cost of a developer can quickly inflate the cost of your learning and development efforts as a whole.
How much support do you need?
Not all LMS eLearning platforms will offer the same level of support. If you foresee your company needing extensive support, make sure you prioritize that when shopping for a platform. As you shortlist LMS platforms, look up online reviews to check for comments on customer service and support.
What does your audience need?
The audience you’re serving can greatly influence the LMS you need. For example, if you’re only concerned with training employees, you need an LMS that makes it easy to track progress and integrates well with your people management systems. Gamification is also a big plus for employee training because it encourages ongoing engagement.
Think about your audience and what would entice them to take your courses. This can help you rule out some LMS options from the start.
What features are most important to you, and what can you live without?
You may luck out and find an LMS that has everything you want, but there’s a chance you’ll have to pick an option that’s missing a wish-listed feature. Think about what features are most important to you and are necessary for achieving your goals.
For example, if an LMS doesn’t integrate with your existing data platforms, and you have thousands of profiles to manually import, it might be worth finding a different LMS.
Your Next LMS eLearning Platform
The right LMS eLearning platform can help you better serve your audiences, promote your brand, and become known as an expert in your niche. Take your time when choosing the right platform, and get feedback from others in your company. And don’t feel you’re locked in if you decide on a platform and it isn’t working out.
Remember — an LMS is only as good as the content on it. Create top-tier animated eLearning videos to ensure that your audience has a great experience on any LMS you choose.
Sign up for a free trial of Vyond to create professional animated videos without any help from a designer or animator. Your audience and your LMS will be better for it!
#### Whole Foods Market on Vyond for Enterprise
Vyond licenses at any level will have you creating more engaging training and communications content.
So if you’ve already got a Professional license, why might you prioritize upgrading to Vyond for Enterprise this year?
Jason Ferguson, Principal Learning Technology Product Manager at Whole Foods Market shares why he’s happy he did.
A few years ago, Jason Ferguson, Principal Learning Technology Product Manager, and the Change Enablement team at Whole Foods Market purchased a few Vyond licenses. But quickly, they found Vyond so invaluable that they upgraded to the 35-seat Enterprise plan they have today and offered seats to the broader L&D team.
Now, Jason wastes less admin time reallocating seats. And Enterprise features like Shared Spaces let them collaborate seamlessly — designers can swap custom assets and hand off projects with no lost time.
Vyond for Enterprise is the platform you know and love — but with even more features to help you drive efficiency in your workflow and protect your enterprise data at the highest level.
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#### Why and How to Create an Animated Sales Training Video
More often than not, training your sales staff is cheaper and more effective than hiring new employees.
Training magazine found in 2018 that it cost $986 to train a current employee. Meanwhile, according to the Center of American Progress, the cost to replace that employee with a new employee is 21% of the current employee’s salary. So, if you wanted to replace a sales manager with a $60,000 yearly salary, it would cost you $12,600 instead of the three-figure cost of training or retraining your current staff.
When it comes to educating existing employees, sales training videos are one of the best methods. Instead of spending resources to train employees on multiple occasions, you only have to produce a video once. From there, you can use that video repeatedly.
As time passes, you can maintain the training’s relevance without redoing most modules by tweaking the information, video assets, storyboards, and the training’s structure, which you will ideate after reading this article.
An animated sales training video is more cost-effective than traditional training
Traditional in-person training often demands more time, energy, and financial resources than training your staff through an animated sales training video does.
Companies formed by a physical team need to cover various expenses if they want to host in-person trainings. First, there’s the opportunity cost of removing employees from their day-to-day tasks. Each hour or day that your sales team spends in training is time they could spend onboarding a new customer or qualifying a lead. Because the event’s purpose is to enhance your team’s performance, you may also have to hire an external trainer and potentially fund their transportation and housing costs if the event lasts several days.
Like in-house companies, remote-first businesses need to handle opportunity costs and hiring fees. But because their team isn’t in a single location, they also have to rent physical space for the training and provide housing and transportation.
The costs to create sales training videos are much lower. You don’t have to invest in transportation or housing or take time out of your employees’ workdays. Instead, you ideate a curriculum—as you would for in-person trainings—create videos for each module, and then share them with your staff as many times as you want.
Animation allows you to produce your modules’ videos at a low cost. Unless you are a large enterprise searching for custom pricing, intuitive animation software like Vyond offers affordable plans that only require a three-figure investment to access their templates, beginner-friendly tools, characters, and props for an entire year.
Cost isn’t the only reason to choose video training. We collaborated with TRUE Global Intelligence to examine employees’ workplace thoughts and behaviors between January 2020 and February 2021. We found 56% of employees prefer to watch an announcement or communication on their own time versus attending a live session during this period, showcasing a preference for asynchronous communication over real-time interactions. Regardless of your sales team’s work modality, opting for video-based sales training is a cost-effective format to improve their performance.
3 steps to making a strong animated sales training video
Training your sales unit is especially important because your reps directly connect with potential and existing customers.
Salespeople must deeply understand your company’s value propositions, the nuances of your offer, and how customers make decisions. You can ensure you’re creating an animated sales training video that will enhance your staff’s skills by following three key steps:
1. Research why your team loses potential sales
Investigate why your team loses potential sales, so you know what information your sales training modules need to cover—including whether you’ll need to interview internal and external experts to create the training and determine the speed at which your staff should start learning the material.
Recordings from recent sales calls are an excellent place to research weaknesses, especially in terms of how reps deliver pitches. You might notice that a deck is unclear or that reps are using unnecessary jargon or expressing an unconfident tone of voice. Though you could discuss these flaws with your staff, recordings are a bias-free way to review their performance.
When you’ve identified areas to improve, schedule one-on-one meetings with team members to learn the reasons behind the undesired actions you noticed on the recordings. The goal of these meetings is to compare what you and the employee believe is causing the problem so that your training is based on real issues and not on assumptions. For example, you might assume an employee’s stumbling on a recording reflects a lack of confidence. But when you meet with the rep, you realize the issue is that they have a weak understanding of your company’s value proposition and positioning statement.
The last step during the research phase is to choose which problems your company will address first through video sales training. Build your training around issues that happen frequently. Two cases of employees’ stumbling are essential to look at, but minuscule compared to a hundred instances of failed objection handling; the latter demands more urgent training.
2. Draft your animated sales training video modules
Create the first version of your sales training videos based on the identified issues. A good starting point is creating a storyboard and script. The purpose of a storyboard is to represent how your classes will unfold visually, showing rough sketches of props, characters, or the training professor’s in-class activities. Storyboards are primarily visual descriptions of scenes, but they also incorporate notes of what each class will discuss, resulting in a script.
These two resources will drastically reduce the time it takes to produce your training and avoid misunderstandings between stakeholders. You can visit our guide to learn more about how to create scripts and storyboards.
When you’ve created a script and storyboard, you can use these resources to build your animated training. If you have never animated, consider creating your video on a platform that offers templates to jump-start your production process.
Vyond offers a wide range of easy-to-use templates that companies can use to create a sales training video. For instance, companies can use our Phone Skills for Successful Sales Calls template to teach employees the crucial skills they need to conduct successful phone calls with prospects.
To raise the likelihood that your videos can truly teach your staff new concepts, gather employees outside your sales team and ask them if they feel they understand the subject after finishing the course. Adjust your training based on this outside perspective, so your sales team is less likely to be confused by the training and more likely to find it valuable.
3. Asking sales reps for feedback on your animated sales training videos
After making your video, gather a small group of sales reps from your organization and ask them for feedback on each module. Unlike individuals outside your sales team, they know the nuances of sales and have the skills necessary to judge your training’s accuracy and potential impact.
When presenting videos to sales reps, ask them to write down portions of your training that are boring, redundant, or confusing. Reanimate those sections and rewrite their script to maximize the chances of creating an enjoyable, engaging training experience for your sales staff.
Sometimes, you can fix clarity issues by changing the course’s structure. But there are times when experts will find a portion of the video irrelevant. If you receive this feedback, explain that section’s goal and the problem it’s trying to solve. If your description doesn’t convince them of the section’s purpose, consider removing it.
Train your staff with animated sales training videos
Sales reps who have weak listening skills, unclear value propositions, and poorly timed follow-ups can cost companies hundreds of clients each year. Maximize the number of closed accounts by supporting your sales team’s skills with an animated sales training video.
The animated sales training video your company creates depends on your organization’s characteristics. However, regardless of your current state, animated video is an impactful, cost-efficient format for training your staff. It doesn’t require expensive gear, flying employees to a single location, or renting a conference room.
All you need is an animation platform like Vyond. From there, you can create cost-effective training videos that are just as effective at teaching concepts as in-person lessons are—if not more so.
Create a sales training video
#### Why Animated Marketing Videos Should Be Your Next Investment
Getting the attention of your audience can be tricky. You’re competing with a lot — social media, games, pop-up ads, and even other branded content. How are you supposed to compete with so many distractions?
Animated marketing videos are an effective, fun way to grip your audience. In fact, nearly 50% of internet users look for videos about a product before making a purchase, and 74% of people say they’ve been convinced to buy or download a piece of software by watching a video. The perks of animated marketing videos are many, but making them requires the right knowledge and preparation.
The Benefits of Animated Marketing Videos
Videos with live actors can be costly and require extensive coordination between large teams and groups of actors. Animated marketing videos require smaller teams and cost less but still offer the powerful benefits of traditional video.
Animated marketing videos are versatile
Animated videos can go wherever your audience is, no matter the social channel or platform. If you have an audience segment on one social platform, you can easily customize an animated video to match that audience and share it there. Being able to make highly shareable video marketing is key in this day and age.
Animated marketing videos can be customized
Animated videos are easier to customize than a live-action video. This makes it possible to match or change your video’s purpose and tone as needed. For example, if you’ve made a video to invite customers to a webinar you can easily modify it to fit a new date or topic.
Sometimes you need to make tweaks or even major changes to a video. Changes with animated videos are more possible than with traditional video. When altering a live-action video, you need to organize actors, the set crew, and so on. Animated marketing videos only require software and maybe a voice actor to make any changes.
Animated marketing videos aren’t limited by reality
This allows even the most fantastic ideas to come to life in an animation. This is also useful for abstract ideas or concepts that would be difficult to show with live-action video.
How to Use Animated Videos for Business
Animation is great for entertainment, but it’s also a great option for businesses. Animation is a versatile form of content, and you can use it in the following ways:
Animated videos can help explain complex products or services. Unlike live videos, animated videos aren’t bound by the constraints of reality, making them ideal for showing complex or abstract concepts.
Animated videos are great for telling your brand’s story. Animated videos are easy to brand, can feature voiceovers from prominent figures in your business, and are easy to tweak to accommodate for changes down the road.
Animated videos are perfect for customer education. Animated videos also make great supplements to product training texts, especially when explaining complicated concepts or technology.
Product explainer videos are easy to make with animated videos, and you can tailor them for nearly any audience segment. For example, if you have a segment of your audience that’s younger and into pop-culture references, you can create an animated video that contains these elements.
How Much Does it Cost to Make an Animated Marketing Video?
The cost of animated marketing videos fluctuates. Some studios estimate a 60-second video costs as much as $50,000, while others cite several thousand. Ultimately, the cost of a custom animated video depends on numerous factors:
Length of the animation: Longer animations typically tend to cost more, whether you’re using a design team or making the video on your own.
Hired talent: Voice actors or designers needed to complete the video all impact the cost. And typically, the more talent required, the higher the cost. This also factors into the cost associated with longer videos.
Cost of software: When making a video in-house, you’ll likely use various pieces of software for animation, editing, music, etc. This might include design software, illustration tools, or even animation software.
One thing that can greatly reduce the cost of animated videos is animation software. Animation software, like Vyond, generally requires a subscription fee or a one-time purchase. But animation software can allow you to make videos without a costly design team or the assistance of an animation studio. Vyond plans start at $89p/month with royalty-free music and sound effects included.
Animation software also helps you save time. For example, Vyond features a library of scenes and characters, all of which are customizable to fit any brand or audience. This makes animating quick and easy, saving you time and costly man-hours.
Tips for Making an Effective Marketing Video
Making an effective animated marketing video requires proper preparations and know-how. The following tips will help you get a proper start on your next animated marketing video:
Plan ahead. It’s important that you create a strategy before spending any time or money on an animated marketing video. Think about what it is you’re trying to get across, whether a video is necessary, who will watch your video, where you should host your video, what your budget is, and so on.
Tell a story. Animated marketing videos can be a great supplement to traditional content marketing. But, like content marketing, your video should tell a story rather than be overly sales-oriented. A video that focuses only on sales won’t resonate and last with your audience, as a story would. A story will captivate and reel your audience in by feeling more relatable.
Consider audience segments. Your brand likely has multiple target audiences or audience segments. Think about these segments when making your animated marketing video. It’s possible you’ll need multiple versions of a marketing video in order to reach all the right segments.
Develop a promotional plan. Your video may organically gain views, but you’ll still need a strategy to ensure that it’s viewed by those who need to see it most. Create a promotional plan that breaks down which social channels you’ll need to promote your video on, what kinds of ads you’ll create for it, and more.
The best-laid plans can fall flat without proper planning. Planning your animated marketing video ahead of time will reduce the chances that your video is a dud and, more importantly, will give your business the results you’re seeking.
Examples of Great Animated Marketing Videos
Animated videos are all about visuals, so we’re sharing some examples of great animated marketing videos. Use these top-notch videos to inspire you when creating your own animated marketing video.
Virtual Care for Kids
Explainer videos are great for breaking down technical, complex, or even less-than-exciting services or products. The below explainer video from Virtual Care for Kids does a great job of quickly breaking down their unique services:
The Virtual Care for Kids video is an especially strong example of an explainer video due to the clear voice-over, concise on-screen text, and colorful animation. It’s captivating while also doing a great job of explaining things.
EverString
EverString (acquired by ZoomInfo) was all about data and sales intelligence. The company explains the origin of data in the video below:
EverString’s video makes great use of animation coupled with infographics and stats to tell a story.
Wuvavi: North Pole Cyber Breach
There’s a fine line between content marketing and traditional marketing. That line is generally storytelling. Wuvavi uses a playful story about a data breach at the North Pole to explore the risks of skimping on cybersecurity.
Wuvavi’s video makes great use of video-in-video in the early scene while using fun characters and a voice-over to tell a story. The end result is a video that markets Wuvavi’s services and educates the audience on the importance of security.
BookYourWeddingday.com
Destination weddings sound great on paper but are a nightmare to plan. BookYourWeddingDay.com makes this point clear in the video below:
The video is a great example of storytelling as a way to connect with the audience. The target audience — those planning destination weddings — will immediately relate to the story and the problem of the couple in the video. This hook, coupled with a quality voice-over, makes for a great animated marketing video.
Envision Auto Relocations
Anyone who has ever moved a long distance has likely realized what a headache moving a car can be. Envision Auto Relocations uses animation to relate to their audience’s problem and illuminate a solution.
Quality animation, a professional voice-over, and a demo of Envision’s mobile app make their video relatable for an audience facing the problem of moving a car long distances.
The examples above span a variety of industries, niches, and problems. Animated marketing videos can be used for virtually any industry or issue; your imagination is the only limiting factor. You can make an animated marketing video for your market, no matter what that market is.
Make animated videos part of your marketing success. Sign up for a free trial of Vyond.
#### Why is video important in marketing
Video continues to dominate the digital landscape. In 2019, people watched an average of 16 hours of online video each week (according to Wyzowl), and video is expected to make up 80% of all internet traffic by 2021.
Faced with these statistics, businesses must prioritize video as a viable marketing channel. But popularity isn’t the only reason marketers should be using this medium. In this post, we’ll break down why it’s vital to use video in your marketing, and how to get started if you aren’t already.
4 reasons why you should use video marketing
85% of businesses use video as a marketing tool, and 92% of marketers who use video say it’s an important part of their marketing strategy. Why all the hype? Here are a few key reasons.
1. Video delivers a high ROI
A healthy ROI is a goal of any marketing campaign, and video delivers. In fact, 88% of video marketers agree that video gives them a positive ROI. Video reduces cost per lead by 19%, and promoted tweets with videos reduce cost-per-engagement by more than half for businesses.
For online stores, video is a powerful way to drive sales on product pages. The medium allows shoppers to see products from multiple angles and in action, so they’re more able to imagine using them in their own lives. That might explain why 74% of people say they’ve been convinced to buy a software product by watching a video.
2. Video is popular and in-demand
Consumers crave video. People watch around 16 hours of online video every week, up 52% in the last two years. And they can’t get enough of it: 86% want more videos from companies.
YouTube is seeing high growth, with the number of channels reaching 1+ million subscribers increasing by more than 65% year over year. And on Twitter, video views are increasing 67% yearly, with more than 2 billion video views on the social media platform daily. The boom in social media’s popularity presents marketers with the opportunity to reach new audiences in novel ways.
3. Video captivates audiences
Video has proven to be one of the most engaging content formats. We skim or multitask when engaging with written content and podcasts, but are more focused when viewing video content. And people are willing to spend more time watching a video than in previous years, with completion rates for short marketing videos just below 90%. This data signals that marketers who use video are more likely to convey their message to audiences.
These trends ring true on social media, too. People are twice as likely to share social content that includes video. On Twitter, posts with video get 10x more engagement. In light of these stats, social media is the perfect space for distributing video content.
4. Video boosts SEO
Every marketer wants content to surface to the top on search engine result pages (SERPs) for maximum visibility. Video is an excellent way to improve your ranking odds and earn click-throughs.
There are a few specific ways video can boost your SEO efforts. For starters, a transcript from your videos can be used as additional content. This gives Google something else to crawl and, as a result, something else that can potentially rank.
Videos themselves can also rank and appear under search results. For example, if you search “creating a great digital experience,” this animated video whitepaper from Bython Media is among the top results.
This is all scratching the surface of how video impacts SEO. Video plays a vital role in SEO, and by proxy, in your company’s online success.
How to create a video marketing campaign
You don’t need to be an experienced videographer or have a big budget to get started with your own video marketing campaigns. There are many tools out there like Vyond that make creating videos easy regardless of production or design experience. Besides using accessible tools, marketers can follow these steps to produce engaging videos.
Start with a goal in mind
Determine your goals for your overall marketing campaigns, as well as for specific videos. Let’s say you want to launch a new product. The ultimate goal is sales, but not every awareness-building video is a conversion-oriented asset. For top-of-funnel (ToFu) video content, you might look at shares or engagement KPIs. But if it’s a product feature video on your product page, you’ll want to look more closely at video completion or conversion rates.
Choose a video format
There are a variety of types of videos to choose from: explainer videos, product videos, demos, testimonials, live streams, user-generated content (UGC), and more. The right format for your video depends on a few key factors:
Channel: Where are you publishing and distributing your video? You might post a tutorial on your brand’s YouTube channel, but share a UGC video on Instagram.
Audience: What types of video formats resonate with your audience? Conduct market research and competitive analyses to understand what people like and don’t like.
Logistics: This includes considerations like budget and timeline. Animated videos, for example, are much simpler to execute than a live video that requires a set, camera equipment, and more.
Once you have the above problems solved, you’ll be ready to choose a type of content for video marketing. Then, it’s time to map out your video with a storyboard.
Create a storyboard and script
Storyboards and scripts keep teams on the same page. They’re a roadmap for executing the set vision for the video and minimizing the risk of costly reshoots.
To create a storyboard, start by outlining your ideas. With an idea of the video’s direction, you can begin to illustrate each part. If you’re not an artist, don’t worry! Stick figures will do. You just need enough visuals to communicate what’s happening at that moment in the video.
Now you’re ready to write your script. You’ll want to begin with an outline that centers on your call to action, followed by any characters and the general structure of the piece. After writing it, make sure you read it out loud—not just in your head. This will help you spot anything that sounds unnatural so you can adjust prior to creating your video.
Learn more about creating these resources with our guides on storyboarding and scriptwriting.
Create your video
You’ve done your prep work—now it’s time to bring your video to life!
The creation process depends on the type of video you’re making. For example; an explainer video may be a short whiteboard animation, while a product video may warrant multiple sections with mixed media.
Some videos are shot over several days, while others can be built in under an hour. If you want to create a video with Vyond, we offer a free trial so you can try it out before committing to a subscription.
As you create your video, keep accessibility in mind. From both an audience-centric standpoint and a legal standpoint, it’s critical that people of all abilities and conditions are able to watch and engage with your videos. U.S.-based marketers can refer to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), which establishes standards for making digital content accessible for all abilities. Compliance with Section 508 is also required of federal agencies and the companies that serve them.
Before you fully roll out your video campaign to the public, sample it with a select group to gauge their reactions and impressions. Send it to a few co-workers and ask for their input. Make necessary adjustments based on feedback before your full rollout.
Analyze and optimize your videos
Your work as a marketer isn’t over once the video is published. Monitor the content’s performance by tracking some or all of these KPIs:
Views: What counts as a view on one platform may not count as a view on another. For example, YouTube only counts a view if the video was watched for at least 30 seconds, and the viewing was intentional. Research what constitutes a view on any platform you’re using to ensure you are accurately tracking this important metric.
Completion rate: Completion rate, like view counts, varies from platform to platform. For example, on YouTube, the completion rate will simply be per-video. On an Instagram story, you’ll want to note how many people completed all your stories for the day, or only made it through a couple.
Click-through rate (CTR): If your completion rate is low, but CTR is high, that’s okay—it means people are interested enough to want to learn more. But when both metrics are low, you’ll want to brainstorm how your content can be more engaging.
Conversion rate: This metric is especially important for product and demo videos, as it will show whether the content drove viewers to make a purchase or sign up for a trial.
Engagement: Check how often users liked, commented on, or shared your video content on social platforms and YouTube.
All of the above metrics are important, regardless of where your video’s shared. But the location of the information can vary, as can the methods needed for gathering it. For example, your completion rate on an Instagram story will be nested within the story interface, while the completion rate for a YouTube video is on the channel dashboard.
When in doubt, do a search on the platform of your choice and find the metric you’re looking for. It’s almost always going to be available; it’s just a question of where.
Driving brand awareness and business through video
As such an engaging medium, video is perfect for keeping customers warm and piquing the interest of leads. After watching your video campaigns, your audience will be eager to stay connected with your brand and continue following its content.
Want to get started with your video marketing today? Sign up for a free trial and attend our bi-weekly tour of Vyond Studio.
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#### Why Our Brains are Wired for Whiteboard Animation Videos
Whiteboard animation is one of the most powerful teaching tools. Beyond having an educational “look”— the drawing hand recalls a teacher’s hand at a classroom chalkboard — whiteboard animation is able to break down complex concepts into simple, engaging videos (or GIFs). Here’s an example:
Before making your own whiteboard animation video, it’s important to understand why this style is effective. In this post, we break down the scientific grounding for whiteboard animation as an educational tool and how you can create whiteboard animations for your own organizations.
3 reasons to use whiteboard animation
According to psychologist Richard E. Mayer’s 12 Principles of Multimedia Learning, “people learn better when extraneous words, pictures, and sounds are excluded rather than included.”
Mayer’s guidelines and other core principles of psychology make a strong case for using whiteboard animation.
The video style is guiding and simple, so viewers know what material to focus on without being overwhelmed. It’s also engaging — viewers experience a first-person sense of involvement in the construction of the concepts as the information is gradually revealed. With these three qualities, whiteboard animation is a powerful learning tool.
1. Whiteboard animation is guiding
Mayer’s Signaling Principle says, “people learn better when cues that highlight the organization of the essential material are added.”
Whiteboard animation follows this principle with the cue of a drawing hand. It gradually reveals information, so it works well as a signaling mechanism to direct viewers’ attention. Here’s another example from voice artist, Samuel Fleming:
The effectiveness of the drawing hand is supported by recent research. Instructional technologist, Selen Turkay states that the cueing mechanism of the whiteboard hand facilitates “overt attentional allocation to direct learners’ attention to important content, making educationally important aspects salient.” Another study conducted by educational psychologist Logan Fiorella, together with Mayer, found that the presence of the drawing hand improved students’ learning in multiple situations. The students showed greater comprehension after seeing the instructor’s hand draw the lesson.
2. Whiteboard animation is simple
Besides the Signaling Principle, Mayer also offers a Coherence Principle that states, “people learn better when extraneous words, pictures, and sounds are excluded rather than included.”
Whiteboard animations embrace this principle with basic black-and-white drawings and minimal text. This simplicity makes it easier for viewers to hone in on the essential content of the lesson without becoming overloaded or distracted by extraneous information.
But whiteboard animations aren’t merely simple. They’re also focused in their simplicity, incorporating what Mayer would refer to as “visually appealing” features, such as the guiding line drawings and the deliberate and sparing use of color to highlight the most instructionally salient material. Used strategically, such features, according to Mayer, initiate the cognitive process and lead to better learning outcomes.
Here’s an example showing pops of color for emphasis. Vyond’s Whiteboard Animation style is now color-customizable.
By sticking to the essentials in a visually appealing way, the whiteboard animation breaks down complicated concepts and communicates them in an understandable way.
3. Whiteboard animation is rewarding
Along with Mayer’s learning principles, further research helps to explain why whiteboard animation is a powerful learning tool.
The step-by-step revealing process of whiteboard animation encourages learning by engaging the viewer in an active way. When they see the drawing hand, the audience anticipates receiving information. As information is gradually revealed, it draws viewers in with the reward of the completed drawing and the finalized main point of each lesson.
Psychologist Richard Wiseman explains how this rewarding pattern can help us learn better. “You’re just making people go ‘ah, this is fun.’ Suddenly, it’s not so much work and that only makes them have a better time and, more importantly, it means the information is just going in,” says Wiseman.
Wiseman’s research shows that whiteboard animation does actually lead to greater retention. His study determined an astounding 15% increase in recall in the test-takers who viewed a whiteboard animation versus those who didn’t.
Researchers of instructional technologies have also proposed other hypotheses for viewers’ engagement in whiteboard animation. Turkay states that “[w]hiteboard animations place viewers in the animator/narrator role as the images are constructed, presumably with the goal of helping viewers mentally construct the concepts.”
This interactivity is built into whiteboard animation through the drawing hand, which puts the viewer into the physical position of the animator. Such “first-person experience of involvement”, Turkay continues, “encourages knowledge construction,” and Turkay’s research, in fact, shows whiteboard animations to have positive effects on the retention of learned material.
With these three key features — being guiding, simple, and interactive — whiteboard animation is equipped to engage learners and clearly communicate information. Factors such as minimal design and the focused use of color make it easy for viewers to comprehend information, while the drawing hand makes the learning process interactive, ultimately helping learners to retain meaningful information.
How to create great whiteboard animation videos
Whiteboard animation is a powerful learning tool with its minimalist style and drawing hand motion. With that said, there are often ways to maximize the educational value of a whiteboard video, whether it’s adding another style or blending them with additional learning materials. Drive your message home with these tips for creating great whiteboard animation videos.
Keep it short
It’s tempting to create a long whiteboard video — you may feel that you need to explain every detail of your subject to make sure viewers are informed.
The truth is that making your whiteboard video long will most likely make it more difficult for viewers to learn from it. The longer the video, the more cognitive overload it creates. With too much information to learn, viewers won’t retain all of the content you’ve shared.
Boost the educational value of your whiteboard by keeping it brief and focusing on your main points. We recommend creating whiteboard videos that are 60 seconds or less in length, like this video from L&D expert, Keith Anderson:
This length gives you enough time to focus on one bite-sized lesson or message without adding in too many details that overwhelm viewers.
To learn more about creating quick educational videos, visit our microlearning video hub.
Mix video styles
While whiteboard animation is effective on its own, as mentioned above, it can be mixed with other video styles to teach concepts more fully. Each style has its own unique connotations that can enhance the message or lesson you’re communicating. Live video might humanize the abstract concepts discussed on the whiteboard, whereas animation gives you full creative control to illustrate your points.
Say, for example, you want to create an explainer video to describe how your product works. To start the video, you might use whiteboard animation. The lack of color in the style can emphasize how life is more dull or worse without the product. Then, when you describe your product’s benefits, the video can switch to color to convey that your product improved the situation. Alternately, color mixed with whiteboard animation can be used to highlight key points, actions, or characters in your video.
Watch these examples from Snag., Cerego, and The Bergamot to see three different ways to mix whiteboard animation with color and live action video.
Emphasize video with supporting collateral
Your whiteboard animation doesn’t need to be the only educational content you provide. Supplement your video with supporting materials — advertisements, emails, learning guides, one-on-one training — to help your viewers understand your message even further.
For example, if you created a whiteboard animation video for new employee training, you might also create a PDF reference guide to give new hires with all their onboarding details. Or, you could keep a poster that explains the concept in the same room where you play the video.
Build your whiteboard animation skills
Continue learning about whiteboard animation videos with the following Vyond resources:
How to transform a complex idea with animation
The complete guide to microlearning
How to build a whiteboard animation video in Vyond:
Apply these tips to create great whiteboard animation videos that are not only informative but also engaging for viewers to watch.
Engage and educate with whiteboard animation
With its combination of simplicity and movement, whiteboard animation is an excellent style for teaching new concepts. There is scientific grounding to back up its learning benefits, and it’s easy for organizations to create these videos, since they’re so short and straightforward. Use this guide to get started and create your first whiteboard animation video in Vyond.
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#### Why You Need a Storyboard for Your Microlearning Video, and How to Create One
Why you need a storyboard.
Once you’ve written a basic script for your microlearning video, it’s time to create a storyboard.
A storyboard is a graphic representation of how your video will unfold, shot by shot. At first, this may seem like overkill — after all, microlearning videos are often less than a minute long, and the whole point is to keep them tightly focused on one objective. Do you really have to plot out each moment?
In fact, storyboarding is crucial for exactly these reasons. Mapping your video out visually will help you refine your ideas to ensure every video element is doing the work you need it to in the brief span of time you have.
Storyboarding can also help you:
Get buy-in from stakeholders: While a script can help others conceptualize your video, the visual nature of a storyboard is often a more effective way to bring it to life pre-production. Sharing your storyboard early on in the process will ensure collaborators and decision-makers understand your vision — and make them much less likely to put up a fight down the line.
Streamline production: Creating a storyboard forces you to work out a lot of the details of your video ahead of time — what shots you want, what order they’ll go in, what props or tools you need, etc. Storyboarding might also help you realize that you’re missing a key piece of logic or dialogue in your script, or that your visuals don’t tie together as cohesively as you thought. Identifying and working through these problems before you start creating your video will prevent wasted effort later on.
Save time: It’s much easier and less time-consuming to make revisions to a storyboard than a video.
How to Create a Storyboard
Ultimately, a storyboard is a series of images representing each frame of your video. How you put the storyboard together, and how much detail you add, is up you — you can do it on paper, in a word processing program, or using specialized software.
If you prefer pen and paper, here are some templates to help organize your frames. Don’t worry about your drawing skills — stick figures will suffice. Just make sure to leave room to jot down the accompanying text (whether it appears on the screen or is spoken by your characters or narrator) for each visual.
Creating a PowerPoint deck or simple word processing document on the computer is another easy option. Specialized software is also available if you’re looking for a more comprehensive solution (check out a few of the most popular storyboarding software here).
At Vyond, we put most of our scripts into a two column “audio/visual” table in google doc. The script goes on the left and descriptions of the visuals are added to the right. The bigger the project, or greater the number of people involved, the more time we spend on the visuals.
Our talented animation team creates storyboards and animatics (video drafts) like this one:
Not everyone has the time or skill for such storyboards, but this level of detail is especially helpful for complex projects with a variety of stakeholders.
Whatever method you choose, be sure that your storyboard conveys what’s happening in the frame, the setting, which characters are present, any essential props, and what text (if any) will appear on screen and where. You can also include important notes about camera angles and movements, transitions between shots, and any other production or post-production details.
If you’re creating an extensive training program with multiple microlearning videos, consider completing the scripts and storyboards for each unit before beginning production on your videos. This will ensure that all the major topics you want to hit are covered, and that the videos fit together logically with minimal repetition.
As you storyboard, keep each video’s objective top of mind, and don’t be afraid to make revisions. This early stage of the process is the best time to tweak your visuals and script in order to create the most compelling and effective microlearning video possible.
Once your storyboard is approved, you’re finally ready to create a video! Read on for tips to creating an animated microlearning video.
Read Next: Tips for Creating Animated Microlearning Videos
And don’t miss the previous articles in this series:
What Is Microlearning? 5 Key Benefits for Today’s Employees
Why Your Company Should Create Microlearning Videos
4 Initial Steps to Creating a Microlearning Video
How to Script a Successful Microlearning Video
About Vyond
Vyond allows people of all skill levels in all industries and job roles to create dynamic and powerful media. With features that go beyond moving text and images, you can build character-driven stories or compelling data visualizations that engage audiences and deliver results.
With Vyond, it’s easy to create video for your social media marketing. Start a free trial and sign up for our weekly webinar.
#### Why Your Company Should Create Microlearning Videos
Advantages of Microlearning Video.
While microlearning can take a variety of other forms (text, games, podcasts, PowerPoints, etc.), research suggests that short microlearning videos are the most effective and engaging medium.
In a previous post, we discussed five concrete benefits of microlearning for organizations providing training to their employees. In this article, we’ll focus on the advantages of video lessons in microlearning.
Humans are drawn to videos.
The human brain is wired to respond to video. We know much of the information transmitted to the brain is visual and that visual aids have been found to improve learning. It will also come as no surprise that employees are 75% more likely to watch a video than read text, and that video conveys more powerful messages than written communication.
Why? Video is uniquely well-suited to storytelling — and humans love stories. “A narrative works off of both data and emotions, which is significantly more effective in engaging a listener than data alone,” writes Cody C. Delistraty in The Atlantic. Delistraty cites Stanford professor Jennifer Aaker, whose research shows that people remember data incorporated into narratives up to 22 times more than when the data is given on its own.
Video can engage employees on a visceral level by replicating a face-to-face connection. Learners are much more likely to connect with a narrative and visual depiction of a person guiding them through a process than they are to a block of static text (or a static image) explaining the material. Video also gives today’s learners the sense of control they crave over material — they can watch it anywhere, anytime and can pause, slow down, speed up, or rewind as many times as they see fit.
Video increases long-term retention.
Research suggests that videos are uniquely suited to maximize retention of material when compared to other media.
“Multimedia presentations (such as narrated animation) are more likely to lead to meaningful learning than single-medium presentations” (like static visuals in a PowerPoint or an audio recording like a podcast), say researchers Richard E. Mayer and Roxana Moreno in the Educational Psychology Review.
This is based in part on dual coding theory, which holds that humans store audio and visual information in two separate areas of the brain. Watching a video engages both channels of the brain, which work together to reinforce the material. “The cognitive process of integrating is most likely to occur when the learner has corresponding pictoral and verbal representations in working memory at the same time,” according to Mayer and Moreno.
In order to store information in our long-term memory, our working memory must first process that information. But our working memory’s capacity (cognitive load) is limited, and if we overload it, we’ll retain less from the activity at hand. Microlearning videos help address this problem in two ways: a) they’re short, so they provide our brains a break to process information and refresh working memory capacity, and b) by engaging both visual and auditory channels at once, they spread the burden for processing the information across these two channels, providing more room for processing and retention.
Ready to take the plunge and create microlearning videos? In the next few articles, we’ll break down what you need to make a video and how to integrate it successfully into a larger training plan.
Read Next: 4 Initial Steps to Creating a Microlearning Video
About Vyond
Vyond allows people of all skill levels in all industries and job roles to create dynamic and powerful media. With features that go beyond moving text and images, you can build character-driven stories or compelling data visualizations that engage audiences and deliver results.
With Vyond, it’s easy to create video for your social media marketing. Start a free trial and sign up for our weekly webinar.
#### Winter 2023 Awards Roundup:
74 G2 Award Wins
We’re excited to share that G2 recognized us with 74 awards for Winter 2023. It’s an honor we consider reflective of our commitment to continuous improvement and dedication to delivering new features that help our customers communicate better.
Top 10 ranking in four new reports
Vyond received 74 awards across the Video Creation, Presentation, Content Creation, and Animation categories, top 10 ranking in four new reports, and 13 first-place awards including:
#1 Leader for Enterprise in Content Creation
#1 Best Usability for Enterprise in Content Creation
#1 Users Most Likely to Recommend for Video Editing
#1 Leader for Enterprise in Animation
#1 Best Results in Video Editing
Vyond has also received “Leader” awards for Enterprise in Content Creation, Presentation, and Animation for the Americas, EMEA, and Europe regions.
Enterprise users voiced their admiration (it’s mutual)
To us, there’s no greater indicator that we’re helping our customers communicate better than the value they find in using Vyond.
Powerful and professional tool that’s easy to learn
— Verified Vyond User for Enterprise
AI-powered Vyond, video creation made easy
— Verified Vyond User for Enterprise
“These awards are a great recognition of our efforts to fully participate in and support our customers’ success,” said Enrique Olives, Head of Product Marketing at Vyond.
“We continue to fulfill our customers’ needs and deliver their most anticipated and requested features. Recently, that’s meant brand management features that help users adhere to—and even enforce—brand guidelines, accessibility features like Open and Closed Captioning that are built directly into the workflow, and customizable props and actions through our applied AI.”
Learn more about our awards and recognition on our awards web page.
#### Working with Voiceovers in Vyond Studio
To bring familiarity and personality to your story, you may want to reconsider using one of our HQ neural voices on your Vyond video projects.
Instead, recording and working with voiceover on Vyond Studio can be beneficial as you can ensure your story is told with the emotion and inflection you envisioned.
But before you can start spinning a yarn, you need to ensure that your script is voice-over ready.
Creating a voiceover-ready script
Scripts exist to help stories and messages cross from one medium to another. But what works for a live-action video script won’t necessarily work for a voice-over script. Voice-over scripts need to emphasize a narrative above all else, so it’s important that you take the appropriate steps to make your script voice-over-ready.
Annotate your script
Aside from speaking clearly and sporadically hydrating your throat with water (or, better yet, apple juice), make sure your script actively reminds you of the things you need to convey when recording. Annotations can help you do just this:
If there are things you want to emphasize when recording, bold or italicize the text there.
If you’d like to add a pause, add a few dashes—or simply make a note of it in the text, e.g., (pause here).
Use transition words, such as however, therefore, and meanwhile to convey a change in idea or scene.
Keep your timing in check by following the 75 words per minute rule. This is slower than conversational speed, allowing viewers to fully digest the information as it’s being presented.
If anyone else will be looking at your script or filling in for you at any point, be sure they understand what your annotations mean.
Break your audio into workable fragments
Whether you record your own audio or hire a voice actor, segment your script into shorter lines and scenes that correspond with your visuals. When editing a video, Vyond can help you upload a single voiceover file that can later be split with ease. Have in mind that breaking up your audio may prove to be beneficial if there are multiple dialogues from different people happening within a scene.
This easy trick also allows you to have better control over your transitions, edits, and final product. Plus, it takes less time to upload and process smaller MP3 files.
Be mindful of character actions
Conversations that are true to life would not lack movement, gesturing, or other visual representations of what you’re saying, would they?
Try to avoid making your video feel stiff and/or overly formal by assigning your characters some actions and emotions.
However, If a piece of dialogue is very long, the character will continue performing the action you have selected and the scene would appear robotic and unnatural. (Cue exit.) For this reason, consider either splitting your voiceover audio or creating a new scene so that you can give the character a new action or you can change the camera angles. Both are good options to keep your video dynamic, meaning visually and audibly engaging for the viewer.
Something to note: In dialogue-based videos—versus voice-over/narration-based videos—The scene length is not responsive to audio track length and therefore doesn’t default to a single line of dialogue.
Name your files accordingly
When it’s time to upload, you don’t want to get lost in a sea of unnamed recordings. Use file names that make it clear what each recording contains for maximum upload ease. Also, make sure your audio files are in MP3, WAV, or M4A format.
Need help uploading? Here’s a handy video walk-through.
3 tips to help you record the best audio for your Vyond animation
There’s a golden rule of audio recording: test, test, and test. Few things are worse than recording an entire script before realizing something wasn’t set up properly. Run a few test lines, and listen back before recording for extended periods.
But beyond testing your recordings over and over, there are a few additional best practices that can help you create like a total pro.
Reduce wind
Wind is one of the most common audio disrupters, even if it’s not audible to the naked ear. (This includes the wind coming out of your mouth when speaking.) For this reason—and many others—it’s worth investing in a proper external mic, plus a pop filter or windscreen.
A pop filter helps avoid the harsh “popping” wind that comes from P and B sounds, and a windscreen helps fend off any other wind sounds in your environment.
There are three types of windscreens you can use to improve sound quality: foam, windsock, and basket. A foam windscreen is a bare minimum, but it’ll do just fine for indoor recording. For outdoor recording, a furry windsock (aka “windjammer” or “dead cat”) or a net-like basket (aka “blimp”) will be a better solution.
Add sound cues
Since you’re planning to sync your audio with animations, it can be helpful to add sound cues when recording. These should be short and loud, like a clap or a beep tone.
In this case, you’d add a sound cue at the start of each scene in your audio recordings so you know exactly when to sync that audio with an action in the editing phase.
Record ambient sound
Lastly, record 10–15 seconds of ambient sound or “room tone.” Ambient sound is the natural sound that happens when no one’s talking, and it can be used to fill the empty space between scenes or when you run out of audio. You can also use it to smooth out pops, clicks, or other unwanted noise.
Also, don’t forget to add closed captions. Adding captions to your Vyond video can be a big deal, especially for synchronized media, which simply means a video with accompanying audio. To make your video accessible to both hearing and visually impaired viewers, you’ll need to add audio and closed captions in a separate text file.
Vyond enables you to create professional animation with little design knowledge. With the information above, you can create audio to go with your dynamic and functional animation, resulting in the complete package.
The sound of success
The best videos put quality first, and adding audio is no exception. Bring quality into focus by investing in the right equipment and software, being mindful of your scenes and their corresponding animations when scripting and recording, and uploading your (clearly named) recordings into Vyond scene by scene.
With lots of options for customizing your perfect visual-to-audio ratio, we’ve made it easy to create and deliver an exceptional audio experience, regardless of experience.
Start a free trial
#### Your Comprehensive Guide to Video Marketing
Video used to be the up-and-comer in marketing. It was new, flashy, and unexpected. Now, video marketing is a mainstay—nearly 50% of internet users look for videos about a product before making a purchase, and 74% of people say they’ve been convinced to buy or download a piece of software by watching a video.
The past few years have seen video consumption climb. Now that video is here to stay, it’s time for any holdouts to dive into video marketing. This guide will help you understand what video marketing is, why it’s important, and how to overcome video marketing challenges and find success with this medium. Lastly, we offer a sampling of free video marketing templates to help you start off on the right foot. First, what exactly is video marketing?
What is Video Marketing?
Video marketing is a type of content marketing that utilizes video to reach an audience. More specifically, video marketing is a core part of modern marketing and is useful for building brand awareness, reaching target audiences across a number of platforms, driving traffic to your brand’s site, and more.
Like traditional content marketing, video marketing can be used in a number of ways to achieve different goals.
Product videos
Product videos are similar to explainer videos, in that they explain how a product or service solves a problem. But product videos, also known as product demos, typically target people further along in the sales funnel by showing off specific product features. The Act-On video below is a great example:
The Act-On video begins almost like an explainer video by sharing pain points. But the video then takes a deeper dive and identifies specific features and shows how their software can help, which is much more in line with a product video.
Live videos
A live video is a real-time broadcast, typically on a social media platform, that gives viewers a chance to interact with a brand. Company leaders or frontline workers can host live videos and can use them to run contests, interact with customers, or, in the case of the Dunkin’ Donuts video below, show people how to do something fun.
Live videos are versatile and can be effective for brand engagement, brand awareness, and building buzz around your company. And if it’s not apparent in the Dunkin’ Donuts video above, live videos can be a blast! Web-based live streaming platforms like BeLive can be especially handy for anyone to promote their brand, interact with their audience and grow their community with live video.
Customer testimonials
Customer testimonials are videos that center on a brand’s clients singing their praises. Studies have found a positive online reputation can directly impact your business’s success, so creating customer testimonials is more important than ever before. The example below, from Dropbox, takes a unique approach by showcasing numerous customer testimonials at once:
Well-spoken customers who will resonate with your audience are one of the most important aspects of a customer testimonial — a point made clear in the Dropbox example.
User-generated videos
There are times when your best marketing videos come from your customers. User-generated content (UGC) videos are pieces of content that your customers create that you can then use to showcase your product, service, or brand in action—while also boosting your customer.
For example, Sylvia Longmire, founder of Spin the Globe Travel, created a video and Facebook post to promote her brand. In the post, she gave Vyond a lovely shout-out. We were able to then promote her post, which helped her social post and brand, and get our name out there as well.
User-generated content can vary in appearance, but, ultimately, it all helps build brand awareness in a very real way.
There are numerous additional video types, but the examples above get at the heart of video marketing. Ultimately, each type of video serves a different purpose, but all of them work toward one common goal: ensuring that your audience finds your brand. This is also the goal of traditional content marketing, so you might be thinking, “Why go through all the trouble to make video marketing content?” For more great examples of UGC have a look at GoPro and Bark Box‘s Instagram accounts.
Explainer videos
Explainer videos detail a new product or service or tell a company’s story via a short video. Explainer videos often use animation to reach potential customers by pointing out a common problem the target audience is having and how the company can solve that problem.
This generic video demonstrates some of the key elements of an effective explainer video. First, a problem is introduced, followed by an introduction of a solution. The rest of the video is dedicated to explaining that solution and calling viewers to action.
If you already have a Vyond account, you can use the video above as a template to create your own explainer video.
USE THIS EXPLAINER VIDEO TEMPLATE
Why is Video Marketing so Important?
Content marketing and SEO content are likely already a part of your current marketing tool kit. But video marketing is also important for a number of reasons, including:
Videos drive engagement. Video in a tweet can drive up engagement by 10x. Traction on social media can translate to traffic to your site, making video especially valuable here. Video ads also frequently outpace other ad formats in revenue. In short, video can increase the chances your marketing efforts pay off in the form of engagement.
People prefer video. Marketing surveys have shown that 66% of people prefer video over text when it comes to learning about a product or service. Because video is the preferred type of content, you’re already more likely to convert people using video versus text.
Video is versatile. You can use a video on a landing page, share it on social channels, and include it in email marketing efforts, giving you the chance to reach numerous audience segments. Keeping in mind the many types of videos outlined earlier, video is usable on virtually any channel, for any purpose. Because of its versatility, video delivers a lot of bang for your buck.
Mobile use is climbing. Believe it or not, the mobile market still has room to grow. About 5.7 billion people are slated to be using mobile devices by 2023. Many mobile devices play videos, meaning you can reach your audience from virtually anywhere with mobile videos.
Video helps with SEO. SEO, or search engine optimization, is the practice of optimizing content so it’s easier to find on Google. YouTube is second only to Google when it comes to search engine traffic, racking up more than 2 billion visitors each month. YouTube videos can show on Google and rank for certain keywords, which is great for brand awareness. Since YouTube is also the world’s second-largest search engine, a trending video on YouTube will also help brand awareness. When you make YouTube content that does well, it’s a win-win.
People love video, and with mobile use climbing, video is set to continue growing in importance. But, while video marketing is important for modern marketing success, video creation is still fraught with challenges.
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How to Overcome Common Video Marketing Challenges
Video used to be inaccessible to many businesses on account of cost, talent shortage, or equipment needs. Video is now more accessible than ever, but there are still common challenges when it comes to video creation and video marketing.
1. Lack of experience
All content can be cumbersome to create, whether it’s a blog post, infographic, or video. But video both figuratively and literally has a lot of moving parts, making it especially intimidating to those with little or no experience. Fortunately, there are steps to help anyone — even those with no experience — make a video.
Step back and plan ahead. Think about what it is you want to accomplish with your video, who your audience is, and what kind of message would resonate with them.
Make a script and storyboard, and think about what your budget can accommodate. Don’t worry if you have zero storyboarding experience. You’ll likely be the one looking at the storyboard, so it’s okay if it’s rough. The important thing is that your script and storyboard capture the message of the video and help you spot any problems before entering production.
Bring in backup when you can. If you don’t have anyone with video experience on hand, bring in a writer or designer or someone with some visual savvy to at least serve as an extra set of eyes. This person can look over your script and storyboard and tell you if there are any potential issues.
Take your time when making a video. Rushing can cause mistakes, and mistakes will only discourage you. Take things one step at a time!
There are a number of great video marketing resources online. Be sure to do some extensive reading before you even begin planning.
2. Budgetary constraints
Every company has a budget. Sure, video has become more affordable, but budget can still be a limiting factor for many video marketers. While you can’t change your budget, you can change your approach to video. If you’re envisioning a live-action video with a number of scene changes and actors, you could be looking at spending many thousands of dollars. An animated video, especially one made with software, would cost you only time and a subscription fee.
Marketing is never a guarantee, especially when you’re first trying a new tactic. Your first few videos have a lot to prove, including the value they can bring to the company. Because of this, keeping costs low is especially important. Consider using animation software and reduce the cost of your first video as much as possible. Once you’ve had one or two successful videos, you’ll be able to make a better case for a higher budget.
3. Human resource shortage
Video production can require a lot of hands. This is especially true for live-action videos, in which case you’ll need actors, a video editing crew, designers, and more. Even an animated video can require a lot of manpower if you’re not using software.
An animated video can entail hiring designers, animators, sound engineers, and voice actors. But with the right animation software, it’s possible to reduce the number of hands and the amount of time needed. For example, with Vyond, you can forgo a designer and an animator. That means a single person can create an animated video. This will help your budget and solve your human resource shortage.
There was a time when video was far more inaccessible; only those with extensive teams and plenty of funding could create videos. Today, video creation isn’t just accessible; it’s also possible from the comfort of your computer with a team of one. But knowing how to create videos is one thing. Knowing how to create effective video marketing is another.
Video Marketing Ideas for Success
Video marketing is a powerful tool, but only when used properly. With the right planning and a little know-how, you can have repeatable video marketing success. The following tips will have you on the right path to creating appealing and effective video marketing.
Be personable
Brands face an uphill battle when it comes to winning people over — 69% of people don’t trust ads. Fortunately, 83% of people trust personal recommendations. The solution to this issue of trust? Make content people want to share and others will be more likely to trust it. People don’t want cold brands — they want relatable, personable faces. Use a video to introduce yourself and your company to viewers and be personable.
It’s also important to make content that will resonate with your target audiences and entertain them or inform them. Viewers can then share your videos, and, as a result, their family and friends are more likely to pay attention to your content. Look at your target audiences on social media and see what kind of content they’re sharing. Use this information to inform your video creation efforts so you can make branded videos that are more likely to be shared.
Tell a story
Videos are a great medium for storytelling. Use your online video to weave a story that audiences can relate to. This is possible whether you’re pitching a product or service or introducing your brand to the world.
For example, if you’re marketing a service with a video, craft a story or scenario the viewer can relate to, and then pitch your product as a solution. The example below, from GM Voices, does a great job using Santa’s call center to drive their point home:
Notice in the video that the story is fantastical in setting but still relatable at its core. You can think way outside of the box and create a story that’s downright goofy; just make the problem relatable. None of us has been on hold trying to call Santa, but we’ve all had horrible customer support experiences. Couple that relatable problem with the fun narrative GM Voices created and you’ve got a shareable video.
Give customers a voice
Customer testimonial videos give your customers a chance to be the star. These videos are also a great way to engage potential buyers — after all, 88% of customers give reviews the same weight as a personal recommendation from a friend or family member.
If you’ve received a glowing review from a customer or personally know of a customer who has had a ton of success with your service or product, reach out and see if they’d be interested in a customer testimonial. You can also go the route of Dropbox and include numerous testimonials in a single video. The important thing is that you’re giving your customer the opportunity to share their honest account of their experience with your brand.
Give your employees a voice, too
If you have a small team, new additions to the company are a big deal. Similarly, it’s a big deal anytime someone joins your company in a leadership role. Use employee videos to give customers a chance to meet your team.
Not only will this help humanize your brand, but it will also give customers a chance to get to know your salespeople, even if they never meet face-to-face. This is also a great way to promote your company culture, which can help attract top talent to your company. Nearly half of the workforce considers culture to be “very important,” making employee videos a great opportunity to highlight what makes your company special.
Be everywhere
You can easily add videos to YouTube, proprietary players on your own site, Facebook, Instagram, and just about anywhere else. 55% of consumers head to YouTube for information before making a purchase. Think about where your audiences like to go and make sure your videos are available there. Your conversion rate and your brand will thank you for it.
The right video marketing strategy can take your brand a long way. The tips above will set you up for repeatable success, making it possible to score video marketing win after video marketing win. Now, to make your video creation process itself a little easier.
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4 Free Video Marketing Templates From Vyond
Templates can make the video creation process smoother, faster, and potentially more effective. Vyond makes it easy to plug into a template and start customizing right away. The following Vyond templates can help you achieve numerous marketing goals without requiring extensive time or animation knowledge. Click here to learn about how to use Vyond video templates.
Testimonial template
Customer testimonials are a great way to spread awareness while also giving your customers the kudos they deserve. Giving your customers a voice is easier than ever with this testimonial template:
Use this template
You can quickly brand this testimonial template with your logo and colors. From there, you can replace the actors with ones that match the customers, and you can plug in the customer’s audio testimonial. This is a great social video piece but should also be featured in a prominent spot on your site.
General sales template
If you have a promo you’d like to announce, this template provides a quick and easy way to get the word out.
Use this template
This template is especially great for social media; it’s short enough to be turned into a GIF, requires no sound to be effective, and can easily be shared. Simply plug in your own promo numbers and company info, change the colors to match your brand, and this video is ready to go!
Event promo template
Whether you’re hosting an in-person event or one online, you’ll need to spread the word. With this template, you can easily tell your audience about an upcoming event.
Use this template
You can replace the information in the template with the right time and date, as well as any venue information. Like the sales template, this video is short enough to easily use it on social media. It’s also perfect for embedding in an email and sending out to your mailing list.
Product/service promo template
Every product and service needs some time in the spotlight. This product and service promo template allows you to promote your latest products and services in a quick animated feature.
Use this template
You can swap out the props for your own custom product art or even your brand logo. From there, you can put in your own descriptions and give customers a quick look at what sets your product or service apart. This is great for including an email newsletter, plugging on social, or placing on your own site.
Moving Forward with Video Marketing
Video marketing is a valuable tool that makes repeatable marketing success possible. While your first foray into video marketing will likely take some time and resources, future efforts will become easier and more efficient. The effort can, and likely will, pay off in the form of a more engaged audience, more brand recognition, and higher sales. And the best part? You and your audience can have fun the entire journey.
Make animated videos part of your marketing success. Sign up for a free trial of Vyond.
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#### Your guide for how to build culture in a remote team with training videos
Culture is your onboarding process and the way you treat people from the moment they join your company. It’s the aesthetics of your website, and your brand as a whole. Culture comprises the policies and rules that dictate how you want people to carry themselves as representatives of your business.
In this post, we’ll cover five of the top five culture killers in the workplace today, offer solutions, share video training templates, and discuss how to create training that builds culture in a remote team.
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Addressing culture killers to improve remote team communication
A good culture can be a deciding factor in employees joining and remaining at a company, while a broken culture can lead to high turnover. COVID-19 changed the workplace landscape and culture expectations and the challenge to adapt presents a huge hurdle. After surveying 2,000 employees at large companies (500+ employees) we’ve identified a few key culture areas to focus on, so your company will not only survive but also thrive at remote work.
Employees want to feel connected, but not 24/7
The problem: Across generations, employees are reporting an improved work-life balance after shifting to a remote environment. Although, there are still frustrations: 40% of employees report feeling disconnected, 34% of employees report extra technical issues or delays, 34% of Gen Zers are working from their beds, work-life balance difficulties are disproportionately impacting women, and more.
The solution: It’s easy to work more than necessary from home, so it’s important for employees to create a work rhythm. Assess your team or company expectations and how you set an example. Are you respecting time-zone differences or do you expect employees to reply to emails and messages at all hours of the day? If so, it might be time to shift to more people-friendly policies.
Here’s a template video with tips for setting work boundaries and excelling at working from home. The video below shares a few creative ways you can help your team feel connected:
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Mental wellness is needed more than ever
The problem: Even though work-life balance has improved lately, many employees are struggling with increased anxiety and uncertainty from factors both within and outside of work. It’s easy to feel disconnected from your team when they’re little more than heads in a video call or names in a chat window. While you could write off this feeling of isolation as a symptom of being remote, some work-related isolation can be remedied with improved communication.
The solution: Despite being online and no longer in the office, you can gather a lot of contextual clues on how your teammates are feeling from their nonverbal communication. Note how your teammates appear during video calls. Do they looking happy and well-rested? Or do they seem stressed and run down?
Set up regular check-ins with your team, and give them time to have a quality one-on-one conversation with you. Use this time to see how they’re doing, and really get a feel for whether or not they’re doing well. This is also a great time to lead by example and tell your team what you’re doing to practice mental wellness.
Get the video template and watch the 5-part remote training course on mental health training for remote teams here.
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Kids and remote work needs to be addressed
The problem: Remote work is an entirely new way of working and living for many people. Our survey revealed some very clear differences between generations when it comes to expectations around remote work and children.
Kids often make uninvited video-call appearances. For some of us, it’s an adorable distraction and a cheerful surprise. For others, well, not so much. Twenty-six percent of respondents believe kids on video calls are an etiquette violation, a whopping 33% of boomers say kids shouldn’t be on video calls. This clashes heavily with Gen Zers, with only 11% of them feeling kids on calls are an etiquette gaffe.
The solution: You never know what others are going through—especially on a remote team. It’s important to be considerate and empathetic toward others. Those with children at home may be unable to get help or may be dealing with any number of situations. Effective remote collaboration across teams depends on having explicit discussions about empathy and team norms. Start the conversation with your teammates and nudge employees towards empathy:
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Company training needs are evolving
The problem: Even prior to the pandemic, employees most preferred self-led online training (51%). And increasingly since work from home began for many employees, workers are seeking training methods outside PowerPoint and wishing their company would implement video training.
When it comes to training topics, some company training course topics are matching what employees are seeking (courses on ethics, data security, and mental health), but some needs are quickly changing and going unmet (management in a remote environment, health safety, having difficult conversations with superiors).
The solution: Consistent, timely, and clear communication is key. Make it a point to ask your team for feedback on remote training and internal communications. Make it a point to dedicate time to addressing evolving employee needs. According to our survey, employees are seeking to learn about health safety (53%), technical skills (48%), and mental health and self-care (45%).
Also, since it can be especially difficult for younger employees to manage up to their superiors in a remote environment, here’s a video to help employees overcome difficult conversations with their manager:
Get this video template
People could use a vacation, but most workers aren’t taking one
The problem: Most people dream about taking vacations, but do they ever actually take them? The survey says, “Nope.”
While 58% stated prior to the pandemic they couldn’t take vacations because of their workload, the vacation woes didn’t end there. Another 27% claimed that guilt about taking a vacation was their main motivator for throwing away PTO.
Most problematic? 20% of employees claim that their employer shames those who use all their vacation time. This type of culture can leave employees overworked and burnt out.
The solution: Once again, this is an issue that can be remedied via clear communication. Drive home the importance of vacation and mental wellness from the moment people are hired. This is also a great time to lead by example. Take time off yourself, and encourage others in leadership positions to take time off—doing so can send a signal to others that time off is completely acceptable. Setting clear expectations can be helpful:
Get this video template
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How to create training that builds culture in a remote team
Remote work culture is a nuanced area and, as such, requires nuanced training. Video is a great way to communicate complex topics, making it ideal for your training. But what should you specifically cover, and how should you cover it?
The template videos above help, but the following tips will help you create thorough custom training materials that cover the necessities and curb future culture issues at your specific company.
Use the right training format
Presentation is often everything. This is especially true in remote training, where you no longer have the benefit of in-person connection.
In our survey, we found 48% wanted to see more video training implemented and 39% said they preferred self-led video training courses. So, before you open up another PowerPoint, consider if you could send a video instead. Or as a start, how about adding video to your PowerPoint presentations?
Keep this in mind as you develop your training content. Animation is accessible and easy with Vyond and can be paired with Articulate Storyline 360 to create interactive remote training courses. This allows you to give your team the training they want, with the freedom to tackle it when it’s most convenient for their schedule.
Also, consider rewarding your team with something fun if they complete their training first, or at all. Even a tiny gift, such as a custom pin with your company’s logo or a gift card, can be a nice way to keep morale high.
Cover the basics
Videos are also an effective way to communicate your sick time and vacation policies. It’s easy for these kinds of policies to feel dense, but with a video, you can quickly break down use cases with animated scenarios. For example, take a look at this breakdown of parental leave policy.
Communicate additional policies clearly
Be sure to communicate additional policies your workplace may have, such as device use, conference call etiquette, appropriate Slack chat, and so on.
No two workplaces are the same, so what worked at one place may not fly at your current workplace. Use animated training videos to play out scenarios demonstrating which behaviors are and aren’t okay. For example, you can create a training scenario that depicts your company’s retaliation policy.
Use animated videos to keep the tone light
Animated videos can also lighten the mood when dealing with serious, complex issues. This can make your audience (i.e., your employees) feel more at ease when learning about the subject.
For example, see how bedside manner is approached in a simple but helpful way with this video.
Many topics, like harassment and retaliation, can be difficult to broach for both employers and employees. An animated video makes it possible to get the tone just right without making light of a serious situation or being melodramatic when being somber is needed.
Pair text with training videos
Text based assets paired with training videos makes the content easy to revisit, search through, and reference when needed. Effective documentation alongside video training allows your team to access information at their own pace or fill any knowledge gaps that may have developed over time (everyone needs a refresher from time to time).
Not only that, but text also helps reading-based learners absorb the material, while the animated video assists your visual learners. This increases the chances your team is actually absorbing the information you’re sharing.
A happier, healthier workplace
Create proper training to ensure that your team is on the same page. We’re all human, and it’s possible that people are still harboring frustrations even after thorough training. But with enough patience and vigilance, you can avoid having a workplace that feels on edge, sick, and in dire need of a vacation.
To use the template videos in this post, sign in to Vyond Studio or start a free trial. Then learn more about how to use Vyond video templates.
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#### Your Guide to Developing an Effective Employee Training Program
The right training acts as the foundation for a successful team. But a poor training experience could cause employees to leave en masse and cost your company a fortune. In fact, more than half of employees stated they would leave a job if companies didn’t offer the required training.
Fortunately, an effective employee training program is within reach for companies, whether they’re remote or in-office, as long as you take the appropriate steps.
At the core of these steps is a single principle: the human element. Every business is unique, filled with different people who have different needs. Build an employee training program based on your team’s needs and not anyone else’s. There are multiple steps to take that ensure you build training around the people who make your company tick.
Determine your team’s needs
Companies often use training as a remedy for a problem. For example, if you notice customers are unhappy with the experience they’re receiving from your salespeople, train your sales team on customer interactions.
But training doesn’t have to be reactionary. Existing employees are the ultimate resource for figuring out which learning gaps to fill. This information allows you to get ahead of those knowledge gaps and prevent a problem before it’s, well, a problem.
First, survey existing employees and ask them about any training shortcomings they experienced when they first joined your company. Ask them what they wish they knew before getting into the role and about their struggles. Take note of each response and highlight any repeated answers or themes. It’s also a good idea to talk to managers or department heads. Ask them about any shortcomings they notice in their team, or if recurring problems arise.
For example, an employee survey or even casual conversation might show there’s a large amount of misunderstanding around recent sales goals. Businesses can turn this knowledge into a training course on the latest sales goals.
Then ask your employees what kinds of training they felt were most effective, and if there are any training styles or content types they’d like to see more of. It’s possible the content of your training isn’t the issue, but the format is.
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Set objectives for your training programs
Once you’ve identified your company’s needs, it’s time to create attainable objectives for your training.
Start by speaking with department heads and leaders within your company to see what unmet business goals exist. For example, let’s say the marketing head tells you their department is struggling to use a new email marketing platform. This issue is a clear indicator that the team needs training on that tool.
Next, couple the unmet business goals or needs with the employee requests from the previous step. Use this combination to create objectives that fulfill training shortcomings while also achieving business goals.
For example, let’s say your team wants more video-based training. Meanwhile, your sales director mentioned that many customers have complained about the length of the sales process. With these two pieces of information, you could create a video training series that focuses on organization and efficiency within sales.
Utilize web-based learning
The definition of a modern workplace is rapidly evolving. Co-located offices are quickly becoming a thing of the past, meaning training needs to go digital (where it hasn’t already). This is where web-based learning comes in. Although digital training is a crucial next step, you’ll need to put a few things in place before diving into web-based learning.
The right learning management system (LMS) allows you to host courses online and track employee performance. Many LMS platforms even support gamification, which is a huge motivator for employees. In fact, 83% of people feel more motivated to complete training when it’s gamified.
Once your LMS is in place, you’re ready to make the training materials. Create courses that are widely usable across various LMS platforms. SCORM compliance is popular and secure and ensures your courses are compatible with most platforms.
With Vyond, you can export your video as a SCORM package and upload it directly into your LMS, no special conversion tools or separate authoring tools required.
As part of the SCORM package download, you can also add completion criteria directly within Vyond. This is one of the most common metrics and it’s another way Vyond can help instructional designers simplify workflow.
Vyond supports both SCORM 1.2 and SCORM 2004.v4, and you can export the format you want to create the course tracking and analytics you need. To learn more about the differences between the two formats, check out this page.
If you’re unsure where to start, read up on eLearning best practices and go from there. (Also, consider using a template to save yourself the time of making things from scratch.)
Lastly, take advantage of the digital format and make interactive courses. Interactive courses allow your team to engage with the learning and test out their knowledge in various scenarios. And creating this level of interactivity is easier than ever.
For example, you can create an interactive video animation with Vyond and Articulate Storyline 360. This combo makes it possible to create high-quality animation with branching storylines that your users can navigate through. The end result is an engaging learning experience that lends itself to repeat viewings.
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Measure objectives with specific training metrics
Before you launch any training, it’s important you know what it is you’re going to track. Training metrics are the best way to tell if a course is working and to get insights on how to make your course more effective.
While many companies have specific metrics they want to track, there are a few you can’t miss:
Completion rate: Track the completion rate to see if your team’s completing the course. If the rate is anything but 100%, see what kind of communication your team has received around the training. Do people know about the training, or has it been sitting on your intranet with no promotion?
Time to complete: Your team needs to complete their training, but it’s important that it’s not taking up all of their time. Keep a close eye on the completion time for each course to ensure it’s not a massive time sink.
Course ratings: Most LMS platforms give people the option to rate a course after they finish it. See what kinds of feedback and ratings your courses are getting to look for areas of improvement. It’s also a good idea to request feedback via email or through surveys to your employees.
Drop-off rate: If the completion is anything but 100%, there’s a good chance people are dropping off somewhere. Use your LMS to see what the drop-off rate is and what section is keeping people from finishing. This likely indicates a problem with the course. It could be too long, too difficult, or not rewarding enough.
Engagement: Look at the completion rate, time spent on courses, comments, and feedback to get a sense of the overall course engagement. It’s safe to say engagement’s climbing if all of those numbers are also climbing.
As you create and launch course after course, take note of any knowledge gaps you have around metrics and engagement. If you find yourself questioning a certain aspect of your course’s performance, research additional metrics to track in the future.
Iterate on future course efforts
Your first course, or even the first few courses, will be largely experimental. You’re seeing what does and doesn’t work and what your team does and doesn’t like. What’s important is that you’re learning from these eLearning courses, too.
Track each course’s performance, take note of the reviews and feedback your team leaves, and apply this knowledge to each future course.
A lot of effort goes into creating an eLearning course, and by tracking the progress of each one and expanding on future efforts, you’re ensuring that’s time and effort well spent.
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Remote work has grown 44% in five years, not counting the workplace shifts brought about by COVID-19. It’s not enough for training to be effective. Training needs to be future-proofed. Going digital and embracing video are two of the best ways to deliver a great experience today and for years to come. They’re also two great steps toward developing an effective employee training program.
Video used to be costly to create, but with Vyond’s animation platform, it’s more affordable and easier than ever before. Vyond is easy to use, empowering those with no design or animation experience with the ability to create beautiful, engaging videos.
Digital learning, and the general digital transformation, isn’t a trend — it’s here to stay. Vyond makes it possible to go digital, create engaging content, and save time. Start your free trial and see how easy it is to plug into the digital world of remote training.
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#### 日本コンテンツパック
日本コンテンツパック
寿司から富士山まで、その他さまざまなアイテムを含む日本コンテンツパックが到着しました！今年は、非常に多くの日本に関連するコンテンツのリクエストをいただきました。そこで、背景、プロップ、衣服、アクションなど多数を揃えたコレクションをご用意しました。これらの新作アイテムの制作を手がけたチームは、今、日本を訪れることを夢見ており、ラーメンの消費量が飛躍的に増えています！
Business Friendlyに新しく追加された日本コンテンツのリストは次のとおりです。
プロップ：新幹線、信号機、家庭用品を含む174種のプロップ
背景：ショップや旅行先を含む9種の背景
キャラクタークリエーターアイテム：浴衣やユニフォームを含む15種類の上半身アイテム、8種類の下半身アイテム、6種類のフィートアイテム、8種類の顔デコレーションアイテム
大人のアクション：扇子を使う、両手で名刺を出すなど、大人のための37種類の新アクション
以下のショーリールテンプレートには、次のものもあります。
日本各地に合わせた15種類のテンプレートシーン
本リリースの衣服を着用した96人のキャラクター
Use this video template >
Use this video template >
ヘルプセンターでは日本語とその他の言語が利用できます
Vyondヘルプセンターは新たに9つの言語をサポートし、より多くの製作者が希望の言語でサポートを受けられるようになりました。英語、または最近追加された言語のいずれかに切り替えることができます。
アラビア語
簡体字中国語
繁体字中国語
フランス語
ドイツ語
イタリア語
日本語
ブラジル ポルトガル語
スペイン語
日本語で検索
ライブラリ内のアイテムを日本語のキーワードで検索できるようになりました！プロップやアクションの大部分をカバーするためにテストを行っていますが、もちろん最新の日本をテーマにしたアセットはすべて日本語で検索可能な状態になっています。
### Pages
#### About
URL: https://www.vyond.com/company/about/
#### Absorb
Absorb
Enhance training effectiveness by combining Vyond’s engaging, AI-powered animated video content with Absorb’s robust learning management capabilities, resulting in more interactive, memorable, and scalable e-learning experiences that improve knowledge retention and learner engagement.
How to upload a video to Absorb.
Log into your Absorb LMS portal as an Administrator.
Navigate to the Admin Experience.
Open the Courses menu from the left-hand side.
Select Courses from the menu.
Choose an existing Online Course or create a new one.
On the Add/Edit Online Course page, scroll down to the Syllabus section.
Select Add Learning Object.
Select Video from the Learning Object options.
Select Next.
Upload your video file. Max file size is 2GB.
Fill in the relevant details in the General, Video, and Options sections.
Save your changes.
Try our other powerful integrations.
Slack
Use Vyond’s text to video in Slack to instantly take your concepts from prompt to screen.
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Google Docs
Use document to video to effortlessly transform your Google doc into an engaging video.
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Zapier
Automate your video creation workflow by pairing with 7,000+ productivity apps and tools in Zapier.
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#### Accessibility
Instant, Effortless Videos for Everyone.
At Vyond, our goal is to put the most innovative tools at the fingertips of everyone who needs them — to make it easier than ever to create impactful videos that drive better results. That’s why we’re 100% committed to accessibility, and usability, for everyone.
If you happen to experience an accessibility issue in Vyond, we’d really appreciate your feedback. Contact us at our Support Center.
Accessibility Conformance Report (ACR) and Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT)
s508 accessibility information for app.vyond.com.
The latest Accessibility Conformance Report (ACR) for Vyond is available for download below, and was produced in April 2024 following the VPAT v2.5® International template format.
The scope and key user flows that were covered in the test:
Sign up page
Login page
Home page (Browse, search and download videos)
Your videos page (Browse, search and download videos)
Vyond Go page (Create a video)
Video page (Preview, edit and download videos)
Vyond Studio was not covered in the assessment.
All testing was conducted using an independent external auditor. Conformance to WCAG 2.1 A and AA accessibility standards was evaluated using a combination of automated analysis tools and manual testing along with assistive technologies by certified testers.
Vyond is always adding and improving features. And while we aim to keep our VPAT up-to-date, it’s not always immediately possible. This means our VPAT may temporarily reflect outdated, redesigned or redundant features. If you find an error or omission from our VPAT, please contact us using the above information.
Download the April 2024 Accessibility Conformance Report (ACR) for Vyond
65% of the Fortune 500 and millions of users rely on Vyond.
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#### Affiliate Program
Vyond Affiliate Partner Program
Partner with Vyond as we change the way the world communicates, one video at a time.
Join the Vyond Affiliate Program Today
Your success is our success.
Vyond firmly believes that our success is tied to the success of our affiliate partners. Because of this belief, we treat you with as much care as we treat our customers. Join the Vyond affiliate program today and start earning commissions by telling your audience about our effortless, all-in-one AI video creation platform for business.
Earn a commission with each purchase. Program benefits:
Unique Tracking Code
Direct traffic to Vyond with a 90-day, cookie-based affiliate tracking code.
Revenue Share
Earn a competitive 15% commission rate on monthly & annual subscriptions for Vyond.
Monthly Payout
Automatically receive commissions monthly via PayPal with a $500 threshold.
Secure Affiliate Portal
Log in to Vyond’s affiliate portal to access your unique tracking link and track sales across KPIs in real-time.
Advanced Analytics
Vyond’s affiliate portal provides the advanced analytics you need to optimize performance.
Marketing and Sales Support
Exclusive newsletters with unique content, access to a library of banner ads and Vyond images, and access to Vyond promotions.
How do I know if I qualify?
We are seeking affiliates that are positioned within the B2B space and maintain active websites. Partners in training & development, marketing, and human resources are especially of interest to us.
Our affiliate partnerships team will be happy to answer any of your questions about joining our program. Please note that if you did not receive a confirmation email, your application may not have been completed properly or the email might be in your spam email folder. Email our affiliate team at vyond@accelerationpartners.com with any questions.
If you are unfamiliar with how affiliate marketing works, reference these FAQs for more information.
We are looking forward to working together!
Become an affiliate.
Become an Affiliate
Affiliate Terms
#### Affiliate Terms and Conditions
Affiliate Terms and Conditions
Affiliate Program Operating Agreement This Affiliate Program Operating Agreement (the “Agreement”) is made and entered into by and between GoAnimate, Inc. (“GoAnimate” or “we”), and you, (“you” or “Affiliate”) the party submitting an application to become a GoAnimate affiliate). The terms and conditions contained in this Agreement apply to your participation with affiliates.goanimate.com (“Affiliate Program”). Each Affiliate Program offer (an “Offer”) may be for any offering by GoAnimate or a third party (each such third party a “Client”) and may link to a specific web site for that particular Offer (“Program Web Site”). Furthermore, each Offer may have additional terms and conditions on pages within the Affiliate Program and are incorporated as part of this Agreement. By submitting an application or participating in an Offer, you expressly consent to all the terms and conditions of this Agreement.
Enrollment in the Affiliate Program
You must submit an Affiliate Program application from our website. You must accurately complete the application to become an affiliate (and provide us with future updates) and not use any aliases or other means to mask your true identity or contact information. After we review your application, we will notify you of your acceptance or rejection to the Affiliate Program, generally within two (2) business days. We may accept or reject your application at our sole discretion for any reason.
Obligations of the Parties Subject to our acceptance of you as an affiliate and your continued compliance with the terms and conditions of this Agreement, GoAnimate agrees as follows:
We will make available to you via the Affiliate Program graphic and textual links to the Program Web Site and/or other creative materials (collectively, the “Links”) which you may display on web sites owned or controlled by you, and in online advertisements (collectively, “Media”). The Links will serve to identify you as a member of our Affiliate Program and will establish a link from your Media to the Program Web Site.
We will pay Affiliate for each Qualified Action (the “Commission”). A “Qualified Action” means an individual person who (i) accesses the Program Web Site via the Link, where the Link is the last link to the Program Web Site, (ii) is not a computer generated user, such as a robot, spider, computer script or other automated, artificial or fraudulent method to appear like an individual, real live person, (iii) is not using pre-populated fields (iv) completes all of the information required for such action within the time period allowed by GoAnimate and (v) is not later determined by GoAnimate to be fraudulent, incomplete, unqualified or a duplicate. For the purpose of clarity, it is understood that Qualified Actions are limited to an individual person’s first transaction on a Program Web Site. Automated or manual renewals, for instance, would not be considered a Qualified Action under this agreement.
We will pay you any Commissions earned 60 days after the Qualified Action, provided that your account balance is currently greater than $500. Accounts with a balance of less than $500 will roll over to the next month, and will continue to roll over monthly until $500 is reached. We reserve the right to charge back to your account any previously paid Qualified Actions that are later determined to have not met the requirements to be a Qualified Action.
Payment for Commissions is dependent upon Clients providing such funds to GoAnimate, and therefore, you agree that GoAnimate shall only be liable to you for Commissions to the extent that GoAnimate has received such funds from the Clients. You hereby release GoAnimate from any claim for Commissions if GoAnimate has not received such funds from the Clients.
GoAnimate shall automatically generate an invoice on behalf of Affiliate for all Commissions payable under this Agreement and shall remit payment to Affiliate based upon that invoice. All tracking of Links and determinations of Qualified Actions and Commissions shall be made by GoAnimate in its sole discretion. In the event that Affiliate disputes in good faith any portion of an invoice, Affiliate must submit that dispute to GoAnimate in writing and in sufficient detail within thirty (30) days of the date on the invoice. If Affiliate does not dispute the invoice as set forth herein, then Affiliate agrees that it irrevocably waives any claims based upon that invoice. In the event that Affiliate is also tracking Qualified Actions and Affiliate claims a discrepancy, Affiliate must provide GoAnimate with Affiliate’s reports within three (3) days after 30th day of the calendar month, and if GoAnimate’s and Affiliate’s reported statistics vary by more than 10% and GoAnimate reasonably determines that Affiliate has used generally accepted industry methods to track Qualified Actions, then GoAnimate and Affiliate agree to make a good faith effort to arrive at a reconciliation. If the parties are unable to arrive at a reconciliation, then GoAnimate’s numbers shall govern.
If Affiliate has an outstanding balance due to GoAnimate under this Agreement or any other agreement between the Affiliate and GoAnimate, whether or not related to the Affiliate Program, Affiliate agrees that GoAnimate may offset any such amounts due to GoAnimate from amounts payable to Affiliate under this Agreement.
Affiliate also agrees to:
Have sole responsibility for the development, operation, and maintenance of, and all content on or linked to, your Media.
Ensure that all materials posted on your Media or otherwise used in connection with the Affiliate Program (i) are not illegal, (ii) do not infringe upon the intellectual property or personal rights of any third party and (iii) do not contain or link to any material which is harmful, threatening, defamatory, obscene, sexually explicit, harassing, promotes violence, promotes discrimination (whether based on sex, religion, race, ethnicity, nationality, disability or age), promotes illegal activities (such as gambling), contains profanity or otherwise contains materials that GoAnimate informs you that it considers objectionable (collectively, “Objectionable Content”).
Not make any representations, warranties or other statements concerning GoAnimate or Client or any of their respective products or services, except as expressly authorized herein.
Make sure that your Media does not copy or resemble the look and feel of the Program Web Site or create the impression that your Media is endorsed by GoAnimate or Clients or a part of the Program Web Site, without prior written permission from us.
Comply with all (i) obligations, requirements and restrictions under this Agreement and (ii) laws, rules and regulations as they relate to your business, your Media or your use of the Links.
Comply with the terms, conditions, guidelines and policies of any third party services used by Affiliate in connection with the Affiliate Program, including but not limited to, email providers, social networking services and ad networks.
Always prominently post and make available to end-users, including prior to the collection of any personally identifiable information, a privacy policy in compliance with all applicable laws that clearly and thoroughly discloses all information collection, use and sharing practices, including providing for the collection of such personally identifiable information in connection with the Affiliate Program and the provision of such personally identifiable information to GoAnimate and Clients for use as intended by GoAnimate and Clients.
Always prominently post and make available to end-users any terms and conditions in connection with the Offer set forth by GoAnimate or Client, or as required by applicable laws regarding such Offers.
Make sure to not place GoAnimate or Vyond ads on any online auction platform (i.e. eBay, Amazon, etc).
Ensure that its officers, employees, agents and subcontractors do not, use the GoAnimate or Vyond brand(a) in or as the whole or part of its own or other trade marks(b) in connection with activities, products or services not related to this Agreement(c) in a manner which may be confusing, misleading or deceptive,(d) in a manner which disparages GoAnimate, its products or services; or(e) otherwise than in accordance with this Agreement.
Submit a copy of all material to be displayed on your Media that refers to GoAnimate or Vyond brands (except that which was obtained directly from GoAnimate) for approval prior to publication and must not make any material changes to any material that has been approved.
only refer to GoAnimate as ‘Vyond.com’ or ‘Powered by Vyond.com’ (or as otherwise required by GoAnimate from time to time) in all material that refers to GoAnimate.
include in such material that refers to GoAnimate such wording and in such location as GoAnimate may require to conform with the requirements of any applicable law or the rule of any governing body;
obtain GoAnimate’s prior written consent to create, publish, distribute or use any written, electronically transmitted or other form of publicity that makes reference to GoAnimate.
Not attempt to create, register, purchase, or obtain, directly or indirectly, any trademark, service mark, trade name, company name, internet domain name, search engine listing, directory listing, meta tag, name that redirects traffic to the Affiliate Media, or other proprietary or commercial right that is identical or confusingly similar to any GoAnimate brands, trademarks, domains, or any variations or misspellings thereof, specifically including but not limited to the GoAnimate and Vyond brands;
Not purchase or bid for placement of “GoAnimate”, “GoAnimate.com”, “Vyond”, “Vyond.com”, or any variation or misspelling thereof as keywords, or the name of any GoAnimate-affiliated brand or trademark, specifically including but not limited to the GoAnimate and Vyond brands, within any third party search engine, advertising network, affiliate network or portal;
Not use unsolicited email (“spam”), spyware (marketing software programs that collect information about a consumer’s internet activities without their consent or knowledge) or adware (executable applications that deliver advertising content or are bundled with applications that deliver advertising content) in their marketing activities.
Not make any attempt to tempt, lure, automatically or forcefully divert visitors away from any GoAnimate or Vyond branded site or GoAnimate or Vyond branded pages on a third-party site.
The following additional program-specific terms shall apply to any promotional programs set forth below:
Email Campaigns. All Email Campaigns are prohibited.
Advertising Campaigns. No Links can appear to be associated with or be positioned on chat rooms or bulletin boards unless otherwise agreed by GoAnimate in writing. Any pop-ups/unders used for the Affiliate Program shall be clearly identified as Affiliate served in the title bar of the window and any client-side ad serving software used by Affiliate shall only have been installed on an end-user’s computer if the function of the software is clearly disclosed to end-users prior to installation, the installation is pursuant to an affirmatively accepted and plain-English end user license agreement and the software be easily removed according to generally accepted methods.
Affiliate Network Campaigns. For all Affiliate’s that maintain their own affiliate networks, Affiliate agrees to place the Links in its affiliate network (the “Network”) for access and use by those affiliates in Affiliate’s Network (each a “Third Party Affiliate”). Affiliate agrees that it will expressly forbid any Third Party Affiliate to modify the Links in any way. Affiliate agrees to maintain its Network according to the highest industry standards. Affiliate shall not permit any party to be a Third Party Affiliate whose web site or business model involves content containing Objectionable Content. All Third Party Affiliates must be in good standing with Affiliate. Affiliate must require and confirm that all Third Party Affiliates affirmatively accept, through verifiable means, this Agreement prior to obtaining access to the Links. Affiliate shall promptly terminate any Third Party Affiliate who takes, or could reasonably be expected to take, any action that violates the terms and conditions of this Agreement. In the event that either party suspects any wrongdoing by a Third Party Affiliate with respect to the Links, Affiliate shall promptly disclose to GoAnimate the identity and contact information for such Third Party Affiliate. Affiliate shall promptly remove any Third Party Affiliate from the Affiliate Program and terminate their access to future Offers of GoAnimate in the Network upon written notice from GoAnimate. Unless GoAnimate has been provided with all truthful and complete contact information for a Third Party Affiliate and such Third Party Affiliate has affirmatively accepted this Agreement as recorded by GoAnimate, Affiliate shall remain liable for all acts or omissions of any Third Party Affiliate.
Confidentiality
Except as otherwise provided in this Agreement or with the consent of GoAnimate, you agree that all information, including, without limitation, the terms of this Agreement, business and financial information, customer and vendor lists, and pricing and sales information, concerning us or any of our affiliates provided by or on behalf of any of them shall remain strictly confidential and secret and shall not be utilized, directly or indirectly, by you for any purpose other than your participation in the Affiliate Program, except and solely to the extent that any such information is generally known or available to the public through a source other than you. Affiliate shall not use any information obtained from the Affiliate Program to develop, enhance or operate a service that competes with the Affiliate Program, or assist another party to do the same.
Limited License & Intellectual Property
We grant you a nonexclusive, nontransferable, revocable right to use the Links and to access our web site through the Links solely in accordance with the terms of this Agreement, for the sole purpose of identifying your Media as a participant in the Affiliate Program and assisting in increasing sales through the Program Web Site.
You may not alter, modify, manipulate or create derivative works of the Links or any GoAnimate graphics, creative, copy or other materials owned by, or licensed to, GoAnimate in any way. You are only entitled to use the Links to the extent that you are a member in good standing of the Affiliate Program. We may revoke your license anytime by giving you written notice. Except as expressly stated herein, nothing in this Agreement is intended to grant you any rights to any of GoAnimate’s trademarks, service marks, copyrights, patents or trade secrets. You agree that GoAnimate may use any suggestion, comment or recommendation you choose to provide to GoAnimate without compensation. All rights not expressly granted in this Agreement are reserved by GoAnimate.
Termination
This Agreement shall commence on the date of our approval of your Affiliate Program application and shall continue thereafter until terminated as provided herein. You may terminate your participation in the Affiliate Program at any time by removing all Links from your Media, deleting all copies of the Links. We may terminate your participation in one or more Offers or this Agreement at any time and for any reason which we deem appropriate with or without prior notice to you by disabling the Links or providing you with a written notice. Upon termination of your participation in one or more Offers or this Agreement for any reason, you will immediately cease all use of and delete all Links, plus all GoAnimate or Client intellectual property, and will cease representing yourself as a GoAnimate or Client affiliate for such one or more Offers. All rights to validly accrued payments, causes of action and any provisions, which by their terms are intended to survive termination, shall survive any termination.
Remedies
In addition to any other rights and remedies available to us under this Agreement GoAnimate reserves the right to delete any actions submitted through your Links and withhold and freeze any unpaid Commissions or charge back paid Commissions to your account if (i) GoAnimate determines that you have violated this Agreement, (ii) GoAnimate receives any complaints about your participation in the Affiliate Program which GoAnimate reasonably believes to violate this Agreement or (iii) any Qualified Action is later determined to have not met the requirements set forth in this Agreement or on the Affiliate Program. Such withholding or freezing of Commissions, or charge backs for paid Commissions, shall be without regard as to whether or not such Commissions were earned as a result of such breach. In the event of a material breach of this Agreement, GoAnimate reserves the right to disclose your identity and contact information to appropriate law enforcement or regulatory authorities or any third party that has been directly damaged by your actions.
Anti-Spam Policy
You must strictly comply with the federal CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 (the “Act”). All emails sent in connection with the Affiliate Program must include the appropriate party’s opt-out link. From time to time, we may request – prior to your sending emails containing linking or referencing the Affiliate Program that you submit the final version of your email to GoAnimate for approval by sending it to your GoAnimate representative and upon receiving written approval from GoAnimate of your email the email may be transmitted to third parties.
It is solely your obligation to ensure that the email complies with the Act. You agree not to rely upon GoAnimate’s approval of your email for compliance with the Act, or assert any claim that you are in compliance with the Act based upon GoAnimate’s approval.
Fraud
You are expressly prohibited from using any persons, means, devices or arrangements to commit fraud, violate any applicable law, interfere with other affiliates or falsify information in connection with referrals through the Links or the generation of Commissions or exceed your permitted access to the Affiliate Program. Such acts include, but are in no way limited to, using automated means to increase the number of clicks through the Links or completion of any required information, using spyware, using stealware, cookie-stuffing and other deceptive acts or click-fraud. GoAnimate shall make all determinations about fraudulent activity in its sole discretion.
Representations and Warranties
You hereby represent and warrant that this Agreement constitutes your legal, valid, and binding obligation, enforceable against you in accordance with its terms and that you have the authority to enter into this Agreement. Subject to the other terms and conditions of this Agreement, GoAnimate represents and warrants that it shall not knowingly violate any law, rule or regulation which is applicable to GoAnimate’s own business operations or GoAnimate’s proprietary products or services.
Modifications
In addition to any notice permitted to be given under this Agreement, we may modify any of the terms and conditions of this Agreement at any time by providing you with a notification by email. The changes will become effective ten (10) business days after such notice. If the modifications are unacceptable to you, you may terminate this Agreement without penalty solely on the account of such termination within such ten (10) business day period. Your continued participation in this Affiliate Program ten (10) business days after a change notice has been posted will constitute your acceptance of such change. In addition, GoAnimate may change, suspend or discontinue any aspect of an Offer or Link or remove, alter, or modify any tags, text, graphic or banner ad in connection with a Link. Affiliate agrees to promptly implement any request from GoAnimate to remove, alter or modify any Link, graphic or banner ad that is being used by Affiliate as part of the Affiliate Program.
Independent Investigation
You acknowledge that you have read this Agreement and agree to all its terms and conditions. You have independently evaluated the desirability of participating in the Affiliate Program and each Offer and are not relying on any representation, guarantee or statement other than as set forth in this Agreement or on the Affiliate Program.
Mutual Indemnification
Affiliate hereby agrees to indemnify, defend and hold harmless GoAnimate and Clients and their respective subsidiaries, affiliates, partners and licensors, directors, officers, employees, owners and agents against any and all claims, actions, demands, liabilities, losses, damages, judgments, settlements, costs, and expenses (including reasonable attorneys’ fees and costs) based on (i) any failure or breach of this Agreement, including any representation, warranty, covenant, restriction or obligation made by Affiliate herein, (ii) any misuse by Affiliate, or by a party under the reasonable control of Affiliate or obtaining access through Affiliate, of the Links, Offers or GoAnimate or Client intellectual property, or (iii) any claim related to your Media, including but not limited to, the content contained on such Media (except for the Links).
GoAnimate hereby agrees to indemnify, defend and hold harmless Affiliate and its subsidiaries, affiliates, partners, and their respective directors, officers, employees, owners and agents against any and all claims, actions, demands, liabilities, losses, damages, judgments, settlements, costs, and expenses (including reasonable attorneys’ fees and costs) based on a claim that GoAnimate is not authorized to provide you with the Links.
Disclaimers
THE AFFILIATE PROGRAM AND LINKS, AND THE PRODUCTS AND SERVICES PROVIDED IN CONNECTION THEREWITH, ARE PROVIDED TO AFFILIATE “AS IS”. EXCEPT AS EXPRESSLY SET FORTH HEREIN, GOANIMATE EXPRESSLY DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES, EXPRESS, IMPLIED OR STATUTORY, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, AND NONINFRINGEMENT, AND ANY WARRANTIES ARISING OUT OF COURSE OF DEALING, USAGE, OR TRADE. GOANIMATE DOES NOT WARRANT THAT THE AFFILIATE PROGRAM OR LINKS WILL MEET AFFILIATE’S SPECIFIC REQUIREMENTS OR THAT THE OPERATION OF THE AFFILIATE PROGRAM OR LINKS WILL BE COMPLETELY ERROR- FREE OR UNINTERRUPTED. GOANIMATE EXPRESSLY DISCLAIMS ANY LIABILITY FOR ANY ACT OR OMISSION OF A CLIENT OR THEIR PRODUCTS OR SERVICES. GOANIMATE DOES NOT GUARANTEE THAT AFFILIATE WILL EARN ANY SPECIFIC AMOUNT OF COMMISSIONS.
Limitation of Liability
IN NO EVENT SHALL GOANIMATE BE LIABLE FOR ANY UNAVAILABILITY OR INOPERABILITY OF THE LINKS, PROGRAM WEB SITES, TECHNICAL MALFUNCTION, COMPUTER ERROR, CORRUPTION OR LOSS OF INFORMATION, OR OTHER INJURY, DAMAGE OR DISRUPTION OF ANY KIND BEYOND THE REASONABLE CONTROL OF GOANIMATE. IN NO EVENT WILL GOANIMATE BE LIABLE FOR ANY INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, PERSONAL INJURY / WRONGFUL DEATH, SPECIAL OR EXEMPLARY DAMAGES, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO, LOSS OF PROFITS OR LOSS OF BUSINESS OPPORTUNITY, EVEN IF SUCH DAMAGES ARE FORESEEABLE AND WHETHER OR NOT GOANIMATE HAS BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY THEREOF. GOANIMATE’S CUMULATIVE LIABILITY TO AFFILIATE, FROM ALL CAUSES OF ACTION AND ALL THEORIES OF LIABILITY, WILL BE LIMITED TO AND WILL NOT EXCEED THE AMOUNTS PAID TO AFFILIATE BY GOANIMATE IN COMMISSIONS DURING THE SIX (6) MONTHS IMMEDIATELY PRIOR TO SUCH CLAIM.
Governing Law & Miscellaneous
Affiliate shall be responsible for the payment of all attorneys fees and expenses incurred by GoAnimate to enforce the terms of this Agreement. This Agreement contains the entire agreement between GoAnimate and Affiliate with respect to the subject matter hereof, and supersedes all prior and/or contemporaneous agreements or understandings, written or oral. Affiliate agrees that GoAnimate shall not be subject to or bound by any Affiliate insertion order or online terms and conditions that amend, conflict with or supplement this Agreement, regardless of whether GoAnimate “clicks through” or otherwise indicates its acceptance thereof. Affiliate may not assign all or any part of this Agreement without GoAnimate’s prior written consent. GoAnimate may assign this Agreement at any time with notice to Affiliate. This Agreement will be binding on and will inure to the benefit of the legal representatives, successors and valid assigns of the parties hereto. The provisions of Section 3, 4(b), 6, 7, 8, 12-15 and any accrued payment obligations shall survive the termination of this Agreement. Except as set forth in the “Modifications” section above, this Agreement may not be modified without the prior written consent of both parties. If any provision of this Agreement is held to be void, invalid or inoperative, the remaining provisions of this Agreement shall continue in effect and the invalid portion of any provision shall be deemed modified to the least degree necessary to remedy such invalidity while retaining the original intent of the parties. Each party to this Agreement is an independent contractor in relation to the other party with respect to all matters arising under this Agreement. Nothing herein shall be deemed to establish a partnership, joint venture, association or employment relationship between the parties. No course of dealing nor any delay in exercising any rights hereunder shall operate as a waiver of any such rights. No waiver of any default or breach shall be deemed a continuing waiver or a waiver of any other breach or default.
By submitting and application to Affiliate Program, you affirm and acknowledge that you have read this Agreement in its entirety and agree to be bound by all of its terms and conditions. If you do not wish to be bound by this Agreement, you should not submit an application to Affiliate Program. If an individual is accessing this Agreement on behalf of a business entity, by doing so, such individual represents that they have the legal capacity and authority to bind such business entity to this Agreement. This Agreement was last revised on 05-07-2018.
#### Agencies
Vyond for Agencies: Create videos that cater to any client.
Whether you’re part of an agency, professional services organization, or eLearning consultancy, the Agency plan gives you a powerful, user-friendly way to offer video creation services. And, our all-in-one, AI video creation platform offers unlimited commercial rights transfers. So your teams can produce engaging video content that drives better ROI and margins for clients.
Buy the Agency plan
AI video production at your fingertips.
Vyond’s powerful AI capability makes video creation faster, easier, and more creative. Our AI can instantly generate infinite props, custom character actions, and even an entire script and video with a click, helping to bring your vision to life. And our integrated suite of brand management features makes managing brand guidelines across multiple client projects a breeze.
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Rights transfers? No problem.
The Agency plan provides unlimited commercial rights transfers with your annual subscription. Easily transfer videos to external users and ensure clients are properly licensed to use their videos in perpetuity.
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Other rights transfer options:
Vyond for Enterprise
An expanded rights package can be added to Vyond for Enterprise to allow global rights transfers on a flat rate basis. To learn more, please complete our Enterprise inquiry form.
Individual transfers
The simplest method for transferring rights for an individual video. Transfer rights to another party for a flat fee of $99 per video. For more information, contact support@vyond.com.
Looking for an agency? See the list of Vyond-approved agencies authorized to create Vyond videos for clients.
Learn more about all the ways to partner with Vyond.
Learn More
Contact Us
#### AI Avatars
Vyond’s AI avatars.Your professional spokesperson on demand.
Vyond’s AI avatars will help your videos achieve all-new levels of personalization and engagement. With a diverse range of over 1,300 avatar options, the need for talent and expensive video shoots are a thing of the past. Now, you can create content that truly resonates with your audience, at scale and in minutes.
Sign Up to Try Now
1,300+ high-quality avatar options, ready for any story.
Whether you need a dynamic representative for sales training or a friendly face for customer service communication, Vyond has you covered.
Deliver targeted training for staff based on your company’s needs and goals.
Ship your product demo quickly. Easy to update for each new release.
Create engaging narratives that communicate brand values and connect on an emotional level.
Simplify and scale. More output. Less workload.
Delegate to your digital self.
Maximize your time. Just enter your script and employ your custom AI avatar to deliver the message, reducing production costs and time. No filming or video editing needed.
Multilingual capabilities.
Vyond’s AI avatars represent different age groups, genders, and ethnicities. Pair with any voice in 95 languages in our library for seamless global communication.
All the best avatars for any job.
For any message and every line of work, Vyond has the avatar for you. We partner with leaders in AI avatar tech to deliver you a best-in-class selection of realistic, high-quality avatars. So you can quickly and easily create highly engaging, effective videos.
Personalize screen recording.
Enhance your screen recordings with AI avatars for a more personalized touch. They’re perfect for tutorials, product demos, and internal communications, and they add a human element that keeps viewers engaged and informed.
Many tools. All-in-one.
Enjoy a seamless workflow and a wide array of editing tools in Vyond Studio to create impactful video content. Combine your avatars with our extensive library of templates, and enhance them further with our wide range of visual styles.
Ready to meet your perfect avatar?
Explore our collection of diverse AI avatars. Find the perfect persona to represent your brand and tell your story.
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“Using a tool like Vyond to present our content in a more creative and engaging way helps us maintain and enhance our relationship with employees, and we’ve been very successful in that regard.”
Christopher AnnandDirector of Programs and Governance
“The ability to create something great in a day with Vyond—when it used to take us three, four, five days to complete—has been a game changer for us to keep up with the speed of business—and it is fast.”
Bryan McElroySenior Team Lead of Change Enablement, Training, and Communications
“More Tanium teams want to recreate their content in Vyond for higher impact. So we’re upgrading to an Enterprise license, onboarding more Vyond creators across the company, and training them to become power users.”
Chaya RaoDirector of Training Development
Thousands of businesses and millions of users
worldwide rely on Vyond.
Try Vyond Today
#### AI Powered Features
Engagement. Retention. ROI. Vyond’s AI video tools make it easy.
With Vyond’s AI video tools, it’s never been easier to capture your viewers’ attention —
and all the amazing results that follow. Transform valuable-but-unused docs into vibrant video
in minutes. Quickly create compelling content from a simple text prompt — and much, much more. With Vyond AI, anyone can make multi-faceted, audience-specific videos in no time.
Avatars
Make your videos more engaging with a human element — choose from one of our many stock AI hosts, then easily translate and caption for any global audience. Or, create your own Custom Avatar.
Learn More About AI Avatars
Text to Avatar
Make sure your audience sees your brand — lifelike or animated, customize your
characters to match diversity, style, and
attire requirements with a simple text
prompt. Even add tailored backgrounds.
Plan and prompt limits apply. See our
Pricing page for details.
Photo to Avatar
Want to create an avatar of a familiar
company representative? Transform a static image of a prospective host into a dynamic, on-screen personality.
Text to Video
All it takes is a simple text prompt —
just type in any idea for video and Vyond Go will convert it into a compelling visual story.
Learn More About Text to Video
Doc to Video
Leverage hidden value sitting in static PowerPoints, PDFs, docs, or scripts —
in minutes, transform them into
compelling, results-focused videos.
Learn More About Doc to Video
URL to Video
Transform complex information into clear
and memorable content by simply pasting
in a web address.
Learn More About URL to Video
Text to Speech
Give your character a voice with a text prompt, then refine it to reach any global audience. Vyond’s 200+ Ultra-HQ voices deliver superior realism and emotion in dozens of languages. Plan and prompt limits apply. See our
Pricing page for details.
Text to Video Clip
Generate and integrate any short scene into
a larger project on-demand with a simple
text prompt. Plan and prompt limits apply. See our
Pricing page for details.
Text to Image
With Vyond’s powerful text to image feature, simply type your description to quickly create the perfect image in the style you need in seconds. Plan and prompt limits apply.
See our
Pricing page for details.
Video to Action
Applying a custom movement to an animated character is as simple as uploading a video
of the action you want to mimic. Plan limits apply. See our
Pricing page for details.
Learn More About Video to Action
Instant Video Translation
Instantly localize your message for impact and clarity with any global audience by translating your video into the desired language. Plan limits apply. See our
Pricing page for details.
Learn More About Instant Translation
Caption Translation
Maximize your video’s accessibility globally with caption translation into your desired language. Plan limits apply. See our
Pricing page for details.
Photo to Character
Create a unique, personalized animated character by simply uploading a photo,
then customize it with outfits, accessories,
and more.
Learn More About Photo to Character
Photo Background Removal
Transform any photo image into a native
prop by uploading the image and
removing the background.
Speech Enhancer
Easily strip out competing background sounds to give your main voice all of the attention it deserves. Plan limits apply. See our
Pricing page for details.
“We had audit training we needed to roll out to 4,000 employees in 3 weeks. Vyond let us do it without
needing an agency.”
— Fortune 500 Bank
65% of the Fortune 500 and millions of users rely on Vyond.
Try Vyond Today
#### AI Video Generator
Engagement. Retention.
In minutes. Meet AI video generation from Vyond.
With Vyond, anyone can quickly create engaging, visually compelling videos that actually get watched. Videos that boost retention, speed up onboarding and training cycles, and close deals faster — Vyond puts every possibility at your fingertips.
Generate AI Video Now
You just found the results you’re looking for.
Ranked the #1 Video Content Creation Platform.
Create and scale effective videos
in minutes.
Forget all the waiting and the agency costs. With Vyond Go, all you have
to do is prompt or upload a doc to deliver essential training content or
deal-closing, personalized sales videos in no time. Then translate into 95 languages to connect with global audiences. Big results for any size team, with zero learning curve.
Every style to connect with any audience.
With Vyond, your teams can make real and immediate impact with audiences by selecting from Vyond’s broad palette of compelling visual styles. Mixed media, avatars, animation, and everything in between —
any style needed to bring every message to life.
On-brand collaboration, best-in-class security.
Give your videos immediate relevancy and consistency with branded backgrounds, props, characters, and scenes. Upload your branded assets —
or let our team create Custom Assets for you — for use within our hundreds of customizable templates. And, with shared libraries, team controls, enterprise level security, and best-in-class data privacy, team collaboration is a secure, streamlined process.
“Vyond has allowed us to be an extremely effective team —
and keep up with the pace of business.”
— Whole Foods Market
Improve every facet of your organization.
Training
Improve employee completion rates up to
68% with results-focused training videos
from Vyond.
Human Resources
Create and update critically engaging onboarding videos 4x faster with Vyond compared to traditional production methods.
Marketing
Deliver engaging short-form marketing videos that boost brand awareness — and drive conversions.
Internal Communications
Don’t let important company announcements go unread, boost engagement by 130% with videos from Vyond.
Sales and Sales Enablement
Onboard reps faster, boost response rates,
and protect pipeline with Vyond videos created in minutes.
How to make a video in minutes with Vyond.
STEP 1
Enter prompt or upload file
STEP 2
Choose layout
STEP 3
Generate video
STEP 4
Edit/Customize
if desired
STEP 5
Download
and share
What Matters MostOther ToolsVyondConsistent brand experienceLimitedYesTraining, marketing, sales, compliance and support use casesLimitedYesAI avatars, animated, mixed media, live action, photographic contentLimitedYesEnterprise governanceLimitedYesGlobal reachYesYes
Generate AI Video Now
AI Video Generator FAQs
What’s the best AI video generator for Enterprise companies?
Vyond is the best AI video generator for Enterprise companies. With its enterprise-ready security, creative versatility, and brand control features,
Vyond makes video creation across organizations safe, fast and easy.
Is it legally safe to use videos made by Vyond’s AI video generator?
Yes. The video assets in Vyond are proprietary to Vyond itself, so they’re legally safe to use. Then there’s Vyond’s security — Vyond has long been
dedicated to privacy, security, and transparency for all features, including those powered by AI.
Can Vyond’s AI video generator create videos in multiple languages?
Yes! Professional, Enterprise, and Agency plan users can directly generate Vyond Go videos in 95 languages. Also, non-English speaking users on any
paid plan can enter in a supported language and instantly get a Vyond Go video in English.
Are AI videos generated in Vyond easy to edit or update?
Absolutely. AI videos generated in Vyond are easy to edit and update, even by users with no video experience. You can easily swap in new characters and adjust text-to-speech settings in Vyond Go — or quickly import your video to Vyond Studio for advanced customization with just a few clicks.
How does Vyond’s AI video generator compare with talking head AI
video generators?
Unlike avatar-only platforms, Vyond offers best-in-class AI avatars in addition to a wide variety of other styles — mixed media, animated, text to image,
text to video clip, screen and webcam recording, and mobile capture. In other words, Vyond has any style you need to better connect with your audience.
65% of the Fortune 500 and millions of users rely on Vyond.
Try Vyond Today
#### AnyStyle
Connect with your audience in style — any style.
Cut agency and recording costs and production delays by quickly generating any video you need in any style — in-house, at your fingertips, all in one place. It’s more than total creative control — it’s an effective way to enhance and accelerate everything, from approvals and compliance to onboarding, training, and getting deals done.
Mixed Media
Boost engagement and compliance rates by easily combining styles — videos, images, charts, infographics, and more in a seamless mixed media format. It’s a quick way to create informative, visually compelling content that makes your message stick. Jumpstart your video by using one of our hundreds of pre-made mixed-media templates.
Text to Video Clip
Save on stock footage searches and production fees — enter a simple text prompt and create the clip you need in minutes. From corporate B-roll to visual, cinematic shots, Vyond’s Text to Video Clip feature will save time and money, while bringing viewers back for more. Plan and prompt limits apply. See our Pricing page for details.
Text to Image
With Vyond’s powerful text to image feature, simply type your description to quickly create the perfect image in the style you need in seconds. Forget searching for expensive stock images — created to fit various formats. Plan and prompt limits apply. See our Pricing page for details.
AI Avatars
Eliminate agency fees and slash production time by casting your own AI talent in minutes. Find the avatar you need across diverse age groups, genders, and ethnicities that seamlessly combine with Vyond’s many languages and styles to ensure your audience hears you loud and clear. You can even create your own avatar using our text-to-avatar or photo-to-avatar features, or create a custom avatar to fit your brand. Plan and prompt limits apply. See our Pricing page for details.
Learn More About AI Avatars
Stock Assets
Whether you’re aiming for detailed training content or colorful sales proposals, you can access over 4 million stock images, videos, and audio files with our Shutterstock integration. Create more engaging and effective content by infusing your videos with visual impact and adding relatable imagery. Plan limits apply. See our Pricing page for details.
Animated
Simplify complex ideas with vibrant, animated videos. Choose from a diverse range of character styles, with the ability to customize their looks, actions, speech, and more. Perfect for engaging storytelling and dynamic presentations, our animated characters, props, and scenes captivate viewers with compelling visuals while cutting training time and boosting compliance rates.
Custom Assets
Tailor your videos with customized, branded assets that perfectly represent your company. Our team can create templates, backgrounds, props, characters, and scenes based on your specific brand needs and requirements – so you can maintain brand consistency and ensure compliance across teams while creating relevant and impactful content. Plus, Vyond’s Custom Avatar feature allows you to create avatars that best represent your brand.
Learn More About Custom Assets
Screen Recording
Ideal for tutorials, demonstrations, and walkthroughs, screen capture and recording allow you to create detailed, instructional content that guides your audience step-by-step while increasing retention. Use it together with our webcam recording to enhance the depth and engagement of your content with a more personal touch.
Webcam Recording
Easily enhance your materials and boost engagement by creating a direct connection with your audience. It’s an ideal way to capture introductions, interviews, and personal messages. Record up to 15 minutes of continuous footage.
Mobile Capture
Effortlessly add real-world footage to your projects — shoot content directly from your mobile device and integrate it into your Vyond videos. Mobile capture is convenient and versatile, and it’s perfect for on-the-go video creation.
Learn More About Mobile Capture
More from Vyond
How to Make AI Videos in Minutes
Prompting AI: Getting the Best Results from Vyond Go
AI-Powered Instant Translation
65% of the Fortune 500 and millions of users rely on Vyond.
Try Vyond Today
#### April Runft
April Runft
April is a content marketing leader with expertise in AI content creation, sales enablement best practices, employee engagement strategies, and more. She has led content and customer advocacy programs for several tech and financial services companies, including Vyond.
Return to Previous Page
#### Articulate
Articulate
Dramatically improve course completion rates by replacing static slides with Vyond’s scenario-based videos in Articulate courses.
How to add videos to Rise 360 lessons.
Open a Rise course and edit or create a lesson.
Select Video from the blocks shortcut bar or click the insert block icon.
To upload your own video, hover over the block, click Edit, then Change.
Choose your video file and click OK.
How to upload videos to Articulate Storyline 360.
Open your Articulate Storyline 360 project and go to Slide View.
Select the Insert tab on the ribbon at the top of the screen.
Select the Video dropdown menu in the Media section.
Choose Video from File.
Browse your computer to locate the video file you want to upload.
Select the video file and click Open.
The video will appear on your slide. You can resize or reposition as needed.
Try our other powerful integrations.
Slack
Use Vyond’s text to video in Slack to instantly take your concepts from prompt to screen.
Learn More
Google Docs
Use document to video to effortlessly transform your Google doc into an engaging video.
Learn More
Zapier
Automate your video creation workflow by pairing with 7,000+ productivity apps and tools in Zapier.
Learn More
Vyond works. Everywhere you work.
Explore Integrations
#### Author
URL: https://www.vyond.com/author/
#### Awards and Reviews
Awards and Reviews
At Vyond, our priority is helping business teams the world over accelerate onboarding, operations, and revenue timelines by easily and securely creating highly engaging video content in minutes. So it’s always an honor when our efforts are recognized. In Spring 2026, Vyond earned a total of 134 badges on G2, and maintains a rating of 4.8/5.
Vyond is CIOReview’s 2026 AI Business Video Creation Platform of the Year.
The honor recognizes Vyond’s dedication to brand-consistent video creation at scale, enterprise-grade security, and advanced multi-agent architecture, as well as measurable results like 40% faster onboarding.
Read the Article →
The go-to platform
for L&D.
Vyond has been consistently recognized by Training magazine as one its Network Choice Awards winners. These coveted awards are presented to best-in-class L&D tools and solutions, based on voting from the 100,000+ members of the Training Magazine Network.
In September 2025, Vyond was named a winner in three categories:
Authoring Tools: Recognizing Vyond for empowering users to create animated video content
Custom Content/Program Development: Celebrating Vyond’s effectiveness in building tailored training programs
Gamification: Honoring Vyond’s features supporting interactive and game-based learning experiences
An “excellent” ranking, from the world’s best customers.
Vyond has a very strong Net Promoter Score (NPS) of 51 — a measurement of (and testament to) the loyalty of our customers. A score of 50+ is considered “excellent” in our competitive sectors of SaaS and Enterprise Technology. It’s a direct reflection of our ongoing dedication to creating a highly effective customer-focused experience, delivering on a promise of revenue velocity.
Vyond’s NPS highlights include:
Outstanding Score
Vyond’s NPS of 51 points to a high level
of customer loyalty and satisfaction.
Attributes
The high score stems from positive evaluations, with customers describing Vyond as “fast,” “easy-to-use,” “flexible,” and “fun”.
Customer Support
Our strong customer service was also noted as a contributing factor to Vyond’s high rating.
Recent G2 Reviews for Vyond
What’s Vyond reputation?
Unlike many AI video creation platforms who are relatively new to the market, Vyond has been a trusted platform for companies of all sizes for more than 15 years.
On G2 and other review sites, Vyond customers consistently praise Vyond for being an intuitive, accessible platform that empowers non-designers to create professional-quality videos quickly and affordably. They highlight how it saves both time and production costs, letting teams build engaging learning, training, and communication content without relying on outside studios.Many appreciate the platform’s large and versatile library of templates, characters, and props—plus the ability to upload custom assets—which makes it easy to tailor videos to different audiences or brand styles. Reviewers also commend Vyond’s responsive customer support, robust training materials, and steady stream of feature updates that show the company listens to user feedback. Across industries, users describe Vyond as a reliable, continually improving tool that helps them communicate ideas more clearly and creatively.
How do users rate Vyond on G2?
Vyond is one of the highest rated video creation platform tools on the market. Vyond has a G2 rating of more than 4.8 out of 5 – based on more than 400 reviews, and a Capterra rating of 4.7 out of 5, based on more than 250 reviews.
What big companies use Vyond?
Vyond is used – and loved – by thousands of Enterprise companies and more than 65% of the Fortune 500, including Amazon, Disney, Microsoft, Google, Meta, Whole Foods Market, Roche, Allstate, American Express, Fidelity, The Home Depot, and many more. Vyond, a FedRamp Certified vendor, is also used by many federal, state, and local government agencies.
What awards has Vyond won?
Vyond is consistently recognized by G2 and The Telly Awards for the quality of their platform–and the quality of the content created in the platform. In 2025, Vyond received 85 total badges from G2, 15 overall #1 rankings and four #1 rankings for Enterprise, including #1 video creation for Enterprise and #1 content creation for Enterprise. In 2024, Vyond won 63 awards across categories like Presentation, Video Creation, Content Creation and Animation. Over the past five years, content created in Vyond has also won numerous Telly Awards for excellence in branded content, educational videos and more.
Love Vyond? Share your experience on
#### Blog
Vyond Blog
Stay up to date with the latest news and Vyond product updates. For more in-depth content, including webinars, case studies, and more, check out our Resources page.
Company News & Awards
Vyond Appoints SaaS Industry Veteran Scott Ernst as Chief Executive Officer
By Vyond Team on May 29, 2026
Vyond announces the appointment of Scott Ernst as Chief Executive Officer marking the next chapter in Vyond’s evolution.
Read More
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Newsletter
August 2026 Vyond Newsletter
By Mark Rader on August 6, 2026
Explore six Vyond Turbo (beta) examples. Hear how our Community members get more out of Vyond. See how our most recent updates can save you time.
Read More
AI Video Creation, Customer Stories, Learning & Development
The Value of Vyond Community: 4 Members Share Their Stories
By Mark Rader on August 5, 2026
The Vyond Community provides access to exclusive templates and tutorials, a direct line to the product team, and a supportive space to exchange ideas.
Read More
AI Video Creation, Communication Tips, Newsletter
June 2026 Vyond Newsletter
By Mark Rader on June 25, 2026
Explore June’s Vyond highlights, including new ElevenLabs voices, faster editing tools, Community exclusives, and a message from CEO Scott Ernst.
Read More
Company News & Awards
Vyond Appoints SaaS Industry Veteran Scott Ernst as Chief Executive Officer
By Vyond Team on May 29, 2026
Vyond announces the appointment of Scott Ernst as Chief Executive Officer marking the next chapter in Vyond’s evolution.
Read More
Communication Tips, Company News & Awards, Newsletter
May 2026 Vyond Newsletter
By Mark Rader on May 26, 2026
New “members-only” content in Community. An inspiring success story. And get ready for Vyond Turbo in June. Watch to learn more.
Read More
AI Video Creation, Sales & Sales Enablement
From Content Support to Revenue Infrastructure: What 514 Buying Cycles Reveal About Sales Enablement Priorities
By Mark Rader on May 21, 2026
This report helps sales enablement decision-makers assess the business value of key segments in AI video creation platforms.
Read More
AI Video Creation, Company News & Awards, Newsletter
April 2026 Vyond Newsletter
By Mark Rader on April 28, 2026
Use these three new AI tools to make sure your videos look, sound, and feel exactly right.
Read More
Company News & Awards
Vyond Named to G2’s Best Software of 2026 List
By Mark Rader on April 6, 2026
We’re thrilled to share that Vyond has been named to G2’s Best Software 2026 list — placing us among only 0.63% of the 179,500 companies listed on G2. Specifically, Vyond has been […]
Read More
AI Video Creation, Video Creation
Sora’s Demise Highlights the Importance of Enterprise Governance and Control for AI Content Platforms
By Mark Rader on April 6, 2026
When OpenAI pulled back Sora a few weeks ago, it wasn’t just a product flop—it was a wake-up call. Enterprises that had built workflows around Sora were suddenly forced to confront a […]
Read More
AI Video Creation, Learning & Development, Sales & Sales Enablement
4 Ways Vyond Speeds Up Revenue Velocity for Sales Teams
By Mark Rader on March 10, 2026
You need sales enablement software that shortens your sales cycle, protects your pipeline, and expands your customer footprint. Powerful AI video creation tools deliver speed, relevance and results – at every stage […]
Read More
AI Video Creation, Communication Tips, Newsletter, Video Creation
February 2026 Vyond Newsletter
By Vyond Team on February 26, 2026
Transform “zombie content” into videos that get watched. Quickly add branding to avatars and edit avatar scripts and voices right in Studio.
Read More
AI Video Creation, Learning & Development, Video Creation
7 Best Training Video Software in 2026
By Mark Rader on January 7, 2026
Explore the best training video software for educating staff and persuading customers to choose your product over competitors.
Read More
AI Video Creation, Video Creation
9 Best AI Video Generators in 2026
By Mark Rader on January 6, 2026
See the top AI video generators for creating compelling videos. Compare features, pricing, and fit to find the best tool for your business needs.
Read More
AI Video Creation, Product Releases & Updates, Video Creation
How Vyond’s Latest AI Cut Your Content Creation Time in Half in 2025
By Mark Rader on December 11, 2025
At Vyond, we put our content creators first. That’s why our product releases this year were laser-focused on optimizing your work flow, converting new ideas and existing content into videos faster, and […]
Read More
Communication Tips, Video Creation
Using a Variety of Styles Boosts Video Engagement
By Mark Rader on November 13, 2025
In a screen-first world, it’s no surprise that video remains the most engaging medium. But if you want your videos to stand out — and actually help your audience retain information — […]
Read More
AI Video Creation, Product Releases & Updates, Video Creation
Shared Spaces
By Mark Rader on November 5, 2025
Shared Spaces is a feature available to Vyond Enterprise, Agency, and Vyond for Government plan users that makes collaborating on video projects simpler — and helps ensure compliance and content consistency at […]
Read More
AI Video Creation, Video Creation
7 Best Animation Software for Beginners in 2026
By Mark Rader on October 30, 2025
Discover the top animation software for beginners. See which one is right for your organization so you can start making more compelling videos.
Read More
AI Video Creation, Company News & Awards, Product Releases & Updates, Video Creation
Make More Impactful Videos Faster: Vyond’s Fall 2025 Release Delivers Results
By Vyond Team on October 8, 2025
You’re constantly asked to do more with less, meet impossible deadlines, and create compelling, on-brand communication that delivers real business impact. That’s why Vyond’s Fall 2025 Release isn’t about us — it’s […]
Read More
AI Video Creation, Communication Tips, Company News & Awards, Learning & Development, Product Releases & Updates, Video Creation
Vyond + SCORM: A Powerful Combination
By Vyond Team on September 17, 2025
SCORM has long been the standard for creating, tracking, and delivering eLearning content. And now with Vyond’s SCORM package export, you can do all three seamlessly within a single workflow. What is […]
Read More
AI Video Creation, Product Releases & Updates, Video Creation
Creating Custom Animated Characters and AI Avatars in Vyond
By Vyond Team on September 2, 2025
Video content that features recognizable and relatable characters and “talking head” hosts engages audiences more effectively than generic, stock library alternatives. With Vyond’s powerful all-in-one video creation platform at your fingertips, creating […]
Read More
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#### Boost engagement and retention with Vyond — the #1 animated video maker.
Boost engagement and retention with Vyond — the #1 animated video maker.
Increase viewer engagement rates by over 40% with animated, story-driven videos from Vyond. With Vyond’s user-friendly, enterprise-ready platform, your teams will save precious time and money by quickly creating compelling content in the flow of work, without the usual production bottlenecks.
Create an Animated Video
Truly engaging videos that move the needle.
Ranked the #1 Video Content Creation Platform.
Compelling content in minutes.
The need for fresh or updated content can arise in an instant. That’s what Vyond Go is built for. With Vyond’s intuitive AI animation tools, anyone can create engaging videos that eliminate production costs and bottlenecks — no experience necessary. Then: Deliver onboarding, training, or sales videos that hit home, and even translate them into 95 languages to connect with any global audience.
Collapse creation time with Vyond templates.
Need a creative jumpstart? Save time and shrink onboarding and training cycles with Vyond’s pre-built templates. With hundreds of ready-to-customize templates for a broad range of use cases, chances are good that Vyond already has a headstart on any animated video you need.
Animation styles for every use case.
Tailor your storytelling to fit your message and audience with Vyond’s wide range of animation styles. Our style libraries include characters, props, backgrounds and scenes. Plus, we have pre-made templates, which include even more options. Have an idea you’d like to try out, or want to create your own style? Try our text to video clip feature.
On-brand collaboration, best-in-class security.
Give your videos immediate relevancy and consistency with branded backgrounds, props, characters, and scenes. Upload your branded assets —
or let our team create Custom Assets for you — for use within our hundreds of customizable templates. And, with shared libraries, enterprise level security, and best-in-class data privacy, along with team administration controls, Vyond Studio makes collaboration a secure, streamlined process.
“We use Vyond to create everything from communications videos to kick off new programs to videos that support our recruiting efforts.”
— Sears Home Services
Improve every facet of your organization.
Training
Improve employee completion rates up to
68% with results-focused training videos
from Vyond.
Human Resources
Create and update critically engaging onboarding videos 4x faster with Vyond compared to traditional production methods.
Marketing
Deliver engaging short-form marketing videos that boost brand awareness — and drive conversions.
Internal Communications
Don’t let important company announcements go unread, boost engagement by 130% with videos from Vyond.
Sales and Sales Enablement
Onboard reps faster, boost response rates,
and protect pipeline with Vyond videos created in minutes.
How to make an animated video in minutes with Vyond Go.
STEP 1
Upload file or
enter prompt
STEP 2
Choose layout
STEP 3
Generate video
STEP 4
Edit/Customize
if desired
STEP 5
Download
and share
What Matters MostOther ToolsVyondAbility to support business storytellingLimitedYesCustom, on-brand animated assetsLimitedYesConsistent brand experienceLimitedYesTraining, marketing, sales, compliance and support use casesLimitedYesAI avatars, animated, mixed media, live action, photographic contentLimitedYesEnterprise governanceLimitedYesGlobal reachYesYes
Create an Animated Video
Animated Video Maker FAQs
What’s the best AI animated video generator?
Vyond is the best AI animated video generator, thanks to its wide variety of animated styles and assets. Choose from a diverse range of character styles, with the ability to customize their looks, actions, speech, and more. You can even request custom assets if you need a particular style and look. Perfect for engaging storytelling and dynamic presentations, Vyond’s animated characters, props, and scenes captivate viewers and simplify complex ideas with compelling visuals. Vyond also offers AI translation tools and ultra-high-quality AI voices to connect with global audiences.
Can I customize animated videos in Vyond?
Absolutely. In fact, Vyond’s ability to help you create highly relevant content is one of the things our customers appreciate the most.
You can easily use industry-specific templates, scan in photos of your work locations, create one-off objects, use team members’ real voices for audio, create characters that look like people you work with — and much more. Enterprise clients can also create uniforms with their company logo, request bespoke character styles, and easily manage their brand with our Brand Kit and custom assets.
What are some animated video examples made in Vyond?
Browse our Customer Videos library to explore real examples of animated videos made by people like you, across industries, roles, and geographies.
How do I make an animated video with AI?
You can generate videos in seconds with a text prompt in Vyond Go. Or choose from our wide range of scenes, characters, backgrounds, and templates in Vyond Studio to make something great in a matter of minutes. Want to see for yourself? Sign up for a free trial.
Can I create animated Vyond videos on my phone?
Yes! You can use to Vyond to instantly create and download animated videos from your mobile device, access and view your existing video library, and make minor file edits like renaming, copying, and moving videos. You can also download your library videos or specific scenes. (That said, to experience the full video creation functionality and features, we recommend using Vyond on your desktop.)
65% of the Fortune 500 and millions of users rely on Vyond.
Try Vyond Today
#### Brand Management
The new standard for brand management.
Your company’s reputation is built on your brand, so don’t leave it to chance. With Vyond’s Brand Management Suite, your teams have access to tools that make brand management part of the workflow. It’s available with our Vyond for Enterprise plan.
Company Watermark
Protect your company’s videos by quickly and easily adding a company watermark — apply them anywhere on the video and they’ll stay static on the screen.
Approval Management
Easily maintain brand consistency and ensure that the videos created adhere to brand guidelines by requiring approval before they can be downloaded.
Applying Logos
Turn any (or every!) character into a brand evangelist with the ability to apply your logo to apparel tops and headgear from the Vyond library.
Brand Kit
To ensure brand adherence and consistency across projects, brand assets can be integrated into Vyond, and shared across your organization. And, you can easily add your company logo, assets, or other important elements to a brand kit collection that your teams can quickly access.
Custom Color Palette
You can easily maintain consistent brand colors and imaging across videos by saving specific colors to a custom palette in the Vyond Studio.
Color Shuffler
Quickly apply up to five brand colors to scenes and props with Vyond’s Color Shuffler. Get a new color scheme with each click, and “shuffle” through multiple variations from your color palette.
Custom Assets
Your brand is one-of-a-kind. And our team can help create custom characters, clothing and uniforms, props, and other assets for your exclusive use. Connect with our sales team for more information.
What brand management features are included in Vyond Enterprise?
Vyond’s Brand Management Suite for Enterprise and Agency users includes the following powerful brand management features:
Font Import: The ability to import fonts for brand consistency across videos (also available to Professional plan users)
Applying Logos: the ability to apply a logo or image that moves dynamically with a character’s clothing top or hat (available on all character styles)
Approval Management: The ability to manage content and ensure brand compliance by require video approvals
Brand Kit: A tool that lets you easily integrate brand assets into Vyond and share across your organization
Color Shuffler: A functionality that lets you automatically recolor content using color combinations taken from an approved brand kit or saved color palette
Company Watermark: The ability to easily add your company watermark to your video right in Vyond
Custom Color Palette: A simple way to save brand colors for use throughout your videos
Color Changeable Props: The ability to recolor any Vyond prop to match your company’s brand guidelines (this is available for all other plans too)
What’s Vyond’s Brand Kit – and how does it work?
Vyond’s Brand Kit allows Enterprise and Agency teams to centralize their branded assets—like logos, colors, and images—so everyone can easily create videos that follow company brand guidelines. The Account Owner sets up the Brand Kit by uploading assets to the studio, saving them to a Collection, and designating that Collection as the team’s Brand Kit. Once set, all team members can access it from the Brand Kit tab in the content panel and use those assets in their videos to maintain consistent branding. Only one Brand Kit can exist per account, but it can be renamed or disabled at any time by the Account Owner, which removes it from team collections and the studio panel.
Can I make videos that fit my company’s brand with Vyond?
Yes — you can easily create fully branded videos in Vyond using its Brand Management Suite and Custom Brand Assets features. These tools help teams produce consistent, on-brand content at scale, ensuring every video aligns with company visuals and messaging.
The Brand Management Suite, available for Enterprise users, lets you upload logos, fonts, and color palettes into a shared Brand Kit so everyone creates from the same assets. You can add watermarks for brand protection, set approval workflows for quality control, and use tools like Logo Application and a color shuffler to apply brand elements automatically across templates and scenes.
Vyond’s Custom Brand Assets service takes it further by offering customers brand-specific characters, props, uniforms, and backgrounds —as well as branded templates you can access and use right in Vyond Go. Together, these features let teams create cohesive, professional videos that reflect their brand identity across every project.
65% of the Fortune 500 and millions of users rely on Vyond.
Try Vyond Today
#### Careers
Vyond Careers
We are an eclectic team of analytical, creative, and diverse people. We are opera singers and teachers, musicians and hockey players. Our goal is to make, sell, and support a world-class platform that puts the power of video creation in the hands of everyone, everywhere. And we’d love for you to join us.
Our Commitment to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.
We believe that each employee’s unique experiences and perspectives help us to deliver on our vision and mission. Vyond cultivates a just and equitable working environment in which all team members feel valued, included, and empowered to do their best work. Diversity is more than race or gender — it’s about the whole of a person’s identity — and our goal is to foster an environment that attracts talent, encourages innovation, and respects our differences.
Vyond is hiring.
Click the button below to browse career opportunities in San Mateo and Chicago, or keep scrolling to explore open positions in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Thailand.
Browse Jobs in U.S.A.
Open Positions:
Senior Engineer / Lead Engineer(HTML5 / NodeJS / React)
Hong Kong
Position Summary: In your role as Senior Engineer you will work on a variety of Engineering tasks as required by the team, including: New feature development Issue investigation and resolution Resolution verification / testing automation Researching new technologies Your personal…
65% of the Fortune 500 and millions of users rely on Vyond.
Try Vyond Today
#### Case Studies
Case Studies
Find out how organizations like yours have used Vyond to create effective, high-quality video.
How a Fortune 50 Bank Closed Frontline Training Gaps in Fraud, Resiliency, and AI Adoption
Vyond’s enterprise-grade communication platform met strict security, compliance, and governance standards that supported high-stakes training.
Read More
How an Online Retail Giant Scaled Global Workforce Training Without Adding Agency Spend
US L&D team brought in Vyond & within weeks, instructional designers without any creative background produced professional training videos.
Read More
How a Global Consulting Firm Cut Proposal Video Turnaround From 10 Weeks to 48 Hours
Global consulting firm faced bottlenecks in producing high-quality videos, Vyond reduced video production time from 10 weeks to 48 hours.
Read More
How Securitas Direct Revolutionized Its Training and Improved Employee Satisfaction
Revamped training boosts employee satisfaction and smooths onboarding at Securitas Direct with Actua & Vyond.
Read More
Advocate Health Creates Engaging Onboarding at Scale with Vyond
Advocate Health transformed nursing orientation for 40,000+ nurses using Vyond’s AI voices, animated and mixed media styles, and templates.
Read More
Salesloft Helps Reps Adopt a New Company Narrative with Vyond
See how Salesloft turned complex narrative changes into compelling, Star Wars-inspired training videos that wowed employees and transformed company-wide communication.
Read More
Tanium Transforms C-Suite Presentations into Video Summaries with Vyond
Tanium’s Enablement team transformed an executive’s AI keynote into an engaging Vyond video that sales, marketing, and enablement teams use to educate audiences.
Read More
Quickbase Doubles Customers’ Course Completion Rates with Vyond
Quickbase boosted customer course completion rates from 33% to 68% with Vyond’s engaging video storytelling. Discover how Vyond’s AI-powered tools and microlearning format helped transform Quickbase’s customer education strategy and drive higher product adoption.
Read More
WebCE’s Marketing and Product Teams Hit Sky-High Production Goals with Vyond
WebCE uses Vyond to create engaging video content both for their education products and marketing efforts. Read on to learn how.
Read More
American College of Education Creates High-Quality, High-Volume eLearning with Vyond
Discover how the American College of Education boosted course completion rates by 5-10% with Vyond’s video creation platform. Learn about their innovative approach to curriculum development, resulting in engaging, high-quality, and quickly produced eLearning content.
Read More
Percepta Empowers Global Call Center Excellence with Vyond
Percepta keeps its global call center team nimble in the face of constant change with Vyond’s instant translation features and Vyond Go.
Read More
ProMobile BI Designs Indian State Government Anti-Tobacco Campaign with Vyond
ProMobile BI and the Indian government use gamified Vyond videos to create an effective anti-tobacco campaign.
Read More
Tanium Simplifies Complex Cybersecurity Topics with Vyond
Vyond training helps customers get more value from Tanium’s platform and helps prospects decide to buy. Read on to learn how.
Read More
Indeed Fuels Sellers’ Success with Vyond
Learn how sales enablement videos created quickly in Vyond Go help Indeed’s sales reps generate more revenue.
Read More
Michigan State Guides Fundraisers Through Transformation with Vyond
At Michigan State University, Vyond content guided fundraising staff through a radical technology change. Read on to learn how.
Read More
Fortune 500 Telecom Company Builds Stronger Customer Support Teams with Vyond
A Fortune 500 telecom company used Vyond training to increase their customer service reps’ competency scores by double-digit percentages.
Read More
Illinois Courts Make Major Policies Stick with Vyond
Vyond helps Illinois Courts staff across 102 counties understand major policies and scale their training with limited resources.
Read More
Leading Health Solutions Company Drives Learner Engagement with Vyond
A leading health solutions company uses Vyond to help 1,200 client-facing reps stay up to speed on business-critical information. Read on to learn how.
Read More
GoHealth Powers Better Customer Service with Vyond
GoHealth built a repository of Vyond videos to help their customer service agents answer callers’ questions faster and deliver a better customer experience.
Read More
This Global Tech Company Trains New Sales Reps 5x Faster with Vyond
With Vyond, this global tech company transformed a text-based sales training into an interactive experience that’s 80% shorter and more effective.
Read More
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65% of the Fortune 500 and millions of users rely on Vyond.
Try Vyond Today
#### Commitment to Service
Vyond’s Commitment to Service.
Proactive and Responsive Support.
Vyond begins its enterprise relationships by asking “What defines success for you?” Based on that answer, your dedicated Customer Success Manager will customize your onboarding experience and ensure we provide the support you need to achieve those goals on our platform.
Help whenever you need it.
We have a multi-layered customer support infrastructure providing live, expert support by phone, email, or chat for 18 hours a day. You’ll also be a member of the Vyond Community, where you can ask questions and share best practices with thousands of other Vyond users on your way to becoming a Vyond expert.
Check out the Help Center
65% of the Fortune 500 and millions of users rely on Vyond.
Try Vyond Today
#### Company
Vyond: the most trusted since 2007.
Thousands of enterprise-level companies around the world rely on Vyond’s fast, easy, and innovative video creation platform to deliver real value.
The Vyond Story
Originally founded as GoAnimate in 2007, Vyond has since evolved from an animation software company into an all-in-one, AI video creation platform for business.
Today, Vyond employs over 250 people in offices located in Silicon Valley, Chicago, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Thailand. Vyond’s commitment to continued innovation provides customers with a steady stream of best-in-class features and a consistently reliable workflow. And it’s all backed up by top-rated customer support.
The Evolution of Vyond
2025
Vyond is the most trusted enterprise-ready video creation platform.
2023
Launched the industry’s first
AI-powered script and video creator.
2021
Raised $50M from Peakspan Capital to solidify position as leader in enterprise video creation.
2019
ISO 27001 certification achieved.
2018
GDPR compliance achieved.
2018
GoAnimate relaunched as Vyond.
2014
GoAnimate’s library contained over 10,000 assets.
2013
Over 10 million videos created
on GoAnimate.
2007
Vyond was founded as GoAnimate by Alvin Hung.
The Vyond Mission
Vyond’s mission is to empower anyone, regardless of skill level, to create on-brand videos that drive measurable business results.
What is Vyond?
Vyond is the most versatile AI video creation platform for business. Thanks to a comprehensive lineup of features, customers in companies around the world use Vyond to easily turn simple text into engaging video in seconds — content capable of engaging any audience, in 95 languages.
Vyond offers a multitude of styles — including mixed media, photorealistic, AI avatar, screen recording, and animated – so that customers can easily make customized, brand-forward videos that deliver real results.
Who uses Vyond?
Millions of global users and more than 20,000 companies, including over 65% of the Fortune Global 500, rely on Vyond to help them quickly and easily create videos in any style to support their message. Teams in learning and development, HR, sales enablement, and more use Vyond to create training, compliance, onboarding, and sales outreach videos that deliver bottom-line results.
Vyond’s Commitment to
AI Ethics
Vyond is dedicated to privacy, security, transparency, and fairness. Companies can use Vyond’s platform knowing that each feature is enterprise-safe and respectful of user rights. Content created using our generative AI involves no risk to the user, and any use of likenesses requires consent from the user.
Vyond is ISO 27001 certified (for all locations and use cases), GDPR and CCPA compliant, and Data Privacy Framework certified. And Vyond Secure Suite, part of our Enterprise plan, includes features like SSO, customizable password complexity, brute-force login protection, and IP whitelisting.
4.8/5
G2 Rating
20M
Users Worldwide
2X
The National Average in Customer Satisfaction
65% of the Fortune 500 and millions of users rely on Vyond.
Try Vyond Today
#### Contact Us
Contact Vyond
Vyond Silicon Valley2 East 3rd Avenue, Suite 300San Mateo, CA 94401United States of AmericaVyond Chicago20 N Wacker Dr, Suite 1000Chicago, IL 60606United States of AmericaMailing Address204 E 2nd Avenue, Suite 638San Mateo, CA 94401United States of America
Sales Inquiries
Partner & Reseller Inquiries
Community: community@vyond.com
Press: press@vyond.com
Submit a support request: click here or email support@vyond.com. Customer Support is available from midnight to 5:30 p.m. PT, Monday through Friday, excluding Vyond holidays.
Report a security vulnerability
Phone: +1 888 360 9639
FAX: +1 888 726 5646
#### Contentful
Contentful
The combination of Vyond and Contentful allows users to add custom AI generated videos into content workflows, increasing productivity and engagement while reducing content creation costs.
How to upload videos to Contentful.
Navigate to the Media tab in your Contentful space.
Select Add asset and then Single asset.
You’ll see fields for Title, Description, and File.
Choose Publish to make the video available.
Try our other powerful integrations.
Slack
Use Vyond’s text to video in Slack to instantly take your concepts from prompt to screen.
Learn More
Google Docs
Use document to video to effortlessly transform your Google doc into an engaging video.
Learn More
Zapier
Automate your video creation workflow by pairing with 7,000+ productivity apps and tools in Zapier.
Learn More
Vyond works. Everywhere you work.
Explore Integrations
#### Convert PDFs into Videos with AI
Maximize info retention — turn PDFs into vibrant videos.
Transform your static PDFs into powerful visual storytelling that boosts engagement and revenue.
Turn docs and decks into visually arresting videos, and translate them into 95 languages to capture any global audience. Have a useful but unread PDF just sitting in a folder? Turn it into an engaging video in minutes. From onboarding and training to compliance and sales, accelerate every aspect of your operation with just a few clicks.
“Before Vyond, we sent PDFs and they went unread. Now our training is short, animated, and people actually finish it.”
— State Government Agency
Turn a PDF into a video in minutes.
STEP 1
Upload file
STEP 2
Choose layout
STEP 3
Generate video
STEP 4
Edit/Customize
if desired
STEP 5
Download
and share
What Matters MostOther ToolsVyondConsistent brand experienceLimitedYesTraining, marketing, sales, compliance and support use casesLimitedYesAI avatars, animated, mixed media, live action, photographic contentLimitedYesEnterprise governanceLimitedYesGlobal reachYesYes
Ranked the #1 Video Content Creation Platform.
Try Vyond Today
PDF to Video FAQs
What’s the easiest way to turn PDFs into videos with AI?
Vyond’s AI features turn PDFs into polished videos with a variety of options including mixed media, avatars, animation, voiceover, and multiple visual styles.
What’s the best thing to use PDF to video for?
PDF to video conversion tools are effective for a variety of use cases. Sales enablement and product marketing teams convert product one-sheeters, persona explainers, and proposals into internal and external video explainers. Operations, compliance, and governance teams transform huge SOP libraries into bite-sized videos at scale. HR, Internal Comms, and L&D teams turn dry onboarding docs, benefits info and company announcements into engaging video updates and learning series. And the list goes on.
Can I edit videos made from PDFs in Vyond?
Yes. You can edit on-screen text and dialogue using the Quick Edit feature in Vyond Go. Or you can open the draft in our full-feature video editor, Vyond Studio, to change narrators, adjust voices, change out visual elements and add branding. This option gives you more creative control over your end result than most PDF to video tools.
Can I use PDF to video to make videos with company branding?
Absolutely. After your video draft is generated in Vyond Go, you can bring it into Vyond Studio and quickly add logos, brand colors, and other branded elements. There’s also an option to have video templates with your company branding added directly to Vyond Go.
How secure is PDF to video?
Vyond is built with very high security standards. Files are encrypted both in transit and at rest. Prompt inputs are used only to generate scripts, then automatically deleted — they are not logged or stored. Additionally, Vyond doesn’t use customer data to train or improve its AI models, and only partners with providers who follow the same policy.
65% of the Fortune 500 and millions of users rely on Vyond.
Try Vyond Today
#### Convert PowerPoints to Video AI
Boost engagement by converting those static PowerPoints into powerful videos.
Transform your slide decks into compelling videos that boost retention and revenue.
You’ve already done the hard work to create valuable decks — now, make that content infinitely more engaging. With Vyond, you can turn static presentations into vibrant, engaging videos in minutes and translate them into 95 languages to connect with any global audience. Accelerate training and compliance, close deals faster — it’s all just a few clicks away.
“We turned site safety procedures into 2-minute videos —
new hires now finish orientation twice as fast.”
— Fortune Top 100 Heavy Equipment Company
Turn a PowerPoint into a video in minutes.
STEP 1
Upload file
STEP 2
Choose layout
STEP 3
Generate video
STEP 4
Edit/Customize
if desired
STEP 5
Download
and share
What Matters MostOther ToolsVyondConsistent brand experienceLimitedYesTraining, marketing, sales, compliance and support use casesLimitedYesAI avatars, animated, mixed media, live action, photographic contentLimitedYesEnterprise governanceLimitedYesGlobal reachYesYes
Ranked the #1 Video Content Creation Platform.
Try Vyond Today
PowerPoint to Video FAQs
What’s the easiest way to turn presentations into videos with AI?
Vyond’s AI features turn PowerPoint slides into polished videos with a variety of options including mixed media, avatars, animation, voiceover, and multiple visual styles.
What’s the best way to turn slide decks into videos with AI?
In Vyond, you can refine visuals, edit text, and apply branding — or use the auto-generated video as-is. This turns static decks into scalable, high-quality video content in minutes.
What’s the best thing to use PowerPoint to video for?
Use PowerPoint to video for training and onboarding, sales presentations, quarterly updates, and internal communications. Video versions of decks also enable on-demand, asynchronous viewing.
Can I edit videos made from PowerPoints in Vyond?
Absolutely. You can edit on-screen text and dialogue using the Quick Edit feature in Vyond Go. Or you can open the draft in our full-feature video editor, Vyond Studio, to change narrators, adjust voices, change out visual elements and add branding. This option gives you more creative control over your end result than most PowerPoint to video tools.
Can you screen record yourself presenting a PowerPoint in Vyond?
Yes — you can record your PowerPoint slides, narration, and webcam for a more personal, presenter-led video, using our Screen Recorder feature in
Vyond Studio.
How secure is PowerPoint to video?
Vyond is built with very high security standards. Files are encrypted both in transit and at rest. Prompt inputs are used only to generate scripts, then automatically deleted — they are not logged or stored. Additionally, Vyond doesn’t use customer data to train or improve its AI models, and only partners with providers who follow the same policy.
65% of the Fortune 500 and millions of users rely on Vyond.
Try Vyond Today
#### Convert Text to Video With AI
Engage, train, close deals — faster. Convert text to video with Vyond.
Vyond Go, Vyond’s AI text-to-video feature, eliminates production time and costs, and accelerates every aspect of your operation. Just type in a simple prompt or upload a doc to quickly create a visually compelling training, sales, or communications video that speaks directly to any audience. Then easily customize it in any format or style. No experience required, little time needed.
Turn Text to Video Now
Turn text to video in seconds.
Give these a try
Product Launch
Event Promo
Explainer Video
Upload a document and let Vyond Go convert it into a full video for you.
Upload a Document Now
Drop a URL in and Vyond Go will convert it into a video for you.
Add a URL Now
You just found the results you’re looking for.
Ranked the #1 Video Content Creation Platform.
Transform prompts
and docs into videos in minutes.
No more wasted time and costs. With Vyond Go, all it takes is a simple text prompt or uploaded doc to deliver essential training content or deal-closing, personalized sales videos in no time. Big results, no experience needed.
Easily edit narration, dialogue, characters, and more.
Make changes on the fly with the QuickEdit feature in Vyond Go. Adjust text or swap in different characters to instantly update your video. Want more complex changes? Easily import a video into Vyond Studio and use our drag-and-drop interface, extensive template library, text-to-image, and generative AI tools to create new assets. Then translate into 95 languages to connect with any global audience.
On-brand collaboration, best-in-class security.
Give your videos immediate relevance and consistency with branded backgrounds, props, characters, and scenes. Upload your branded assets —
or let our team create Custom Assets for you — for use within our hundreds of customizable templates. And with shared libraries, team controls, enterprise level security and best-in-class data privacy team collaboration is a secure, streamlined process.
“Vyond…allowed us to shorten our production times and keep up with the pace of business.”
— Whole Foods Market
Improve every facet of your organization.
Training
Improve employee completion rates up to
68% with results-focused training videos
from Vyond.
Human Resources
Create and update critically engaging onboarding videos 4x faster with Vyond compared to traditional production methods.
Marketing
Deliver engaging short-form marketing videos that boost brand awareness — and drive conversions.
Internal Communications
Don’t let important company announcements go unread, boost engagement by 130% with videos from Vyond.
Sales and Sales Enablement
Onboard reps faster, boost response rates,
and protect pipeline with Vyond videos created in minutes.
How to make a video in minutes with Vyond.
STEP 1
Enter prompt or upload file
STEP 2
Choose layout
STEP 3
Generate video
STEP 4
Edit/Customize
if desired
STEP 5
Download
and share
What Matters MostOther ToolsVyondConsistent brand experienceLimitedYesTraining, marketing, sales, compliance and support use casesLimitedYesAI avatars, animated, mixed media, live action, photographic contentLimitedYesEnterprise governanceLimitedYesGlobal reachYesYes
Turn Text to Video Now
Vyond Text to Video FAQs
What’s the best AI text to video tool?
Vyond is the best AI text to video tool for any-sized business. With instant script and video generation and an intuitive drag-and-drop interface, Vyond offers AI video generation that’s both user-friendly and versatile enough to meet any business need.
What kind of styles and formats does Vyond’s text to video tool support?
Vyond’s text to video interface allows you to create videos that are mixed media, avatar-focused, animated — and everything in between, in a range of engaging professional styles. Our platform also now offers an AI avatar library, and the ability to create screen recordings right inside the platform.
Can Vyond’s AI text to video feature create videos in multiple languages?
Yes! Professional and Enterprise plan users have the ability to directly generate Vyond Go videos in 95 languages. Also, non-English speaking users on any paid plan can enter (a prompt) in a supported language and instantly get a Vyond Go video in English.
Are AI videos generated in Vyond easy to edit or update?
Absolutely. AI videos generated in Vyond are easy to edit and update, even by users with no video experience. You can easily swap in new characters and adjust text-to-speech settings in Vyond Go — or quickly import your video to Vyond Studio for advanced customization with just a few clicks.
Is the content generated with Vyond’s text to video feature easy to edit
and update?
Yes, AI videos generated in Vyond are easy to edit and update, even by users without video production experience. You can easily swap in new characters and adjust text-to-speech settings in Vyond Go — or quickly import your video to Vyond Studio for advanced customization with just a few clicks.
65% of the Fortune 500 and millions of users rely on Vyond.
Try Vyond Today
#### Coursera
Coursera
Use Vyond’s AI video creation platform to deliver dynamic content that brings lessons to life and boosts student engagement across diverse subjects and learning styles.
How to upload videos to Coursera.
Log into your Coursera account as an admin.
Navigate to the Admin page and select Custom Courses.
Select the course you want to add content to.
At the bottom of a module, select Add item, then Video.
Update the default title to change the name of your video course item.
Upload the video from your computer.
Try our other powerful integrations.
Slack
Use Vyond’s text to video in Slack to instantly take your concepts from prompt to screen.
Learn More
Google Docs
Use document to video to effortlessly transform your Google doc into an engaging video.
Learn More
Zapier
Automate your video creation workflow by pairing with 7,000+ productivity apps and tools in Zapier.
Learn More
Vyond works. Everywhere you work.
Explore Integrations
#### Custom Assets
Custom assets. Better videos.
Maximum effectiveness right out of the box. Get templates, backgrounds, avatars, and more that exactly represent your company, industry, geography, and brand.
Inquire Now
Custom templates for instant, branded content.
We can mix your photos, custom backgrounds, characters, and props together into ready-made templates you can access directly from Vyond Go, our instant video maker, or Vyond Studio.
Custom Brand Suite
We can even help you set up a complete Brand Suite – tools to help teams across your enterprise ensure that brand standards are being met. The Brand Suite elements include a brand kit, color palette and shuffler, custom templates, icons, and characters.
Custom Avatars
Need a specific spokesperson or someone dressed in company gear? You can easily create your own digital avatar and custom voice simply by recording a few minutes of speech. Start creating now on our Avatars page.
Custom Backgrounds and Scenes
Bring additional relevancy to your videos with custom backgrounds that recreate your building and office spaces, facilities, factory or warehouse floor, and more. Backgrounds and scenes can be static or dynamic.
Custom Characters
Let us build custom characters that fulfill your need for a specific style or look – even bring your company mascot to life. Whether you’re looking for modern, stylistic, faceless, or even anthropomorphic, your characters can utilize the thousands of actions and movements that are part of our proprietary framework.
Custom Actions
Our proprietary framework has the flexibility to accommodate specific industry or job-related actions or movements. Our team will work with you to ensure your custom characters move how you need them to.
Custom Props
From tools and machinery to medical or manufacturing equipment, we can create custom props and assets that you can add to your library for easy, repetitive use. We can also create a specific look for furniture, office fixtures, and more.
Represent your brand, exactly.
Inquire Now
#### Customer Videos
Customer Videos
Every year, over twenty thousand companies use Vyond to create branded professional videos that engage and inform their employees and prospects on a wide range of topics. Below are a few excellent examples of their work.
Note: Either Vyond has received written permission to display these videos or our customers have shared this content in the public domain. Any other use of these videos or the content contained in these videos without Vyond’s or these customers’ consent is prohibited.
Featured Videos
Holiday Break, by WebCE
Welcome to the Center for Instructional Innovation by Brandman University
Enabling Colorblind Gamers by Microsoft Enable
Search
Language
Dutch
English
French
German
Italian
Japanese
Zulu
Job Role
Education
Everyone
Healthcare
Human Resources
Learning & Development
Marketing
Sales
Storytelling
Style
AI Avatar
Business Friendly
Characterstyle
Contemporary
Mixed
Modernstyle
Shutterstock
Storybook
Whiteboard Animation
Category
Bundle
Customer support
DEI
Education
eLearning
Event and Invitation
Explainer
Finance
GIF
Government
Healthcare
Infographics
Information Technology
Internal Communication
Marketing
Nonprofit
Onboarding
Presentation
Remote work
Sales
Sales Enablement
Storytelling
Reset
Modern Retirement Planning, by WebCE
Insuring Pets, by WebCE
Holiday Break, by WebCE
Small Group Travel with Melanated Girls Around the World
The Great Race, Chinese Zodiac Explainer
What Are The New Health Reimbursement Arrangements (HRAs)? by WebCE Online Education & Training
UC OATS Workspace Overview by University of California OATS
City of Coral Gables 2019 Smart City Application by The Laboratory of Everyday Things
What is Non-Binary Identity by PDT Global
Imposter Syndrome by PDT Global
Gender Pronouns by ADP Pride
Ramadan Race by Pious Projects
Show More
#### Docebo
Docebo
Vyond’s AI-powered avatar videos enhance Docebo’s intelligent learning platform, creating engaging content that boosts knowledge transfer and learner outcomes.
How to upload videos to Docebo.
Log into your Docebo platform as an administrator.
Access the Admin menu by selecting the gear icon in the top right corner.
Select Course Management from the E-learning section.
Find and click on the desired course.
Go to the Training Material tab.
Select the Add Training Material button and choose Video from the dropdown menu.
On the upload page, select the option to upload a file, then select the Upload file button to choose your file.
Select your video file.
Add a title and description for your video.
If you want to add a thumbnail, you can do so from the Additional Info tab.
Try our other powerful integrations.
Slack
Use Vyond’s text to video in Slack to instantly take your concepts from prompt to screen.
Learn More
Google Docs
Use document to video to effortlessly transform your Google doc into an engaging video.
Learn More
Zapier
Automate your video creation workflow by pairing with 7,000+ productivity apps and tools in Zapier.
Learn More
Vyond works. Everywhere you work.
Explore Integrations
#### eBooks
eBooks
Improve Your Employee Communications with Animated Video
In a video-dominated world, it’s no surprise that employees are 75% more likely to watch a training video than read text. But for many employee communications teams, it’s not always…
Read More
The Vyond Guide to Better Skills Training at Scale
Find out how making two critical adjustments to your L&D training approach can help you efficiently create content that meets the evolving needs of your workforce. What You’ll Learn: How…
Read More
How Large Organizations Use Vyond
Learn how five of our enterprise customers and 65% of the Fortune 500 rely on Vyond’s intelligent video creation software to drive positive business outcomes. You’ll Learn How five very…
Read More
#### Enable sales in minutes.
Reduce ramp time,accelerate pipeline.
Onboard reps faster, boost response rates, and protect pipeline with Vyond.
300%
faster video creation with Vyond Go.
Indeed keeps 1000+ sales reps at peak performance and generating more revenue with Vyond-based tools training.
Read the Indeed case study
500%
faster content production.
Whole Foods Market’s L&D and change management teams create content 5x faster with Vyond.
Read the Whole Foods case study
2,000
videos created (and counting).
Percepta keeps 4000+ call center employees trained on fast-changing technology so they can answer any question that comes their way — which keeps their clients happy.
Read the Percepta case study
Book a Demo with Sales
Increase win rates: Turn old, boring docs into engaging video.
Faster onboarding, faster training, faster pipeline:Templates for every stage of the sales cycle.
Capability + Outcome/Value
Highlight your advantages, improve win rates, and onboard faster.
Talk Track Recap
Engagingly summarize meetings and improve follow-up.
Change Management
Win new clients by showcasing past ROI successes.
Proposal
Walkthrough
Boost stakeholder buy-in and ensure success.
Executive QBR Recap
Tout your value to stakeholders with clear proof.
Business Case Builder
Create a buttoned-up, highly compelling business proposition.
See Sales Enablement Templates in Action
Enable sales in minutes.
1. Select
Choose from a variety of templates covering every stage of the sales cycle.
2. Customize
Easily swap avatars, add branding, or adjust the script.
3. Share
Share via Highspot, Seismic, Salesloft, or Vyond’s Slack & Google integrations.
See Template Library
What our customers are saying.
“We’re pleased with how easy Vyond made it for us to create an animated character for our CTO, choose a realistic voice, and add real-world illustrations required for our story.”
Stefanie CoburnVice President of Enablement, Tanium
“Vyond’s AI video platform makes it extremely easy to share quick-hit training and explain new concepts.
It changed the game on what we’re able to do.”
Joel FleetSenior Director of Field Readiness, Salesloft
“What would normally have taken me a full day – with the plug-and-play aspect of Vyond Go – it took me two hours.”
Virgenia O’HaganStrategist, GTM Leadership Enablement, Indeed
Enterprise-grade security and zero data viewing lets you scale with confidence.
Vyond is ISO 27001-certified, Fed-RAMP-authorized, and our Zero-View Advantage means we never watch your data.
Learn More about Vyond’s Security
Book a Demo with Sales
#### Enrique Olives
Enrique Olives
Enrique is a product marketing executive with subject matter expertise in AI content creation, product positioning and messaging, market strategy, sales enablement, competitive insights, and analyst relations. Enrique has led product marketing for Vyond and Saleforce’s Media Cloud — and held a variety of senior leadership positions in broadcasting, business development, and finance.
Return to Previous Page
#### Enterprise
Vyond, the best video creation platform for the enterprise.
With Vyond Enterprise, organizations can eliminate production costs and schedules, increase engagement rates by 40%, and accelerate critical timelines — all with secure brand governance and industry-leading AI video creation safeguards. In minutes, a simple prompt or valuable static docs can be transformed into visually compelling, story-driven videos in a variety of styles — all while easily collaborating across teams.
Talk with Sales about Enterprise
You just found the results you’re looking for.
Ranked the #1 Video Content Creation Platform.
Maintain brand consistency and shorten approval times with Vyond’s Brand Management Suite.
Ensuring visual consistency and compliance is mission critical both for slashing approval times, and boosting engagement. Vyond’s Brand Management Suite has key features to keep your work on track.
Brand Kit: Keep brand materials like fonts, images, logos, and more in one place and accessible across the enterprise.
Company Watermark: Create a watermark from your company logo or another asset for application in your videos.
Approval Management: Ensure brand cohesiveness across videos with an added layer of approval.
Logo Application: Turn our characters into brand evangelists with the ability to apply your logo to character clothing items.
Learn More about Brand Management
Boost efficiency and productivity with team collaboration.
Simplify the needs of your global organization by making it infinitely easier to share files, videos, and folders. Vyond’s collaboration tools enhance productivity, simplify workflows, and empower teams to collaborate more efficiently in content creation.
Advanced Collaboration: Create and share folders administered from the account level for specific purposes, projects, and groups.
Shared Libraries and Spaces: Allows team access to centralized custom assets and media libraries.
Video Sharing Features: Videos can be securely shared with teams and individual members.
Industry-best AI security and privacy.
With Vyond for Enterprise, robust security offers real peace of mind. Vyond’s best-in-class features make it easy to implement content across the enterprise.
Enterprise-Grade InfoSec: ISO 27001-certified, SSO, & more.
Cloud Infrastructure: AWS hosting, data partitioning & more.
Commitment to Privacy: Verified by TrustArc (among others!).
Brand Compliance: Advanced user permissions, custom styles & assets.
Learn More about Vyond’s Security
AI video creation for any use case, and any audience.
With Vyond, teams can cut agency and recording costs and production delays by quickly generating any video needed in any style — in-house, and all in one place. It’s a highly effective way to enhance and accelerate everything, from approvals and compliance to onboarding, training, and getting deals done.
Users can create in minutes with a prompt or doc using our AI video maker, Vyond Go, get a head start with one of hundreds of pre-made templates, or enjoy total creative control with our full-featured video editor, Vyond Studio.
Connecting with audiences in an impactful way is easy with Vyond’s broad palette of compelling visual styles — mixed media, avatars, animation, and everything in between — any style needed to bring every message to life.
And, with generative AI tools like text to image, text to speech, and instant translation into 95 languages, Vyond delivers full and instant functionality all
in one place.
Learn More about our AI Tools
Customer support at its best.
Vyond’s users consistently rank our Customer Support team among the best. That’s why Vyond has what’s considered an “excellent” NPS (Net Promoter Score) of 51, directly attributable to strong customer service. With Vyond for Enterprise, your teams will have access to our highly-regarded and incredibly supportive team, as well as:
Exclusive Resources: Access a vast library of video templates, guides, webinars, and more.
Dedicated Contact: Your team will be on a first-name basis with a customer success expert.
World Class Support: Our customer loyalty and satisfaction are double the industry average
Learn more about Vyond Support
More Tanium teams want to recreate their content in Vyond for higher impact. So we’re upgrading to an Enterprise license.
— Tanium
Talk with Sales about Enterprise
Vyond Enterprise FAQs
How is my data secured?
Vyond operates with the following standards and certifications: ISO 27001-certified, CCPA, GDPR, and it is verified by Trust Arc, among others.
Vyond Enterprise offers an extra layer of security with Vyond Secure Suite. These are a collection of enterprise security features designed to comply with the IT security standards of any company.
These features include:
Brute force login protection: Administrator-defined login attempts before an account is locked.
IP whitelisting: Ensure that your organization’s Vyond account is only accessible through trusted connections. This prevents logins from any address that has not been specifically whitelisted.
Inactivity logout: Log users out after an administrator-defined amount of inactivity.
Customizable password complexity: Implement company-wide password requirements.
Single sign-on: Integrate Vyond directly with your company’s authentication service.
Custom video cache expiration: Define how long data will remain cached.
Optional security features: Data partitioning, securing user data in its own separate database.
What are user groups and how do they work?
User Groups is an Enterprise collaboration feature. Using user groups is a great way to quickly and efficiently share videos with a specific group of users within your enterprise account. Any enterprise user can create a group based on department, position, location, and so on. The group feature comes in handy when sharing videos with team members. Instead of typing names and emails individually, you can easily select to share to a group and set the permissions for the group members.
Reduce onboarding, access rights management, and offboarding to a single click with User Groups.
What are Shared Spaces, and how do they work?
Shared Spaces is an Enterprise feature that allows you to collaborate with your team by easily sharing content, scenes, and videos.
With Shared Spaces, you can have your content and videos in one place, and onboard new team members without having to share every single thing with them individually. Just invite them to the space, and they’ll have immediate access to all relevant content. Shared Spaces also allows you to offboard old team members without losing content amongst your team.
What’s the best AI video generator for Enterprise companies?
Vyond is the best AI video generator for Enterprise companies. With its enterprise-ready security, creative versatility, and brand control features, Vyond makes video creation across organizations safe, fast and easy.
Is it legally safe to use AI videos generated in Vyond?
Yes. The video assets in Vyond are proprietary to Vyond itself, so they’re legally safe to use. Then there’s Vyond’s security — Vyond has long been dedicated to privacy, security, and transparency — for all features, including those powered by AI.
Can Vyond create videos in multiple languages?
Yes! Professional, Enterprise, and Agency plan users can directly generate Vyond Go videos in 95 languages. Also, non-English speaking users on any paid plan can enter in a supported language and instantly get a Vyond Go video in English.
65% of the Fortune 500 and millions of users rely on Vyond.
Try Vyond Today
#### Events
Video is everywhere.So is Vyond.
Find out where we’ll be.
Upcoming events
VIRTUAL EVENT
The Story Advantage
Thursday, August 20, 202610am PT / 1 pm ET / 6pm BST
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VIRTUAL EVENT
Vyond Product Update
Wednesday, July 29, 202611am PT / 2pm ET / 7pm BST
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VIRTUAL EVENT
Vyond Studio Sessions
Thursday, July 16, 202611am PT / 2pm ET / 7pm BST
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VIRTUAL EVENT
Vyond Product Update
Thursday, July 9, 202610am PT / 1pm ET / 6pm BST
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VIRTUAL EVENT
Vyond Product Update
Wednesday, June 24, 202610am PT / 1pm ET / 6pm BST
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Recent events
VIRTUAL EVENT
Human Storytelling in an AI World
Wednesday, June 17, 202611am PT / 2pm ET / 7pm BST
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VIRTUAL EVENT
Vyond Studio Sessions
Wednesday, June 10, 202610am PT / 1pm ET / 6pm BST
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VIRTUAL EVENT
Vyond Product Update
Wednesday, May 27, 202610am PT / 1pm ET / 6pm BST
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CONFERENCE
Gartner CSO Conference
May 19-20, 2026Caesar’s Palace | Las Vegas, NV
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VIRTUAL EVENT
Vyond Studio Sessions
Wednesday, May 20, 202610am PT / 1pm ET / 6pm BST
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VIRTUAL EVENT
Vyond Product Update
Wednesday, May 13, 202610am PT / 1pm ET / 6pm BST
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VIRTUAL EVENT
Vyond Studio Sessions
Wednesday, April 29, 202610am PT / 1pm ET / 6pm BST
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VIRTUAL EVENT
Community Office Hours
Wednesday, April 22, 202610am PT / 1pm ET / 6pm BST
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VIRTUAL EVENT
Vyond Product Update
Wednesday, April 15, 202610am PT / 1pm ET / 6pm BST
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VIRTUAL EVENT
Vyond Studio Sessions
Wednesday, April 8, 202610am PT / 1pm ET / 6pm BST
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VIRTUAL EVENT
Vyond AI
Friday, March 27, 20267am PST / 10am ET / 3pm BST
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VIRTUAL EVENT
Vyond Product Update
Wednesday, March 18, 202610am PST / 1pm ET / 6pm BST
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VIRTUAL EVENT
Ask Vyond Anything
Wednesday, March 11, 202610am PST / 1pm ET / 6pm BST
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VIRTUAL EVENT
Build a Video with Me
Thursday, March 5, 202612pm PST / 3pm ET / 8pm BST
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VIRTUAL EVENT
Vyond AI
Wednesday, February 25, 202610am PST / 1pm ET / 6pm BST
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WEBINAR
Ask Vyond Anything
Tuesday, February 24, 20268am PST / 11am ET / 4pm BST
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WEBINAR
Build a Video with Me
Thursday, February 19, 20261pm PST / 4pm ET / 10pm BST
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WEBINAR
Ask Vyond Anything
Wednesday, February 11, 202611am PST / 2pm ET / 7pm BST
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WEBINAR
Vyond Product Update
Tuesday, February 10, 202610am PST / 1pm ET / 6pm BST
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WEBINAR
Ask Vyond Anything
Monday, February 2, 202610am PST / 1pm ET / 6pm BST
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TRADE SHOW
DevLearn 2025
November 12-13, 2025MGM Grand HotelLas Vegas, NevadaVyond Booth #566
Learn more
TRADE SHOW
ATD Sell 2025
October 28-29, 2025Kimpton Hotel Palomar PhoenixPhoenix, AZ
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WEBINAR
Make More Impactful AI Videos Faster: Vyond’s Fall 2025 Release
Wednesday, October 22, 202511am PT / 2pm ET / 7pm BST
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WEBINAR
Show Tell and Sell: Tips for Better Demos and Tutorials
Wednesday, September 24, 202511am PT / 2pm ET / 7pm BST
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WEBINAR
How to Crush H2 with Smarter Sales Content (Not More of It)
Wednesday, June 25, 202511am PT / 2pm ET / 7pm BST
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WEBINAR
Help Sales Win with Low-Lift AI Video Tools & Templates
Wednesday, May 21, 202511am PT / 2pm ET / 7pm BST
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WEBINAR
More Visual Versatility, Better AI Avatars: Vyond in 2025
Wednesday, April 23, 202511am PT / 2pm ET / 7pm GMT
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WEBINAR
The Vyond Video Masterclass
Wednesday, March 26, 202510am – 12pm PT / 1pm – 3pm ET
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WEBINAR
Vyond Bootcamp: 2025 Edition
January 16 – March 6, 20259am PT / 12pm ET / 5pm GMT
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WEBINAR
7 Ways to Communicate Better at Work with “Instant Videos”
January 22, 202511am PT / 2pm ET / 7pm GMT
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WEBINAR
5 Vyond Video Makeovers to Inspire You in 2025
December 11, 202411am PT / 2pm ET / 7pm GMT
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WEBINAR
V is for Versatile: 3 New Ways to Hook Audiences with Vyond
November 20, 202411am PT / 2pm ET / 7pm GMT
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WEBINAR
Community Office Hours
November 19, 20246:30am – 7:15am PT
WEBINAR
Community Office Hours
November 5, 202410:00am – 10:45am PT
WEBINAR
Lean L&D: Smarter Tools, Bigger Impact
October 23, 202411am PT / 2pm ET / 7pm BST
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WEBINAR
Community Office Hours
October 22, 202410:00am – 10:45am PT
WEBINAR
Community Office Hours
October 8, 202410:00am – 10:45am PT
WEBINAR
Fall 2024 Storytelling Masterclass
September 18, 202410am – 12pm PT / 1pm – 3pm ET / 6pm – 8pm BST
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WEBINAR
Vyond Bootcamp: Summer 2024 Edition
August 22, 2024Thursdays from June 27 – August 229am PT / 12pm ET / 5pm BST
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WEBINAR
All-in-One, All Right Here: How Vyond is Making Video Creation Effortless
August 21, 202411am PT / 2pm ET / 7pm GMT
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#### Everyone
Vyond for Small and Medium-sized Business: Video creation made effortless.
Video doesn’t have to be complicated. With Vyond, creating engaging and effective videos at scale is efficient — and thanks to our generative AI, effortless. Best of all, as the only all-in-one, AI video creation platform, Vyond puts all the best video creation tools at your fingertips.
Try Vyond Today
All you need. All in one place.
With Vyond, you can create for any topic with a wide-range of visual styles, including animated, AI avatars, photorealistic, mixed media, and live capture. Speed up workflow with built-in background removal, translation into 95 languages, captioning, and more. Maintain brand standards with our brand management suite and share assets and projects across teams with collaboration features. Even use generative AI tools to create visual elements on-demand or generate an entire script and video in less than a minute!
Try Vyond Today
Powerfully easy.
Your business needs video. Vyond is here to help. Forget the time, expense, and complication of traditional video, with Vyond you can bring full video creation capabilities in-house and to every member of your team — no video experience necessary.
Use Vyond Go to instantly create prompt-based editable scripts and videos with generative AI. Or get full creative control of every aspect of your video with Vyond Studio, our drag-and-drop, simpler-than-creating-a-slideshow video editor. Two powerful applications that make creating professional business videos intuitive and effortless.
Try Vyond Today
Create with confidence.
Vyond is built for business. Our easy to use platform empowers users of all ability levels to create professional, engaging videos that deliver measurable time, efficiency, and cost savings to organizations of any size – from small businesses to enterprise organizations with thousands of employees. Our built in brand management, collaboration, and enterprise-level security features give over 65% of the Fortune 500 the confidence to create with Vyond.
Try Vyond Today
“I’ve been using Vyond for about two years now. I researched half a dozen companies out there, tested several, and found that Vyond was by far the easiest to use in the shortest period of time. We use Vyond to create everything from communications videos to kick off new programs to videos that support our recruiting efforts.”
Keith AndersonDirector of Learning, Sears Home Services
65% of the Fortune 500 and millions of users rely on Vyond.
Try Vyond Today
#### Federal Inquiry Form
Vyond for Government (FedRAMP) Inquiry Form
Thank you for your interest in Vyond for Government. Please complete the form below, and we’ll be in touch.
To contact an account manager directly, please call +1 888 360 9639.
Thank you!
We’ll contact you in 1-2 business days.
#### Getting Started with Vyond
Getting Started with Vyond: A Beginner’s Guide
Step 1: Navigate Vyond Studio
Navigating the Vyond Homepage
Understand where to find tools for editing and animation
Learn how to access projects, templates, and tutorials
Step 2: Create Your First Video
Making Your First Video – A Step by Step Walkthrough
Learn the basics of adding scenes, characters, and props
Assign actions, add dialogue, and replace elements in a template
Step 3: Edit and Customize Your Video
How Do I Create, Edit, and Preview a Video?
Modify characters, adjust text, and insert sound effects
Use the timeline to control timing and sequencing
Step 4: Use Characters and Lip-Syncing
Character Animation and Lip-Syncing
Make characters move and interact
Use automatic lip-syncing to match voiceovers with speech
Step 5: Preview and Export Your Video
How to Export a Video
Preview your final project to check for errors
Learn how to export and share your video
Additional Resources by Skill Level
Beginner
Using Vyond Go (Text To Video) – Learn how to turn written scripts into animated videos instantly
Vyond Bootcamp Sessions – Dive deeper into character animation and lip-syncing
Getting Started – Essential guides and tutorials to help new users get started
AI Avatars – How to create an avatar video to enhance your content
Intermediate
6 Awesome Ways to Use Continue Scene – Create fluidity with your animations and become a master at video production
Bulk Edit Across Scenes – Bulk edit props and assets across multiple scenes
Mix Different Media Styles – Mix different media styles for versatile videos
Advanced
7 Types of Camera Movement – How to use camera movements to enhance storytelling
Editing Layers with Asset View – Edit layers, organize, reorder, and fine-tune elements
How to Create Accessible Video Content – Create accessible video content, ensuring inclusivity through captions, audio descriptions, and design choice
Where to Get Additional Help
Vyond Support Center: help.vyond.com – Search for help articles or contact support
Vyond Live Chat: Available for Professional and Enterprise users within the platform
Email Support: Reach out to support@vyond.com for Vyond’s support team for direct assistance
#### GoAnimate for Schools
Vyond for Education
See why educators love teaching with videos made in Vyond (formerly GoAnimate*).
In this screen-first world, no educational format is better at grabbing learners’ attention, explaining tricky concepts clearly, and improving information retention than engaging videos.
With Vyond Studio and our new instant script and video generator, Vyond Go, teachers at every level (elementary, high school, university) can easily create engaging videos about any topic they want, no video skills required.
Vyond (formerly GoAnimate) is perfect for creating engaging course content for students at every level — and a simple way for adult students to create video presentations and summaries themselves.
To see how the platform works, sign up for a free trial:
Try Vyond for Free
And to see how affordable Vyond is — both for individual users and educational institutions — check out our pricing page.
*We phased out GoAnimate for Schools in 2019. If you’re looking for a similar platform, designed specifically for use by school-age children, we encourage you to find an alternative that is COPPA- and GDPR-complaint. If you’d like to explore how Vyond’s all-in-one video creation platform could help your teachers and students above the age of 18, please reach out at support@vyond.com.
#### Google Docs
Create videos directly from Google Docs.
Turn your documents into engaging videos that deliver impact.
Connect to Google Now
Summarize documents visually, effortlessly.
Convert Google Docs into vibrant, striking videos and take your ideas to the next level.
Connect to Google.
Simple set up. Select the button below to connect Vyond to Google Docs.
Add to Google Docs
Generate video straight from Google Docs.
Add a video prompt if you like! Vyond will transform your document into a video.
Take it further with a personalized touch.
Polish your video in Vyond Studio for even more customization options. Your message, your way, for instant, effortless communication.
Connect to Google Now
Vyond works. Everywhere you work.
Explore Integrations
#### Highspot
Highspot
Vyond’s adaptable video styles and Highspot’s AI-driven insights empower sales teams to create, manage, and track engaging video content for impactful buyer interactions.
How to upload a video to Highspot.
Log in to Highspot: Access your Highspot account and navigate to the desired Spot where the video will be uploaded.
Add Files: Select the plus sign or the Add Files option in the Spot.
Upload Files: Select this option to upload a video file directly from your computer.
Drag and drop: Drag the video file (e.g., MP4) into the upload area
Browse: Select Choose Files to locate it on your device
Set Usage Type: Indicate whether the video will be for internal or external use.
Finalize Upload: Select Add to complete the upload process.
Try our other powerful integrations.
Slack
Use Vyond’s text to video in Slack to instantly take your concepts from prompt to screen.
Learn More
Google Docs
Use document to video to effortlessly transform your Google doc into an engaging video.
Learn More
Zapier
Automate your video creation workflow by pairing with 7,000+ productivity apps and tools in Zapier.
Learn More
Vyond works. Everywhere you work.
Explore Integrations
#### Home
Create effective videos in seconds.
Mixed Media
Learn More
Avatar
Learn More
Photorealistic
Learn More
Gen AI
Learn More
Screen Recording
Learn More
Mobile Capture
Learn More
Instant Translation
Learn More
Webcam
Learn More
Animated
Learn More
Vyond. The fast and easy, enterprise-ready video creation platform that produces real results.
Try Vyond for Free
65% of the Fortune 500 rely on Vyond.
Vyond Go
Turn text to video in seconds.
Vyond Go instantly turns your idea, document, or URL into an effective video. It’s fast, easy, and perfect for explainers, sales enablement, or training.
Find Out More
Give these a try
Product Launch
Event Promo
Explainer Video
Upload a document and let Vyond Go convert it into a full video for you.
Upload a Document Now
Drop a URL in and Vyond Go will convert it into a video for you.
Add a URL Now
PRODUCT FEATURES
AI avatars: Your one-stop casting shop.
With Vyond’s wide variety of engaging AI avatars, you’ll easily find the perfect face and personality to bring your message to life.
Find Out More About Vyond’s AI Avatars
PRODUCT FEATURES
Yes, we have a template for that.
Start creating immediately using Vyond’s template library. Our templates come with a wide range of styles, settings, characters, and props — or customize them as you see fit.
Search
Office
L&D
Business
Training
HR
Social Media
Marketing
eLearning
Engage and motivate with compelling training videos.
Presentation
Capture your audience with dynamic charts and graphs.
Storytelling
Choose from a wide range of settings for narrative-driven videos.
Marketing
Effortlessly create professional-quality promotional videos.
Browse All Templates
What our customers are saying.
Hear why L&D and HR leaders, instructional designers, and more love Vyond.
“We need training quicker, more efficient and on-the-spot, and Vyond provides all of that in a fun and entertaining way.”
Jason FergusonPrincipal Learning and Development Analyst, Change Enablement, Whole Foods Market
“Vyond has been such a great solution for us. It’s less expensive and labor-intensive compared to doing video production in-house, and it gives us the results we need. That’s a big win, both for our team and for management.”
Jon HegidioSenior Instructional Designer, Rentokil Terminix
“At one point a Vyond competitor reached out with a pitch and I said ‘absolutely not — it doesn’t do what we need it to do.’ Nothing’s like Vyond. I’m a loyal customer”
Virgenia HallSenior Learning & Development Specialist, Systems & Tools, Indeed
“Our Vyond content is more effective at getting noticed across the department.”
Adeline Wharton Learning Designer and Instructor, Business Process Improvement & Analysis, Michigan State University
“We’ve used Vyond videos to explain some serious legal topics, and they get positive reception from judges, state’s attorneys, and circuit clerks.”
Angie KanakTraining Specialist, Court Services Division, Administrative Office of the Illinois Courts
“Before Vyond, we never had people tell us that they enjoyed the cybersecurity training we offered. They do now.”
Melissa CamperInformation Security Analyst, Shelter Insurance
Watch Testimonials
Educate, engage, and expand your reach with Vyond.
Learning & Development
83% of learners would rather watch videos than learn via words on a screen. Grab their attention and keep it with engaging, visually stimulating videos.
Discover Training and eLearning Solutions →
Human Resources
Boost workforce engagement and productivity, speed up onboarding, and breathe new life into your communication with attention-grabbing videos and GIFs.
Discover Better HR Video Solutions →
Marketing
Get real results – dramatically improved engagement, ROI, brand awareness and conversions – with videos that nail your message and demand attention.
Discover Vyond’s Marketing Solutions →
Sales
Sell more, sell better. Instantly create personalized pitches and compelling follow-ups, train your team quicker and more effectively. Videos with Vyond make all the difference.
Discover Vyond’s Better Sales Solutions →
Vyond for Enterprise
Efficiently create on-brand content at scale, with complete privacy, security and support. Vyond is the only agile video creation studio that supports the rigorous security requirements of enterprise organizations.
Find Out More About Vyond for Enterprise
Thousands of businesses and millions of users worldwide rely on Vyond.
Try Vyond Today
#### How to Use Vyond Video Templates
How to Customize Any Vyond Video Template
Looking for a quick and easy way to make customized videos? Vyond offers 1000+ templates for a wide variety of use cases and job roles – all of which you can quickly modify to make your own.
Pick the Perfect Template
First, browse our Template page or Quickstart Kits and find the template that best suits your specific needs. Just click “Use This Template” to get started. If you’re already signed in and selecting from the in-app template library, click “Edit in Studio.”
Editing is Easy
Once you’re in Vyond Studio, select the scene you want to edit and click on the element you want to change.
Avatars: Right click on the placeholder image, choose “replace” and select an already generated avatar video you want to use
Text: Double click the text field and enter your own text
Images/Props: Right click on the asset and choose “replace” from the menu, then replace with another from your library or Vyond’s
Colors: Double click on the element and select a new color from the color selector in the top right nav
Characters: Right click on the character, choose “replace” and select a character, or create a new one in Character Creator
Tips:
If the text to speech for your replacement avatar or character is longer or shorter than the original scene, you can easily adjust the scene length to match by dragging the right edge of the scene left (shorter) or right (longer)
Quickly replace assets or colors across multiple scenes by selecting the desired scenes and using “Asset View” in the lower right corner to edit common elements across the scenes
Add Your Avatar, Or Add Yourself
Want to create a new avatar video? Just follow these simple steps:
Select an avatar from Vyond’s library
Input your script or text to speech (which you can preview if you want), and generate it
Once generated, it’ll appear in your recent video section on your homepage, ready for use (learn more here about creating an avatar)
Looking to create and use a custom avatar? Start the purchase for this added feature from the “Create your own” link on the avatar page. There, you can also upload your consent and training video. Learn more here about creating a custom avatar.
Integrate Custom Branding
One of the best features of creating with Vyond is how easily you can make any video your own – and all the different ways you can do it.
If you’re an Enterprise user, create your brand kit to get access to all your branded assets for quick editing including:
Upload to your brand kit custom color palettes, images, logos, fonts, brand guidelines
Add a logo watermark
Add logos to characters
Set approval management for additional brand management and security
If you’re on a Professional or Starter plan, you can:
Add your brand colors to assets
Change backgrounds
Upload your logo as an image to add it to scenes
Upload fonts (Professional users)
The Finishing Touch
Time for a couple final tweaks and then, The Big Reveal:
Make sure your scene length matches text to speech/avatar length – adjust as needed
Translate your video into 95 languages, including TTS and onscreen text (requires Professional plan and above)
Add open and/or closed captions
Download and export
Explore Our Templates
#### Human Resources
Transform your HR communications.
Your team has a lot on its plate: creating employee onboarding, training, workforce communications – the list goes on. With Vyond’s all-in-one, AI video creation platform, you can turn critical information into impactful and attention-grabbing videos in just minutes.
Streamline your video creation.
Instantly create videos from a simple prompt with our AI video maker, Vyond Go. Type what you want, and we’ll take it from there. Or use our intuitive, full-featured video editor, Vyond Studio, to get complete creative control and customization with drag-and-drop simplicity.
With Vyond’s templates, pre built characters, and tools that let you upload brand assets, fonts, and more, you can create professional videos in a fraction of the time.
Try Vyond Today
All you need. All right here.
Effortless video creation starts with having all the best tools in one place.
Get the right look for the right audience with an ever-expanding variety of options ranging from animated to photorealistic and everything in between. Our generative AI can also help create any visual or background — and even apply recorded actions directly to a character.
Integrations like Shutterstock, ultra-high-quality AI voices, and instant translation into 95 languages bring more functionality directly to you and help lighten your tech stack. Even screen and web recording are built right in and just a click away.
Try Vyond Today
Better brand management and collaboration built right in.
Our brand management and collaboration tools make brand cohesiveness and asynchronous collaboration easy. Add a company watermark, create approval requirements, upload brand fonts, colors, and guidelines so everyone is on the same page, and more. Supercharge your collaboration by sharing files and assets across teams and time zones. After all, teamwork makes the dream work!
Try Vyond Today
Increase employee engagement.
Video is the most engaging form of content. Keep your employees captivated — while still delivering important information — with video that gets results.
With Vyond, you can transform your communication with beautiful videos and gifs, resulting in increased engagement and productivity across the organization.
Try Vyond Today
Unify a distributed workforce.
The distributed workforce of today wants self-paced, mobile content. With Vyond, you can create content that’s accessible anywhere, on any device, through a medium they are already familiar with, video! Ensuring your team stays informed and connected.
Try Vyond Today
Human Resources FAQs
What’s the best AI tool for making onboarding videos?
The best AI tool for onboarding videos should allow you to create content from scratch, templates, text prompts, or by converting existing materials (PDFs, PowerPoints, Google Docs). It should make it easy to stay on brand and collaborate across teams. Since policies and best practices change frequently, it should also support quick, universal edits. Vyond checks all these boxes and has been a trusted tool for thousands of L&D and HR teams for over 15 years.
What’s the best video tool for HR teams?
The best video tool for HR teams—especially those asked to do more with less—is an AI video creation platform like Vyond. Its AI-powered features make it easy to turn everyday content—policies, training materials, onboarding docs, and internal updates—into engaging videos without production skills, while keeping everything on brand. From onboarding and compliance to culture and communications, Vyond supports a wide range of HR use cases in one platform.
What’s the easiest way to make recruiting videos for social media?
Ideally, you’ll want a user-friendly AI video tool with built-in templates and the ability to create custom content quickly. Tools like Canva offer templates, but more versatile platforms like Vyond allow you to adapt templates, generate videos from existing content, scripts, or text prompts, and export in formats optimized for social channels.
65% of the Fortune 500 and millions of users rely on Vyond.
Try Vyond Today
#### Integrations
Vyond Integrations
Effortless communication across your workflow. Discover the ever-expanding list of integrations you can use with Vyond.
Featured Integrations
Use Vyond with these apps – and generate videos without missing a beat.
Slack
Use Vyond’s text to video in Slack to instantly take your concepts from prompt to screen.
Learn More
Google Docs
Use document to video to effortlessly transform your Google doc into an engaging video.
Learn More
Zapier
Automate your video creation workflow by pairing with 7,000+ productivity apps and tools in Zapier.
Learn More
Browse by Category
Discover which apps you can use with Vyond to easily create more effective videos.
Absorb
Pair Vyond videos with Absorb’s learning management tools for more memorable and scalable e-learning experiences.
Learn More
Articulate 360
Replace static slides by integrating your Vyond videos into Articulate courses to boost course completion rates.
Learn More
Contentful
Increase productivity and reduce costs by adding Vyond-generated videos into Contentful’s workflows.
Learn More
Coursera
Bring lessons to life and boost student engagement by creating engaging videos in Vyond and Coursera.
Learn More
Docebo
Combine Vyond videos with Docebo’s intelligent learning platform to help improve learner outcomes.
Learn More
Google Docs
Use document to video to effortlessly transform your Google doc into an engaging video.
Learn More
Highspot
Highspot’s AI-driven insights empower sales teams to create, manage, and track engaging video content.
Learn More
iSpring Learn
Bring captivating Vyond videos to iSpring Learn’s user-friendly LMS to deliver impactful content.
Learn More
Moodle
Create content that enriches collaborative learning in Moodle by integrating Vyond’s AI video platform.
Learn More
Salesloft
Pair with personalized videos to enhance outreach, improve efficiency, and drive revenue growth.
Learn More
Seismic
Boost sales engagement and use analytics to refine strategies and deliver impactful buyer experiences with videos.
Learn More
Slack
Use Vyond’s text to video in Slack to instantly take your concepts from prompt to screen.
Learn More
Squarespace
Integrate custom videos created in Vyond into Squarespace to easily build a more clickworthy website.
Learn More
Square / Weebly
Incorporate Vyond videos with Square’s payment interface and Weebly’s web tools for a more immersive customer experience.
Learn More
Vimeo
Share your Vyond videos on Vimeo’s video hosting platform to help drive engagement and brand visibility.
Learn More
Wistia
Combine Vyond’s video creation with Wistia’s video hosting and analytics for viewer engagement insights.
Learn More
WordPress
Harness the storytelling potential of Vyond video creation to drive engagement across your WordPress platforms.
Learn More
Zapier
Automate your video creation workflow by pairing with 7,000+ productivity apps and tools in Zapier.
Learn More
Absorb
Pair Vyond videos with Absorb’s learning management tools for more memorable and scalable e-learning experiences.
Learn More
Articulate 360
Replace static slides by integrating your Vyond videos into Articulate courses to boost course completion rates.
Learn More
Coursera
Bring lessons to life and boost student engagement by creating engaging videos in Vyond and Coursera.
Learn More
Docebo
Combine Vyond videos with Docebo’s intelligent learning platform to help improve learner outcomes.
Learn More
iSpring Learn
Bring captivating Vyond videos to iSpring Learn’s user-friendly LMS to deliver impactful content.
Learn More
Moodle
Create content that enriches collaborative learning in Moodle by integrating Vyond’s AI video platform.
Learn More
Contentful
Increase productivity and reduce costs by adding Vyond-generated videos into Contentful’s workflows.
Learn More
Squarespace
Integrate custom videos created in Vyond into Squarespace to easily build a more clickworthy website.
Learn More
Square / Weebly
Incorporate Vyond videos with Square’s payment interface and Weebly’s web tools for a more immersive customer experience.
Learn More
Vimeo
Share your Vyond videos on Vimeo’s video hosting platform to help drive engagement and brand visibility.
Learn More
Wistia
Combine Vyond’s video creation with Wistia’s video hosting and analytics for viewer engagement insights.
Learn More
WordPress
Harness the storytelling potential of Vyond video creation to drive engagement across your WordPress platforms.
Learn More
Highspot
Highspot’s AI-driven insights empower sales teams to create, manage, and track engaging video content.
Learn More
Salesloft
Pair with personalized videos to enhance outreach, improve efficiency, and drive revenue growth.
Learn More
Seismic
Boost sales engagement and use analytics to refine strategies and deliver impactful buyer experiences with videos.
Learn More
65% of the Fortune 500 and millions of users rely on Vyond.
Try Vyond Today
#### Internal Communications
Internal Communications: Create locally, engage globally.
With Vyond, you can communicate critical information effortlessly, creatively, and on-brand to employees across your organization and around the world. Whether it’s company policies, strategies, or updates, Vyond helps you streamline how you engage with your workforce with all the tools you need, all in one place.
Better brand management and collaboration built right in.
Our brand management and collaboration tools make brand cohesiveness and asynchronous collaboration easy. Add a company watermark, create approval requirements, upload brand fonts, colors, and guidelines so everyone is on the same page, and more. Supercharge your collaboration by sharing files and assets across teams and time zones. After all, teamwork makes the dream work!
Try Vyond Today
Creative solutions that increase employee engagement.
Effortless video creation starts with having all the best tools in one place.
Get the right look for the right audience with our ever-expanding variety of options, ranging from animated to photorealistic and everything in between. Our generative AI can also help you create any visual or background and even apply recorded actions directly to a character.
Integrations like Shutterstock, ultra-high-quality AI voices, and instant translation into 95 languages bring more functionality directly to you – helping you more easily create content that employees want to watch while lightening your tech stack. Even screen and web recording are built right in and just a click away.
Try Vyond Today
Effortlessly enhance your company culture.
Vyond streamlines and simplifies video creation. There’s no need for production expertise or specialty software knowhow. Anyone can begin creating powerful, relevant, and engaging videos in minutes – no experience necessary.
Vyond’s extensive library of thousands of pre-built scenes, hundreds of video templates, and over 40,000 props and character actions saves you time and effort in creating engaging and relevant video communication. With Vyond, you can quickly and easily create videos that keep your employees informed and up-to-date.
Try Vyond Today
Internal Comms FAQs
What’s the best way to make internal comms videos with AI?
If you want a single AI solution for internal communications videos, choose a platform that supports a wide range of styles. Vyond is well-suited for key use cases like onboarding, training, company announcements, recruiting, and global workforce enablement. Users can create screen recordings, animated explainers, avatar-led videos, and data-driven visuals to communicate complex information clearly.
How do I make quick company update videos?
Choose an easy-to-use AI video tool that requires no prior experience. Start with a template and customize it with your brand. You can use an LLM (like ChatGPT) to convert updates into a script, then add it to your template—or simply input your notes into the platform’s AI video generator and let it create a draft automatically. Platforms like Vyond can be preloaded with branded templates to ensure consistency.
What’s the best tool for creating engaging employee communications?
Organizations use many formats for employee communications—email, PDFs, slide decks, intranet posts, and meetings—but these often struggle to capture attention. Video is one of the most engaging formats because it combines visuals, voice, and motion. The best tools are fast, easy to use, and flexible. Platforms like Vyond enable teams to create professional, on-brand videos with templates, animation, and AI features, making it easy to scale communication without production overhead.
65% of the Fortune 500 and millions of users rely on Vyond.
Try Vyond Today
#### iSpring Learn
iSpring Learn
Vyond’s intuitive video creation tools complement iSpring Learn’s user-friendly LMS, enabling organizations to easily produce and deliver captivating video content.
How to upload a video to iSpring Learn.
Method 1: Drag and Drop
Find the video file on your computer.
Click and drag the video to the desired location on the iSpring Learn page.
Release the mouse button to drop the video.
Method 2: Upload from Folder
Click the Video icon on the iSpring Learn interface.
Select Click to upload.
Browse your computer, select the video file, and click Open.
Method 3: Copy from Another Page
Find a video on another page in iSpring Learn.
Copy the video.
Paste it onto the new page where you want it.
Try our other powerful integrations.
Slack
Use Vyond’s text to video in Slack to instantly take your concepts from prompt to screen.
Learn More
Google Docs
Use document to video to effortlessly transform your Google doc into an engaging video.
Learn More
Zapier
Automate your video creation workflow by pairing with 7,000+ productivity apps and tools in Zapier.
Learn More
Vyond works. Everywhere you work.
Explore Integrations
#### Learning Center
Learning Center
Whether you’re looking for in-depth how-to’s on our latest product offerings, informative Q&A’s with Vyond experts, or fast and easy shortcuts for creating truly compelling content, you’ll find it all right here.
Office Hours
Bootcamp
Getting Started with Vyond
Sales Enablement QuickStart Kit
Love Vyond? Share your experience on
#### Mark Rader
Mark Rader
Mark is Vyond’s Director of Content Marketing and a subject matter expert in AI content creation, business communication, and visual storytelling. Prior to Vyond, he led high-performing content teams at Jellyvision and Wonderlic, two established B2B SaaS companies.
Return to Previous Page
#### Moodle
Moodle
Vyond’s versatile AI video creation platform integrates with Moodle to empower educators to create and share engaging visual content that enriches collaborative learning experiences across diverse educational settings.
How to upload videos to Moodle.
Method 1: Drag and Drop (if your browser supports it)
Log into your Moodle course.
Select Turn editing on at the top right of the page.
Locate your video file on your computer.
Click and drag the video file directly onto your Moodle course page.
When you release the mouse, a box will appear.
Choose whether you want the video:
Embedded in a label (visible on the page), or
Added as a clickable file resource.
Click Upload to finish.
Method 2: Manual Upload
Log into your Moodle course.
Select Turn editing on at the top right of the page.
Choose Add an activity or resource where you want to add the video.
Select File from the list of options.
Select Add.
Give your file a name.
In the Select files section, choose Add file.
Navigate to Browse to find your video file on your computer.
Select the file and choose Open.
Select Upload this file.
Scroll down and select Save and return to course.
Try our other powerful integrations.
Slack
Use Vyond’s text to video in Slack to instantly take your concepts from prompt to screen.
Learn More
Google Docs
Use document to video to effortlessly transform your Google doc into an engaging video.
Learn More
Zapier
Automate your video creation workflow by pairing with 7,000+ productivity apps and tools in Zapier.
Learn More
Vyond works. Everywhere you work.
Explore Integrations
#### Photo to Character
Create a character instantly.
Transform your photos into unique characters within seconds using Vyond’s AI-powered Photo to Character creator! Simply take or upload a photo, and Vyond will automatically generate a character based on your image. Customize your character with outfits, accessories and more with ease. Use this feature to quickly create personalized and engaging characters for training videos, internal communication, marketing content, and more.
Try Vyond Today
Additional resources.
Want to learn more about the exciting features and functionality Vyond’s all-in-one AI video creation platform has to offer? Explore the links below!
Plans and PricingVyond GoVyond StudioText to Image Product Release Notes
Other AI features
AI-Powered Video Creator Features (home)
Instant Infinite Library: AI-Powered Text to Image Feature
Generate Character Actions: AI-Powered Video to Action
Powerful Localization: AI-Powered Instant Video Translation
65% of the Fortune 500 and millions of users rely on Vyond.
Try Vyond Today
#### Press
Press
For press inquiries, please contact us at press@vyond.com.
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#### Pricing
Real value, real results.
Business
Professional
Enterprise
Agency
Monthly
Showing Annual Prices
Annual
Starter
US$58/mosingle user plan $699 billed annually
US$99/mosingle user plan Save 40% with annual pricing
Buy Now
Starter features include:
Access to AI avatars and tools
650+ high quality text to speech voices
Screen and webcam recording
Text to video (incl Doc/Script/URL to video)
10,000 credits per user, per month
Compare Plans
Professional
US$100/moper user $1199 billed annually
US$199/moper user Save 50% with annual pricing
Buy Now
All Starter features, plus:
Team collaboration tools
Access to 4M+ Shutterstock assets
Instant translation into 95 languages
Generative avatars from a text prompt
20,000 credits per user, per month
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Enterprise
US$137/moper user $1649 billed annually
Not available for monthly subscription
Buy Now
Buy Now
Contact Us for Multi-Seat Pricing
All Professional features, plus:
200+ ultra high quality text to speech voices
Brand Management Suite
Advanced collaboration
Enterprise security features
Virtually unlimited credits
*Read more about Vyond Security and Data Privacy
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Agency
US$167/moper user $1999 billed annually
Not available for monthly subscription
Buy Now
Buy Now
Contact Us for Multi-Seat Pricing
For creating client-facing content.
All Professional features, plus:
Brand Management Suite
Advanced collaboration
400,000 credits per user, per month
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US Government FedRAMP
(Vyond for Government)
Compare Plans
Compare Plans
Starter
$58/mo billed annually
$99/moSave 40% with annual pricing
Buy Now
Professional
$100/mo billed annually
$199/moSave 50% with annual pricing
Buy Now
Enterprise
$137/mo billed annually
Not available for monthly subscription
Buy Now
Buy Now
Agency
$167/mo billed annually
Not available for monthly subscription
Buy Now
Buy Now
Key Plan Differences
AI Avatars Choose from 1,300+ unique high quality avatar options
AI-powered Instant VideoLet AI generate your video using a prompt, .doc, .pdf, .ppt, .txt or URL
Advanced CollaborationCreate folders with account specific access for specific purposes, projects, or groups with Shared Spaces
Brand Management SuiteA complete toolkit that effortlessly brings brand management into the workflow
Ultra High Quality AI Voices 200+ ultra high quality text to speech voices
Vyond Secure SuiteComprehensive enterprise security features designed to safeguard data access, confidentiality, and integrity
Credits per User, per Month Credits available per user, per month towards use of AI features (See AI Tool for credit features)
10,000
20,000
Virtually Unlimited
400,000
Monthly Video DownloadsMaximum video and GIF downloads per user, per month
100
200
Virtually Unlimited
Virtually Unlimited
Max. Video DurationMaximum length (minutes) per video
25
40
90
90
AI Tools
Credits per User, per MonthFlexibly shift AI usage across select tools that use credits (see credit usage table for more info). AI features that utilize credits include:Avatar/Custom Avatar usageText to AvatarText to ImageText to SpeechText to Video (Vyond Go: Text, Doc, Script, URL)Translation
10,000
20,000
Virtually Unlimited
400,000
AI Avatars Choose from 1,300+ unique high quality avatar options
Avatar Background Swap & TransparencySwappable avatar backgrounds including uploaded images or transparency
Automatic Background RemovalRemove backgrounds from uploaded images
Caption TranslationTranslate caption text into any of 95 languages
Custom AI Avatars & Voice CloningCreate a digital version of yourself and your voice (contact your sales rep or csm for pricing or start in app)
Document to Video Upload a .doc, .txt, .ppt, or .pdf as part of your Vyond Go prompt
Photo to CharacterCreate a Vyond animated character from a photo
Script to VideoCreate a scripted Vyond Go video using a .doc, .txt, .ppt, or .pdf script
Text to ImageCreate unique images and backgrounds with generative AI using text prompts
Text to Speech (high quality)Choose from 650+ high quality text to speech voices
Text to VideoInstantly generate a script and video from a text prompt in Vyond Go
URL to Video Instantly generate a video using a web page in Vyond Go
Instant Video TranslationAutomatically translate all onscreen text, text to speech, and dialog script within your video into 95 languages
Speech Enhancer1-click optimization of recorded speech (powered by Dolby.io)
Text to AvatarGenerate an avatar, in virtually any style, with a simple text prompt and add a TTS voice
Video to ActionUpload a recorded action and apply it to animated characters
Vyond Go Multilingual SupportPrompt in Vyond Go with any of 95 supported languages
Text to Speech (ultra high quality) 200+ ultra high quality text to speech voices
Text to Video ClipCreate a 4-5 second video clip from a text prompt, with or without audio (credits and clip length based on image generation model used)
Credits Used for AI Features
Credits Used for Speech
Avatar Speech Credit usage calculated per 10 text characters; rounded up to next tenper 10 text characters
40-50
40-50
40-50
40-50
Custom Avatar UsageCredit usage calculated per 10 text characters; rounded up to next ten. For use of existing custom avatars, does not include custom avatar creation (contact your sales rep for information and pricing on purchasing custom avatars)per 10 text characters
50
50
50
50
TTS Generation (High Quality) Credit usage calculated per 10 text characters of high quality text to speech voices; rounded up to next tenper 10 text characters
2
2
2
2
TTS Generation (Ultra High Quality) Credit usage calculated per 10 text characters of ultra high quality voices; rounded up to next tenper 10 text characters
10
10
TranslationCredit usage calculated per minute of video duration, rounded up to the next minuteper minute of video duration
160
160
Credits Used per Generation
Text to AvatarCredit usage calculated per generation of one (1) avatar (avatar generation does not include TTS)
160
160-800
160-800
Text to ImageCredit usage calculated per generation of one (1) image
160
160
160-800
160-800
Text/Doc/Script/URL to Video (Vyond Go)Credit usage calculated per generation in Vyond Go
800
800
800
800
Text to Video ClipCreate a 4-5 second video clip from a text prompt, with or without audio (credits and clip length based on image generation model used)
2,500-4,000
2,500-4,000
Learn more about Credit Usage
Visual Styles
AI Avatars Choose from 1,300+ unique high quality avatar options
AnimatedCustomizable characters in Whiteboard, Contemporary, and Business Friendly styles, as well as extensive character style options transferable from Vyond templates
Charts and InfographicsDynamic charts and graphs that can be integrated into any style video
Custom AI Avatars & Voice CloningCreate a digital version of yourself and your voice (contact your sales rep for information and pricing)
Custom AssetsProfessionally created library of custom backgrounds, props, characters, templates, and scenes, built to your specific requirements (contact your sales rep for information and pricing)
Dual VideoCombine two different video elements within a scene (example: avatar with a screen recording)
Generative AICreate unique images and backgrounds with generative AI using text prompts
Screen Recording Capture video of your device’s screen
Transparent GIFs Create and download GIFs with transparent backgrounds
Webcam Recording Capture audio and video using your device’s camera and microphone
Mixed MediaCombine various styles – videos, images, charts, infographics, and more – within a video
PhotorealisticUpload your photos or access over 4 million stock images and video clips from ShutterStock (ShutterStock requires Professional plan or higher)
Brand Management
Color Changeable PropsRecolor any Vyond prop to match your company’s brand guidelines
Font ImportImport fonts for brand consistency across videos
Brand Management Suite
Applying LogosApply a logo or image that moves dynamically with a character’s clothing top or hat (available on all character styles)
Approval ManagementManage content and ensure brand compliance by requiring video approvals
Brand KitEasily integrate brand assets into Vyond and share across the enterprise
Color ShufflerAutomatic recoloring using color combinations taken from a brand kit or saved color palette
Company WatermarkAdd your company watermark to your video
Custom Color PaletteSave brand colors for use throughout your videos
Security
GDPR/CCPA ComplianceCompliant with EU and California data privacy regulations
ISO27001 ComplianceCompliant with legal, physical, and technical information security standards
Privacy Shield ComplianceVerified by TrustArc
Event LoggingTrack activity across the enterprise by requesting logs from your team’s account
Vyond Secure Suite A collection of enterprise security features designed to comply with the IT security standards of any company
Brute Force Login ProtectionAdministrator-defined number of login attempts before an account is locked
Custom Video Cache ExpirationDefine how long data will remain cached on our AWS servers
Inactivity LogoutLog users out after an administrator-defined time period of inactivity
IP WhitelistingLimit account access to trusted connections and IP addresses
Optional Security FeaturesData Partitioning & Encryption Keys
Password ComplexityAdministrator-defined password requirements
SCIM IntegrationSCIM protocol users can simplify Vyond provisioning across the enterprise
Single Sign On (SSO)Integrate Vyond directly with authentication services like Google Workspace, Office 365, and SAML 2.0
Localization
Caption TranslationTranslate caption text into any of 95 languages
Closed and Open CaptionsCreate captions with or without audio cues (download in .srt, .vtt, or .mp4)
Export & Import TextExport all text in your video for editing and then re-import to update your video
Instant TranslationQuickly translate onscreen text, text to speech, and dialog scripts into 95 languages
Vyond Go Multilingual SupportPrompt Vyond Go in any of 95 supported languages
Team Collaboration
Shared LibrariesShare audio, video, and image assets with your team
User Management PanelAdminister the accounts on your team
Video CollaborationCollaborate with others who purchase seats on your subscription
Video Sharing FeaturesShare videos securely with individuals or your entire team
Advanced CollaborationCreate folders with account specific access for specific purposes, projects, or groups with Shared Spaces
Integrations
Google DocsInstantly generate a video from within a Google document
SlackInstantly generate, view, download, and share Vyond Go videos from directly within the Slack platform
Zapier Integrate Vyond and Zapier to create automated video creation workflows from 7,000+ apps
ShutterstockAccess over 4 million stock images and video clips
Video Options
1080pExport .mp4 videos in 1080p resolution
Animated GIF ExportExport animated GIFs in an 8-second loop
Aspect RatiosCreate videos in 16:9 (horizontal), 9:16 (vertical), 1:1, or custom aspect ratios
Download TTSDownload your TTS file in .mp3 format
Favorite TTSPin your favorite or most often used TTS voice (including voice style settings) for quick reference
File Download Supported file types: .gif, .mp3, .mp4, SCORM, .srt, .vtt, .webm
File UploadSupported file types: .png, .jpg, .svg, .mp3, .mp4, .wav, .m4a, .ttf, .otf
Global EditEdit single or multiple assets across a scene or multiple scenes Swap assetsChange actionsChange expressionsChange colorsAdd or change effectsAdd or remove a motion pathAdjust positionAdjust sizeAdjust rotationAdjust opacity
Separate Audio TrackSeparate the audio track of imported videos for enhanced editing control
Smart Capture (Mobile App)Automatically match props and characters from the Vyond library with objects and people from your uploaded picture
Transparent Video BackgroundsCreate videos with transparent backgrounds and download in .webm format
CollectionsOrganize your props and uploaded assets
Export & Import TextEasily review and make quick changes by exporting the text in your video, making edits, and importing the new text
SCORM ExportUpload your video directly into any LMS as a SCORM package
PNG ExportExport PNG images of each scene
PPT ExportExport a PowerPoint deck with slides of each scene
Training & Support
Live Chat Support Instant access to our in-house support team
Priority Phone SupportJump to the front of the line and get your questions answered more quickly
Outstanding value in any plan.
Compare Plans
#### Privacy Policy
Privacy Policy
Last Updated: March 18, 2026
GoAnimate, Inc. or its affiliates d/b/a Vyond (“we”, “us” or “our”) recognizes the importance of the privacy of our users. This Privacy Policy contains important information for you about how we collect, use, disclose, retain and delete your personal information collected by us through our website vyond.com (https://vyond.com) (the “Site”) and the services available through our Site (collectively, the “Services”). It also describes your choices regarding use, access, and correction of our personal information.
Your personal information, as collected through this website and the Vyond platform, will be processed in accordance with this policy and applicable data protection laws. Use of our Site or Services and any dispute over privacy is subject to this Policy and our Terms of Service, including its applicable limitations on damages and the resolution of disputes, subject to any law in your jurisdiction applicable to our Service. Our Terms of Service are incorporated by reference into this Privacy Policy.
Please read this Privacy Policy carefully. If you have any questions, feel free to contact our privacy officers by email at privacy-support@vyond.com or by mail at GoAnimate, Inc., 204 East Second Avenue, Suite 638, San Mateo, CA 94401 USA.
Notice at Collection. At or before the time of collection, California residents may have a right to receive notice of our practices, including the categories of personal information to be collected, the purposes for which such information is collected or used, whether such information is sold or shared and how to opt-out of such uses, and how long such information is retained. You can find those details by clicking on the following links.
Personal Information We Collect And Process
How We Disclose Information
Your Privacy Choices
Your Privacy Rights
How Long We Retain Your Information
Cookies and Other Tracking Mechanisms
User-Generated Content
Vyond Community
Third-Party Links
Children and Minors
International Visitors
Supplemental Notice for California Residents
Supplemental Notice for European Residents
Data Privacy Framework
Changes to this Privacy Policy
Contact
Categories of DataPurpose of ProcessingLawful Basis (applicable for EEA users only)Your name, mailing address, phone number, email address, contact preferences, and credit card information.To register and create your Vyond account or perform account transactions.Performance of our contract to provide the Services to you.Your email address and any other information you provide to us, such as contact and employment information.To communicate with you, including by email, about our Services, to respond to your questions and to request feedback, to offer you additional services, or to provide you with additional content or information that might be relevant or interesting to you.Our legitimate interest in communicating with you about our Services and marketing any additional services.Your audio recordings and text including text input into prompt boxes as part of generative AI features included in a Video or from an Avatar that you create.To improve and provide our Services where you choose to record your own voice or image in an animation or otherwise input information into our Site or Services in any form, such as voice, image or text including text prompt functionality using generative AI.Performance of our contract with you in terms of providing the Services and our legitimate interest in terms of improving the Services.Information you provide such as your occupation, language, zip code and area code and any feedback you might give us on our Site or Services. Through cookies we may also automatically collect: your domain name, browser type, browser language, operating system type, device name and model, location, time zone where Services are accessed, pages or screens viewed, links clicked, IP address, when and the length of time you visit our Site or use our Services and the referring URL or the webpage that led you to our Site. We use the information derived from users’ access to and use of our Site and our Services, both on an individual and aggregated basis, and to respond to user desires and preferences.To better understand customer behavior in order to improve our Site, and Services and enhance User experiences, including to tailor the content provided through our Site and Services to provide you with personalized recommendations, and to improve our marketing of our Services.Our legitimate interest in improving our products, services and marketing our products and services.
Personal Information We Collect and Process
If we do combine non-personal information with personal information, the combined information will be treated as personal information for as long as it remains combined.
We may collect and process any of the information above as we deem necessary to (i) prevent, identify and address fraudulent or unlawful activity and security incidents; (ii) comply with laws, rules and regulations applicable to us in the US; (iii) resolve disputes with customers, users or third parties; (iv) respond to claims and legal processes (including but not limited to subpoenas and court orders); and (v) protect our property rights and those of our customers including by retaining data backups for business continuity purposes. For users in the EU: the foregoing purposes for processing are based on our legitimate interests.
We do not share any user data with third-party AI models. Specifically, Google Workspace APIs are not used to develop, improve, or train generalized AI and/or ML models.
How We Disclose Information
We may disclose the information that we collect about you with the following entities:
Your Employer/Contracting Entity. If you are using the Site or the Services through a work email address, we may disclose your information to your employer/contracting entity only for the purpose of facilitating their potential purchase of an enterprise account from us.
Authorized Resellers. We may disclose your information including your email address, employer and usage data with our authorized resellers and channel partners so that they can provide customers and potential customers with helpful information about our products and services to allow them to make an informed purchasing decision. Our resellers are not permitted to use your information for any other purpose other than contacting customers and potential customers. Where we transfer your information, we have also put in place appropriate safeguards to protect your information irrespective of your country of residence.
Service Providers. We may disclose your information to our vendors or service providers or agents who act as processors or sub-processors on our behalf in providing systems support for our services and our business. Accordingly, these vendors, service providers or agents may process and store your personal information. Service Providers, for example marketing automation and user analytics platforms, may use your personal data in aggregated form where it does not identify you, for their own analytics and research and development purposes. Vendors or service providers we may disclose to include:
Cloud-based hosting providers and IT service and support providers which may process any of your information mentioned in this privacy policy as they provide hosting services for all of the data that you provide or we collect in the context of the Services and provide underlying IT services and related support services to allow us to provide the Services and operate our business.
Marketing automation and data enrichment platforms process contact information (name, email address, physical address, phone number, company name, job role) and provide updated or complete contact information to support our marketing efforts.
Customer relationship management platforms process contact information as well as transaction information (such as type of subscription) to allow us to better support and market our customers.
Customer support and community platforms which may process contact information and any personal data that users share on the platform.
Accounting and finance platforms process transaction information (e.g. name, location and payment history) to allow us to budget, forecast and pay taxes.
Payment processors securely process your contact information and payment card information to process your payment for our Services.
User analytics platforms will generally process usage information automatically collected from cookies on our Site and Services (domain name, browser type, browser language, device ID, operating system type, device name and model, pages or screens viewed, links clicked; IP address, when and the length of time you visit our Site or use our Services and the referring URL, or the webpage that led you to our Site) as well as information contained in our customer relationship management platform to provide analytics which support our decisions relating to product and service improvement (which includes content personalization) as well as marketing efforts.
Consulting firms will process any information that we provide to them which generally includes aggregated data but may include identifying information in limited circumstances.
Financial advisors, accountants and law firms may process any personal information that may be relevant in the provision of their services to us. While all service providers are subject to contractual obligations of confidentiality, these professional advisors are also generally subject to professional obligations of confidentiality.
We may also disclose the information that we collect about you in the following ways:
Business Transfers. We may disclose your information to another entity if we are acquired by or merged with another company if substantially all of our assets are transferred to another company, or as part of a bankruptcy proceeding.
In Response to Legal Process. We may disclose your information to comply with the law, or a judicial proceeding, subpoena, court order or another legal process.
To Protect Us and Others. We may disclose your information to law enforcement, financial institutions, judicial authorities or regulatory authorities when we believe it is necessary to investigate, prevent or act regarding illegal activities, suspected fraud, situations involving potential threats to the safety of any person, violations of our Terms of Service or this Privacy Policy, or as evidence in litigation in which we are involved.
Aggregate and De-Identified information. We may disclose aggregate or de-identified information about our users for marketing, advertising, research or similar purposes.
Privacy Choices
GoAnimate will offer individuals the opportunity to choose (opt-out) whether their personal information is (a) to be disclosed to an employer or non-agent third party or (b) to be used for a purpose other than the purpose for which it was originally collected or subsequently authorized by the individual. GoAnimate will provide individuals with reasonable mechanisms to exercise their choices.
If we plan to use your personal information for a new purpose that differs significantly from the one originally disclosed, or share it with a third party not outlined in this Privacy Policy, we will give you the option to decide if you wish to proceed with this use or disclosure.
You may sign-up to receive email or newsletter or other communications from us. If you would like to discontinue receiving this information, you may update your email preferences by using the “Unsubscribe” link found in emails we send to you or by contacting us at support@vyond.com.
Privacy Rights
In accordance with applicable law, you may have the right to: (i) request confirmation of whether we are processing your personal information; (ii) obtain access to or a copy of your personal information; (iii) receive an electronic copy of personal information that you have provided to us, or ask us to send that information to another company (the “right of data portability”); (iv) object to or restrict our uses of your personal information; (v) seek correction or amendment of inaccurate, untrue, incomplete, or improperly processed personal information; and (vi) request erasure of personal information held about you by us, subject to certain exceptions prescribed by law. If you would like to exercise any of these rights, please follow the instructions set forth below.
We will process such requests in accordance with applicable laws. To protect your privacy, we will take steps to verify your identity before fulfilling your request. Where we are the “Processor,” “Service Provider,” or other similar term of the personal information under applicable data protection laws, you must contact the appropriate data “Controller,” “Business,” or other entity ultimately responsible for your information to exercise these rights.
Non-Discrimination. You may have the right not to receive discriminatory treatment by us for the exercise of your rights conferred by data protection laws.
Right to Review, Delete, and Control Our Use of Your Information. You may have the right to request access to your personal information and may have additional rights depending on the personal data protection laws applicable to your jurisdiction.
You can review most of the personal information we collect about you by logging into your account and reviewing your account information and updating the personal information we maintain about you.
You may also contact our privacy officers at the address below, or email us at privacy-support@vyond.com to request access to (i) review your personal information and (ii) exercise any of your rights with respect to your personal information, including erasure or deletion, and/or (iii) request cancellation of your account.
Right to Take Your Information With You. You may have the right to obtain a copy of your personal information and take it with you. The copy will be in a structured, commonly used and machine-readable format. If requested by you and when technically feasible, we will send that information via electronic means to a third-party designated by you, where we are the Controller of the information.
Right to Remove Your Information. We may store videos you have created on Vyond or external assets you have imported into your asset library on Vyond. You can delete such videos or assets at any time by logging into your account and using the deletion tools provided within Vyond. Please note that such tools will only apply to the copies hosted on Vyond and will not apply to videos previously downloaded or exported. Please also note that it may take up to one (1) month for such deletions to become permanent and irreversible.
Right to File a Complaint. If we fail to respond to your complaint within a reasonable period of receiving it in writing, or if you are dissatisfied with the response that you receive from us, you may, subject to the laws applicable to you, lodge a complaint with the data protection authorities in your home jurisdiction.
Opting Out of “Sharing” For Cross Context Behavioral Advertising. Subject to applicable law, you may also have the right to opt-out of sharing of information for cross-context Behavioral advertising. You can do so by accessing the “Your Privacy Choices” page available here or by broadcasting the GPC signal.
If you have any questions about how to remove videos or assets on Vyond, please contact our support team at support@vyond.com.
How Long We Retain Your Information
GoAnimate is subject to various retention requirements and retains personal data only for as long as necessary for a specified purpose or legal requirement wherever technically and operationally feasible and in accordance with any applicable regulations. If you are using the Site or the Services through your employer’s multi-seat account, please be aware the Administrator of the account has the ability to delete all personal data processed using the Site or the Services, including any content you create and your account details.
Cookies and Other Tracking Mechanisms
We and our service providers use cookies and other tracking mechanisms to track information about our users’ use of our Site or Services. We or our service providers may combine this information with other personal information we collect from you.
Do Not Track. Our Site does not respond to Do Not Track signals and we or our third-party service providers may track your activities once you leave our Users may disable certain tracking as discussed in this section (e.g., by disabling cookies).
Cookies. We or our service providers may use cookies to track your activity on our Site. A cookie is a text file that a website transfers to your computer or device for record-keeping purposes. We or our service providers may use cookies to track your activities on our Site, such as the pages visited and time spent on our Site. Most browsers allow users to refuse cookies. The Help portion of the toolbar on most browsers can inform you about how to prevent a computer from accepting new cookies, how to have the browser notify a user upon receipt of a new cookie, or how to disable cookies altogether. If you disable cookies, you may not be able to browse certain areas of our Site, or use certain parts of our Services, such as our recommender system which will tailor content according to User preferences.
Clear GIFs, Pixel Tags, and Other Technologies. Clear GIFs are tiny graphics with a unique identifier, similar in function to cookies, which are embedded invisibly on web. We or our service providers may use clear GIFs (also known as web beacons, web bugs or pixel tags), relating to our Site to track your activities, help us manage content, and compile statistics about usage of our Site. We or our service providers may also use clear GIFs in HTML emails to our users, to help us track email response rates, identify when our emails are viewed, and track whether our emails are forwarded.
Third-Party Analytics. We use third-party service providers, such as Google Analytics, to evaluate the use of our Site and our Services. We or our service providers use automated devices and applications to evaluate the use of our Site and Services. We or our service providers use these tools to help us improve our Site, Services, performance, and user experiences. These entities may use cookies and other tracking technologies, such as web beacons or Flash cookies, to perform their services. You can learn more about Google’s practices by visiting here.
Google Analytics Advertising. We use Google Analytics Advertising features to collect and analyze information on how users engage with our Site and our Services. We use the following Google Analytics Advertising features:
Remarketing with Google Analytics. This allows us to advertise to people who have previously engaged with our business.
Google Display Network Impression Reporting. This allows us to assess the impact of impressions and other site behavior.
Google Analytics Demographics and Interest Reporting. This allows us to cater ads to specific audiences.
Integrated services that require Google Analytics to collect data for advertising purposes, including the collection of data via advertising cookies and identifiers.
Google Signals. This allows us to assess aggregated session data for users who have consented to Ads Personalization.
Google-ID. Upon login, we assign subscribed Vyond application users a pseudo-anonymous ID that enables us to measure, understand, and improve the user experience across devices and platforms. Subscribed users can opt out of the User-ID via the “Manage My Preferences” link located at the bottom of each page.
Users who prefer to opt out of having their data used by Google Analytics can do so by installing the Google Analytics opt-out browser add-on for the web. You may also opt out of Google Analytics Advertising features via Ads Settings or Ad Settings for mobile apps.
User-Generated Content
Users can create content on our Site or Services, such as by creating videos using the assets we provide and importing their own assets (such as image and audio files) for inclusion in these videos. You control the sharing and distribution settings for the videos created by you according to the control settings you set for yourself. If you have elected to make your animations public, then other users will be able to see that you posted animations and view your animations. We cannot prevent such information from being used in a manner that might violate this Privacy Policy, the law or your personal privacy. If you or other users authorized on your account download or export a video, the resulting video file does not reside on our Site or Services and is no longer governed by this Privacy Policy.
Vyond Community
Users can also post materials and other information through their use of the Vyond Community Site. You will determine what materials and information you post, and because those postings will be viewable by other users of the Vyond Community Site, you should have no expectation of privacy with respect to such postings.
Third-Party Links
Our Site and Services may contain links to third-party websites. Any access to and use of such linked websites is not governed by this Privacy Policy but instead is governed by the privacy policies of those third-party websites. We are not responsible for the information practices of such third-party websites.
Children and Minors
Our Site and our Service are not directed to children under 18. Without a parent or legal guardian’s written consent, we do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 18 years of age. If we become aware that we have unknowingly registered and collected personal information from a child under the age of 18 without parental consent, we will make reasonable efforts to delete such information from our records and that registration will be subject to immediate termination for violation of our Terms of Service.
International Visitors
Our computer systems are currently based in the United States. If you choose to use our Services from other regions of the world with laws governing data collection and use that may differ from U.S. law, then please note that you are transferring your information outside of those regions to the U.S. for storage and processing. By providing any information, including information, on or to our website, you acknowledge and accept such transfers, storage, and processing.
Supplemental Notice for California Residents
The California Consumer Privacy Act (“CCPA”) provides California residents with the right to know what categories of personal information we have collected about them, whether we have disclosed that personal information for a business purpose (e.g., to a service provider), whether we “sold” that personal information, and whether we have “shared” that personal information for “cross-context Behavioral advertising” in the preceding twelve months. California residents can find this information below:
Categories of Personal Information We CollectCategories of Third Parties To Whom Personal Information Is Disclosed For a Business PurposeCategories of Third Parties To Whom Personal Information Is Shared or SoldIdentifiersService ProvidersAnalytics and Advertising PartnersPersonal information categories listed in Cal. Civ. Code § 1798.80(e)Service ProvidersN/ACommercial informationService ProvidersAnalytics and Advertising PartnersInternet activity or electronic network activity informationService ProvidersAnalytics and Advertising PartnersGeolocation dataService ProvidersN/AAudio, electronic, visual, thermal, olfactory, or similar informationService ProvidersN/AProfessional or employment-related informationService ProvidersN/AInferences drawn from other personal information to create a profileN/AAnalytics and Advertising Partners
The categories of sources from which we collect personal information and our business and commercial purposes for using and disclosing personal information are set forth in “Personal Information We Collect and Process,” “How We Disclose Your Information” sections above. We will retain personal information in accordance with the time periods set forth in the “How Long We Retain Your Personal Information” section.
We “sell” and “share” your personal information to provide you with “cross-context Behavioral advertising” about our products and services. No mobile information will be shared with third parties / affiliates for marketing / promotional purposes. All other categories exclude text messaging originator opt-in data and consent; this information will not be shared with any third parties. You can opt out of being tracked by third parties and targeted advertising as set forth in the “Your Privacy Rights” section.
Disclosure Regarding Individuals Under the Age of 16.
We do not have actual knowledge of any “sale” of personal information of minors under 16 years of age. We do not have actual knowledge of any “sharing” of personal information of minors under 16 years of age for “cross-context Behavioral advertising.”
Verification
To protect your privacy, we will take steps to reasonably verify your identity before fulfilling requests submitted under the CCPA. These steps may involve asking you to provide sufficient information that allows us to reasonably verify you are the person about whom we collected personal information or an authorized representative. Examples of our verification process may include asking you to provide the email address or phone number we have associated with you, opening a link sent to the contact information provided, and following the instructions on the website you are taken to.
Authorized Agent
Only you, or someone legally authorized to act on your behalf, may make a verifiable consumer request related to your personal information. To authorize an agent, provide written authorization signed by you and your designated agent using the information found in the “Contact Us” section below and ask us for additional instructions.
Supplemental Notice for European Residents
Controller and Processor. We are the Controller of data that you provide in order for us to create your account and to provide with you the Services. You are the Controller of any personal data that is uploaded by you in connection with creating videos through the Services and we are the Processor of that data on your behalf. We will process the data according to your instructions, which you give us in the process of signing up for the Services, specifically to facilitate your use of the Services.
Data Transfers. We are based in the United States so your personal data (i) will not be processed in the European Economic Area (EEA) and (ii) will be processed by us or our service providers in the United States and other non-EEA countries. We have affiliates located in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Thailand, and Singapore that mainly develop our products and Services. These affiliates have limited access to personal data but may access your personal data to provide technical support when troubleshooting an issue. Any transfer of EEA personal data between GoAnimate affiliates occurs on the basis of EU Commission-approved standard contractual clauses.
We have authorized resellers and channel partners all over the globe. Our largest markets where we have established channel partners are the US, UK, Germany, France, Brazil, Australia, Japan, and South Korea. But, as we said, we may have a channel partner or reseller in other jurisdictions including in your jurisdiction. In any event, we always ensure that we have appropriate contractual safeguards in place to protect your data regardless of the location of the reseller. For transfers of EEA data to the UK and Japan we rely on adequacy decisions (available here and here respectively). For transfers to all other countries not deemed to have an adequate level of data protection under EU law we rely on European Commission-approved standard contractual clauses.
All of our service providers and vendors mentioned in the ‘How We Disclose Information’ section above (except for our EU-based customer support partner) are located in the US and any transfers of EEA personal data to these service providers and vendors are made on the basis of EU Commission-approved standard contractual clauses. You may request a redacted copy of these standard contractual clauses by contacting us at privacy-support@vyond.com.
Data Privacy Framework
GoAnimate, Inc. doing business as Vyond complies with the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework (EU-U.S. DPF), the UK Extension to the EU-U.S. DPF, and the Swiss-U.S. Data Privacy Framework (Swiss-U.S. DPF) as set forth by the U.S. Department of Commerce. GoAnimate, Inc. doing business as Vyond has certified to the U.S. Department of Commerce that it adheres to the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework Principles (EU-U.S. DPF Principles) with regard to the processing of personal data received from the European Union in reliance on the EU-U.S. DPF and from the United Kingdom (and Gibraltar) in reliance on the UK Extension to the EU-U.S. DPF. GoAnimate, Inc. doing business as Vyond has certified to the U.S. Department of Commerce that it adheres to the Swiss-U.S. Data Privacy Framework Principles (Swiss-U.S. DPF Principles) with regard to the processing of personal data received from Switzerland in reliance on the Swiss-U.S. DPF. If there is any conflict between the terms in this privacy policy and the EU-U.S. DPF Principles and/or the Swiss-U.S. DPF Principles, the Principles shall govern. To learn more about the Data Privacy Framework (DPF) program, and to view our certification, please visit https://www.dataprivacyframework.gov/.
GoAnimate, Inc. doing business as Vyond is subject to the regulatory enforcement powers of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. In certain situations, GoAnimate, Inc. doing business as Vyond may be required to disclose personal data in response to lawful requests by public authorities, including to meet national security or law enforcement requirements.
GoAnimate, Inc. doing business as Vyond respects your control over your information and, upon request, we will confirm whether we hold or are processing information that we have collected from you. You also have the right to amend or update inaccurate or incomplete personal information, request deletion of your personal information, or request that we no longer use it. Under certain circumstances we will not be able to fulfill your request, such as if it interferes with our regulatory obligations, affects legal matters, we cannot verify your identity, or it involves disproportionate cost or effort, but in any event we will respond to your request within a reasonable timeframe and provide you an explanation. In order to make such a request of us, please email us at privacy-support@vyond.com.
In compliance with the EU-U.S. DPF and the UK Extension to the EU-U.S. DPF and the Swiss-U.S. DPF, GoAnimate, Inc. doing business as Vyond commits to resolve DPF Principles-related complaints about our collection and use of your personal information. EU and UK and Swiss individuals with inquiries or complaints regarding our handling of personal data received in reliance on the EU-U.S. DPF and the UK Extension to the EU-U.S. DPF and the Swiss-U.S. DPF should first contact GoAnimate, Inc. doing business as Vyond at: privacy-support@vyond.com.
Please note that for personal information about you that we have obtained or received for processing on behalf of a separate, unaffiliated entity – which determined the means and purposes of processing, all such requests should be made to that entity directly. We will honor and support any instructions they provide us with respect to your personal information.
In compliance with the EU-U.S. DPF, the UK Extension to the EU-U.S. DPF, and the Swiss-U.S. DPF, GoAnimate, Inc. doing business as Vyond commits to refer unresolved complaints concerning our handling of personal data received in reliance on the EU-U.S. DPF, the UK Extension to the EU-U.S. DPF, and the Swiss-U.S. DPF to TRUSTe, an alternative dispute resolution provider based in the United States. If you do not receive timely acknowledgment of your DPF Principles-related complaint from us, or if we have not addressed your DPF Principles-related complaint to your satisfaction, please visit https://feedback-form.trustarc.com/watchdog/request for more information or to file a complaint. These dispute resolution services are provided at no cost to you.
For complaints regarding EU-U.S. DPF, the UK Extension to the EU-U.S DPF, and Swiss-U.S. DPF compliance not resolved by any of the other DPF mechanisms, you have the possibility, under certain conditions, to invoke binding arbitration. Further information can be found on the official DPF website: https://www.dataprivacyframework.gov/framework-article/ANNEX-I-introduction.
In the context of onward transfers, GoAnimate, Inc. doing business as Vyond is accountable for the processing of personal data it receives, under the EU-U.S. DPF, the UK Extension to the EU-U.S. DPF, and Swiss-U.S. DPF and subsequently transfers to a third party acting as an agent on its behalf. GoAnimate, Inc. doing business as Vyond remains liable under the EU-U.S. DPF Principles, and the UK Extension to the EU-U.S. DPF, and the Swiss-U.S. DPF Principles if GoAnimate, Inc. doing business as Vyond’s agent processes personal information in a manner inconsistent with the EU-U.S. DPF Principles, and the UK Extension to the EU-U.S. DPF, and the Swiss-U.S. DPF Principles, unless GoAnimate, Inc. doing business as Vyond proves that it is not responsible for the event giving rise to damage.
Changes to this Privacy Policy
This Privacy Policy is current as of the “Last Updated” date set forth above. We may change this Privacy Policy from time to time, so please be sure to check back periodically. We will post any changes to this Privacy Policy on our Site. If we make any changes to this Privacy Policy that materially affect our practices with regard to your personal information, we will provide you with email or written notice in advance of such change by highlighting the change on our Site or on our Service. If you do not accept such change, we may restrict or terminate your use of our Site or Service.
We will also keep prior versions of this Privacy Policy in an archive for your review here:
December 18, 2025 Privacy Policy
January 8, 2025 Privacy Policy
December 4, 2024 Privacy Policy
July 12, 2024 Privacy Policy
November 30, 2023 Privacy Policy
September 27, 2023 Privacy Policy
July 19, 2023 Privacy Policy
May 16, 2023 Privacy Policy
January 17, 2023 Privacy Policy
January 25, 2022 Privacy Policy
March 22, 2021 Privacy Policy
July 28, 2020 Privacy Policy
June 16, 2020 Privacy Policy
Feb 11, 2020 Privacy Policy
Oct 3, 2019 Privacy Policy
May 16, 2019 Privacy Policy
January 25, 2019 Privacy Policy
May 6, 2018 Privacy Policy
August 1, 2017 Privacy Policy
June 8, 2017 Privacy Policy
April 1, 2008 Privacy Policy
Contact
If you have any questions, complaints, or comments about this Privacy Policy, or seek to exercise your rights under applicable personal data protection law, please contact us. We will use reasonable efforts to respond to you as soon as possible.
Send mail to:GoAnimate, IncAttn: Privacy Officer204 East Second Avenue, Suite 638San Mateo, CA 94401
privacy-support@vyond.com
#### Products
Vyond Products
The effortless, all-in-one AI video creation platform.
Vyond provides everything needed to communicate better, including Vyond Go, our AI-powered instant video maker, and Vyond Studio, our full-featured video editor. Even create videos on the go with Vyond Mobile.
Vyond Go: The AI-powered instant video maker.
Instantly generate compelling and effective videos from simple prompts in multiple styles, including mixed media, photorealistic, animated, and more. Edit or update as needed or get even more creative control by editing in Vyond Studio.
Learn More →
Vyond Studio: Our full-featured video editor.
Create compelling and impactful mixed media videos by combining avatars with any Vyond style, automatically translate videos into 95 languages, add screen and webcam recordings, and more. With Vyond, creating engaging business videos is easier than ever.
Learn More →
Vyond Mobile: Effortless video creation on the go.
Since inspiration can strike anywhere, Vyond Mobile gives you the ability to instantly create, edit, and share videos whenever you need them. Smart Capture helps you automatically gather Vyond props and characters that match your photo. And, you can save captured media into your library.
Learn More →
What could take an agency or in-house video production team 3-4 weeks to produce, we can complete with Vyond in 3-4 hours. It’s like having the full power of a video studio as a part of your team at a fraction of the cost. The application does most of the work—script writing, animation, and editing right at our fingertips.
Christopher AnnandDirector of Programs and Governance, Ethics and Compliance Office, Cargill
65% of the Fortune 500 and millions of users rely on Vyond.
Try Vyond Today
#### Resources
Resources
From our insightful webinars to our informative blogs, you’ll find all of Vyond’s resources right here. Go ahead, dig in.
Resource Types
Blog
Webinars
Video Templates
Learning Center
Events
Featured Case Studies
Indeed Fuels Sellers’ Success with Vyond
How Shelter Insurance Builds Cyber Resilience with Vyond
Michigan State Guides Fundraisers Through Transformation with Vyond
See All Case Studies
Blog Topics
AI Video Creation
Video Creation
Communication Tips
Product Releases & Updates
Company News & Awards
Customer Stories
Learning & Development
Human Resources
Sales & Sales Enablement
Marketing
Love Vyond? Share your experience on
#### Sales
Vyond for Sales: Sell more, sell better with videos.
Connecting with today’s distracted and overwhelmed prospects has never been more challenging. That’s why Vyond is the perfect solution for boosting sales and enabling your sellers. With Vyond, you can effortlessly create engaging, effective videos for sales pitches, custom demos, team training, and more.
Stand out and be seen with Vyond videos.
Vyond videos capture attention better than any email. And Vyond’s all-in-one video creation platform is the one place you can instantly create any style of video you need — highly personalized for each prospect. Check out 11 ways to boost sales and enable your sellers with Vyond.
Give memorable presentations.
Create highly engaging presentations and demos with Vyond. Show them live or pull them into a landing page tailored to each account.
With Vyond’s dynamic charts, branding options, and diverse, eye-catching assets, your pitches will spark audiences to take action — like signing that paperwork.
See how
Expedite pre-sales.
Your entire buying committee won’t want to follow you into the technical weeds — but their approval is important. Videos made with Vyond can help less technical audiences quickly understand how your solution can help them, how it fits into their bigger company picture, and the costs of inaction.
Easily save solution engineers hours with automated demo videos, AI-powered scripting, and lifelike voiceovers. And collaborate seamlessly so pre-sales teams can swap their best-performing assets.
See examples
Add personality at scale.
Vyond videos give you that personal touch at scale. Use our character creator and lip-sync tools to introduce yourself in an email with a personalized email or animated GIF. Or create short social media videos to establish yourself as a trusted resource.
See how
Create on-demand sales training videos.
With Vyond, you can quickly and easily create effective sales videos specific to your product or service and your own sales process.
Import the videos to your corporate learning management system or host them on your intranet. With those in place, your team will always have access to vital information whenever they’re ready to learn.
See examples
Sales FAQs
What’s the best video tool for making prospecting videos?
Many tools enable quick, personalized prospecting videos, such as simple webcam recordings. However, more versatile platforms allow reps to create more engaging content, including animated videos, screen recordings, and avatar-based presentations. While Vyond has traditionally been used in L&D, enterprise teams increasingly use it for prospecting, follow-ups, and QBRs.
What’s the best video creation software for sales enablement
Sales teams often use tools like Vidyard or Loom for quick outreach videos due to their CRM integrations. However, scalable sales enablement requires more than one-off recordings. Vyond stands out by combining AI-powered creation, reusable templates, and brand control—allowing teams to produce consistent, high-impact content at scale.
Indeed Fuels Sellers’ Success with Vyond
Global Tech Company Trains Sales Reps 5x Faster with Vyond
11 Way to Boost Sales and Enable your Sellers with Videos
65% of the Fortune 500 and millions of users rely on Vyond.
Try Vyond Today
#### Sales Enablement Quickstart Kit
Sales Enablement Quickstart Kit
Slash ramp time, boost engagement, and drive pipeline performance with handpicked templates for every stage. No need to start from scratch.
Customer-Facing: Start the Conversation
Tee up stronger deals with video templates designed for outbound outreach, early discovery, and influencing champions before the first meeting.
Product Teaser or Demo Preview
Business Case Builder
Personalized Prospecting
Customer-Facing: Deal Acceleration & Post-Sale Success
Win late-stage deals and expand existing accounts with video templates designed for follow-ups, proposal recaps, onboarding, and reinforcing value post-sale.
Customer Story/Proof Point
Proposal Recap or Walkthrough
Quarterly Business Review (QBR)
Internal Enablement: Sales Team Training
Train faster and reinforce strategy, tools, and messaging at scale with video templates designed for internal enablement.
Competitive Battle Card
Talk Track Breakdown
Tech Stack Tutorials
Capture potential sales with Vyond Integrations.
Drive growth without leaving your workflow with our integrated partner apps.
Try It Now
Try It Now
Try It Now
Tips and insights to unlock your team’s full potential.
Expert advice and key customer insights into capturing real ROI with Vyond.
11 Ways to Boost Sales Blog
Indeed Case Study
Global Tech Company Case Study
Salespeople love Vyond.
“Vyond is a very powerful content authoring tool with a sleek and fast SaaS interface. It can help you create high quality engaging and modern content. The latest addition of AI (Vyond Go) is absolutely impressive. It gives the potential to create way more in much less time.”
Vincent DrapeauDirector, Sales Training
Salesloft
“We’re pleased with how easy Vyond made it for us to create an animated character for our CTO, choose a realistic voice, and add real-world illustrations required for our story.”
Stefanie CoburnVice President of Enablement Tanium
“We’re Vyond enthusiasts. It’s a tool we really enjoy using. It’s so easy for everyone to jump right in and it’s really fast to put together a high-quality product.”
Laurel SchulertHead of Learning Design & DevelopmentGlobal Tech Company
Find out how you can onboard faster and drive pipeline with Vyond.
Talk to Sales
#### Salesloft
Salesloft
Integrating Vyond with Salesloft empowers businesses to create visually compelling, personalized video content, streamline workflows, and track engagement with actionable insights. This combination enhances outreach, improves efficiency, and drives revenue growth.
How to upload a video to Salesloft.
Go to the Conversations product tab.
Select Upload a Recording in the upper right corner. The Upload a Recording window will appear.
From the Upload a Recording window, add the following meeting details:
Meeting Title
Meeting Organizer (Click the dropdown arrow to find and select a name.)
Meeting Date
Once you’ve added the meeting details, add your recording file by:
Dragging and dropping the recording file into the Drag and Drop box
Selecting the Drag and Drop box to select a file saved on your computer
(Optional): Link the recording to an Account. If the Account is associated with an Opportunity, that Opportunity will also be linked to the recording.
Select Upload.
Try our other powerful integrations.
Slack
Use Vyond’s text to video in Slack to instantly take your concepts from prompt to screen.
Learn More
Google Docs
Use document to video to effortlessly transform your Google doc into an engaging video.
Learn More
Zapier
Automate your video creation workflow by pairing with 7,000+ productivity apps and tools in Zapier.
Learn More
Vyond works. Everywhere you work.
Explore Integrations
#### Security
Vyond Security and Data Privacy
Vyond is the only all-in-one, AI video creation platform that supports the rigorous security requirements of enterprise organizations. Vyond is ISO 27001 certified (for all locations and use cases), GDPR and CCPA compliant, as well as Data Privacy Framework certified. Vyond Secure Suite (a component of our Vyond for Enterprise solution) builds in IT-friendly features such as SSO, customizable password complexity, brute-force login protection and IP whitelisting. Advanced options such as data partitioning (which prevents commingling of data) are available as well.
“I’ve been using Vyond for about two years now. I researched half a dozen companies out there, tested several, and found that Vyond was by far the easiest to use in the shortest period of time. We use Vyond to create everything from communications videos to kick off new programs to videos that support our recruiting efforts.”
Keith AndersonDirector of Learning, Sears Home Services
ISO/IEC 27001 Certification
One of the most widely accepted and recognized international standards for information security management, the ISO/IEC 27001 standard certifies that Vyond has the requisite information security controls in place to protect client data. The certification process includes a rigorous audit of Vyond’s information security management systems and controls and is awarded only to those companies that can meet the standard as judged by an independent, accredited team of auditors.
European Union General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a comprehensive regulation focused on the protection and free movement of individuals’ personal data. It requires companies handling such data to obtain informed consent before collecting it, to safeguard this information, and to ensure that any companies they share this information with follow the same standards. Companies must also be able to report on what personal data they have obtained and to return or destroy an individual’s information upon request. GoAnimate Inc., the company that operates Vyond, is compliant with the GDPR.
CCPA Compliance
Vyond has taken steps to ensure its processing of personal information is consistent with the requirements of CCPA.
Hosting and Infrastructure
Vyond’s Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution is hosted on top-tier secure cloud services provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS). AWS is a secure, durable technology platform with industry-recognized certifications and audits: PCI DSS Level 1, FISMA Moderate, FedRAMP, HIPAA, and SOC 1 (formerly referred to as SAS 70 and/or SSAE 16) and SOC 2 audit reports.
Your Payment Information Is Safe with Us
Vyond does not collect, accept, handle, process, receive, transmit, or store your payment card information electronically at all, and we solely utilize PCIDSS Level 1-compliant service providers for handling payment processing and subscriptions.
GoAnimate Inc., the company that operates Vyond, maintains a Certificate of Validation for PCIDSS for the electronic payment processing workflow. This certificate is available on request.
Penetration Tests and Monitoring
Vyond’s applications and our IT infrastructure undergo regular automated and manual vulnerability assessments by independent companies. This is done in addition to AWS’ own independent tests, periodic internal tests, and 24/7 monitoring of security-related events by dedicated teams.
The Vyond operations team maintains a monitoring dashboard and metrics associated with different service components. We also have proactive alerting controls for notification by different channels, subject to the significance of the event.
Third-party Vendor Management
Vyond maintains a comprehensive workflow on vendor security assessment and regular reviews. Prior to engaging a third-party vendor, the company’s management team and involved departments conduct a thorough review and subsequently investigate implications to information security. We closely review service agreements to ensure that potential avenues for misuse of customer information would be identified early and eliminated. Once a vendor has been selected, we conduct regular reviews on their performance and information security.
Application Security
Our team follows secure development methodologies with code reviews that incorporate automated quality assurance controls. Software components utilized in the Vyond platform undergo regular checks against published vulnerability databases to facilitate remediation planning. We also raise any security concerns during the planning and specification phase.
Access Control
Our applications are deployed on AWS Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) on segregated logical networks separate from those of other companies with a few number of defined ingress and egress points to minimize the potential attack surface and facilitate security monitoring. Administrative access to servers on the network requires going through dedicated encrypted tunnels from authorized workplace networks. Only operations personnel are authorized access to the production network. Network firewalls are on a deny-by-default configuration and specific service ports open only on a valid business need.
User accounts are created only for those with a need-to-know clearance and access granted on a least privilege basis. Upon staff departure, accounts are promptly disabled or removed.
Single Sign-On & Password Security
Using Office365 or Google Single Sign-On (SSO) with your Vyond account enables fast, easy logins, and improves online security.
For businesses with even stricter security policies, we offer locally administered SSO designed for direct integration with your corporate authentication service. For more information, contact our sales team.
For teams that don’t take advantage of either SSO option, Vyond Studio offers team administrators comprehensive password control features, including password complexity requirements, regularly enforced password changes, and disallowing the use of previously used passwords.
Data Privacy Framework
The EU-U.S. and Swiss-U.S. Data Privacy Frameworks were designed to provide guidance around data protection for companies engaging in transatlantic commerce. Similar to our commitment to GDPR, we respect your control over your own information and take the utmost care to ensure that all data we receive is subjected to the applicable principles of the Data Privacy Framework. GoAnimate Inc., the company that operates Vyond, participates in and has certified compliance with the EU-U.S. and the Swiss-U.S. Data Privacy Framework.
To learn more about the Data Privacy Framework, and to view our certification, visit the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Data Privacy Framework List at https://www.dataprivacyframework.gov.
#### Seismic
Seismic
Integrating Vyond with Seismic lets teams create, manage, and track engaging videos. Boost sales engagement, streamline workflows, align teams, and use analytics to refine strategies and deliver personalized, impactful buyer experiences.
How to upload a video to Seismic.
Select Add Element: In the content creation or lesson builder area, choose the Video element.
Upload Your MP4 File:
Drag and drop the MP4 file into the video element, or choose Upload Video and locate the file on your computer
Ensure the file size is within the 1 GB limit and in a supported format
Wait for Processing: Allow the file to finish processing before proceeding
Edit (Optional): Use Seismic’s editor to trim, crop, or create a cover image for the video.
Submit: Once satisfied with the upload and edits, select Submit to finalize.
Try our other powerful integrations.
Slack
Use Vyond’s text to video in Slack to instantly take your concepts from prompt to screen.
Learn More
Google Docs
Use document to video to effortlessly transform your Google doc into an engaging video.
Learn More
Zapier
Automate your video creation workflow by pairing with 7,000+ productivity apps and tools in Zapier.
Learn More
Vyond works. Everywhere you work.
Explore Integrations
#### Senior Engineer Lead Engineer HTML5 Nodejs React
Senior Engineer / Lead Engineer
(HTML5 / NodeJS / React)Hong Kong
Position Summary:
In your role as Senior Engineer you will work on a variety of Engineering tasks as required by the team, including:
New feature development
Issue investigation and resolution
Resolution verification / testing automation
Researching new technologies
Your personal preference, ability and the needs of the team will dictate the projects you will work on, including front-end, back-end, database and API development.
Your career progression to more senior engineering roles will be determined exclusively by the demonstration of your ability and the results you achieve.
Requirements
Knowledge of at least one OOP language (e.g. Java or C++)
Working knowledge of at least one of the following: Node.js, HTML5/CSS, Javascript client frameworks (e.g. React.js or Angular.js), Javascript server frameworks (e.g. Express.js)
Previous working experience in Agile development teams is a plus
Previous experience of leadership in software development is a plus
Previous experience of test-driven development is a plus
Good command of English
Email Your Resume
#### Slack
Save time. Stay in the flow. Create videos in Slack.
Instantly create videos with /vyond go in any channel or direct message.
Try It in Slack Now
Make and share videos directly in Slack.
Convert your messages into a video. Bring the power of video communication to your team.
Add Vyond to Slack.
Simple set up. Select the button below to add Vyond to your Slack workspace.
Add to Slack
Create video with a simple
/vyond go.
Use the command /vyond go, paste your prompt, and get a video ready to share directly in Slack. From spark of an idea to screen in no time.
Drive the message home your way.
Small edits or bold changes, personalize every detail of your video in Vyond Studio. Effortless communication powered by visual storytelling.
Try It in Slack Now
Vyond works. Everywhere you work.
Explore Integrations
#### Solutions
Total control. Total engagement. Video creation from Vyond.
Try Vyond Today
Learning andDevelopment
Boost employee completion rates up to
68% with results-focused training videos
from Vyond.
Discover L&D Solutions
HumanResources
Create and update critically important onboarding videos 4x faster than traditional production methods.
Discover HR Solutions
InternalCommunications
Don’t let important company announcements go unread, boost engagement by 130% with videos from Vyond.
Discover Internal Communications Solutions
Sales
Boost response rates and rescue
stalled deals with tailored videos
made in minutes.
Discover Sales Solutions
Marketing
Deliver engaging short-form marketing
videos that boost brand awareness —
and drive conversions.
Discover Marketing Solutions
Sales Enablement
Accelerate onboarding, train reps faster, and update materials in no time with videos made in Vyond.
Discover Sales Enablement Solutions
Truly engaging videos that move the needle.
Ranked the #1 Video Content Creation Platform.
The outcomes you need start right here.
With Vyond Studio, it’s easy to create and share polished, results-focused videos. Start with a template or use our huge library of animated and realistic characters, props and backgrounds to create from scratch. Create voices with Text to Speech, add company branding with a few clicks, and translate instantly into 95+ languages.
Create and scale effective videos in minutes.
Have a useful but unread PDF, PowerPoint, or doc just sitting in a folder? With Vyond Go, simply upload a doc or enter a prompt to create and deliver essential training content or deal-closing, personalized sales videos in no time. Instantly upload to Studio to add branding and localize for global audiences. Big results for any size team, with zero learning curve.
Every style to connect with any audience.
Unlike other AI video platforms, Vyond features a huge range of visual
styles — animated, photorealistic, avatars, and everything in between.
This allows you to conveniently create the perfect video for any business context, all in one place — and avoid costly production bottlenecks.
On-brand collaboration, best-in-class security.
Give your videos immediate relevancy and consistency with branded backgrounds, props, characters, and scenes. Upload your branded assets —
or let our team create Custom Assets for you — for use within our hundreds of customizable templates. And, with shared libraries, enterprise level security, and best-in-class data privacy, team collaboration is a secure, streamlined process.
“Vyond became our primary tool for global training. Moving it from a team line item to an operational cost helped us scale across departments.”
— Global Healthcare Company
Try Vyond Today
65% of the Fortune 500 and millions of users rely on Vyond.
Try Vyond Today
#### Square / Weebly
Square / Weebly
Incorporate Vyond’s AI generated custom videos within Square’s user-friendly payment interface and Weebly’s website development tools, creating a more immersive and informative purchasing experience for customers.
How to upload videos to Square.
Sign in to your Square Dashboard.
Navigate to Sales channels > Online > Website > Edit site.
Add a Video section to your page.
Select the + button in the block editor.
Select Upload file to add a new video, or Select from library to reuse a previously uploaded video.
Choose the video file from your computer to upload.
Try our other powerful integrations.
Slack
Use Vyond’s text to video in Slack to instantly take your concepts from prompt to screen.
Learn More
Google Docs
Use document to video to effortlessly transform your Google doc into an engaging video.
Learn More
Zapier
Automate your video creation workflow by pairing with 7,000+ productivity apps and tools in Zapier.
Learn More
Vyond works. Everywhere you work.
Explore Integrations
#### Squarespace
Squarespace
Integrate custom videos created in Vyond into Squarespace to easily build a more clickworthy website.
How to upload videos to Squarespace.
Navigate to the desired location on your site where you want to add a video.
Edit a page or post.
Choose Add block or an insert point.
Select Video.
Open the block editor by clicking the pencil icon on the block.
Select the + button in the block editor.
Select Upload file to add a new video, or Select from library to reuse a previously uploaded video.
Choose the video file from your computer to upload.
Wait for the upload to complete. You can track the progress in the bottom-right corner.
To add a custom featured image, customize playback settings, or add a video description.
Select outside the block editor to save your changes.
Try our other powerful integrations.
Slack
Use Vyond’s text to video in Slack to instantly take your concepts from prompt to screen.
Learn More
Google Docs
Use document to video to effortlessly transform your Google doc into an engaging video.
Learn More
Zapier
Automate your video creation workflow by pairing with 7,000+ productivity apps and tools in Zapier.
Learn More
Vyond works. Everywhere you work.
Explore Integrations
#### Terms of Service
Terms of Service
Last Updated: September 27, 2023
Important; Read Carefully: GoAnimate, Inc., a Delaware corporation the provider of the Vyond platform (“Company”) provides a right to use the Vyond Platform pursuant to these Terms of Service (this “Agreement”). This Agreement is a legal contract between you (if using the Vyond Platform in your capacity as an individual) or the legal entity you represent (e.g., your employer) (“Customer”) and Company. Read the terms of this Agreement carefully. By signing up for a free trial, subscribing to, or using the Vyond Platform, Customer agrees to be bound by this Agreement. If Customer does not agree to the terms of this Agreement, do not sign up for a free trial, subscribe to, or use the Vyond Platform.
This Agreement is effective as of September 27, 2023 except if Customer has previously agreed to an earlier version of this Agreement, this Agreement shall be effective as set forth in Section 16 of this Agreement. Prior versions of this Agreement are archived for review here:
January 17, 2023 Terms of Service
January 25, 2022 Terms of Service
August 17, 2021 Terms of Service
July 22, 2021 Terms of Service
April 29, 2018 Terms of Service
1. DEFINITIONS
“Administrator” means the person or persons assigned system privileges by Customer under a multi-seat Vyond Professional or Vyond for Enterprise plan, which system privileges are used to configure, and govern how non-administrative users under Customer’s account interact with and use the Services.
“Content” means videos, photos, images, graphics, audio, music, sounds, special effects, logos, branding, marks, text, scripts, files, information and other data.
“Customer Content” means all Content that Customer uploads, posts or otherwise makes available or provides to the Vyond Platform.
“Customer-Owned Output” means all Content and Generated Scripts that are generated and/or transformed by Vyond AI based solely on Customer Content.
“Data Protection Law” means all laws applicable to Company in its performance of the Services relating to data protection and data privacy including, as applicable, the EU General Data Protection Regulation 2016/679 (“EU GDPR”) and U.S. state privacy laws such as the California Consumer Privacy Act, Cal. Civ. Code § 1798.100 et. seq. as amended, extended, repealed and replaced (collectively “U.S. State Privacy Laws”). “Data Controller”, “Data Processor” and “Personal Data Breach” shall have the meanings given those terms in the EU GDPR.
“Generated Script” means the written form of a Video generated and/or transformed on the Vyond Platform, which specifically includes dialogue, narration and/or on-screen text, but excludes audio and video.
“Personal Data” means any information that is considered “personal data,” “personal information,” or other analogous term under Data Protection Law.
“Services” means the services that Company provides to Customer under this Agreement, which may include use of the Vyond Platform, customer support and training.
“Subscription” means the then-current Company subscription plan(s) for which Customer will pay or has paid a subscription fee to use the Vyond Platform.
“Video” means an animated video(s) that Customer creates by using the Vyond Platform.
“Vyond AI” refers to features and modules on the Vyond Platform that enable Customer to generate and/or transform Content, Customer Content, Generated Scripts, Vyond Assets and/or Videos, and is based on one or more underlying third-party foundational models and/or Company-owned proprietary models.
“Vyond Assets” means all Content that Company makes available or provides within the Vyond Platform, including templates, characters, actions, backgrounds, props, fonts, music and sound effects, other than Customer Content. Vyond Assets include all Content that Customer generates and/or transforms using Vyond AI, other than Customer-Owned Output.
“Vyond Platform” means the cloud-based platform that allows Customer to create and edit Generated Scripts and Videos by accessing a suite of proprietary applications, the Vyond Assets and Vyond AI.
2. LICENSES
Subject to the terms and conditions of this Agreement, including the payment of the applicable Subscription fee and the limitations imposed by Customer’s Subscription, Company hereby grants Customer, solely during the term of this Agreement, a non-exclusive, non-transferable (except in accordance with Section 13 below) right to access and use the Vyond Platform.
Subject to the terms and conditions of this Agreement, Company hereby grants Customer a non-exclusive, royalty-free and perpetual license to use, reproduce, display, perform and distribute the Videos created by Customer for Customer’s own commercial use.
Subject to the terms and conditions of this Agreement, Company hereby grants Customer a non-exclusive, royalty-free and perpetual license to use, reproduce, display and distribute all Generated Scripts that are not Customer-Owned Output for Customer’s own commercial use. With respect to Generated Scripts that are Customer-Owned Output, such Generated Scripts are owned by Customer as provided in Section 3 below and therefore are not licensed under this paragraph.
Customer represents and warrants that Customer has (and will have) all rights that are necessary to grant Company the license rights in Customer Content under this Agreement. Customer represents and warrants that neither Customer, nor Customer’s use and provision of Content to be made available through the Services, nor any use of Customer’s Content by Company on or through the Services will infringe, misappropriate or violate a third party’s intellectual property rights, or rights of publicity or privacy, or result in the violation of any applicable law or regulation.
Subject to the terms and conditions of this Agreement, Customer hereby grants to Company, solely during the term of this Agreement, a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free license to use, reproduce, display and perform Customer Content and Customer-Owned Output solely as necessary to provide the Services to Customer under this Agreement. Company may sublicense this license to Company’s cloud service provider for the sole purpose of enabling Company to provide the Services to Customer under this Agreement.
Company may also grant Customer, subject to the terms and conditions of this Agreement, a non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and use the Vyond Platform, on a free trial basis, not to exceed fourteen (14) days. Such trial subscription shall not include any license to use, reproduce, display, perform or distribute Videos for any commercial use other than for Customer to evaluate the Vyond Platform.
3. OWNERSHIP
As between the parties, and except for the licenses granted by this Agreement, Customer retains all right, title and interest, including all related intellectual property rights, in and to all Customer Content and Customer-Owned Output.
As between the parties, and except for the licenses granted by this Agreement, Company retains all right, title and interest, including all related intellectual property rights, in and to Vyond Assets, the Vyond Platform, the Videos (excluding Customer Content contained therein, which shall be owned by Customer), Generated Scripts (other than Generated Scripts that are Customer-Owned Output), any other software, information and materials made available by Company under this Agreement, and any modifications to the foregoing.
Customer acknowledges and understands that: (i) Vyond Assets used to create a Video make up the substantial majority of every Video and that Vyond Assets are reused by Company and offered to Company’s other customers, and therefore any Video created by Customer may appear substantially similar to any videos created by Company’s other customers; and (ii) the use of Vyond AI may produce similar scripts, Content or videos in response to similar prompts or queries from Company’s other customers, and therefore any Generated Script, Vyond Asset or Video created by Customer using Vyond AI may be substantially similar to any scripts, Content or videos created by Company’s other customers. Customer agrees that the ownership and license provisions set forth in this Agreement are reasonable and appropriate both to clarify and protect Customer’s and Company’s respective ownership rights, and to diminish the risk of ownership disputes between Customer and Company’s other customers.
Company retains all rights not expressly granted to Customer under this Agreement. Customer does not have any implied rights under this Agreement, or any rights to use any Vyond Assets or the Vyond Platform except as expressly provided in this Agreement.
4. RESTRICTIONS
Except to the extent expressly permitted by applicable law, Customer may not decompile, disassemble, reverse engineer or otherwise attempt to derive the source code for the Vyond Platform.
Except to the extent expressly permitted by applicable law, Customer may not use Vyond AI to derive (or attempt to derive) the underlying components of models, algorithms and systems of the Services, or to create, train, or improve (directly or indirectly) any other AI service or any product or service that is competitive with the Vyond Platform.
Customer shall not remove (or attempt to remove) any copyright, trademark or other intellectual property rights notice contained in or on any Vyond Assets, the Vyond Platform or any Video. Customer shall not remove (or attempt to remove) any digital watermark that may appear in any Video. Additionally, Customer shall neither defeat nor circumvent (or attempt to defeat or circumvent) any digital rights management technology used by Company.
A user account is required to access the Vyond Platform and may be accessed and used only by those authorized individuals who have registered on Vyond. Each user will choose a unique, non-transferable password. User accounts may not be “shared” or used by more than one individual. In the event of a breach of this restriction, Company may terminate this Agreement or require Customer to pay any Subscription fees due in arrears, at Company’s discretion.
No right or license is granted to display or perform any Video (in whole or in part), over any of broadcast, cable, satellite television or subscription-based or pay-per-download over-the-top (OTT) platforms, unless Customer has purchased a “Broadcast Rights” license for the Video(s) to be displayed or performed, or (b) Customer and Company have otherwise expressly agreed in writing.
No right or license is granted to use the Vyond Assets in any way other than as part of a Video created using the Vyond Platform, unless (a) Customer has purchased an “Asset Rights” license for the Vyond Asset(s) to be used, or (b) Customer and Company have otherwise expressly agreed in writing.
Videos may not be assigned, transferred or used for the benefit of a third party, unless (a) Customer has purchased a “Rights Transfer” license for the Video(s) to be transferred, (b) Customer has subscribed to a Vyond Professional for Agencies plan, (c) Customer and Company have otherwise expressly agreed in writing, or (d) Customer has transferred or assigned its rights under this Agreement pursuant to Section 13.
Customer shall not create or sell any non-fungible-token (NFT) in connection with any Generated Scripts (other than Generated Scripts that are Customer-Owned Output), Vyond Assets or any Video.
Certain of the Vyond Assets are provided by Company under license from Shutterstock, Inc. (“Shutterstock Assets”). If Customer chooses to use any Shutterstock Assets, Customer’s use of such Shutterstock Assets shall be further restricted as follows: (I) Customer shall not use any Shutterstock Assets (a) together with pornographic, defamatory, or unlawful content or in such a manner that it infringes upon any third party’s trademark or intellectual property rights, (b) portraying any person depicted in a Video (a “Character”) in a way that a reasonable person would find offensive, including but not limited to depicting a Character (i) in connection with pornography, “adult videos,” adult entertainment venues, escort services, dating services, or the like, (ii) in connection with the advertisement or promotion of tobacco products, (iii) as endorsing a political party, candidate, elected official, or opinion, (iv) as suffering from, or medicating for, a physical or mental ailment, or (v) engaging in immoral or criminal activities, or (c) as a trademark, service mark, or logo; (II) Customer shall not use any Shutterstock Assets that are music or sound effects (a) as a musical theme in connection with any Video, (b) in an audio-only capacity in which music or sound effects is the primary content of any Video, (c) in an international television advertising campaign by or on behalf of an entity with annual revenues of more than One Billion Dollars ($1,000,000,000), (d) remixed or otherwise altered, except that Customer may engage in basic editing (e.g., setting start/stop points, determining fade-in/fade-out points, etc.), or (e) in a downloadable form available through the Internet or otherwise including making it available via FTP, IRC, peer-to-peer file sharing services or the like; and (III) Customer shall not use any Shutterstock Assets that are music or sound effects in any public performance (i.e., including exhibition over the Internet).
Certain of the Vyond Assets are provided by Company under license from Universal Production Music, a unit of Universal Music – MGB NA LLC (“UPM Assets”). If Customer chooses to use any UPM Assets, Customer shall be obligated to: (i) report to the appropriate performing rights society any public performance of such UPM Assets (i.e., including exhibition via the Internet); and (ii) pay any corresponding “public performance royalties/fees” in connection with such uses, as applicable.
5. DATA SECURITY, ACCEPTABLE USE, AND DATA PRIVACY
Data Security
Company currently uses Amazon Web Services (“AWS”) as its cloud services provider. AWS infrastructure is housed in Amazon-controlled data centers. AWS has been accredited under ISO 27001, as well as SOC 1/SSAE 16/ISAE 3402 (Previously SAS 70 Type II) and SOC2 Type II. For more information on the security provided by AWS, please see the Amazon Web Services Security Center page (https://aws.amazon.com/security/).
Customer acknowledges that no data transmission over the Internet or data storage system can be guaranteed to be 100% secure and Company cannot guarantee the security of data transmitted to it or that it stores. Customer acknowledges that if it wishes to protect its transmission of any data, it is Customer’s responsibility to use a secure encrypted connection to communicate with the Vyond Platform. Company shall not be liable to Customer for any liabilities arising from the operation of the Vyond Platform over the Internet or other networks outside of its control.
Company will not monitor, display or delete Customer Videos except for the purpose of enforcing Company’s acceptable use policy, Company’s privacy policy, or complying with the request of a governmental or regulatory body (including subpoenas or court orders) or otherwise as required by law.
Acceptable Use
Company’s acceptable use practices regarding the use of Vyond Platform are governed by Company’s acceptable use policy published at the bottom of this Agreement, as it is amended from time to time. Customer agrees to abide by Company’s acceptable use policy.
Data Privacy
EU GDPR:Customer acknowledges that Company is the Data Controller with respect to the processing of Personal Data for which Company determines the purposes and means of processing (for example account and billing information) and which is governed by Company’s privacy policy, currently available at https://vyond.com/privacy.
When Company provides Customer with the Services under this Agreement, Company may process certain Personal Data on Customer’s behalf (“Covered Personal Data”) – for example Personal Data Customer has uploaded at Customer’s own discretion for inclusion in Vyond Videos. When Company processes this limited set of Covered Personal Data, Company is the Data Processor and Customer is the Data Controller. This subsection applies to this limited set of Personal Data over which Company is the Data Processor. Customer agrees to comply with all the obligations applicable to Customer under Data Protection Law and Customer represents that Customer has all necessary rights and consents to transfer the Covered Personal Data to Company for processing. Company will use and process the Covered Personal Data in order to provide the Services under this Agreement in accordance with Customer’s instructions (as represented in this Agreement) and Data Protection Law. In Company’s role as Data Processor it shall: (a) only process Covered Personal Data in accordance with this Agreement, as part of any processing initiated by Customer in using the Services and to comply with other reasonable documented instructions consistent with this Agreement (Company will inform Customer if an instruction infringes Data Protection Law); (b) not sell, rent, release, disclose, disseminate, make available, transfer Covered Personal Data for monetary or other valuable consideration; (c) not further transfer Covered Personal Data (Customer understands that Company and its subprocessors are located in the United States and the EEA, and Customer consents to processing in these locations) to any country outside EEA without notice to Customer and subject to such requirements as are necessary to comply with Data Protection Law; (d) ensure that Covered Personal Data is subject to appropriate technical and organizational security measures to protect against unauthorized or unlawful processing of such data and against accidental loss or destruction of, or damage to, such data; (e) ensure that all persons with access to Covered Personal Data are subject to appropriate confidentiality obligations; (f) notify Customer and allow Customer an opportunity to object (on reasonable grounds) before engaging a new subprocessor to process Covered Personal Data in order to provide the Services, ensure such subprocessor provides at least the same level of security as Company, and remain fully liable to Customer in respect of the performance of the subprocessor’s data protection obligations; (g) at Customer’s cost, provide assistance to Customer in relation to Customer’s obligations concerning data subject rights, data security, data breach notification and data protection impact assessment obligations; (h) notify Customer without undue delay of becoming aware of a Personal Data Breach; (i) after the Services have been provided, cease processing Covered Personal Data and, at Customer’s discretion, delete or return Covered Personal Data except for non-readable backup copies of Covered Personal Data which are retained and deleted in accordance with Company’s data deletion policies and except as continued retention is otherwise required by law in which case Company shall notify Customer of such requirement; and (j) comply with any reasonable requests for information necessary to demonstrate compliance with this Section 5. Customer consents to Company’s use of its current subprocessors, and Company will make available a list of current subprocessors on request. Customer may request a standalone Data Processing Agreement and/or EU standard contractual clauses for EEA to US data transfers.
U.S. State Privacy Laws:To the extent the U.S. State Privacy Laws apply to Company’s processing of Covered Personal Data, this subsection shall also apply. Company will: (i) comply with its applicable obligations under such U.S. State Privacy Laws; (ii) provide the same level of protection as required under the U.S. State Privacy Laws; (iii) notify Customer if it can no longer meet its obligations under the U.S. State Privacy Laws; (iv) not “sell” or “share” (as such terms are defined by the U.S. State Privacy Laws) Covered Personal Data; (v) not retain, use, or disclose Covered Personal Data for any purpose (including any commercial purpose) other than the as necessary to provide the Services; (vi) not retain, use, or disclose Covered Personal Data outside of the direct business relationship between Customer and Company unless otherwise permitted by the U.S. State Privacy Laws; and (vii) not combine Covered Personal Data with Personal Data that Company (a) receives from, or on behalf of, another person, or (b) collects from its own, independent consumer interaction, unless otherwise permitted by the U.S. State Privacy Laws. Company will permit Customer, upon reasonable request, to take reasonable and appropriate steps to ensure that Company Processes Covered Personal Data in a manner consistent with the obligations applicable to it under the U.S. State Privacy Laws by requesting that Company attest to its compliance with this Section of the Agreement. Following any such request, Company will promptly provide that attestation or a written response about why it cannot provide it. If Customer reasonably believes that Company is engaged in processing of Covered Personal Data that is not authorized under this subsection, Customer will immediately notify Company of such belief, and the Parties will work together in good faith to remediate the allegedly violative Processing activities, if necessary.
Processing DetailsThe nature, purpose, subject matter, and duration of Company’s processing of Covered Personal Data is the provision of the Services for the Term, the categories of data subjects are generally employees, and the types of Covered Personal Data are any Personal Data Customer has uploaded at Customer’s own discretion for inclusion in Videos.
6. TERM AND TERMINATION
This Agreement begins on the date when Customer first signs up for a free trial or the date when Customer subscribes to a paid Subscription.
If Customer subscribes to a monthly, quarterly or annual Subscription, the Agreement will continue for a term of one month, one quarter or one year, as applicable, and will automatically renew for additional one month, one quarter or one year periods, as applicable, each subsequent period thereafter until terminated as provided for in this Section 6.
Company may terminate this Agreement if Customer has not paid any applicable Subscription fee or if Customer materially breaches the Agreement and fails to remedy the breach within thirty (30) days’ notice of the breach.
Should Customer wish to terminate this Agreement for convenience, Customer may turn off the auto-renew feature under Account Settings. In the event of Customer’s termination pursuant to this Section 6, this Agreement will terminate at the end of then-current Subscription term, and there will be no refund of any Subscription fees paid by Customer under this Agreement for the then-current Subscription term.
Company reserves the right to change or discontinue any part of the Vyond Platform or the Services at any time. If Company discontinues or sunsets the Vyond Platform or Services altogether, it will give Customer thirty (30) days’ prior notice.
The definitions and rights, duties and obligations of the parties that by their nature continue and survive shall survive any termination or expiration of this Agreement.
7. PAYMENT, RENEWALS, AND TAXES
Company charges a Subscription fee for access to the Vyond Platform. Customer agrees to pay all fees charged by Company and otherwise incurred by Customer. All fees are payable in advance, non-refundable and, unless otherwise stated, in US dollars.
If Customer fails to pay the applicable fees in a timely manner, other than fees disputed in good faith, Company may suspend or terminate Customer’s access to either the Vyond Platform or certain features of the Vyond Platform.
Customer is responsible for, and will indemnify and hold Company harmless from, payment of all taxes (other than taxes based on Company’s net income), fees, duties, and other governmental charges, and any related penalties and interest, arising from the payment of fees to Company under this Agreement or the delivery or license of the Vyond Platform or use of the Vyond Platform or provision of any Services. Customer will make all payments to Company free and clear of, and without reduction for, any withholding taxes; any such taxes imposed on payments of fees to Company will be Customer’s sole responsibility, and Customer agrees to provide Company with official receipts issued by the appropriate taxing authority, or such other evidence as Company may reasonably request, to establish that such taxes have been paid.
8. GOVERNMENT RESTRICTIONS
Customer may not export or re-export the Vyond Assets, the Vyond Platform or Videos except in compliance with the United States Export Administration Act and the related rules and regulations and similar non-U.S. government restrictions, if applicable. The foregoing and all accompanying documentation are deemed to be “commercial computer software” and “commercial computer software documentation,” respectively, pursuant to DFAR Section 227.7202 and FAR Section 12.212(b), as applicable. Any use, modification, reproduction, release, performing, displaying, or disclosing of the foregoing by the U.S. Government is governed solely by the terms of this Agreement.
9. WARRANTY
Company represents and warrants to Customer that for a period of ninety (90) days from Customer’s first use of the Vyond Platform, the Vyond Platform will function correctly in all material respects. In the event of a breach of this warranty, Company will use its reasonable commercial efforts to remedy the breach or, at Company’s discretion, may refund the fees paid for access to the Vyond Platform. Such remedies shall be the sole remedy by Customer against Company for a breach of this warranty.
EXCEPT AS OTHERWISE PROVIDED IN THIS SECTION, THE VYOND ASSETS, THE VYOND PLATFORM, THE VIDEOS AND THE SERVICES ARE PROVIDED TO CUSTOMER “AS IS” AND WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, WHETHER EXPRESS, IMPLIED, STATUTORY, OR OTHERWISE, AND COMPANY HEREBY DISCLAIMS AND EXCLUDES, TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, ALL OTHER WARRANTIES, WHETHER STATUTORY, EXPRESS, OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, NON-INFRINGEMENT OF THIRD PARTY RIGHTS, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, MERCHANTABILITY, TITLE AND SATISFACTORY QUALITY.
Company does not warrant that the Vyond Assets, the Vyond Platform, the Videos or the Services will meet Customer’s needs or requirements or be error-free or always available or available at any particular time or that any errors or defects will be corrected.Customer represents and warrants to Company that Customer owns or otherwise controls and has sufficient rights or licenses to provide all Customer Content for use by Company in the manner contemplated by this Agreement.
10. LIMITATION OF LIABILITY
IN NO EVENT WILL EITHER PARTY BE LIABLE FOR ANY LOST PROFITS OR BUSINESS OPPORTUNITIES, LOSS OF USE, BUSINESS INTERRUPTION, LOSS OF DATA, OR ANY OTHER INDIRECT, SPECIAL, INCIDENTAL, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES UNDER ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER BASED IN CONTRACT, TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE AND PRODUCT LIABILITY), INDEMNIFICATION OR OTHERWISE.
EACH PARTY’S LIABILITY UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT, IN ANY EVENT, EXCEED THE FEES, IF ANY, PAID OR PAYABLE BY CUSTOMER TO COMPANY UNDER THIS AGREEMENT IN THE 12 MONTH PERIOD IMMEDIATELY PRIOR TO THE EVENT FIRST GIVING RISE TO THE CLAIM. THE FOREGOING LIMITATIONS WILL APPLY TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW, REGARDLESS OF WHETHER SUCH PARTY HAS BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES AND REGARDLESS OF WHETHER ANY REMEDY FAILS OF ITS ESSENTIAL PURPOSE. WITH RESPECT TO ANY TRIAL SUBSCRIPTION, IN NO EVENT WILL COMPANY’S LIABILITY FOR ANY DAMAGES ARISING OUT OF OR RESULTING FROM THIS AGREEMENT, INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, ANY USE (OR ATTEMPTED USE) OF THE VYOND PLATFORM, EXCEED FIFTY DOLLARS (USD $50).
11. INDEMNITY
Subject to Section 10, Customer shall indemnify and hold harmless Company and its officers, directors, employees and agents from and against liabilities, costs, losses, damages, judgments, expenses (including attorneys’ fees and costs of experts and costs of appeals) arising out of or in connection with any and all of the following: (a) any allegation that Customer Content infringes, misappropriates or violates any intellectual property right, including, without limitation, any rights of publicity or privacy, (b) any claims for defamation or slander, invasion of privacy or other violation of a person’s rights, (c) any unauthorized activity relating to Customer’s account, or (d) any failure of Customer to have all necessary rights and licenses in and to Customer Content.
Subject to Section 10, Company shall indemnify and hold harmless Customer and Customer’s officers, directors, employees and agents from and against third party out of pocket liabilities, costs, losses, damages, judgments, expenses (including attorneys’ fees and costs of experts and costs of appeals) arising out of or in connection with any and all of the following: any third party claim that the Vyond Assets or Vyond Platform infringe, misappropriate or violate any United States patent, copyright, trademark or trade secret rights of any third parties.
Each party’s obligations to indemnify the other party under this Section shall be conditioned upon the following: (a) The indemnified party shall promptly notify the indemnifying party in writing of the claim; (b) the indemnified party shall grant the indemnifying party sole control of the defense and settlement of the claim; and (c) the indemnified party shall provide the indemnifying party, at the indemnifying party’s expense, with all assistance, information and authority reasonably required for the defense or settlement of the claim.
Notwithstanding the foregoing, Company shall have no liability for any claim of infringement based on (a) the use of the Vyond Assets or the Vyond Platform other than in accordance with this Agreement, or (b) the combination of the Vyond Assets or Vyond Platform with other content, services, software or hardware not provided by Company, where the combination causes the infringement and not the Vyond Assets or Vyond Platform standing alone.
If the Vyond Assets or the Vyond Platform, or any material portion thereof, are held by a court of competent jurisdiction to infringe, or if Company believes that the Vyond Assets or the Vyond Platform may be subject to a claim or held to infringe, Company shall in its commercially reasonable judgment and at its expense (a) replace or modify the Vyond Assets or the Vyond Platform so as to be non-infringing, provided that the replacement content or platform contains substantially similar functionality; (b) obtain for Customer the rights to continue using the Vyond Assets or the Vyond Platform; or (c) if a non-infringing content or platform or the rights to use the Vyond Assets or the Vyond Platform cannot be obtained upon commercially reasonable terms, terminate this Agreement. Upon any such termination of this Agreement, Company shall refund any unused Subscription fees paid by Customer under this Agreement for the then-current Subscription term.
This Section sets forth each party’s exclusive remedy, and the indemnifying party’s entire liability, with respect to infringement or misappropriation of intellectual property rights of any kind arising out of this Agreement.
12. CONFIDENTIALITY AND FEEDBACK
Customer agrees to keep confidential and not use other than in the performance of this Agreement or disclose to a third party any information of Company that Customer knows or reasonably should know is confidential to Company.
To the extent Customer provides Company with any suggestions, information, ideas, or feedback concerning any of the Vyond Assets, Vyond AI, Vyond Platform, or Services, including a report of any errors which Customer discovers while using the Vyond Platform or any related documentation (“Feedback”), such Feedback will be the property of Company. Customer agrees to assign, and hereby does assign, all right, title and interest worldwide in the Feedback, and the related intellectual property rights, to Company and agrees to assist Company in perfecting and enforcing these rights.
13. ASSIGNMENT
Customer may not transfer or assign Customer’s rights under this Agreement, in whole or in part, without the prior written consent of Company, except that Customer may, without obtaining the prior written consent of Company, transfer and assign Customer’s rights under this Agreement in connection with a merger, acquisition or sale of all or substantially all of Customer’s assets to which this Agreement relates (each, a “Permitted M&A Transaction”). Any attempted assignment in violation of the foregoing is void. If Customer transfers or assigns Customer’s rights under this Agreement pursuant to a Permitted M&A Transaction, Customer agrees to promptly inform Company of the identity and address of the other party involved in the Permitted M&A Transaction. Company may freely transfer or assign its rights under this Agreement. Subject to the foregoing, this Agreement will bind and inure to the benefit of the parties and their respective successors and permitted assigns.
14. NOTICES AND INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS
If Customer has any questions about this Agreement, or if Customer wants to contact Company for any reason, please direct all correspondence to: GoAnimate, Inc., 204 East 2nd Avenue, Suite 638, San Mateo, CA 94401 USA or send us an email to support@vyond.com.
Infringement. Company respects the intellectual property rights of others, and we ask Customer to do the same. Company may, in appropriate circumstances, terminate Services and/or access to the Vyond Platform for subscribers who infringe the intellectual property rights of others or block or delete their Generated Scripts or Videos. If Customer believes that Customer’s work is the subject of copyright infringement and/or trademark infringement and appears on the Vyond Platform, please provide Company’s designated agent the following information:
A physical or electronic signature of a person authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.
Identification of the copyrighted and/or trademarked work claimed to have been infringed, or, if multiple works at a single online site are covered by a single notification, a representative list of such works at that site.
Identification of the material that is claimed to be infringing or to be the subject of infringing activity and that is to be removed or access to which is to be disabled at on the Vyond Platform, and information reasonably sufficient to permit Company to locate the material.
Information reasonably sufficient to permit Company to contact Customer as the complaining party, such as an address, telephone number, and, if available, an electronic mail address at which Customer may be contacted.
A statement that Customer has a good faith belief that use of the material in the manner complained of is not authorized by the copyright and/or trademark owner, its agent, or the law.
A statement that the information in the notification is accurate, and under penalty of perjury, that Customer is authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.
Company’s agent for notice of claims of copyright or trademark infringement on the Vyond Platform can be reached as follows:
General Counsel
copyright-support@vyond.com
GoAnimate, Inc.204 East 2nd Avenue, Suite 638San Mateo, CA 94401(888) 360-9639
Please also note that for copyright infringements under Section 512(f) of the Copyright Act, any person who knowingly materially misrepresents that material or activity is infringing may be subject to liability.
Submitting a DMCA Counter-Notification. Company will notify Customer that Company has removed or disabled access to copyright-protected material that Customer provided, if such removal is pursuant to a valid DMCA take-down notice that Company has received. If Customer receives such notice from us, Customer may provide Company with a counter-notification in writing to Company’s designated agent that includes all of the following information:
Customer’s physical or electronic signature;
Identification of the material that has been removed or to which access has been disabled, and the location at which the material appeared before it was removed or access to it was disabled;
A statement from Customer, under the penalty of perjury, that Customer has a good faith belief that the material was removed or disabled as a result of a mistake or misidentification of the material to be removed or disabled; and
Customer’s name, physical address and telephone number, and a statement that Customer’s consent to the jurisdiction of a court for the judicial district in which Customer’s physical address is located, or if Customer’s physical address is outside of the United States, for any judicial district in which Company may be located, and that Customer will accept service of process from the person who provided notification of allegedly infringing material or an agent of such person.
Termination of Repeat Infringers. Company reserves the right, in its sole discretion, to terminate the account or access of any user of our Vyond Platform and/or Services who is the subject or repeated DMCA or other infringement notifications and to block and delete their Generated Scripts or Videos.
15. ENTIRE AGREEMENT
This Agreement, any Company policy referred to in this Agreement and any schedule referring to this Agreement, each of which is incorporated by reference, constitutes the complete agreement between the parties and supersedes all prior or contemporaneous agreements or representations, written or oral, concerning the subject matter of this Agreement and such schedule.
Any terms and conditions contained in any purchase order that are inconsistent with or in addition to the terms and conditions of this Agreement will be deemed stricken from such purchase order, unless expressly agreed to in writing by Company.
16. GENERAL
The laws of the State of California govern all matters arising out of this Agreement, without regard to conflict of law principles. The United Nations Convention for the International Sale of Goods shall not apply. The federal and state courts located in San Mateo County, California USA will have non-exclusive jurisdiction in respect of disputes arising in connection with this Agreement. If any provision of this Agreement is held invalid, that provision will be deemed amended to achieve as nearly as possible the same economic effect as the original provision and the remainder of this Agreement will continue in full force and effect. The parties to this Agreement are independent contractors and this Agreement will not establish any relationship of partnership, joint venture, employment, franchise, or agency between the parties. Neither party will have the power to bind the other or incur obligations on the other’s behalf without the other’s prior written consent. This Agreement is non-exclusive, and each party will be free to enter into other similar agreements or arrangements with other third parties. Company has no liability for any failure of performance or equipment due to causes beyond its reasonable control, including the following: acts of God, fire, flood, earthquake, tsunami, storm, or other catastrophes; any law, order, regulation, direction, action, or request of any governmental entity or agency, or any civil or military authority; national emergencies, insurrections, riots, wars or acts of terrorism; strikes, lock-outs, work stoppages, or other labor difficulties; or failure of the Internet or any telecommunications, hosting or service provider. This Agreement may be modified only by a written agreement that is signed by authorized representatives of both parties and identifies itself as an amendment to this Agreement, provided that Company may modify this Agreement at any time upon notice to Customer, with such modification to be effective on the next renewal term of this Agreement as provided under Section 7. No term or provision hereof will be considered waived by a party, and no breach excused, unless the waiver or consent is in writing signed by such party. No consent by a party to, or waiver of, a breach, whether express or implied, will constitute a consent to, waiver of, or excuse of any other, different or subsequent breach. The section headings appearing in this Agreement are inserted only as a matter of convenience and in no way define, limit, construe or describe the scope or extent of such paragraph or in any way affect such section.
VYOND ACCEPTABLE USE POLICY (AUP)
GoAnimate, Inc. (“Company”) has established this Acceptable Use Policy (this “Policy”) in order to define certain activities and behaviors that are prohibited. Company reserves the right to modify this Policy at any time. Changes and modifications to this Policy will be effective when posted to Company’s website or when Company provides notice of the change, whichever is sooner. Capitalized terms used in this Policy but not defined in this Policy shall have the meanings given to such terms in the Terms of Service.
Customer will neither knowingly upload Content to nor knowingly create a Generated Script or Video on the Vyond Platform which:
Defames, abuses, harasses, stalks, threatens or otherwise violates the legal rights (such as the rights of privacy and publicity) of others, or is libelous or defamatory.
Uses explicit or obscene language, contains sexually explicit images (actual or simulated) or is pornographic in any way.
Uses racially, ethnically or otherwise offensive language.
Is discriminatory (based on race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, age, national origin, ancestry or physical ability) or ridicules or makes negative reference to certain individuals or groups, including, without limitation, with respect to religion, the mentally or physically disabled, sexual orientation, gender, or national origin or ethnicity.
Exploits children or minors.
Depicts cruelty to animals.Incites illegal activity or otherwise promotes the committing of a crime.
Incorporates any material to which Customer does not possess all necessary rights or which infringes or misappropriates any intellectual property or proprietary right of any party, including, without limitation, any patent, copyright, trademark, trade secret or moral right or any right of publicity or privacy.
Incorporates any unsolicited or unauthorized advertising, promotional materials, ‘junk mail’, ‘spam’, ‘chain letters’, ‘pyramid schemes’, or any other form of such solicitation.
Falsely expresses or implies that such content or material is sponsored or endorsed by Vyond or Company.
Transmits or provides any viruses, worms, defects, Trojan horses or other items of a destructive nature or any software or material that is designed or intended, or otherwise likely, to cause harm to any software, equipment, hardware or system, including, without limitation, any materials which contains a virus, Easter egg, worm, software code, data or other files or programs designed to damage or allow unauthorized access to any hardware, software, equipment or system or which may cause any defect, error, malfunction, corruption, damage or harm to any such hardware, software, equipment or system.
In the community areas of the Vyond Platform, Customer will not knowingly:
Defame, abuse, harass, stalk, threaten or otherwise violate the legal rights (such as the rights of privacy and publicity) of others, or make libelous or defamatory statements.
Use explicit or obscene language, or make sexually explicit or pornographic statements.
Use racially, ethnically or otherwise offensive language.
Make discriminatory statements (based on race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, age, national origin, ancestry or physical ability) or ridicule or make negative reference to certain individuals or groups, including, without limitation, with respect to religion, the mentally or physically disabled, sexual orientation, gender, or national origin or ethnicity.
Exploit children or minors.
Encourage cruelty to animals.
Incite illegal activity or otherwise promote the committing of a crime.
Disseminate any unsolicited or unauthorized advertising, promotional materials, ‘junk mail’, ‘spam’, ‘chain letters’, ‘pyramid schemes’, or any other form of such solicitation.
Collect any information about other users or members (including usernames and/or email addresses) for any purpose.
Falsely express or imply that Customer’s statements are sponsored or endorsed by Vyond or Company.
Customer will further refrain from knowingly:
Using any robot, spider, scraper or other automated means to access the Vyond Platform or Services.
Taking any action that imposes an unreasonable or disproportionately large load on Company’s equipment or infrastructure.
Creating user accounts by automated means or under false or fraudulent pretenses.
Removing, obscuring or changing any copyright, trademark, hyperlink or other proprietary rights notices contained in or on the Services, Vyond Platform, Vyond Assets or any Vyond Platform related code embeddable or embedded on a third party web site.
Using the Vyond Platform, Vyond Assets or Services to violate the security of any computer, equipment, device, hardware, system or network or transfer or store illegal Content or material.
This list of prohibitions provides examples and is not complete or exclusive. Company reserves the right to: (a) terminate Customer’s account and/or suspend Customer’s access to the Vyond Platform for violation of this Policy until such time as the violation is corrected; and (b) block or delete any Customer Content, Customer-Owned Output, Generated Scripts and/or Videos; in each case with or without cause, and with or without notice, which Company reasonably determines in good faith is inappropriate or disruptive to the Services or the Vyond Platform or to any other user of the Services or the Vyond Platform (or any combination thereof) or that may expose Company to liability. Company may report to law enforcement authorities any actions that may be illegal, and any reports it receives of such conduct. When legally required or at Company’s discretion, Company will cooperate with law enforcement agencies in any investigation of alleged illegal activity on this site or on the Internet.
Company has no obligation to monitor, police or remove any Customer Content, Customer-Owned Output, Generated Scripts and/or Videos or other information submitted by Customer or anyone else.
#### Text to Image
Think it, type it, generate it.
Generate any visual or background you can imagine with our AI-powered Text to Image feature. From simple to complex, your prompt can create anything you can dream up!
More styles. Infinite possibilities.
Generate images in six distinct, eye-catching styles:
Block print · Paper art · Gradient vector · Colorist · Photo realism · Concept art
With more styles coming soon!
Each style lets you choose whether you want to create a visual or a background.Plan and prompt limits apply.
Try Vyond for Free Today
Looking for tips on prompting for Text to Image? Look no further.
Additional resources.
Want to learn more about the exciting features and functionality Vyond has to offer? Explore the links below!
Plans and PricingVyond GoVyond StudioText to Image Product Release Notes
Other AI features
AI-Powered Video Creator Features (home)
Create a Character Instantly: AI-Powered Photo to Character Creator
Generate Character Actions: AI-Powered Video to Action
Powerful Localization: AI-Powered Instant Video Translation
65% of the Fortune 500 and millions of users rely on Vyond.
Try Vyond Today
#### The Best AI Video Generator with Human Avatars
The Best AI Video Generator with Human Avatars
If you’re curious about AI video creation tools that let you produce a wide range of videos, including videos with human avatars as hosts, you’ve come to the right place.
In this article, we’ll explain what’s important to consider about AI video generators and AI avatar creation tools. Then we’ll show you how the best AI video tools make it easy to integrate AI avatar hosts into all kinds of engaging AI videos.
Benefits of AI video generators
The emergence of generative AI in late 2022 sparked a new market category: AI-powered video creation tools. Their outputs vary, but what AI video generators have in common is how you use them: enter a text prompt or verbatim script, and the tool generates your bespoke video.
Top benefits of AI video generators include:
Versatility: An AI video generator like Vyond can create videos in a wide range of styles and formats—everything from animated to photorealistic to mixed media, with and without AI avatars.
Time savings: A creation process that might’ve taken hours before can now be done in a few minutes. Many people like to use these tools to get them started with a first draft that they can refine.
Ease of use: Unlike legacy video production tools, AI video generators are intuitive and simple to use, so anyone can create professional-looking videos.
Challenges with AI video generators
As exciting as these tools are, AI video generators have two major drawbacks worth noting.
Limited to a single style: With one exception, most AI video generators specialize in a single video style, such as talking avatar AI videos or animated style videos. So if you want the flexibility to make different video styles, you need to cobble together multiple specialized tools.
Limited control over output: The best AI video creation tools make it easy to edit their bespoke outputs, but many still lag here. If you have moderate edits, typically you’ll have to start over and regenerate your video.
In the realm of AI video generators, one category of outputs has gotten increasingly popular: talking avatar AI videos.
Benefits of talking avatar AI videos
In the past two years, there’ve been huge strides in how realistic and believable talking AI avatars come across (as well as AI voice generators, which go hand in hand). When used thoughtfully in business contexts, talking avatar AI videos are an efficient way to create content with a friendly host.
Concerns around the creation of deep fakes are not unfounded, but responsible and ethical creators of AI video avatar platforms build controls into their tools to reduce these risks (like consent triggers whenever a video is created that includes someone’s official avatar likeness).
Top benefits of AI video generators include:
Add a human touch at scale: AI avatars add a human-like touch that draws viewers in, helping you convert text-based content into something that’s more engaging than just narration and text on screen.
Faster, cheaper production: Avatars will say exactly what you give them. Text prompt in, video out. Generating your video takes minutes, instead of hours with human actors.
Easy to translate: AI avatars are multilingual in a way few humans are. Creating content with AI avatars and AI voices makes translation quick, smooth, and nearly instant, so you can engage with global audiences.
1. Choose an AI Avatar
2. Give them a unique voice
3. Generate your video
Challenges with talking avatar AI videos
Advances in talking avatar AI videos are exciting, but many companies are still figuring out how to use them most effectively. Some of the most common challenges include:
Overuse: Just like human “talking heads,” using avatars by themselves for a full video can be disengaging for your audience. Instead, AI avatars are best used in small doses. For example, use them to introduce a series or as a small inset over a screen recording.
Integration: Integrating AI avatars into other content — like screen recordings and animated storytelling — can be tricky, especially with avatar-only vendors like Synthesia and Colossyan.
Emotional range: Avatars’ ability to convey emotion is still limited and thus, risks turning off some audiences.
All told, AI video generators are easy to use, help you create high-quality results, and save you time. And the best, most versatile platforms will offer multiple styles — including talking avatar AI videos.
The best AI video generator with human avatars: Vyond
In response to the challenges outlined above, Vyond has evolved from being the leading animated video creation platform to become an all-in-one AI video creation platform that’s powerful but effortless, and versatile enough so you can give up your one-off tools.Vyond brings the best of emerging AI tools right into your workflow. Vyond’s instant script and video creator lets you produce original videos in less than a minute with a simple prompt, or by dropping in a script or reference document. Features like text to image allow you to create original props and backgrounds in whatever style you need with a simple text prompt. AI-powered instant video translation quickly localizes your video in any of 95 languages.But most notable is the Vyond’s deep library of best-in-class AI avatar options — and how easy it is to integrate them into other video content directly in the platform.
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Vyond’s AI talking avatars and custom avatars
In Vyond, you can choose from a wide selection of AI avatars ready to communicate an inclusive, relatable message in every video. The library includes 200+ expressive human avatars — including a selection from avatar industry leader HeyGen — for a total of 1100+ human avatar and background combinations, as well as a variety of options to customize avatars for different industries, job types, and settings.
You can use avatars on their own, or even better, combine them with any Vyond style — animated, photorealistic or anything in between — to create a dynamic video that delivers exceptional engagement, relatability, and results.And if you’d rather work with an avatar of someone your audience will recognize, from company leaders and corporate trainers to mascots, you can create a custom avatar (with consent). Custom avatars can act as digital stand-ins, helping their human twins be in two places at once while delivering messages authentically. Learn more about custom avatars.
Simple to integrate AI talking avatars into other video types
As mentioned earlier, the Achille’s heel of AI-avatar-only vendors is that they encourage overuse and force creators to jump platforms if they want to integrate their avatars into other content. But incorporating AI avatar hosts into any kind of training, marketing, sales, and internal communications video is easy in Vyond. You can set avatars to appear as full screen or half screen narrators, or embed them in masked circles using Vyond’s pre-built templates or starting from scratch.
The future of AI video generators with talking avatars
With AI video generation technology constantly evolving, it can be difficult to gauge which software platform is best equipped to adapt to your changing needs and choose with confidence.
Vyond was designed to alleviate those concerns by providing you with an unusually versatile video toolkit that’s constantly updated with the best new AI features as they become available, including the latest, greatest talking AI avatar options on the market. And in a fast-changing world, that’s as close to future-proofing as you can get.
FAQs about AI videos with human avatars
What is an AI video generator?
AI video generators are a type of software that lets you enter a text prompt or verbatim script to generate bespoke videos. They’re easy to use, helping you create high-quality results and saving you time. While many other tools can only produce one type of video, as the only all-in-one AI video creation platform, Vyond offers multiple styles — including talking avatar AI videos.
What are AI talking avatars?
AI talking avatars are lifelike, digital representations of people. They use AI to mimic expressions, movements, and voices. Videos with AI avatars are getting more popular because they’re super fast and easy to create, and also really easy to translate and update.
They’re also great for continuity because, unlike paid actors or internal employees, AI avatars are always available and will never leave your company.
Vyond offers two categories of AI avatars: pre-made avatars and custom avatars. Learn more about Vyond’s AI avatars.
What’s the best way to use AI talking avatars in training and business videos?
You can use avatars on their own, or even better, mix them with other styles, backgrounds, layouts for one-of-a-kind content that’s more engaging and relatable.
What is the best AI video generator with human avatars?
Vyond is the best AI video generator with human avatars, thanks to its wide variety of avatar options and simple integration with other video styles for a custom look. Plus Vyond features AI translation tools and ultra high-quality AI voices that make translation quick smooth, and nearly instant.
Does Vyond integrate with other tools?
Yes. Vyond’s integrations with your favorite tools — like Google Docs, Slack, and Zapier — make it even more convenient to create any type of video you need, without leaving your workflow.
Try Vyond Today
More from Vyond
Vyond’s AI avatars. Your professional spokesperson on demand.
AI tools for video creation.
Instant, effortless video. AnyStyle. Every audience.
65% of the Fortune 500 and millions of users rely on Vyond.
Try Vyond Today
#### The Easiest AI Script to Video Generator
The Easiest AI Script to Video Generator
Effortlessly turn a script into an engaging, effective video with Vyond’s AI script to video generator, Vyond Go. Create quick training, marketing, sales and internal communication videos that say exactly what you want — in seconds.
How to use Vyond’s AI script to video feature
Upload your script
Upload or paste your script into Vyond Go. Then select a format and click “Create Video.”
Review and edit your draft
Make adjustments with Quick Edit or dive into Vyond Studio to customize more.
Download your final video
Export your video as an mp4 file and share as you see fit! (It’s really that easy.)
Why use Vyond’s AI script to video tool?
Vyond’s AI script to video feature helps you make a wide range of video styles in seconds—everything from videos with AI avatar hosts to videos with animated narrators to engaging mixed media videos with stock assets and motion graphics.
And if your script needs a tweak after previewing your video? Just edit your text in the sidebar and regenerate your video in seconds.
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What makes Vyond’s AI script to video generator special
Vyond Go offers three powerful ways to turn your ideas into a video:
Script-based creation: Input your exact script and let the AI bring it to life—verbatim.
Document-based creation: Upload a reference file (like a PowerPoint or PDF) and let Vyond’s AI do the rest.
Prompt-based creation: Type in a topic and let AI generate both the script and the video.
This flexibility makes Vyond perfect for teams that want control over messaging while still speeding up production with AI.
For content creators who know what they want to say but need help bringing visuals to life, Vyond’s AI script to video generator is the perfect partner. And if you’re looking for a fresh take, you can even provide a reference script and let the AI reinterpret it in a new way.
Benefits of using Vyond’s script to video generator
Skip storyboarding
Let Vyond’s AI tool instantly create a visual layout and flow based on your script.
Save time and hassle
Create videos 10x faster than you can with traditional production methods.
Create videos in many styles
Make dynamic videos featuring avatars, motion graphics, animation and more.
Vyond: The best script to video AI tool for training and business communications
Whether you want full control over your messaging or need AI to take the lead, Vyond gives you the flexibility to turn scripts into polished videos in seconds.
From talking heads to mixed media explainers, no other AI script to video tool makes video creation for business communication and training as fast, powerful, or versatile.
What’s the best script to video AI tool for L&D and sales enablement?
Vyond is the best script to video AI tool for both Learning & Development (L&D) and sales enablement—hands down. Unlike other tools that only offer avatars or basic narration, Vyond combines the speed of AI with true visual storytelling flexibility. Whether you’re making onboarding content, microlearning videos, or sales training materials, Vyond supports multiple video formats—talking heads, scenes with characters, and motion graphics. With features like Quick Edit and Vyond Studio, your team can quickly fine-tune messaging while keeping everything on-brand and impactful.
What’s the best script to video tool for marketing, TikTok and YouTube?
If you’re a marketer creating videos for TikTok, YouTube, or paid social, Vyond is your best bet. With Vyond Go, you can generate scroll-stopping content using a script, a topic prompt, or a reference doc. The platform supports animated explainers, talking heads, and dynamic motion graphics—all ideal for short-form and long-form video marketing. Whether you’re producing influencer-style content or polished product promos, Vyond combines script-to-video AI speed with high creative control.
Can I change the script to a script to video AI video after it generates?
Yes! With Vyond’s AI script to video tool, you can easily edit your script post-generation. Just update the text in the editing sidebar, and Vyond will regenerate your video—complete with new visuals and voiceover. It’s ideal for last-minute changes, script refinements, or brand messaging tweaks.
How do I create script to video content that’s on brand for my company?
It’s easy to swap in different colors and characters in the videos you create in Vyond Go by bringing the draft into Vyond Studio and making adjustments. It’s also possible to have Vyond create custom branded script-to-video templates built right into Vyond Go, so you can ensure every video output you create follows your brand guidelines.
You can easily customize videos created in Vyond Go by bringing them into Vyond Studio. There, you can apply brand colors, swap characters, and adjust visuals to match your guidelines. Vyond also offers custom branded script-to-video templates to ensure every video stays consistent and on-brand from the start.
More from Vyond
How to Make AI Videos in Minutes
Prompting AI: Getting the Best Results from Vyond Go
AI-Powered Instant Translation
Try Vyond’s script to video AI today.
With Vyond’s effortless AI platform, you can create any video you need in a huge range of styles — instantly with a simple script. Start helping your company communicate, train, and engage better today:
Get Started for Free
#### Training and ELearning Videos
Engage your learners with video.
Since video retention rates are 9x those of text, video is the new standard for getting your learners prepared. Enter Vyond. As the only all-in-one, AI video creation platform, Vyond can accelerate your learning and development results. When you create with Vyond, you can quickly and effortlessly transform critical information into engaging videos at scale — increasing efficiency, reducing costs, and maximizing business outcomes.
Try Vyond Today
Multiple ways to create. Consistently powerful results.
Instantly create videos from a simple prompt with our AI video maker, Vyond Go. Type what you want, and we’ll take it from there. Can’t get much easier than that.
Or use our intuitive, full-featured video editor, Vyond Studio, to get complete creative control and customization with drag-and-drop simplicity. Because inspiration or need can strike anywhere, you can even create videos on the go with Vyond Mobile on your tablet or phone.
With Vyond, the power to create engaging video content is always at your fingertips.
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All you need. All right here.
Effortless video creation starts with having all the best tools in one place.
Get the right look for the right audience with our ever-expanding variety of options, ranging from animated to photorealistic and everything in between. Our generative AI can also help you create any visual or background and even apply recorded actions directly to a character.
Integrations like Shutterstock, ultra-high-quality AI voices, and instant translation into 95 languages bring more functionality directly to you and help lighten your tech stack. Even screen and web recording are built right in and just a click away.
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Effective learning and training made effortless.
Vyond streamlines and simplifies video creation. There’s no need for production expertise or specialty software knowhow. Anyone can begin creating powerful, relevant, and engaging videos in minutes – no experience necessary.
With an extensive library of thousands of pre-built scenes, hundreds of video templates, and over 40,000 props and character actions, creating engaging and relevant video communication for any industry is quick and easy.
Then, simply save your video as an MP4 and seamlessly import it into your learning management system.
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Better brand management and collaboration built right in.
Our brand management and collaboration tools make brand cohesiveness and asynchronous collaboration easy. Add a company watermark, create approval requirements, upload brand fonts, colors, and guidelines so everyone is on the same page, and more. Supercharge collaboration by sharing files and assets across teams and time zones. After all, teamwork makes the dream work!
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Check out our L&D template library
Get a jump on creating engaging, relevant training videos by visiting our L&D video template library before you begin your next project. We’ve got you covered with templates featuring animated, photorealistic, and mixed media styles and more than 200 common eLearning topics.
Browse our templates now
Training and eLearning FAQs
What’s the best AI tool for making training videos?
There’s a growing market for AI video creation platforms. The tools most trusted and used by L&D teams and instructional designers are those that support a wide range of training video styles, integrate well with LMS systems, and are highly user-friendly—so staff without video experience can create content easily. While companies like Synthesia and HeyGen market themselves as top AI training video tools, their utility can be limited due to their avatar-only delivery format. Vyond offers broader functionality, enabling animated, avatar, screen recording, genAI, stock, text-based, and mixed media training videos.
What’s the best way to turn PowerPoint slides into training videos?
If you’re looking for both quality and speed, using an AI video creation tool with a document-to-video conversion feature is the best approach. The workflow is simple: upload your slides, select a video style (narration, conversion, or talking head presenter), and let the AI transform your content into a script while selecting relevant visuals. Then edit as needed and share. Pros: it’s fast, consistent, and boosts engagement. Cons: longer documents may require multiple uploads.
Which L&D video platform has the best customer support?
Vyond consistently receives industry-leading marks for customer support and overall satisfaction. In Spring 2026, Vyond earned G2 badges for Best Support, Best Relationship (overall and Enterprise), and Best Usability, among others, and maintains a 4.8/5 rating on G2. In 2025, Vyond’s customer success team achieved an NPS score of 51—more than 50% above the industry average.
Does Vyond integrate with LMS systems?
Yes! Vyond integrates with Learning Management Systems (LMS) by supporting SCORM exports and standard video formats like MP4. This allows teams to upload content directly or embed it while tracking engagement, completion, and performance. Key features include:
SCORM compliance: Export videos as SCORM packages for seamless LMS tracking.
Platform support: Works with systems like Moodle, iSpring Learn, Cornerstone, and CourseMill.
Flexible delivery: Share via MP4 files or embed via platforms like YouTube or Vimeo.
Authoring compatibility: Commonly used with tools like Articulate Storyline, Rise, and Adobe Captivate.
These capabilities help L&D teams create interactive eLearning content, monitor learner progress, and incorporate assessments effectively.
65% of the Fortune 500 and millions of users rely on Vyond.
Try Vyond Today
#### Trust Center | Vyond’s Commitment to Ethical Policies
Vyond’s Trust Center
At Vyond, our goal is to deliver instant, effortless video creation for business. We’re constantly developing and curating the best tools available — including the enterprise grade features you expect — to help you tell your story as effectively and efficiently as possible.
We’re committed to delivering on this promise responsibly — with a dedication to privacy, security, transparency, and fairness — for all features including those powered by AI. You can use Vyond’s platform knowing that each feature is enterprise-safe and respectful of user rights.
Below you’ll find links to resources such as Vyond policy statements, third party certifications, and answers to frequently asked questions that demonstrate our commitment to doing business in a trustworthy manner.
Resources
ISO 27001 CertificateDirect downloadISO 27001 Statement of ApplicabilityDirect downloadVPAT (Voluntary Product Accessibility Template)Download our ACR and VPATCAIQ (Consensus Assessment Initiative Questionnaire)Contact usInformation Security PolicyContact us (NDA required)Business Continuity PlanContact us (NDA required)Penetration test results summaryContact us (NDA required)Vulnerability scan results summaryContact us (NDA required)HECVATContact us (NDA required)AI FAQ and Ethics StatementDownload our statementVyond Secure SuiteLink to Vyond Secure SuiteData PartitioningLink to Overview DocumentSubprocessorsLearn moreData Privacy FrameworkLearn moreFedRAMP CertificationLearn moreAcceptable Use PolicyLearn more
FAQ
What are the security features that make Vyond a trusted and enterprise-ready solution?
For more than a decade, Vyond has built enterprise-grade solutions following the product development principle known as “Security By Design.” Vyond is ISO 27001:2022 certified across all locations and products, and offers service to government agencies under the rigorous and continuous monitoring requirements of the U.S. federal government’s FedRAMP program. Vyond achieved its first FedRAMP Certification in June of 2025, which can be seen here.
Key security features include brute force login defense and robust protection from DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks; configurable inactivity logout, IP whitelisting, password policies, and server-side cache settings; seamless integration with customer Single Sign-On solutions, including IdP and SP authentication under SAML 2.0, Oauth solutions using Google or Microsoft Office 365, and SCIM provisioning (learn more). With these safeguards, Vyond’s Secure Suite enables enterprises to create and collaborate confidently within a secure video creation platform.
Does Vyond store AI prompts after they are used to generate video scripts?
No. Generated video scripts based on prompt inputs are stored in short term memory, but once a script is generated, the prompt input is automatically deleted, and is never logged or stored beyond that.
Is any data provided by Vyond customers used as input for training Vyond’s AI?
No. We don’t use any data provided by end users as input for the creation, development, training, or improvement of AI components of the product, and we don’t partner with AI model creators who don’t make the same commitment.
How does Vyond help customers ensure that videos they create based on AI-generated rough-draft scripts don’t violate the intellectual property rights of others?
Vyond follows industry best practices under AI governance frameworks, such as the EU AI Act and ISO 42001, for providing transparency and guidance when outputs are created using inputs processed by generative AI features. This includes in-app text at the point of engagement that warns end users not to use the intellectual property of another as an input for an AI prompt. Vyond also requires the “human-in-the-loop” design principle be strictly followed. By doing so, enterprises are protected from automated means of processing inputs without human oversight.
What are Vyond’s security measures regarding the use of custom avatars?
To create a custom avatar based on your likeness, Vyond requires explicit consent to comply with data protection regulations. Users must record and submit a separate video of themselves reading a specific consent statement. This gives Vyond permission to use audio and video samples to create and share a digital avatar. A custom avatar request cannot be processed if the consent statement is missing or doesn’t meet Vyond’s standards. If a custom avatar is created, but no longer desired, the creator of the avatar can contact Vyond’s support team to have it permanently deleted from Vyond’s platform.
What Personal Data is collected by Vyond?
Vyond collects two types of Personal Data. The first is business contact information, such as name and email address. The second is data that end users optionally choose to upload into the Vyond platform that also qualifies as Personal Data. Learn more.
Does Vyond support Single Sign-On (SSO)?
Yes. SAML 2.0-based SSO is supported with both Identity Provider and Service Provider options.
Does Vyond support Multi-factor Authentication?
Not directly, but through the use of SSO.
Does Vyond offer SLAs (Service Level Agreements)?
Yes. All Enterprise subscription plans come with contractual SLAs.
Are third parties used to provide any portion of your service(s)?
Yes. See our list of subprocessors here.
Where is Vyond hosted?
Vyond uses Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the primary hosting facility is the US East 1 Zone in Northern Virginia. The secondary facility is AWS’ US West 1 Zone in Portland, Oregon.
Does Vyond have a SOC 2 Type II report?
No. Vyond relies on AWS for infrastructure security and reviews the AWS SOC 2 Type II annually as part of ISO 27001 controls.
Is data encrypted in transit?
Yes, data is encrypted using TLS 1.2.
Is data encrypted at rest?
Yes, data is encrypted using AES-256 encryption.
Does your organization have a pre-employment screening policy for employees and contractors? For UK suppliers – does it map to BPSS?
Yes.
Is data protection and information security training part of your induction processes? Do your employees and contractors undergo regular data protection and information security training?
Yes, annually.
If you use external data centers in delivering services to us, how are these protected?
This is the responsibility of our cloud host. For more info please see Amazon’s data center policy
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#### Value and ROI
Vyond videos get results.
Fast & Efficient
You need to be able to create videos — at scale — without making a production out of it. With Vyond, making a video is no more complicated than making a PowerPoint. The templated scenes, drag-and-drop interface and intuitive, adaptive UI make it fast. The efficiency comes from the ability to easily work in stages, while continually circulating drafts for feedback and review. Unlike live-action video production, there is no “black box” process.
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Relevant
Vyond was built around a concept of “instant relevance.” We feel our users should be able to find assets (scene templates, backgrounds, props, character actions, character types) relevant to their industry or job function – immediately. We’ve got multiple traditional methods for surfacing this content quickly. We are now augmenting that with AI for an even better user experience.
See Examples
Brand Compliant
Vyond understands that compliance with brand and style guidelines is table stakes for our customers. With that in mind, we’ve made it simple to upload company logos and corporate fonts, change the colors of key assets or templates, customize the clothing/uniforms of the characters — or even remove the characters’ facial features completely. Our text to prop and video to action features allow any item or action to become an asset in your Vyond library.
Find out How
Infosec and Data Privacy
Vyond is the only agile video creation studio that supports the rigorous security requirements of enterprise organizations. Vyond is ISO 27001 certified (for all locations and use cases), GDPR and CCPA compliant, as well as Privacy Shield certified. Vyond Secure Suite (a component of our Vyond for Enterprise solution) provides oft-requested features such as SSO, customizable password complexity, brute-force login protection and IP whitelisting. Advanced options such as data partitioning (which prevents commingling of data) are available as well.
Get the Details
Scalability and Reliability
Vyond scales. Its simplicity ensures it can be used by anyone. This takes video creation out of the hands of specialists and puts it in the hands of everyone. Its robust cloud infrastructure ensures it will remain snappy and responsive, even with hundreds of thousands of concurrent users. Vyond customers have enjoyed >99.85% uptime for several years in a row.
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Proactive & Responsive Support
Vyond begins its enterprise relationships by asking “What defines success for you?” Based on that answer, your Customer Success Manager will customize your onboarding experience and ensure we provide the support you need to achieve those goals on our platform.
Your Customer Success Manager is your main point of contact for all things Vyond. Beyond that, we have a multi-layered customer support infrastructure providing live, expert support by phone, email, or chat for 18 hours a day. You’ll also be a member of the Vyond Community, where you can ask questions and share best practices with thousands of other Vyond users on your way to becoming a Vyond expert.
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ROI — Accelerating Business Outcomes
Vyond videos are 10x more efficient, cost-effective, and intuitive to create with high velocity compared with legacy video production approaches. Our enterprise customers see 130% or more increases in engagement rates, while saving millions of dollars over time vs. expensive agencies.
See Case Studies
65% of the Fortune 500 and millions of users rely on Vyond.
Try Vyond Today
#### Video Marketing Software
Effective marketing made effortless.
Get more engagement with less effort. With Vyond, you can create a variety of videos that fit seamlessly into any marketing strategy, across the funnel. Engage prospects with explainer videos, product demos, or even animated ads that inform and entertain, with higher retention rates than text. Whether you’re building video into campaigns, events, trade shows, social media, or presentations, Vyond is the effortless, all-in-one AI video creation platform that makes marketing unforgettable.
Video made easy with Vyond.
Vyond provides everything needed to communicate better. Designed for users of all skill levels, our intuitive tools allow you to generate effective videos in multiple styles.
Instantly create videos from a simple prompt with our AI video maker, Vyond Go. Type what you want, and we’ll take it from there. Can’t get much easier than that.
Or use our intuitive, full-featured video editor, Vyond Studio, to get complete creative control and customization with drag-and-drop simplicity. Not to mention hundreds of customizable templates and tens of thousands of character movements and assets that help you create videos for any role, topic, or industry-specific scenario.
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Better brand management and collaboration built right in.
Our brand management and collaboration tools make brand cohesiveness and asynchronous collaboration easy. Add a company watermark, create approval requirements, upload brand fonts, colors, and guidelines so everyone is on the same page, and more. Collaboration is supercharged with the ability to share files and assets across teams and time zones — because teamwork makes the dream work!
Learn More about Brand Management
Consolidate your tech stack.
Effortless video creation starts with having all the best tools in one place.
Have the right look for the right audience with our ever-expanding variety of options ranging from animated to photorealistic and everything in between. Our generative AI can also help generate any visual or background and even apply recorded actions directly to a character.
Integrations like Shutterstock, ultra-high-quality AI voices, and instant translation into 95 languages bring more functionality directly to you and help lighten your tech stack. Even screen and web recording are built right in and just a click away.
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Marketing FAQs
What’s the best way to make product marketing videos with AI?
The best AI tools for product marketing allow you to generate scenes, characters, and voiceovers from scripts or notes, then customize with branding. Platforms like Vyond support avatar-led videos, mixed media content, and pre-built templates designed to showcase product value, use cases, and benefits clearly and engagingly.
What’s the best way to make marketing videos with AI?
Choose a tool that enables fast creation and editing so you can adjust messaging without bottlenecks. Unlike advanced tools like Adobe Premiere or Final Cut, user-friendly platforms like Vyond allow anyone to create professional videos with full control over branding. AI-powered tools enable rapid iteration, testing, and scaling across campaigns without relying on production teams.
How do I turn marketing slide decks into videos with AI?
Most AI video platforms allow you to upload presentations and convert them into videos in various styles. Vyond supports animated videos, avatar presenters, and narration-based formats using stock visuals and text. You can easily edit AI-generated drafts in the editor—adding images, colors, and branding—to ensure consistency.
65% of the Fortune 500 and millions of users rely on Vyond.
Try Vyond Today
#### Video Template Library
Video Template Library
Save hours of time and effort and accelerate every stage of your operation with our video templates. Pre-filled with scenes, avatars, characters, and styles, they cover a vast array of use cases. And you can easily customize them with brand and message details. In minutes, anyone can create and share a retention-boosting video to connect with any audience.
Featured Videos
Onboarding Video – First Day
Warehouse Scenes
Quarterly Performance Review
Search
Job Role
Education
Everyone
Healthcare
Human Resources
Learning & Development
Marketing
Sales
Storytelling
Style
AI Avatar
Business Friendly
Characterstyle
Contemporary
Mixed
Modernstyle
Shutterstock
Storybook
Whiteboard Animation
Category
Bundle
Customer support
DEI
Education
eLearning
Event and Invitation
Explainer
Finance
GIF
Government
Healthcare
Infographics
Information Technology
Internal Communication
Marketing
Nonprofit
Onboarding
Presentation
Remote work
Sales
Sales Enablement
Storytelling
Reset
Onboarding Video – First Day
Warehouse Scenes
Quarterly Performance Review
How to Boost Engagement in eLearning
Finding Balance in Remote Work
Hospital Operations Report
Site Safety Essentials Training
Morning Energy Office Scenes
Corporate Fitness for Employees
Digital Network Narration Scenes
Patient Intake Protocol
Tips to Collect and Address Customer Feedback
Show More
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#### Video to Action
Bring your characters to life.
Walk, run, or do a cartwheel! Bring your Contemporary-style characters to life with Vyond’s AI-powered Video to Action feature. Just upload a video of the action you want your character to mirror and watch the magic happen. Whether you’re inventing your own dance or working on an assembly line, your imagination is the limit! Get your characters to move the way you want for more dynamic and engaging training, marketing videos and more.
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Additional resources.
Want to learn more about the exciting features and functionality Vyond’s all-in-one AI video creation platform has to offer? Explore the links below!
Plans and PricingVyond GoVyond StudioText to Image Product Release Notes
Other AI features
AI-Powered Video Creator Features (home)
Instant Infinite Library: AI-Powered Text to Image Feature
Create a Character Instantly: AI-Powered Photo to Character Creator
Powerful Localization: AI-Powered Instant Video Translation
65% of the Fortune 500 and millions of users rely on Vyond.
Try Vyond Today
#### Vimeo
Vimeo
Vyond and Vimeo empowers creators to effortlessly produce captivating videos with Vyond’s intuitive video creation tools and seamlessly share them on Vimeo’s robust video hosting platform, enhancing storytelling capabilities, driving audience engagement, and boosting brand visibility.
How to upload videos to Vimeo.
Log into your Vimeo account.
Select New in the top right corner of the page.
Choose Upload from the dropdown menu.
On the Upload page, choose your upload method:
Select Choose files to upload from your computer.
Choose from other options like Dropbox, Google Drive, etc.
Select the destination folder in your Vimeo library for the new video.
Choose the file you want to upload.
Wait for the upload to complete automatically.
After upload, you’ll be taken to the video settings page.
Configure privacy settings as needed.
Adjust other video settings as desired.
Try our other powerful integrations.
Slack
Use Vyond’s text to video in Slack to instantly take your concepts from prompt to screen.
Learn More
Google Docs
Use document to video to effortlessly transform your Google doc into an engaging video.
Learn More
Zapier
Automate your video creation workflow by pairing with 7,000+ productivity apps and tools in Zapier.
Learn More
Vyond works. Everywhere you work.
Explore Integrations
#### Vyond + Vbrick: Enterprise Video at Scale
Create, Personalize, and Distribute Enterprise Video at Scale
Together, Vyond’s AI video creation and Vbrick’s enterprise-grade delivery give you everything you need to create personalized videos, distribute them securely, and measure their impact.
Create & deliver videos that move people.
With Vyond, producing professional-quality video is effortless. In minutes, you can generate personalized content with lifelike AI avatars, expressive voices, and brand-ready designs. Pair that with Vbrick’s intelligent, secure video management and enterprise distribution, and you’ve got a complete solution for driving communication and engagement across your organization.
Learn More
Personalized video. Enterprise impact.
Today’s workforce expects communication that’s human, engaging, and relevant. With Vyond + Vbrick, you can deliver it:
Create custom, multilingual videos in minutes
Distribute securely at enterprise scale
Embed wherever work gets done
Track analytics that prove engagement and outcomes
Request a Demo
Why Vyond + Vbrick?
Create compelling content.
With Vyond’s intuitive AI platform, anyone can produce professional videos — whether for sales, HR, L&D, compliance, IT, or executive communications.
Bring a human touch.
Engage your audience with authentic AI avatars and natural voices across 95 languages and accents.
Stay secure and compliant.
Vbrick ensures enterprise-grade governance, retention policies, and access controls so your content is safe and on-brand.
Deliver with confidence.
Embed video in the apps and workflows your teams already use — from intranets to HR and IT platforms.
Prove business impact.
Vbrick analytics show who watched, how long, and how video drives outcomes.
Solutions that scale with your business.
Knowledge Sharing – Transform written content into engaging explainer videos to boost self-service and reduce support costs.
Employee Onboarding – Welcome new hires with personalized, engaging videos — securely delivered worldwide.
Sales Enablement – Equip your sales teams with personalized video content that simplifies complex offerings, builds buyer trust, and accelerates deals.
Corporate Training – Create memorable learning experiences with Vyond, then track completion and compliance with Vbrick.
Leadership Communications – Turn executive updates into polished, personalized messages that inspire.
Change Management – Simplify complex initiatives with storytelling and video, ensuring everyone understands and engages.
The power of two leaders.
The leading AI-powered video creation platform, helping organizations deliver professional, personalized, and brand-ready video at speed and scale.
The enterprise leader in secure video delivery, live streaming, intelligent video content management, and analytics.
Together, we enable organizations to create personalized videos with impact, distribute them seamlessly, and measure engagement at scale.
Talk to Our Team
#### Vyond Approved Agencies
Vyond Approved Agencies
Looking for an agency to create Vyond videos for you? This list includes Vyond approved agencies authorized to create Vyond videos for their clients. Please click on the agency name below to contact them directly for further information.
Agency List
Contact NameAgencyMary NunaleyLavender Dragon Team, Inc.Dominik CaraveCarave.Video — The explainer forgeAmmar NaveedAmmar NaveedTawny HoskinAtomic JoltHassan BabarHorizon02Imelda NeriTAEC Tecnología Avanzada para la Educación y la CapacitaciónAndy KwongAK Media SolutionSamuel FehilyYour Video PartnerAlan BlumeStartUpSellingPriyanka SarinPriyanimakers Pvt LtdMiri MarchantI’m LearningBob DupreyRestaurant PlaybooksKhuram Ali KhanKhuram Ali KhanChris Paxton McMillinD3 Training Solutions (Design, Develop, Deliver)Ciska BrinkaaresPatrice CourtemancheFormation Witeach Inc.Shenteria ChildsBusiness Video LadySarah WilhelmsHD Productions, Inc.Finn HolroydWhite Bicycle LtdMuhammad HuzaifaMuhammad HuzaifaMiranda ManningAt Your Best Inc.Katie MerrienCommuniKate Design LimitedAsma ZainebCommLab India
65% of the Fortune 500 and millions of users rely on Vyond.
Try Vyond Today
#### Vyond Cookie Policy
Vyond Cookie Policy
Effective Date: March 18, 2026
This Cookie Policy describes the different types of cookies and similar technologies that may be applied on https://www.vyond.com (a “Site”) of GoAnimate, Inc. or its affiliates (which operate the Vyond website and Vyond platform).
We may change this Cookie Policy at any time. Please take a look at the “Effective Date” legend at the top of this page to see when this Cookie Policy was last revised. Any changes in this Cookie Policy will become effective when we make the revised Cookie Policy available on or through the Site.
Please read this Cookie Policy carefully. If you have any questions, feel free to contact our privacy officers by email at privacy-support@vyond.com or by mail at GoAnimate, Inc., 204 East Second Avenue, Suite 638, San Mateo, CA 94401 USA.
What are Cookies?
Cookies are a standard feature of websites that allow us to store small amounts of data on your computer about your visit to the Site. Cookies help us to learn which areas of the Site are useful and which areas need improvement.
You can choose whether to accept cookies by changing the settings on your browser. However, if you disable this function, your experience on the Site may be diminished and some features may not work as intended.
What Cookies Do We Use?
Below we list the different types of cookies that may be used on the Site. To the extent any Personal Information is collected through cookies, the Privacy Policy applies and complements this Cookie Policy.
The Site uses both first party cookies (which are set by the Site being visited) and third party cookies (which are set by a server located outside the domain of the Site).
Strictly Necessary. These cookies are necessary for the website to function and cannot be switched off in our systems. They are usually only set in response to actions made by you which amount to a request for services, such as setting your privacy preferences, logging in or filling in forms. You can set your browser to block or alert you about these cookies, but some parts of the site will not then work. These cookies do not store any personally identifiable information.
Functional. These cookies enable the website to provide enhanced functionality and personalization. They may be set by us or by third party providers whose services we have added to our pages. If you do not allow these cookies then some or all of these services may not function properly.
Targeting. These cookies may be set through our site by our advertising partners. They may be used by those companies to build a profile of your interests and show you relevant advertising on other sites. They do not store directly personal information, but are based on uniquely identifying your browser and internet device. If you do not allow these cookies, you will experience less targeted advertising.
Performance. These cookies allow us to count visits and traffic sources so we can measure and improve the performance of our site. They help us to know which pages are the most and least popular and see how visitors move around the site. All information these cookies collect is aggregated and therefore anonymous. If you do not allow these cookies we will not know when you have visited our site, and will not be able to monitor its performance.
Following is a list of the cookies used on the Site. If you don’t see a list and would like to, please temporarily disable your ad blocker and refresh the page.
Cookie List
Service NameHostCookie TypeDescriptionImpactimpact.comStrictly NecessaryAllows us to track purchases for Affiliate partners.OneTrustvyond.comStrictly NecessaryAllows us to store information about the categories of cookies the site uses and whether visitors have given or withdrawn consent for the use of each category.Vyondvyond.comStrictly NecessaryAllows us to provide you with services available through our websites and to use some of their features, such as access to secure areas.Ruptrupt.devStrictly NecessaryAllows us to strengthen security and prevent fraud and abuse.Zendeskzendesk.comStrictly NecessaryAllows us to provide chat service and accelerate loading times for self-help functionality available through our websites.ZoomInfozoominfo.comStrictly NecessaryAllows us to comply with requests to prevent tracking and understand visitor interactions with our websitesVimeovimeo.comFunctionalAllows users to view videos on our website.Facebookfacebook.comTargetingThese cookies are placed by sites we advertise on from time to time and help us determine the effectiveness of said advertising. They may also serve you advertisements on websites you visit other than Vyond based on your interests and limit the amount of times you might see the same ad.Google Adwordsadwords.google.comTargetingThese cookies are placed by sites we advertise on from time to time and help us determine the effectiveness of said advertising. They may also serve you advertisements on websites you visit other than Vyond based on your interests and limit the amount of times you might see the same ad.Instagraminstagram.comTargetingThese cookies are placed by sites we advertise on from time to time and help us determine the effectiveness of said advertising. They may also serve you advertisements on websites you visit other than Vyond based on your interests and limit the amount of times you might see the same ad.LinkedInlinkedin.comTargetingThese cookies are placed by sites we advertise on from time to time and help us determine the effectiveness of said advertising. They may also serve you advertisements on websites you visit other than Vyond based on your interests and limit the amount of times you might see the same ad.Microsoft AdvertisingBing.comTargetingThese cookies are placed by sites we advertise on from time to time and help us determine the effectiveness of said advertising. They may also serve you advertisements on websites you visit other than Vyond based on your interests and limit the amount of times you might see the same ad.YouTubeyoutube.comTargetingThese cookies are placed by sites we advertise on from time to time and help us determine the effectiveness of said advertising. They may also serve you advertisements on websites you visit other than Vyond based on your interests and limit the amount of times you might see the same ad.Amplitudeamplitude.comPerformanceAllows us to understand user interactions with our websites and ultimately refine that experience to better serve you.Google Analyticsgoogle.com/analyticsPerformanceWe use Google Analytics to understand user interactions with our websites and ultimately refine that experience to better serve you. That includes its User-ID feature, which allows us to associate multiple sessions and interactions from the same user across different devices and browsers. The identifier is pseudonymous and does not contain personal information. User-ID is only enabled for active Vyond account holders who have consented to “Performance Cookies” and are actively logged into the Vyond application.Pardotpardot.comPerformanceAllows us to understand user engagement to improve the effectiveness of our sales and marketing initiatives.
How Do I Manage Cookies?
In addition to the options provided above, you may refuse or accept cookies from the Site at any time by activating settings on your browser. Information about the procedure to follow in order to enable or disable cookies can be found on your Internet browser provider’s website via your help screen.
Some Vyond-branded web pages are powered by third party vendors. Our Help Center is one example. The content there is ours, but the underlying pages are powered by the vendor. Each vendor will have its own Cookie Policy, which means that cookie selections you make on our Site will not carry through to the Vyond-branded pages of another site. If you see a pop-up asking you to make cookie selections you have already made on our home page, that is the reason.
#### Vyond Customer Testimonials
Customer Testimonials
Find out why L&D and HR leaders, instructional designers, and more rely on Vyond to create unforgettable video content that educates their employees and makes a positive impact on their organization’s bottom line.
65% of the Fortune 500 and millions of users rely on Vyond.
Try Vyond Today
#### Vyond FAQs
Vyond FAQs
The Value of Vyond
Platform and Plans
Video Styles, Formats, and Assets
Security and Compliance
Customer Service and Customer Success
The Value of Vyond
What kind of teams and companies use Vyond most?
Vyond is designed for Enterprise organizations that need to communicate, train, and share knowledge at scale.
Our customer base includes more than 17,000 companies and more than two-thirds of the Fortune 500. Specifically, we help teams in L&D, sales enablement, internal communications, HR, compliance, marketing and more quickly deliver engaging, on-brand communications and training to employees, prospects and customers.
By combining AI-powered content creation, collaboration workflows, governance controls, localization, and enterprise-grade security, Vyond enables Enterprise teams to move faster without sacrificing quality, consistency, or compliance. As a result, these teams:
Reduce production bottlenecks and dependence on external agencies
Successfully scale communication across large, distributed workforces
Create content faster while maintaining brand standards
Keep training and communications current without expensive rework
Support multiple business functions from a single platform
What are the biggest business benefits of using Vyond?
As organizations grow, delivering internal and external communications becomes more challenging—and critical to their success. Companies need to onboard new hires faster, train more effectively, communicate more effectively with buyers and customers, and ensure information is accurate and accessible in every context.
Vyond helps organizations of all sizes to scale the creation of engaging, mission-critical video content employees and customers actually engage with—that delivers business results. L&D teams use Vyond to create and refresh eLearning that supports upskilling initiatives, closes critical compliance training gaps, and drives employee retention. Sales enablement and revenue teams use Vyond to onboard new hires faster, equip reps with intel faster, and rescue stalled deals with “just in time” video answers. HR and internal communications teams use Vyond to boost engagement with company updates, policy changes and more. And the list goes on.
Customers across the board have reported significant measurable outcomes, including:
Reducing video turnaround times from 10 weeks to 48 hours
Increasing course completion rates from 33% to 68%
Producing proposal and training videos 97% faster
Training new sales representatives 5x faster
Creating training content 4x faster
Generating employee communications that received 73x more views than PDFs
Can I create on-brand videos at scale with Vyond?
Absolutely. Vyond helps organizations create repeatable communication workflows that make it easier to create, update, localize, and distribute information consistently and securely across teams and regions—while always staying on brand.
Teams can scale content production by quickly transforming large quantities of existing information (slide decks, PDFs, LMS courses) into engaging, scalable videos—and by creating net-new video content in minutes using our AI capabilities, pre-built templates, and drag-and-drop video editor.
Organizations use Vyond’s convenient centralized platform to support onboarding, training, enablement, compliance, operations, executive communications, change management initiatives and more.
How does using Vyond compare to using an agency or an internal creative team?
For most organizations, the goal isn’t simply to create more content—it’s to remove the roadblocks that slow the business down.
With Vyond, companies avoid lengthy production cycles and the bottlenecks and missed deadlines that follow by reducing or eliminating their dependence on external agencies or busy internal creative departments. Instead, teams that use Vyond can create and update content directly, in less time than it takes to write up a creative brief.
Having access to a user-friendly video creation platform like this allows organizations to respond more quickly to changing priorities while maintaining greater control over quality, messaging, compliance, and governance.
Success stories include:
An educational institution that produced a training series in one-quarter the time required by an external vendor
A global consulting firm that reduced production timelines from 10 weeks to 48 hours
An international retail giant that scaled global workforce training without adding agency spend
Platform and Plans
What is Vyond?
Vyond is the only enterprise-ready, all-in-one, AI video creation platform for business. Vyond provides everything needed to communicate better and faster, including an AI instant video maker (Vyond Go), a full-featured video editor (Vyond Studio), and video creation on the go (Vyond Mobile). Users can complete their first video in less than a minute.
Unlike single-feature products, Vyond offers many visual styles that can be seamlessly combined in a variety of ways to engage any audience and help users create videos that deliver sustained engagement and better results over time. Styles include mixed media, AI avatars, animated, and custom generative AI.
How do Vyond subscriptions work?
Vyond offers five subscription plans. As of May 7, 2025, Vyond uses a credit system designed to expand access to AI tools and features, including AI avatars and instant video creation, across plans. Starter and Professional plans are available monthly or annually with significant savings. Enterprise, Government, and Agency plans are only available annually.
The Starter plan is $99 a month or $699 billed annually, and includes 10,000 credits per user, per month. The Professional plan is $199 a month or $1,199 billed annually and includes 20,000 credits. The Enterprise plan is built for larger teams and is only available as an annual plan at $1,649 billed yearly. The Government plan, also billed yearly, is $2,450 and is FedRAMP Certified. An Agency plan is available as an annual option, at $1,999, billed yearly, that includes unlimited rights transfers. See all the details on our Plans page.
Can I use Vyond for free?
Vyond free trials allow users to try out Vyond, and include 2,000 credits to try most of the AI tools and features. All trial exports carry a watermark which is removed upon upgrade.
(Note: Plan trials may be offered in select regions for $10 USD. Plan trials allow expanded access to Starter and Professional plan features, including additional AI tools. All plan trials are non-refundable.)
How many videos can I create with Vyond?
The number of videos you can create depends on your subscription plan. For example, the Starter plan allows up to 100 videos per month, while the Professional plan allows up to 200 videos per month. Enterprise and Agency plans have virtually unlimited creation limits. Per seat quotas for our other plans reset on the first of each month.
How does Vyond compare to other AI video generator tools?
Vyond offers the most powerful, versatile and secure Enterprise AI video platform on the market. Unlike its competitors, Vyond delivers the best of emerging AI tools all in one place. And with our powerful integrations and API functionality, companies are able to use Vyond as communication infrastructure that allows employees, with or without video skills, to create high-impact professional videos right in the flow of work.
The platform’s most notable features include: a deep library of best-in-class AI avatar options, best-in-class animated video creation, access to millions of stock photos and videos, AI functionality that allows for instant video and image generation with a simple prompt or reference document, screen recording, video editing and more.
Unlike other AI video tools (like Synthesia and HeyGen), Vyond understands that not every business communication should be a talking-head video. Training, onboarding, compliance, change management, customer education, and executive communications work best with a combination of visual storytelling, demonstrations, animation, avatars, screen recordings, and branded content experiences. With access to all these Enterprise-secure tools directly in the platform, Vyond users can create all variety of dynamic videos that are perfect for any audience–and deliver exceptional engagement, relatability, and results.
Vyond’s instant script and video creator, Vyond Go, lets you produce original videos in minutes with a simple prompt, or by dropping in a script or reference document. Vyond’s drag-and-drag video editor, Vyond Studio, lets you build videos from hundreds of video templates, edit instant video drafts, or build from scratch. And Vyond’s AI-powered Instant Video Translation feature lets you quickly localize any video you create into any of 95 languages.
What video formats can I export in?
You can export your videos as an MP4, SCORM, WebM file, animated GIF, or as a sequence of still images. Various resolution options are available, including HD.
Is there a limit on video length or file size?
For Starter plans, there’s a 25-minute length limit. For Professional plans, it’s a 40-minute limit. For Government, Enterprise, and Agency plans, there’s a 90-minute limit.
Is there a watermark on exported videos?
Only Free Trial videos have a watermark.
Can I collaborate with team members on Vyond?
Yes, the Government, Professional, and Enterprise plans include collaboration features which allow team members to collaborate and share content within the same account.Enterprise plan users have the additional ability to create and share folders for specific purposes, projects and groups, with the ability to add specific team members to collaborate.
What happens to my videos if I cancel my subscription?
Even after your subscription expires, you retain the rights to use the videos you’ve created in accordance with Vyond’s Terms of Service. However, access to Vyond’s platform and features will be restricted. Data retention for paid accounts is 18 months. Videos created during a free trial are kept for 90 days.
Is it possible to change the email address associated with my Vyond account?
Yes, you can change the email address under your Profile Settings under Email Address. Once you complete the update, a confirmation email will be sent to the new email address.
Does Vyond offer integrations with other tools?
Yes, Vyond offers various integrations with many well-known platforms to enhance your access to Vyond and integrate video creation to work in the places you work. For example, Vyond offers instant video generation directly from Google Docs, Slack conversations, and integration with Zapier, which allows you to automate video creation by connecting to 7,000+ apps. Learn more about Vyond’s integrations.
How does Vyond handle my personal information?
Vyond is committed to providing you with a singular level of privacy, security, transparency, and fairness — for all features including those powered by AI. You can use Vyond’s platform knowing that each feature is enterprise-safe and respectful of user rights. Visit the Vyond Trust Center for more information on privacy and security.
Is Vyond suitable for creating videos in different industries?
Yes, Vyond caters to various industries — including finance, healthcare, education, and more — providing versatile tools and industry-specific templates, background, and characters; from lab settings to warehouses, Vyond has you covered. And with a variety of visual styles ranging from mixed media and AI avatars to animated and photorealistic, you can create any video you need to engage your audience.
Is Vyond cloud-based or do I need to install software?
Vyond is entirely web-based and works on major desktop browsers like Chrome, Edge, and Safari — no software installation required.
Can I use Vyond on a mobile device or tablet?
While videos can be viewed on mobile, full video creation features are best accessed on a desktop or laptop browser.
Video Styles, Formats, and Assets
What animation styles are available in Vyond?
In addition to over 1,300 avatar options, Vyond offers a diverse range of contemporary and traditional animation styles. Styles with premade characters and props include Business Friendly (modern, corporate-focused), Whiteboard Animation (hand-drawn sketch animations), Contemporary (flat design with a fresh, modern look), and Storybook (colorful, realistic look). Vyond continues to add new styles with character and content packs to ensure you have style options suited to your different storytelling approaches. Characters can be used within each template or easily copied to a new video.
What types of characters are available in Vyond?
Vyond provides a wide range of customizable characters across a variety of animation styles, in addition to providing avatars in a range of settings and attire suitable for diverse industries. Vyond continually adds additional character style content packs and templates, increasing the variety of character styles available. All Vyond animated characters can be adjusted for skin tone, facial expressions, clothing, and accessories to fit various industries and storytelling needs.
Can I create my own custom characters?
Yes! The Character Creator allows you to design fully customized characters by selecting from a variety of hairstyles, outfits, facial features, and body types across a diverse range of looks and ethnicities, allowing for thousands of variations to better match your brand or audience.
Can Vyond create assets for me?
Yes! The Vyond design team can create all kinds of custom assets for you, for a fee. Options include custom animated characters both in an existing Vyond style or in your own brand character style, custom backgrounds, props, outfits, and actions. Please contact us to explore which options are right for you.
What are AI avatars in Vyond?
AI avatars in Vyond are digital representations of people that can serve as virtual presenters or characters in your videos. You can pair them with any of Vyond’s over 780 text to speech voices to add a human element without the need for live actors or expensive video shoots. Vyond also makes it easy to create custom avatars based on real people at your company that reflect both their likeness and voice.
How many AI avatar options does Vyond offer?
Vyond provides over 1,300 high-quality AI avatar options. These avatars come with various backgrounds, outfits, professions, angles, and aspect ratios to suit diverse storytelling needs.
Can I create custom AI avatars in Vyond?
Yes, Vyond allows users to create custom AI avatars. You can submit a request for a custom avatar through Vyond’s platform to have a personalized digital spokesperson that aligns with your brand or message. Learn more about creating custom avatars.
Are Vyond’s AI avatars compatible with multiple languages?
Absolutely. Vyond’s AI avatars can be paired with text-to-speech voices in 95 languages, enabling seamless global communication and localization of your video content.
What are the use cases for AI avatars in Vyond?
AI avatars are versatile and can be used as effective hosts and presenters in various scenarios, including training videos, product demonstrations, customer service messages, and personalized sales and marketing content. They can add a human touch and enhance engagement in your videos at scale.
What types of props and backgrounds does Vyond offer?
Vyond includes thousands of props (office equipment, vehicles, furniture, etc.) and backgrounds (urban, corporate, outdoor, home settings) that can be used across different animation styles.
Can I upload my own assets into Vyond?
Yes, Vyond allows users to upload custom images, logos, and audio files to personalize their videos further. This is great for branding and integrating company-specific visuals.
Does Vyond support text animations and motion effects?
Yes, Vyond’s asset library includes all kinds of text animations, kinetic typography, and motion effects like fade-ins, pop-ups, and transitions to enhance storytelling.
Are there pre-made templates available in Vyond?
Yes, Vyond provides over 1,000 professionally designed templates for different industries and video purposes, including training, HR, marketing, and explainer videos.
What kind of audio and music options does Vyond offer?
Vyond includes a built-in library of background music tracks and sound effects that can be added to videos. Users with a Professional plan or above can also access audio clips through Shutterstock. You can also record voiceovers directly within the platform.
Can I animate characters to lip-sync with voiceovers?
Yes! Vyond has an automatic lip-sync feature, allowing characters to match their mouth movements to uploaded voiceovers, making dialogue look natural.
Security and Compliance
What enterprise security features does Vyond offer?
Vyond is ISO 27001 certified, ensuring a high standard of data security and operational integrity for enterprise use. Learn more about Vyond’s Secure Suite for Enterprise organizations here.
Where is Vyond data stored, and is it GDPR compliant?
Vyond stores data securely on the Amazon Cloud Services (AWS) infrastructure and complies with GDPR regulations, allowing users to manage personal data responsibly. Visit the Vyond Trust Center for more information on security.
What is Vyond’s current FedRAMP status?
Vyond is officially FedRAMP Certified to operate in the FedRAMP marketplace (Package ID: FR2433985791). Federal agencies and contractors are able to purchase and use Vyond for Government with a reciprocal ATO. Vyond’s FedRAMP Marketplace listing can be found here.
How does Vyond collaborate with government agencies?
Vyond launched Vyond for Government, a specialized version of its platform tailored for federal agency use. This allows government entities to create engaging videos for purposes such as public outreach, training, and internal communications, all while maintaining the strict security requirements of federal agencies and partners. Vyond has partnered with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs to facilitate its listing in the FedRAMP marketplace.
What features does Vyond for Government offer to federal agencies?
Vyond for Government provides a comprehensive video creation solution with advanced security features compliant with FedRAMP standards. The platform includes a diverse range of custom imagery and characters, a brand management suite, and team collaboration tools. These features enable federal agencies to easily and efficiently transform critical information into engaging visual communications for employees, partners, and constituents.
Customer Service and Customer Success
What support options are available for Vyond users?
Vyond offers customer support via chat, email, or phone from midnight to 5:30 p.m. PT, Monday through Friday, excluding Vyond holidays.
Does Vyond offer training or onboarding for new users?
Yes, Vyond provides onboarding resources including tutorials, live and on-demand webinars, and a comprehensive help center to help users get started quickly. Vyond Community programs also provide continuing education and inspiration to existing customers.
What are Vyond Office Hours?
Vyond Office Hours are live, interactive sessions held monthly to answer questions, preview new features, and share best practices. Dates and times are announced through the Vyond Events page and through email.
Can I ask questions or get live feedback during Office Hours?
Yes! Vyond’s Office Hours are designed to be interactive. Participants can ask questions, request feedback on their videos, or simply listen and learn from others. It’s a friendly, supportive environment for all skill levels.
What is Vyond Community?
Vyond Community is an online hub that brings together creators, communicators, and innovators from around the world in one shared space. Community members get access to live virtual events and recordings, video creation tips from Vyond Academy, Community-exclusive video templates, early beta testing opportunities, and the opportunity to get peer feedback, inspiration for new projects, and more. Vyond customers can join the Community at https://community.vyond.com/.
65% of the Fortune 500 and millions of users rely on Vyond.
Try Vyond Today
#### Vyond Global Partner Program
Vyond Global Partner Program
Your customers want simple, effective video solutions — and you can deliver! Whether you refer customers to Vyond or resell it in your local market, we’ll make sure you have everything you need to help your customers succeed.
Ready to explore how you can become a Vyond Partner? Let’s get started.
Partner with Vyond
Current Partners
Program Benefits
Onboarding and
Training
Sales, marketing, and product training provided by Vyond to get your team enabled.
Attractive Commission Structure
Escalating commission levels based on three partnership tiers.
Vyond Platform
Access
Not For Resale (NFR) license provided for your sales and marketing teams to demo and promote Vyond to customers.
Co-Marketing Opportunities
Align with Vyond marketing initiatives including webinars, blog posts, emails, and social media campaigns.
Marketing Support
Receive additional marketing funds to support the activities and initiatives that you want to run.
Secure Partner Portal
Log into Vyond’s Partner Portal to access a library of resources including creative assets, messaging guides, co-brandable collateral, and sales tools.
Sell Vyond. See results.
Partner with Vyond
#### Vyond Go
Vyond Go.The easiest way to turn text to video.
Vyond Go instantly transforms your idea, URL, or document into an engaging video. Get the look you need from a comprehensive selection of mixed media templates featuring AI avatars and more.
Make a video in seconds.
Give these a try
Product Launch
Event Promo
Explainer Video
Upload a document and let Vyond Go convert it into a full video for you.
Upload a Document Now
Drop a URL in and Vyond Go will convert it into a video for you.
Add a URL Now
Any industry, any need — we’ve got you covered.
Vyond Go makes an effective video on your topic — perfect for explainers, sales enablement, or training.
Turn simple text into a polished video in seconds.
Summarize any doc into short video clips to engage sales prospects beyond static slide decks.
Design custom training experiences that make learning stick with tailored industry-specific scenarios.
Your video. On time. On brand.
Text to video.
Type or paste your idea into Vyond Go. It will identify the key message and convert your prompt into a compelling visual story.
URL or doc to video.
Have source material on hand? Transform any URL or document to video. Just drag and drop to make complex information clear and memorable.
Templates for any use.
No video experience? No problem. Vyond Go’s template-based approach ensures you can quickly create and scale professional, high-quality content with confidence and ease.
Brand your content easily.
Whether you want to make quick edits to the script, or customize colors or branding, Vyond’s all-in-one suite has everything you need to take any project across the finish line.
“What would normally have taken me a full day – with the plug-and-play aspect of Vyond Go – it took me two hours.”
Virgenia HallSenior Learning & Development Specialist, Systems & Tools
Which plan types have access to Vyond Go?
Vyond Go is accessible across all plan types, including Free Trials, up to the monthly credit usage limits within each plan. Free plans can experience Vyond Go but will not be able to download videos or receive monthly credit refreshes. Find more information on the Vyond credits here.
Does Vyond Go generate avatar videos?
Yes! Vyond Go has a growing selection of templates that include avatars. Simply enter your prompt (up to 4,000 characters) or upload your prompt source, select from a library of avatar, mixed media, or animated template styles, and generate. Want to adjust the text to speech or swap your avatar? Do it easily without leaving the Vyond Go workflow with Quick Edit.
Why does generating with AI use credits?
There are costs associated with each prompt entered into Vyond and subsequently processed by our LLM (large language model) partners, who utilize significant computing power to perform their LLM calculations. The new credit system considers these costs while offering more access to advanced AI features and the flexibility to shift AI usage across select tools that use credits, in any combination, up to the plan’s monthly allotment.
You can find more information on how credits are allocated by feature here.
How does Vyond protect my privacy and data when using AI?
Vyond is committed to data privacy, security, transparency, and fairness. We invite you to download our AI FAQ and Ethics Statement, or visit the Vyond Trust Center for more resources or to request additional information.
As general practice, Vyond recommends avoiding prompts that contain personally identifiable information (PII) and adhering to your company’s information security policies and guidelines.
What’s the difference between text to video and prompt to video?
“Text to video” refers specifically to generating video content from written descriptions or scripts. “Prompt to video” is a broader term that can include text, images, audio, or other multimodal inputs. Our instant AI video generator Vyond Go has three different prompt options for creating a video. You can enter text (text to video), start with a URL (URL to video), or upload a document (doc to video) to create a video output in minutes.
More from Vyond
How to Make AI Videos in Minutes
Prompting AI: Getting the Best Results from Vyond Go
AI-Powered Instant Translation
65% of the Fortune 500 and millions of users rely on Vyond.
Try Vyond Today
#### Vyond Mobile
Vyond Mobile: Effortless video creation on the go.
The power of AI video creation in your pocket.
Welcome to video creation anytime, anywhere from your mobile device! With Vyond Mobile, you’ll have on the go access to Vyond Go, so you can generate videos on the spot. With our Smart Capture feature, you can use AI to match props, backgrounds, and characters from our library to your photos. You can even seamlessly save captured content to your library for future use. Vyond Mobile gives you the ability to create powerful videos that educate, engage, and expand your reach wherever inspiration strikes.
Download Vyond Mobile for free from the Android or Apple store.
No waiting, just creating.
Making a video doesn’t have to wait until you get back to the office. Now, you can create videos on the spot, wherever you are with Vyond Mobile. You can instantly create and upload a customer testimonial video from your conference booth. Or start a training video as soon as new equipment arrives. Even document new safety processes or procedures while you’re still on the hospital floor. Vyond video creation is with you when you need it.
Capture, create, edit, and share.
Vyond Mobile brings capture, create, and edit functionality with you wherever you go. So you can edit text, characters, and voices right from your mobile device and have your edits sync seamlessly across devices. Plus, with mobile access and downloading, sharing videos with your collaborators and stakeholders will be easier than ever. With Vyond, video creation is as mobile as you are.
More from Vyond
Vyond’s AI avatars. Your professional spokesperson on demand.
AI tools for video creation.
Instant, effortless video. AnyStyle. Every audience.
65% of the Fortune 500 and millions of users rely on Vyond.
Try Vyond Today
#### Vyond Office Hours
Vyond Office Hours
Get the inside scoop on everything Vyond. Our interactive bi-weekly sessions, hosted by Vyond’s customer success team, feature product updates and learnings, and informative Q&A’s.
Customize Videos and Improve Workflows
Watch Now
A session focused on new ways of customizing videos and improving workflows.
Q&A Session with Katryna Villegas
Watch Now
A session focused on expert tips, feature insights, and live Q&A to help you sharpen your skills and get your questions answered.
Product Update Featuring Ed Yang
Watch Now
A session highlighting what’s new in Vyond: AI Avatars, Motion Mixing and more.
Character Style and AI Credit Updates
Watch Now
A session highlighting updated character styles, credits for generating avatars, and flexible closed captioning.
Spotlight on Presenter Templates
Watch Now
A session focused on customizing presenter templates, Vyond’s Shutterstock integration, and AI avatars.
Creating Engaging Interactive Content
Watch Now
A discussion on scenario-based learning, interactive sales training videos, and using Vyond’s AI to create engaging content.
Enhancing Videos by Adding Motion
Watch Now
A session on how to enhance videos by adding motion to characters and assets, and organizing complex animations.
Using Video within Your Vyond Video
Watch Now
A features session focused on using multiple videos in one scene, and AI avatars with text-to-speech capabilities.
Creating More Engaging Avatar Videos
Watch Now
A session dedicated to making compelling avatar videos through effective audio, screen recordings, and masking.
Enhanced User Experience
Watch Now
This session is dedicated to Q&A as well as highlighting characterediting, Shutterstock integration, and live demo integration.
A Wide-Ranging Product Update
Watch Now
This quarterly product session covers screen recording, AI avatars,enhanced background removal, screen sharing, and more.
Building Effective Scenes with Vyond
Watch Now
This informative session touches on customizing characters, managing assets, captioning methods, and masking techniques.
Character Actions, Text to Prop, and More
Watch Now
This session features a demo of a capping machine project and covers asset view, text to prop, template use, and more.
Feature Updates and Enhancements
Watch Now
An end-of-year session covering product enhancements such as updated editing features and video previewing.
Building Interactivity in Quizzes and More
Watch Now
This wide-ranging session covers multi-language videos, requesting props and themes, adding subtitles, and much more.
Vyond Studio and Vyond Go Enhancements
Watch Now
This session touches on updates such as text-to-speech enhancements, templates, customization, and muti-lingual support.
Creating More Engaging Training Videos
Watch Now
This helpful session answers questions and offers tips on creating engaging training videos, organizing audio, using fonts, and more.
Show more
Don't miss our upcoming live Office Hours!
Reserve your spot now
#### Vyond Partners
Vyond Partners
Across the globe, Vyond teams up with renowned local experts in eLearning and business communications. Our partners help organizations of all sizes unlock fast, easy AI-powered video creation — tailored to your needs and your region.
Browse by Category
Austria
Exclusive: Germany
Nordics
TicTac Learn partners with Vyond to deliver all-in-one AI video creation for digital learning. Together, we empower organizations in Germany to rapidly produce engaging, customized training, onboarding, and communication content — streamlining workflows and transforming how teams learn and connect.
Learn More
Ireland
United Kingdom
Omniplex Learning offers end-to-end digital learning solutions specializing in learning design, technology integration, and organizational transformation. Our comprehensive portfolio includes authoring tools, LMSs, content creation, training, and professional services — and we provide continuous support throughout the L&D journey.
Learn More
Australia
New Zealand
MicroWay and Vyond bring AI-powered video creation to Australia and New Zealand. Create, customize, and scale training, marketing, and communication content with Vyond’s all-in-one platform — reinforced with MicroWay’s regional expertise in eLearning, support, and digital transformation.
Learn More
India
MENA
Stratbeans partners with Vyond to equip organizations in India with AI-driven video creation for learning, onboarding, and business communications. Unlock rapid content production, seamless localization, and impactful engagement that’s bolstered by Stratbeans’ expertise in digital learning and workforce upskilling.
Learn More
Japan
WebDemo and Vyond deliver AI-powered video solutions across Japan. Transform your training, marketing, and communications with Vyond’s all-in-one platform — supported by WebDemo’s digital learning expertise and commitment to innovative, scalable content for diverse audiences.
Learn More
Belgium
Luxembourg
Netherlands
Courseware partners with Vyond to empower Dutch organizations with AI video creation for e-learning, onboarding, and business comms. Benefit from Vyond’s all-in-one platform and Courseware’s local expertise to deliver engaging, effective, and scalable content for today’s digital workplace.
Learn More
Switzerland
Vyond partners with HiveQ in Switzerland offering AI-powered video creation for training, marketing, and internal communications. Leverage Vyond’s all-in-one platform and HiveQ’s digital learning experience to create professional, engaging content that drives results and supports organizational growth.
Learn More
South Africa
MENA
TTRO partners with Vyond to deliver AI-driven video creation for education and enterprise across Africa. Harness Vyond’s all-in-one platform and TTRO’s expertise to create impactful training, onboarding, and communication content that accelerates learning and business transformation.
Learn More
France
Across France, Distrisoft partners with Vyond to provide AI-powered video creation, enhancing digital learning strategies, content, and platforms — including authoring tools, LMS, and animation — while providing custom training and support to help organizations transform learning and development.
Learn More
United States
Gi4 partners with Vyond to deliver secure video creation for U.S. Federal and State agencies. Specializing in human-centered solutions, compliance, and mission support, Gi4 empowers government teams to modernize training, communication, and outreach — serving those who serve our nation.
Learn More
Global
Vbrick is the leading Enterprise Video Platform (EVP) provider. Its AI-powered, end-to-end, cloud-native solution provides a secure, central hub for video, making it easy to connect any video asset to any business process, unlocking the true power of video for the enterprise.
Learn More
Spain
Portugal
Actua partners with Vyond to empower Spanish organizations with AI video creation for e-learning, onboarding, and business comms. Benefit from Vyond’s all-in-one platform and Actua’s local expertise to deliver engaging, effective, and scalable content for today’s digital workplace.
Learn More
Singapore
Philippines
ACP Computer partners with Vyond to empower organizations in Singapore with AI video creation for e-learning, onboarding, and business comms. Benefit from Vyond’s all-in-one platform and ACP Computer’s local expertise to deliver engaging, effective, and scalable content for today’s digital workplace.
Learn More
Turkey
ETGI Grup partners with Vyond to empower Turkish organizations with AI video creation for e-learning, onboarding, and business comms. Benefit from Vyond’s all-in-one platform and ETGI Grup’s local expertise to deliver engaging, effective, and scalable content for today’s digital workplace.
Learn More
Taiwan
KSC Thinktank partners with Vyond to empower Taiwanese organizations with AI video creation for e-learning, onboarding, and business comms. Benefit from Vyond’s all-in-one platform and KSC Thinktank’s local expertise to deliver engaging, effective, and scalable content for today’s digital workplace.
Learn More
Italy
Mosaicoelearning partners with Vyond to empower Italian organizations with AI video creation for e-learning, onboarding, and business comms. Benefit from Vyond’s all-in-one platform and Mosaicoelearning’s local expertise to deliver engaging, effective, and scalable content for today’s digital workplace.
Learn More
Mexico
Colombia
TAEC partners with Vyond to empower Latin American organizations with AI video creation for e-learning, onboarding, and business comms. Benefit from Vyond’s all-in-one platform and TAEC’s local expertise to deliver engaging, effective, and scalable content for today’s digital workplace.
Learn More
Israel
iLearn Group partners with Vyond in Israel to help organizations with AI video creation for e-learning, onboarding, and business comms.
Learn More
South Korea
2Miles partners with Vyond to serve the South Korea market.
Learn More
Pakistan
Blendtolearn partners with Vyond in Pakistan to help organizations with AI video creation for e-learning, onboarding, and business communications.
Learn More
Hong Kong
Cogito Solutions partners with Vyond to serve the Hong Kong market.
Learn More
Greece
Compact partners with Vyond to serve the Greece market.
Learn More
Southeastern Europe
Copperpot partners with Vyond to serve the Southeastern Europe market.
Learn More
Japan
Dive partners with Vyond to serve the Japan market.
Learn More
Australia
New Zealand
Edsoft partners with Vyond to serve the Australia and New Zealand markets.
Learn More
Malaysia
Indonesia
eLearning Minds partners with Vyond to serve the Malaysia and Indonesia markets.
Learn More
France
eLearning Touch partners with Vyond to serve the France market.
Learn More
Czech Republic
Slovak Republic
Poland
e-learnmedia partners with Vyond to serve the Czech and Slovak markets.
Learn More
India
MENA
Horsepower Distribution partners with Vyond to serve the India and MENA markets.
Learn More
Japan
Human Science partners with Vyond to serve the Japan market.
Learn More
South Africa
Humming Learn partners with Vyond to serve the South Africa market.
Learn More
Costa Rica
Latin America
InterHAND partners with Vyond to serve the Costa Rica market.
Learn More
France
KawaLearn partners with Vyond to serve the France market.
Learn More
Brazil
L3 partners with Vyond to serve the Brazil market.
Learn More
Vietnam
Nettop Learning partners with Vyond to serve the Vietnam market.
Learn More
Taiwan
PosBoss partners with Vyond to serve the Taiwan market.
Learn More
Israel
ShalevSoft partners with Vyond to serve the Israel market.
Learn More
Brazil
Software.com.br partners with Vyond to serve the Brazil market..
Learn More
Netherlands
Belgium
Spike partners with Vyond to serve the Netherlands and Belgium markets.
Learn More
Denmark
Storyboard partners with Vyond to serve the Denmark market.
Learn More
Mexico
Brazil
XMarts Group partners with Vyond to serve the Latin American market.
Learn More
United States
Gi4 partners with Vyond to deliver secure video creation for U.S. Federal and State agencies. Specializing in human-centered solutions, compliance, and mission support, Gi4 empowers government teams to modernize training, communication, and outreach — serving those who serve our nation.
Learn More
Mexico
Colombia
TAEC partners with Vyond to empower Latin American organizations with AI video creation for e-learning, onboarding, and business comms. Benefit from Vyond’s all-in-one platform and TAEC’s local expertise to deliver engaging, effective, and scalable content for today’s digital workplace.
Learn More
Costa Rica
Latin America
InterHAND partners with Vyond to serve the Costa Rica market.
Learn More
Brazil
L3 partners with Vyond to serve the Brazil market.
Learn More
Brazil
Software.com.br partners with Vyond to serve the Brazil market..
Learn More
Mexico
Brazil
XMarts Group partners with Vyond to serve the Latin American market.
Learn More
Austria
Exclusive: Germany
Nordics
TicTac Learn partners with Vyond to deliver all-in-one AI video creation for digital learning. Together, we empower organizations in Germany to rapidly produce engaging, customized training, onboarding, and communication content — streamlining workflows and transforming how teams learn and connect.
Learn More
Ireland
United Kingdom
Omniplex Learning offers end-to-end digital learning solutions specializing in learning design, technology integration, and organizational transformation. Our comprehensive portfolio includes authoring tools, LMSs, content creation, training, and professional services — and we provide continuous support throughout the L&D journey.
Learn More
Belgium
Luxembourg
Netherlands
Courseware partners with Vyond to empower Dutch organizations with AI video creation for e-learning, onboarding, and business comms. Benefit from Vyond’s all-in-one platform and Courseware’s local expertise to deliver engaging, effective, and scalable content for today’s digital workplace.
Learn More
Switzerland
Vyond partners with HiveQ in Switzerland offering AI-powered video creation for training, marketing, and internal communications. Leverage Vyond’s all-in-one platform and HiveQ’s digital learning experience to create professional, engaging content that drives results and supports organizational growth.
Learn More
France
Across France, Distrisoft partners with Vyond to provide AI-powered video creation, enhancing digital learning strategies, content, and platforms — including authoring tools, LMS, and animation — while providing custom training and support to help organizations transform learning and development.
Learn More
Spain
Portugal
Actua partners with Vyond to empower Spanish organizations with AI video creation for e-learning, onboarding, and business comms. Benefit from Vyond’s all-in-one platform and Actua’s local expertise to deliver engaging, effective, and scalable content for today’s digital workplace.
Learn More
Turkey
ETGI Grup partners with Vyond to empower Turkish organizations with AI video creation for e-learning, onboarding, and business comms. Benefit from Vyond’s all-in-one platform and ETGI Grup’s local expertise to deliver engaging, effective, and scalable content for today’s digital workplace.
Learn More
Italy
Mosaicoelearning partners with Vyond to empower Italian organizations with AI video creation for e-learning, onboarding, and business comms. Benefit from Vyond’s all-in-one platform and Mosaicoelearning’s local expertise to deliver engaging, effective, and scalable content for today’s digital workplace.
Learn More
Greece
Compact partners with Vyond to serve the Greece market.
Learn More
Southeastern Europe
Copperpot partners with Vyond to serve the Southeastern Europe market.
Learn More
France
eLearning Touch partners with Vyond to serve the France market.
Learn More
Czech Republic
Slovak Republic
Poland
e-learnmedia partners with Vyond to serve the Czech and Slovak markets.
Learn More
France
KawaLearn partners with Vyond to serve the France market.
Learn More
Netherlands
Belgium
Spike partners with Vyond to serve the Netherlands and Belgium markets.
Learn More
Denmark
Storyboard partners with Vyond to serve the Denmark market.
Learn More
India
MENA
Stratbeans partners with Vyond to equip organizations in India with AI-driven video creation for learning, onboarding, and business communications. Unlock rapid content production, seamless localization, and impactful engagement that’s bolstered by Stratbeans’ expertise in digital learning and workforce upskilling.
Learn More
South Africa
MENA
TTRO partners with Vyond to deliver AI-driven video creation for education and enterprise across Africa. Harness Vyond’s all-in-one platform and TTRO’s expertise to create impactful training, onboarding, and communication content that accelerates learning and business transformation.
Learn More
Japan
WebDemo and Vyond deliver AI-powered video solutions across Japan. Transform your training, marketing, and communications with Vyond’s all-in-one platform — supported by WebDemo’s digital learning expertise and commitment to innovative, scalable content for diverse audiences.
Learn More
Singapore
Philippines
ACP Computer partners with Vyond to empower organizations in Singapore with AI video creation for e-learning, onboarding, and business comms. Benefit from Vyond’s all-in-one platform and ACP Computer’s local expertise to deliver engaging, effective, and scalable content for today’s digital workplace.
Learn More
Taiwan
KSC Thinktank partners with Vyond to empower Taiwanese organizations with AI video creation for e-learning, onboarding, and business comms. Benefit from Vyond’s all-in-one platform and KSC Thinktank’s local expertise to deliver engaging, effective, and scalable content for today’s digital workplace.
Learn More
Israel
iLearn Group partners with Vyond in Israel to help organizations with AI video creation for e-learning, onboarding, and business comms.
Learn More
South Korea
2Miles partners with Vyond to serve the South Korea market.
Learn More
Pakistan
Blendtolearn partners with Vyond in Pakistan to help organizations with AI video creation for e-learning, onboarding, and business communications.
Learn More
Hong Kong
Cogito Solutions partners with Vyond to serve the Hong Kong market.
Learn More
Japan
Dive partners with Vyond to serve the Japan market.
Learn More
Malaysia
Indonesia
eLearning Minds partners with Vyond to serve the Malaysia and Indonesia markets.
Learn More
India
MENA
Horsepower Distribution partners with Vyond to serve the India and MENA markets.
Learn More
Japan
Human Science partners with Vyond to serve the Japan market.
Learn More
Vietnam
Nettop Learning partners with Vyond to serve the Vietnam market.
Learn More
Taiwan
PosBoss partners with Vyond to serve the Taiwan market.
Learn More
Israel
ShalevSoft partners with Vyond to serve the Israel market.
Learn More
India
MENA
Stratbeans partners with Vyond to equip organizations in India with AI-driven video creation for learning, onboarding, and business communications. Unlock rapid content production, seamless localization, and impactful engagement that’s bolstered by Stratbeans’ expertise in digital learning and workforce upskilling.
Learn More
South Africa
MENA
TTRO partners with Vyond to deliver AI-driven video creation for education and enterprise across Africa. Harness Vyond’s all-in-one platform and TTRO’s expertise to create impactful training, onboarding, and communication content that accelerates learning and business transformation.
Learn More
India
MENA
Horsepower Distribution partners with Vyond to serve the India and MENA markets.
Learn More
South Africa
Humming Learn partners with Vyond to serve the South Africa market.
Learn More
Australia
New Zealand
MicroWay and Vyond bring AI-powered video creation to Australia and New Zealand. Create, customize, and scale training, marketing, and communication content with Vyond’s all-in-one platform — reinforced with MicroWay’s regional expertise in eLearning, support, and digital transformation.
Learn More
Australia
New Zealand
Edsoft partners with Vyond to serve the Australia and New Zealand markets.
Learn More
Vbrick is the leading Enterprise Video Platform (EVP) provider. Its AI-powered, end-to-end, cloud-native solution provides a secure, central hub for video, making it easy to connect any video asset to any business process, unlocking the true power of video for the enterprise.
Learn More
Ready to explore how you can become a Vyond Partner?Let’s get started.
Partner with Vyond
#### Vyond Secure Suite
Vyond Secure Suite
Enterprise organizations often have unique data security needs, making additional security options and configurations necessary for compliance. Vyond Secure Suite, available only with Vyond for Enterprise, gives administrators the flexibility they need to implement Vyond while ensuring that company data remains secure.
See All Enterprise Features
Rest Secured
Create and collaborate confidently with the advanced protection of Vyond Secure Suite, part of our all-in-one, AI video creation solution for the enterprise. Our collection of security features complies with the enterprise-level IT security requirements of any company, such as brute-force login, inactivity logout, IP whitelisting, customizable password complexity, SSO, and custom video cache expiration.
Brute Force Login Protection
Protect your team’s user information – and company data – from being compromised by brute force login attacks. This feature protects against guessed passwords and brute force attacks by allowing the account administrator to set the number of failed login attempts before an account is locked. The method of resolving an account lock is also configurable. Lockouts can be resolved by an administrator, or with a customizable timeout.
Inactivity Logout
Define a timeout for inactive logged in accounts, ensuring that unauthorized users won’t be able to access sensitive data on idle systems. This timer is administrator-configurable to match your company’s preferred balance of convenience and security.
IP Whitelisting
This feature allows administrators to ensure that your organization’s Vyond account is only accessible through trusted connections. This prevents logins from any address that has not been specifically whitelisted.
Customizable Password Complexity
For organizations with company-wide password complexity and password change requirements, customizable password security is an ideal solution. With the Vyond Secure Suite, it’s easy to enforce password policy compliance – including requiring regular password changes, disallowing the use of previously used passwords, and requiring complex passwords.
Single Sign On
For environments where other options aren’t secure enough, Vyond offers SAML 2.0 SSO designed for direct integration with your corporate authentication service. All authentication is done locally, and based on a signed, secure certificate. This feature allows you to control password security requirements directly from your authentication server.
Custom Video Cache Expiration
Vyond utilizes cache for enhanced speed when generating videos or previews. Custom cache expiration allows an administrator to define how long data will remain cached – and to decide on the optimal balance between speed and security for your organization.
65% of the Fortune 500 and millions of users rely on Vyond.
Try Vyond Today
#### Vyond Studio
Vyond Studio: Total creative control,
totally engaging results.
Slash production costs and time with our full-featured, drag-and-drop video editor. Every video
creation tool needed in-house, at your fingertips, and all in one place.
The outcomes you need start right here.
Boosting your engagement rates improves everything else — from onboarding and training to dealmaking — and Vyond Studio gives you the tools to get
there quickly. Start from scratch, save time with one of our hundreds of templates, or create a video instantly by uploading a script, doc, or prompt. Whichever way you choose, Vyond Studio makes creating and finishing truly compelling content far easier and more streamlined than with traditional production methods.
Any style, for any audience, and every situation.
Don’t spend on separate tools — every style and option you need to connect with any audience, anywhere, is right at your fingertips.
Easily tailor every message to the right audience with multiple visual styles.
Quickly create compelling content
with hundreds of
lifelike avatars.
Deliver professional narration with accurate, emotionally evocative AI voices.
Connect with
global audiences in
95 languages.
Quickly combine, edit, and generate compelling visuals and backgrounds on-demand. Add images and video, enhance voice overs, apply customized actions to characters, and enhance your storytelling with a multitude of mixed media visuals. Then, scale it globally. With Vyond Studio, creating and sharing polished, results-focused videos that boost engagement and retention is easier than ever, and you’ll save time and money doing it.
Learn More About Our Styles
On-brand collaboration,
best-in-class security.
Give your videos immediate relevancy and consistency with branded backgrounds, props, characters, and scenes. Upload your branded assets —
or let our team create Custom Assets for you — for use within our hundreds of customizable templates. And, with shared libraries, enterprise level security and best-in-class data privacy, along with team administration controls, Vyond Studio makes collaboration a secure, streamlined process.
Customer-focused,
customer-awarded.
At Vyond, we work hard to help our customers work smarter and faster — from onboarding and training, to compliance, sales, and revenue realization. So it means a lot when we’re recognized for our efforts.
In fact, G2 has ranked Vyond the #1 Video Content Creation platform — and in Spring 2026, we earned a total of 134 badges on G2. Overall, we maintain a rating of 4.8/5.
“We now include a Vyond video in every product launch email — our open and click-through rates jumped immediately.”
— Global SaaS Provider
Try Vyond for Free
More from Vyond
How to Make AI Videos in Minutes
Prompting AI: Getting the Best Results from Vyond Go
AI-Powered Instant Translation
65% of the Fortune 500 and millions of users rely on Vyond.
Try Vyond Today
#### Vyond’s AI Video Translator —
connect easily with any
global audience
Vyond’s AI Video Translator — connect easily with any
global audience.
Turn one training video into a global learning experience.
Reach your international audiences loud and clear by translating and scaling your videos with accurate voice, subtitles, and lip-sync in
95 languages — all in Vyond. Select ethnically and culturally specific narrators, eliminating expensive recording sessions and production bottlenecks. Create dozens of accurate, engaging versions from a single video in minutes.
“Vyond became our primary tool for global training.”
— Global Healthcare Company
How to instantly translate a video
with Vyond.
Step 1: Upload video or open file.
Step 2: Choose your language.
Step 3: Review audio and on-screen text.
Step 4: Download and publish.
What Matters MostOther ToolsVyondGlobal reachYesYesConsistent brand experienceLimitedYesTraining, marketing, sales, compliance and support use casesLimitedYesAI avatars, animated, mixed media, live action, photographic contentLimitedYesEnterprise governanceLimitedYes
Ranked the #1 Video Content Creation Platform.
Try Vyond Today
AI Video Translation FAQs
How can I support local teams without hiring translators?
Vyond helps organizations go beyond basic translation to create localized content that feels authentic and relevant to every audience. In addition to instant
AI dubbing, Vyond gives teams creative control over the visuals, voices, and environments used in their videos — so content reflects the people and cultures it’s meant for.
With Vyond, you can:
Select culturally and ethnically specific narrators using avatars and animated characters
Generate custom avatar hosts and backgrounds with Text to Avatar
Create animated hosts and characters modeled after company leaders
Upload real company photos to use as backgrounds
Build custom animated assets tailored to specific work environments and industries
Unlike AI video tools that only automate translation, Vyond helps you fully localize your content experience.
What’s the best way to personalize content for different regions?
Good AI video translation tools make it easy to translate content into multiple languages, but the best go further — helping you create fully localized video experiences at scale. With instant translation into 95 languages (covering 99.9% of customers), a wide range of text-to-speech (TTS) voices, 1,300+ avatars, and flexible output styles, Vyond delivers more complete localization than most AI video platforms — all safe and secure for international Enterprise use.
How do I ensure employees understand critical information?
Vyond’s AI translation tools are a highly reliable way to guarantee your videos resonate with all of your employees, no matter where they live and work or what language they speak. AI translates your script, generates a natural-sounding voice with accurate pronunciation in the target language — with control over tone. Then it syncs it to your visuals, and produces a ready-to-use video.
What’s the fastest way to translate training videos at scale?
You can use AI translation and TTS to generate localized versions of videos in minutes. Simply upload or create your video, select your target language, review audio, text, and captions if needed, then export and repeat for additional languages.
65% of the Fortune 500 and millions of users rely on Vyond.
Try Vyond Today
#### Webinars
Webinars
Check out the latest webinars on Vyond’s capabilities, use cases, and ways your team can get the most out of Vyond.
Discover the new, all-in-one Vyond.
Create any video, in any style, all in one place.
Learn More
Try It Now
On-Demand: Make More Impactful AI Videos Faster: Vyond’s Fall 2025 Release
Discover Vyond’s latest release—create faster, brand-compliant training & sales videos with new avatars, templates & AI voices.
Learn More
On-Demand: Show Tell and Sell: Tips for Better Demos and Tutorials
In this 30-minute webinar with Vyond’s Craig Kingsbury and Lye Cwan Ng, you’ll learn best practices for creating engaging, effective demos and tutorials and see how easy it is to do in Vyond.
Learn More
On-Demand: Help Sales Win with Low-Lift AI Video Tools & Templates
In this webinar, sales enablement experts from Salesloft and Vyond will show how you can use powerful new AI video creation tools to better enable your sellers with the intel, skills, and tools they need to succeed — and save yourself time and headaches in the process.
Learn More
On-Demand: More Visual Versatility, Better AI Avatars: Vyond in 2025
Find out how the latest, greatest additions to Vyond’s versatile video platform will help you create the most relevant and impactful video for any communication challenge in 2025.
Learn More
On-Demand: The Vyond Video Masterclass
Learn how to hook, educate, and persuade any audience with techniques used by video editors at the world’s most popular YouTube brand — and two award-winning Vyond video producers.
Learn More
On-Demand Webinar: Vyond Bootcamp: 2025 Edition
Want some help bringing your video ideas to life? Or just curious about what’s possible in Vyond? Our superstar Customer Success Managers will walk you through all the essential Vyond techniques.
Learn More
On-Demand Webinar: 7 Ways to Communicate Better at Work with “Instant Videos”
Now, even with zero video skills, you and your teammates can create and share helpful, tailored videos in less than five minutes with peers, prospects, and customers, just like we do at Vyond.
Learn More
On-Demand Webinar: 5 Vyond Video Makeovers to Inspire You in 2025
Make 2025 your year of stellar video engagement. Whether you’re creating videos from scratch, refreshing existing content, or both, you’ll leave this video makeover session with at least five simple strategies for giving your videos a professional-grade “glow up” next year.
Learn More
On-Demand Webinar: V is for Versatile: 3 New Ways to Hook Audiences with Vyond
Until recently, creating a well-rounded video toolkit required using multiple vendors. But now you can create the perfect video for every business context, in a single all-in-one platform. Because “versatile” is Vyond’s […]
Learn More
On-Demand Webinar: Lean L&D: Smarter Tools, Bigger Impact
In this 30-minute webinar, three learning leaders will share their advice on building more efficient teams — and getting the most bang for the buck from the tools you use every day.
Learn More
On-Demand Webinar: Fall 2024 Storytelling Masterclass
Connecting authentically with your audience is more important than ever in this new AI-powered world. Discover how your company can meet this urgent engagement challenge with clear messages grounded in humor and […]
Learn More
On-Demand Webinar: All-in-One, All Right Here: How Vyond is Making Video Creation Effortless
This summer, Vyond is bringing order to the chaotic world of video creation. On August 21, Vyond will reveal the latest features in our new all-in-one AI video creation platform. Join us […]
Learn More
On-Demand Webinar: Why On-Brand Content Matters — and How Vyond Makes It Easy
Consistent branding and audience-specific messaging have always been key to building trust and engagement with your employees, customers, and prospects. And in this new age of AI, that’s never been truer.
Learn More
Vyond Bootcamp: Summer 2024 Edition
Want some help bringing your video ideas to life? Or just curious about what’s possible in Vyond? Over eight 30-minute sessions this summer, our superstar Customer Success Managers will walk you through […]
Learn More
On-Demand Webinar: Magic That Works: How GenAI Is Helping the Enterprise Win in 2024
A year and a half out from its splashy debut, Generative AI is gaining serious traction as a time-saving and creativity-boosting Enterprise communication tool. As a result, companies have big decisions to […]
Learn More
On-Demand Webinar: How Regulated Organizations Can Engage and Train Better
Join us to discover why animated videos can be one of your most powerful tools for getting through to your audiences when stakes are high, details matter, and regulators are watching.
Learn More
On-Demand Webinar: Unlimited Video Styles, Total Brand Control: Vyond’s Spring 2024 Release
Creating engaging, relevant, on-brand videos just got a whole lot easier. Join us to see how Vyond’s new brand management kit, exciting improvements to Vyond Go, and the addition of more video […]
Learn More
On-Demand Webinar: Vyond Spring 2024 Storytelling Masterclass
Communicate better — with storytelling tips from a Pulitzer-winning data journalist — and popular YouTube educator.
Learn More
On-Demand Webinar: Create Better Training on Technical (and Tricky) Topics
In this webinar, two veteran technical trainers will share their blueprint for creating engaging and effective training videos on complex topics.
Learn More
On-Demand Webinar: How to Retain Your Best Talent in 2024: 4 L&D Execs Weigh In
Join us to get L&D expert insights for retaining your best people next year and beyond.
Learn More
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#### Why Vyond
Loved by users. Trusted by business. Meet Vyond.
With Vyond for Enterprise, you can quickly and effortlessly transform critical information into engaging videos at scale — increasing efficiency and reducing costs, with all the robust security your organization demands. Better yet, as the only all-in-one, AI video creation platform, Vyond allows you to create videos in a variety of styles — from animated to photorealistic and everything in between.
Try Vyond Today
Instant, effortless video creation.
Vyond is the only all-in-one, video creation platform for business. With our intuitive, easy-to-use AI-powered instant video maker, Vyond Go, and our full-featured video editor, Vyond Studio, you can effortlessly generate your first video in minutes. Trusted by millions of global users and more than 20,000 companies, including over 65% of the Fortune 500, Vyond quickly transforms your critical information into engaging videos, driving better business&outcomes.
Try Vyond Today
All-in-one. All you need. Enterprise ready.
Vyond provides everything you need to communicate better. From security to brand management to collaboration, Vyond’s innovative features and integrations help consolidate your tech stack, streamline video creation, and drive measurable business results — like 10x audience engagement and 75% reductions in content production time — across learning and development, compliance, sales, marketing, and&more.
Try Vyond Today
Multiple styles. Unlimited possibilities.
With diverse styles ranging from animation to photorealistic and everything in between, you’re free to create the exact content in the best style to engage with your audience — or let Vyond’s AI create it for you. Whether your vision calls for characters, avatars, or screen- and webcam-recorded content, Vyond videos lead to sustained engagement and better&results.
Try Vyond Today
Check out a few recent G2 reviews:
65% of the Fortune 500 and millions of users rely on Vyond.
Try Vyond Today
#### Wistia
Wistia
Revolutionize your video marketing strategies by combining Vyond’s intuitive AI video creation tools with Wistia’s powerful video hosting and analytics platform to gain deep insights into viewer behavior and engagement metrics.
How to upload videos to Wistia.
Method 1: From the Content Library
Navigate to the Content Library.
Select New and select Upload Media.
Choose a file from your computer.
Select the appropriate folder or Channel, or create a new folder.
Select Upload 1 media.
Method 2: From a folder
Open the desired folder.
Either drag and drop media directly onto the page, or:
Choose Add in the dropdown menu.
Select Upload.
Choose the video files you want to upload.
Method 3: Using drag and drop
Drag your media file into your browser window.
Drop it onto the desired folder or upload area.
Try our other powerful integrations.
Slack
Use Vyond’s text to video in Slack to instantly take your concepts from prompt to screen.
Learn More
Google Docs
Use document to video to effortlessly transform your Google doc into an engaging video.
Learn More
Zapier
Automate your video creation workflow by pairing with 7,000+ productivity apps and tools in Zapier.
Learn More
Vyond works. Everywhere you work.
Explore Integrations
#### WordPress
WordPress
Calling all content creators! Harness the storytelling potential of AI generated video creation with Vyond, driving content engagement across your WordPress platforms.
How to upload videos to WordPress.
Method 1: Using the Media Library
Log in to your WordPress dashboard.
Go to Media > Add New.
Drag and drop your video file or choose to Select Files.
Wait for the upload to complete.
Method 2: Using the Block Editor
Edit a post or page.
Select the + button to add a new block.
Search for and select Video block.
Choose from:
Upload: Select a video file from your computer.
Media Library: Choose a previously uploaded video.
Insert from URL: Paste a link to an externally hosted video.
Try our other powerful integrations.
Slack
Use Vyond’s text to video in Slack to instantly take your concepts from prompt to screen.
Learn More
Google Docs
Use document to video to effortlessly transform your Google doc into an engaging video.
Learn More
Zapier
Automate your video creation workflow by pairing with 7,000+ productivity apps and tools in Zapier.
Learn More
Vyond works. Everywhere you work.
Explore Integrations
#### Your Privacy Choices
Your Privacy Choices
DO NOT “SELL” OR “SHARE” MY PERSONAL INFORMATION FOR TARGETED ADVERTISING
Residents of California, Colorado, Connecticut, Utah, and Virginia (or their authorized agents) have the right under the privacy laws of those states (“State Privacy Laws”) to opt out of the “sale” and “sharing”/use for digital advertising of their personal information by a company governed by those State Privacy Laws.
Vyond may participate in digital advertising networks and engage other advertising services to deliver advertising that is tailored to your interests. Some targeted advertising, such as the participation in certain ad networks and advertising on social media platforms can constitute the “sharing” or “sale” of your personal information as those terms are defined in applicable State Privacy Laws. In order to opt out of this activity, please click here.
You may also enable an opt-out preference signal for a browser or plug-in that makes it clear that such signal is meant to have the effect of opting you out of the sale and sharing of your personal information. Note that if we can identify you as an individual, we will process such a request, but if we only can identify your device or browser, we will only be able to apply the request to that specific device or browser and only for cookie or pixel-based selling and sharing. We process opt-out preference signals in a frictionless manner . By “frictionless,” we mean that we will not charge a fee or valuable consideration; and we will not change your experience with our service or display a notification, pop-up, text, graphic, animation, sound, video or any interstitial content in response to the opt-out preference signal.
Please note that, otherwise, Vyond does not presently exchange personal information for money with anyone. We also do not “sell” or “share” Sensitive Personal Information (as defined under State Privacy Laws). Further, Vyond does not knowingly sell the personal information of minors 16 years old or younger.
Please remember that our ability to maintain a record of your request is limited by the accuracy and completeness of the information you provide. We will only record the name and email address that you provide to us.
For more information about our privacy practices, please see our Privacy Policy.
#### Zapier
Automate task to video. Simple flows with Zapier.
Integrate Vyond into Zapier workflows to save time and auto-delegate video making.
Build Flow in Zapier Now
Create powerful code-free workflow automation.
Connect your business tools to Vyond in Zapier to create automated personalized videos
exactly where you need them in your workflow.
Pair with Zapier.
Simple set up to automate your workflow. Select the button below to connect Vyond to Zapier and 7,000+ productivity apps and tools.
Add to Zapier
Build your flow to create a video.
Select the apps and actions you’d like to trigger video generation.
Your look. Your message.
You can even automate a notification reminder to customize your video to perfection in Vyond Studio. Deliver your message in your own branded voice and style, effortlessly and instantly.
Connect to Zapier Now
Vyond works. Everywhere you work.
Explore Integrations
### Case Studies
#### Advocate Health Creates Engaging Onboarding at Scale with Vyond
Advocate Health Creates Engaging Onboarding at Scale with Vyond
Vyond revamp ensures an engaging learning experience for 40,000+ nurses
About Advocate HealthHeadquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina, Advocate Health is the third-largest nonprofit, integrated health system in the United States, serving nearly six million patients across 68 hospitals and 1,000 care locations.
IndustryHealthcare
Employees150,000
Challenge
Advocate Health saw an opportunity to more efficiently onboard 40,000+ nurses across its six-state footprint.
So the Nursing Education & Professional Development, Enterprise Learning Experience, and Content teams partnered to develop a single comprehensive program for onboarding nurses nationally. Doing so would ensure a consistent experience for new hires — and allow individual sites and units to focus more on creating content about their speciality areas.
The tool they chose for the project was Vyond. “We were already using it for a lot of other things,” says Crystal Gellin, an education designer for Nursing Education & Professional Development. “We’ve found it so easy to use — it’s a very highly liked software in our department and at Advocate.”
Approach
With recommendations from an Advocate Content team audit in hand, project sponsors proposed the creation of a new six-week series, woven together with an ongoing detective story.
From there, the Nursing Education & Professional Development and Enterprise Learning Experience teams took the reins, first agreeing on the styles, color palette, characters, and backgrounds they’d use for a cohesive look and feel. They opted for an animated style with mixed-media elements like software screenshots and simulations.
After three months of development in Vyond and Articulate Storyline, the new orientation course launched in March 2025 via Workday LMS to the first new cohorts of nurses, and the team continues to monitor program outcomes.
How Vyond Helped
The team praised Vyond’s versatility and collaboration features for helping them get the job done. “Vyond has been a great tool to enable the storytelling we wanted. And it was really easy for us to share characters and assets,” says Kayla Sell, training coordinator for Nursing Education & Professional Development.
Vyond’s template library got its share of shoutouts, as well as AI image generation for creating bespoke backgrounds and specific objects. “It’s been nice to have some consistency in the style and also the freedom to make exactly what I need, as I need it,” Kayla says.
“AI voices and text to speech are definitely features we’ve been using a lot and that’ll save us a lot of time down the road,” adds Crystal. “They sound very, very real, so we aren’t having to do our own voice-overs. And they’ll make edits and updates much easier.”
Reflecting on this project, Nikki Morawski, an instructional designer on the Enterprise Learning Experience team, thinks its success will lead to more requests for improved content. “Vyond is becoming a popular tool. It’s entertaining. It’s engaging. We love it.”
Nikki MorawskiInstructional Designer, Enterprise Learning Experience, Advocate Health
“Vyond is becoming a popular tool. It’s entertaining. It’s engaging. We love it.”
Read Related Case Studies
Leading Health Solutions Company Drives Learner Engagement with Vyond
Why a Healthcare Products Company Relies on Vyond for Regulatory Compliance
This Global Tech Company Trains New Sales Reps 5x Faster with Vyond
See All Customer Stories
65% of the Fortune 500 and millions of users rely on Vyond.
Try Vyond Today
#### American College of Education Creates High-Quality, High-Volume eLearning with Vyond
American College of Education Creates High-Quality, High-Volume eLearning with Vyond
Vyond videos get 5–10% higher engagement and completion rates
About American College of Education
American College of Education (ACE) is a private online college with headquarters in Indianapolis, Indiana. As a Certified B Corporation, ACE follows the B Corp standards of social and environmental performance, positive impact on employees and customers, and public transparency. The school is accredited by the Higher Learning Commission (HLC) and offers programs focused on education, business, healthcare, and nursing.
Industry
Higher education
Employees
500+
Challenge
The curriculum development and production team at American College of Education (ACE) has a challenging mission to deliver engaging content efficiently for a diverse student body across all of ACE’s 50+ online, year-round degree programs.
Traditional methods like PowerPoint and standalone talking-head videos lacked the engagement modern learners seek. And they were too time-consuming for a curriculum production team responsible for delivering high volumes of content. “There are times we’re rolling out ten courses in six weeks,” says Monica Speer, Assistant Manager of Learning Design.
Monica and her team needed a solution to help them create and update content quickly while upholding ACE’s high standards for instructional design and engagement. “We don’t have months to create a course,” Monica says. “We need to move quickly and deliver top quality, so we went with Vyond.”
Approach
The curriculum development team works with academics and provides Monica and her team video scripts (20+ pages) for the courses; sometimes, studio-quality talking-head presentation footage is provided, too. From these materials, the team builds multimedia content courses, each comprising 20 Vyond videos on average, including text, audio, and images to reinforce important points or help visualize processes.
“We also use characters and stories wherever we can to make the content more relatable and interesting for students,” says Kelsey Corder, an eLearning content designer. “And we always try to tailor the content to their future industries, using different scene templates, or creating them with the expansive prop library, to help reflect the nuances within, say, healthcare versus health education versus health financing.”
The curriculum development and production process repeats regularly as new programs and courses are developed and existing courses are revised. At the busiest times, the team works on Vyond content eight hours a day, with a goal to each produce two videos daily.
How Vyond helped
With Vyond, the ACE team can create 100+ videos each five-week term and keep their curriculum current, engaging — and accurate. “We’re an accredited college and our multimedia content follows the approved script to ensure alignment with student outcomes for the courses,” Monica says.
On the learner side, the results have been tangible. “Our LMS analytics show that students are more engaged with our Vyond course content,” says Scott Dowling, eLearning content designer. “We see five to ten percent higher student engagement and video-completion rates, on average, for videos produced using Vyond.”
On the production side, the team says Vyond’s templates and collaboration features have been a timesaver given their high volume and fast turnarounds. “We’ve created a huge library of ACE scenes that apply across courses. Everybody shares as we go, and we give assets easily searchable names. The shared library has been a lifesaver,” says Kelsey.
Beyond curriculum content, ACE keeps finding new ways to use Vyond: such as making their commencement event accessible and inclusive during the pandemic. “We created virtual commencement videos in Vyond, allowing graduates to see their names, hear their names being called, and experience a sense of ceremony,” says Monica. “Now it’s become a tradition.”
We see five to ten percent higher student engagement and video-completion rates, on average, for videos produced using Vyond.
Scott DowlingeLearning Content Designer
65% of the Fortune 500 and millions of users rely on Vyond.
Try Vyond Today
#### Architects use Vyond to win 1st place at the Smart City Solutions Competition
Architects use Vyond to win 1st place at the Smart City Solutions Competition
Animation isn’t just an entertaining medium — it can also be a tool for driving positive social change. A team of architects in Coral Gables, Florida used Vyond for exactly this purpose. Their award-winning video has the potential to significantly improve life in their city.
The group of architects — known as The Laboratory of Everyday Things — won first place in the Smart City Solutions Competition. Hosted by the University of Miami and the City of Coral Gables, the contest was created to help the city become more efficient and sustainable.
For this year’s competition, entrants were asked to submit a proposal, including a five-minute video, for relieving traffic-related problems in Coral Gables. The Laboratory of Everyday Things was selected based on their proposal’s feasibility, impact, and originality, among other qualities.
Rogelio Cadena, a project manager at DLGV Architects, is a member of The Laboratory of Everyday Things. He and his colleague Claudia Ansorena were responsible for using Vyond to transform the team’s ideas and storyboards into animation. We caught up with Rogelio to learn a bit more about what the video creation process was like and his advice for fellow video creators.
Describe the team behind this video.
R: The team met while teaching a joint architectural studio class between University of Miami and Tsinghua University. Three of the team members currently teach architecture at the University of Miami School of Architecture, while the other two team members teach architecture in China.
Three of the team members also have their own independent firms. I work in one of them, DLGV Architects, as a project manager.
How did your team discover Vyond?
R: We knew that we had to create a video for the competition, so we began researching and discussing different ways of approaching the video. Our team decided that animation would be the best medium, since it provides a wide range of visuals to communicate architectural ideas.
We consulted with a colleague who is familiar with animation and learned how expensive and time-consuming outsourcing this video to an artist would be. Knowing that the project must be completed in three months, we opted to find a software that would allow us to create our own animations.
The Architectural Director of our DLGV office referred us to Vyond. He had used the program for a competition in his MBA program and won first place, so he only had good things to say about the tool.
Talk us through the process from start to finish for making this award-winning video.
R: The entire process of creating and presenting the video for the competition was three months long.
We brainstormed ideas and conducted research by meeting with city officials and collecting data maps using ArcGIS software. Once we had worked through our ideas, the team members based in the US started storyboarding the video in weekly Friday meetings.
After the storyboards were complete, my colleague Claudia Ansorena and I started animating the ideas in Vyond. It took us roughly sixteen hours to create the first version of the video and about 90 hours to create the final video.
Which Vyond feature was the most helpful when creating this video?
R: The ability to customize the way characters look and assign them unique actions. It was a deciding factor when we chose to use Vyond. These character features gave us so much freedom and allowed us to move quickly as we tested out different ideas for the video.
Additionally, the ability to import other types of media was incredibly helpful for us. We were able to add architectural drawings from outside programs seamlessly.
Which tools did you use in conjunction with Vyond?
R: To create custom drawings, we used Photoshop, Illustrator, SketchUp, RoughAnimator, and AutoCAD. We also used a voice recorder app to capture the voice-over audio.
Was collaborating with multiple team members to create the video challenging?
R: Not at all. Vyond creates a link that you can send to show others what you’re working on, so it was easy to share the video at each creation stage with team members. This sharing feature was especially useful for remotely collaborating with our Chinese team members. We were able to instantly send them our videos, so they could give us feedback on how to improve the messaging of the video.
What advice would you give to others who want to make a video?
R: Don’t expect the process of creating the video to be linear. The trajectory of making the video that you initially imagine may dramatically change as you work through your ideas. If that happens, be open to making revisions, even if they’re last minute. There were a few scenes, for example, that we initially thought would be long, but ultimately were cut down when we realized they weren’t so important.
What are your future plans for using Vyond?
R: We’re currently in the process of translating this Vyond video into Mandarin for our Chinese audience. Additionally, we intend to enter the video into several competitions later this year relating to urban planning and architecture.
Looking to the future, I see our team using Vyond again for future competitions. The tool was easy for us to use, yet still powerful enough for us to create a high-quality video with multiple types of media.
Creating positive change with animated video
The winning video from The Laboratory of Everyday Things shows that animation isn’t just a tool for teaching concepts — it’s also a medium for challenging ideas and creating positive changes. Instead of opting for a traditional slideshow, use video in your next proposal to engage your audience and explain the improvements you wish to see — whether they’re for your community or your company.
#### Cargill Creates Approachable and Impactful Compliance Training with Vyond
Cargill Creates Approachable and Impactful Compliance Training with Vyond
Intranet articles with Vyond images saw 30% higher open rates
About Cargill
Founded in 1865, Cargill is a privately held, American global food corporation based in Minnesota. Cargill operates in 70 countries and sells to 125 countries, generating $165 billion in annual revenue.
Industry
Food & Agriculture
Employees
155,000
Challenge
Cargill is a company with complex global operations. Across the many countries where it operates, it’s key that employees understand the nuances of local laws, the importance of adhering to them, and the potential impact of noncompliance, like penalties and damage to brand and reputation. And it’s up to the Compliance team to fulfill that mission.
Christopher Annand, Director of Programs and Governance, is charged with guiding the company towards a more “principles-based” approach to compliance: communicating the positive behaviors the company wants to see, rather than outlining the many laws employees should avoid breaking.
To successfully engage the company’s workforce with this new, positive approach, Christopher felt the way his team communicated also needed to evolve. So he decided to move away from text-heavy training materials and, instead, create short, interactive, engaging video content that would be especially helpful to visual learners and more appealing to younger employees.
Approach
Aligned to the launch of an internal “Ethics Week,” Christopher and his team released new Vyond videos that covered critical subject matter and provided examples of what “good” looks like.
Instead of clicking through documentation, employees watched short videos where a lineup of recurring, recognizable characters explained topics like how employees should handle safety situations they’re unsure of, gifts and entertainment protocol, and conflicts of interest.
The team was so pleased with the Ethics Week pilot feedback, they expanded their use cases for Vyond to include:
Creating training video content that’s hosted on Cargill’s LMS;
Embedding videos on Cargill’s intranet portal to promote compliance programs;
Sending videos directly to employees via email; and
Using Cargill leaders’ Vyond characters in other static collateral
How Vyond helped
While Compliance content often gets a reputation for being boring and dry, Christopher said Vyond allows his team to create material that’s creative – even fun, where appropriate. And it’s helping their results: he and the team see much higher rates of employee engagement with content that includes Vyond videos and imagery.
On Cargill’s intranet site, employee open rates on compliance articles featuring a Vyond image were 30% higher than other articles without the imagery. Further, articles that included a Vyond video embedded in the content were 65% more likely to generate employee comments—and averaged about 20% more comments—than other articles.
“I can definitively say that if we incorporate Vyond videos into one of our front-facing articles on the website, we will drive readership of that article because people are curious, they’re interested, and for some people, they know this an established thing we do and they look forward to it,” Christopher said.
And in relationships with regulators, Christopher believes that Vyond helps signal how seriously Cargill takes compliance.
“We feel confident that we’re demonstrating a robust training program as a control for employees,” Christopher said. “Vyond gives us a way to continue that training and reinforce concepts with vignettes and advisories—going beyond traditional compliance course methods.”
Compliance is a serious topic. Using a tool like Vyond to present our content in a more creative and engaging way helps us maintain and enhance our relationship with employees, and we’ve been very successful in that regard.
Christopher AnnandDirector of Programs and Governance
65% of the Fortune 500 and millions of users rely on Vyond.
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#### Fortune 500 Telecom Company Builds Stronger Customer Support Teams with Vyond
Fortune 500 Telecom Company Builds Stronger Customer Support Teams with Vyond
Service reps rate video series 5/5 for helpfulness
About the company
As one of the world’s leading providers of technology and communications services, this global technology company serves 99% of the Fortune 500 and 150+ countries globally.
Industry
Telecommunications
Employees
100, 000+
Challenge
A Fortune 500 telecom company counts on their global customer service workforce of 56,000 to support their growing U.S. customer base. To deliver excellent service, these reps need a strong understanding of products, operations, and their U.S. customers’ priorities and communication preferences.
Feedback about existing training content showed learners had knowledge gaps around terminology and common customer scenarios, making the content less effective. So the customer service team turned to the L&D team for help.
In turn, the L&D team turned to Vyond to help them create a new series of microlearning videos. “With the scene customization, library of character diversity options, props, and opportunities for visual humor, I knew Vyond would help us tell stories that learners could connect with,” says Adam Fosnaugh, Consultant of Instructional Design.
Approach
Adam and his team created a series of energetic, entertaining, and educational videos in Vyond called “Making Connections” focused on topics that international partners identified as most challenging, like customer value, billing, and working with connected devices.
The goal was to draw parallels that service reps and their leaders could better understand and relate to. The team wanted the videos to help clear up confusion, create “aha” moments for the team, and spark dialogue.
All current service reps were required to take the training, and the L&D team partnered with the service rep onboarding team to ensure all new hires take it going forward. To measure effectiveness, learners complete a competency questionnaire before and after the training. After Vyond training, learners’ competency improvement percentages were in the double digits across all three categories.
How Vyond helped
“Making Connections” has since grown to include eight videos and counting, and, to date, each video has gotten 10,000+ views and a 5/5 rating for its engagement level and relevance to learners’ roles.
The project has been held up as an internal training success story and the series has been included in a broader initiative around customer service innovation.
“These requests could have easily been addressed with a paragraph and stock image on a one pager, which would have been forgotten the second the representative looked at it,” Adam says. “But we didn’t go that route. The learners are invested in the topics, because we were invested in getting them to pay attention. That would not have been possible without Vyond.”
Vyond allowed me to not just educate but to tell a story. Integrating my script was easy with Vyond’s wide assortment of assets.
Adam FosnaughConsultant of Instructional Design
65% of the Fortune 500 and millions of users rely on Vyond.
Try Vyond Today
#### GoHealth Powers Better Customer Service with Vyond
GoHealth Powers Better Customer Service with Vyond
Agents answer customers’ questions quickly and accurately with repository of 50+ Vyond microlearning videos
About GoHealth
With partnerships across the private health insurance ecosystem and expertise in Medicare, GoHealth is a publicly traded health insurance marketplace helping improve access to healthcare in the U.S.
Industry
Insurance
Employees
2,500
Challenge
GoHealth’s 2,000 service agents help customers across the U.S. successfully enroll in new healthcare plans with one of the platform’s many partner insurance carriers.
To give good guidance to customers calling in, agents have to stay up-to-date on countless insurance plans, eligibility criteria, and state-by-state nuances. But many of them were struggling to answer the same types of questions, which required them to place customers on hold until a manager was free to assist them.
Hoping to improve the customer experience, GoHealth’s L&D team decided to give agents access to more workflow-based learning.
Approach
The L&D team built out and populated a knowledge management system, a central repository with answers to customers’ most commonly asked questions, as well as news and updates that agents should be aware of.
Wherever they could, the team presented complex new information as microlearning videos in Vyond to help agents grasp what they need to know quickly, with consistent intros and outros, giving the collection a cohesive feel so agents know what to expect.
How Vyond helped
To date, the team has stocked the knowledge management library with over 50 Vyond microlearning videos to help agents answer customers’ questions quickly and accurately. The team continues to add targeted microlearning videos as state rules and carrier policies change, and continues to monitor the impact on customers’ wait times with the goal to reduce them.
Beyond the knowledge management library, the team uses Vyond to incorporate more storytelling into courses like leadership training and pairs Vyond with tools like Articulate to incorporate interactivity into their training content. The team also plans to replace some in-person training sessions with a series of pop-up 90-second Vyond videos, a change that will save them significant time and money.
Extensive usage has led to the expansion of Vyond’s footprint throughout the organization. As a result, GoHealth recently upgraded to Vyond for Enterprise to take advantage of exclusive Enterprise-only features like ultra-high-quality AI voices and Shared Spaces, a powerful organizational feature that allows their teams to quickly and easily collaborate.
The company’s training content is getting noticed externally too: one of their onboarding courses received a 2023 ATD “Excellence in Practice” Award, and another project earned them a Stevie Award for “Achievement in Human Resources.”
“What’s special about our team’s experience with Vyond is our relationship with customer success and their responsiveness,” says Lauren Merrild, Senior Manager, Learning & Development. “The timeliness of their feedback has really helped us move forward on projects with quick turnaround times.”
The premade templates in Vyond are amazing. I love them. I’m always able to find what I need in terms of what I want to convey with the storytelling that I’m doing.
Lauren MerrildSenior Manager, Learning & Development, GoHealth
65% of the Fortune 500 and millions of users rely on Vyond.
Try Vyond Today
#### How a Fortune 50 Bank Closed Frontline Training Gaps in Fraud, Resiliency, and AI Adoption
How a Fortune 50 Bank Closed Frontline Training Gaps in Fraud, Resiliency, and AI Adoption
Challenge
This global financial institution needed an enterprise-grade communication platform that met strict security, compliance, and governance standards while supporting sensitive, high-stakes training and emergency response communications.
Approach
Vyond was first deployed where loss exposure was highest: Fraud Operations and Call Center training, where unclear or outdated content increases operational risk. Once the platform proved effective at improving frontline comprehension and behavior change, usage expanded into Manager and Executive Development, Business Resiliency communications used during live incident response, and Technical Education programs supporting the bank’s AI rollout under model-risk and regulatory scrutiny.
IT Security gave us the green light. That’s what made the difference. We could finally use AI inside training without re-opening every approval conversation.
— VP, Enterprise Learning, Fortune 50 Bank
How Vyond Helped
Vyond made it possible for a range of teams to deliver secure, high-impact communications at scale. Specifically, the organization:
Closed training gaps in frontline fraud and call center teams supporting direct loss-prevention outcomes and reducing the lag between policy changes and frontline behavior change.
Built business continuity and incident-response training that holds up under examiner review, reducing refresh cycles from weeks to days when policy or threat conditions change.
Accelerated safe AI tool adoption from quarters to weeks across regulated business units with role-specific training aligned to the bank’s model-risk and data-privacy standards.
The bank has scaled Vyond from one high-priority use case to five enterprise programs, with per-license value doubling as more teams reuse the platform. Training that previously required outside agencies or specialized in-house production now ships internally, on the bank’s own timeline and within its security perimeter.
Read Related Case Studies
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Vyond Across Multiple Departments, Reduces Production Time by 97%
Fortune 50 Retail Giant Uses Vyond Globally as Communication Infrastructure
Salesloft Helps Reps Adopt a New Company Narrative with Vyond
See All Customer Stories
65% of the Fortune 500 and millions of users rely on Vyond.
Try Vyond Today
#### How a Global Consulting Firm Cut Proposal Video Turnaround From 10 Weeks to 48 Hours
How a Global Consulting Firm Cut Proposal Video Turnaround From 10 Weeks to 48 Hours
Challenge
A global consulting firm was losing speed where speed wins deals. Video content produced through external agencies took up to 10 weeks per project, long enough that proposal teams couldn’t realistically include custom video in client pitches, and HR and Compliance couldn’t respond to regulatory or policy changes within the cycle the business required. The firm needed to bring production in-house without sacrificing quality.
Approach
The firm started where the pain was sharpest: HR and Compliance, where policy changes were outpacing the agency production cycle. Using Vyond Go, internal teams began creating video content themselves–fast enough to keep pace with evolving regulatory and policy updates. Once the model proved successful, Sales and Client Services adopted Vyond for creating video proposals, pitches, and client-facing explainers—bringing custom video into deal cycles where turnaround time had previously made it impractical.
“I can do in an afternoon what used to take me two weeks. That changes what we can put in front of a client during a live pitch.”
— Partner, Global Consulting Firm
How Vyond Helped
Reduced proposal video turnaround from 10 weeks to 48 hours, enabling teams to deliver differentiated client content while competitors were still scoping projects.
Standardized communication across HR, Compliance, Internal Comms, and Sales, reducing inconsistencies that led to scope confusion and costly rework
Added custom video explainers to proposals at the moment proposal speed wins deals, increasing differentiation in competitive bids.
Brought video production in-house, eliminating agency dependency and redirecting budget toward higher-value client work.
Read Related Case Studies
Fortune 50 Retail Giant Uses Vyond Globally as Communication Infrastructure
Fortune 50 Bank Trusts Vyond’s Secure Platform for Their Compliance and Manager Training
Salesloft Helps Reps Adopt a New Company Narrative with Vyond
See All Customer Stories
65% of the Fortune 500 and millions of users rely on Vyond.
Try Vyond Today
#### How a Top 25 Financial Services Company Transformed Their Training Program with Engaging “Infotainment” Videos
How a Top 25 Financial Services Company Transformed Their Training Program with Engaging “Infotainment” Videos
Employee views on Vyond videos increased 73-fold over PDFs
About the company
This publicly traded financial services company is one of the top 25 holding companies in the U.S. with more than $190 billion in assets.
Industry
Financial Services
Employees
11,000+
Challenge
At one major financial services company, it’s the Engagement team’s job to arm nearly 2,000 customer support representatives with the industry information and company updates they need to best serve customers.
The Engagement team’s business-critical messages to these employees had been taking the form of text-heavy documentation, shared via email. But engagement was low: emails sat unopened in inboxes, with business-critical information being ignored until the last possible minute.
To solve this urgent engagement problem, the team knew they had to rethink how they communicated key company messages.
“We were solving for two challenges,” says an Engagement Manager on the team. “First is, how can we communicate in a way that’s ‘chunkable’ and digestible? And another is, how do we help our messages not get lost in the shuffle?”
That led the team to Vyond.
Approach
The team decided to move away from text-heavy content and communications in favor of a video-centric, micro-learning approach. They’d condense pages of information into “infotainment” videos to convey key messages to frontline contributors in a way that was fun and engaging — and made people look forward to new emails from the team.
“We had a hunch that people are more willing to click a video and engage with something that’s not a four-page instruction manual,” the Engagement Manager says.
How Vyond helped
With Vyond, the team transformed their text-based lessons and hours-long sessions into concise, digestible videos sent with email.
In one case, an eight-page document became a three-minute video. In another, the team condensed a four-hour teaching session into an eight-minute video.
The improvements to engagement were even more dramatic. The team saw drastic increases in employee views when they used Vyond videos compared to PDF newsletters, which saw views in the single digits. In one case, views increased 24-fold, and in another, 73-fold.
And switching to a microlearning video approach didn’t just boost engagement. Adding visual and audio to their training materials has enabled the team to more clearly communicate complicated ideas, which has helped ensure that their trainings “stick.”
Every email our employees get is fighting for their attention. We’ve got to convince them to open and click ours – and Vyond gives us leverage.
Engagement ManagerTop 25 Financial Services Company
65% of the Fortune 500 and millions of users rely on Vyond.
Try Vyond Today
#### How an Online Retail Giant Scaled Global Workforce Training Without Adding Agency Spend
How an Online Retail Giant Scaled Global Workforce Training Without Adding Agency Spend
Challenge
An online retail giant operating across North America, Europe, and India needed training that could keep pace with its hiring volume and operational complexity. Traditional production was slow, expensive, and required specialized design skills the instructional design team didn’t have on staff. Within weeks of adopting Vyond, instructional designers with no creative background were producing professional training videos independently, reducing reliance on outside agencies and eliminating internal bottlenecks.
Approach
Word of the team’s success spread. And soon, global training teams in Europe and India — and operations teams within the company’s other brands — began using Vyond to:
Build scenario-specific microlearning for warehouse, fulfillment, and customer-facing teams, directly targeting the situations that drive safety incidents, throughput loss, and customer experience issues.
Localize training in days instead of weeks, accelerating workforce readiness in new markets while maintaining operational standards globally.
Displace agency and production vendor spend, redirecting that budget toward higher-impact workforce programs.
“Localization in other apps is kind of a pain. With Vyond I create one video, then language variants, and it reaches my whole workforce in English, Portuguese, Spanish, Korean.”
— Director of Learning & Communications,Fortune 500 Retail Giant
How Vyond Helped
Since adopting Vyond, the organization has steadily replaced outside agency contracts and consolidated internal tools, scaling Vyond across more teams every year. The platform now powers training and operational communications across the company’s global workforce —spanning regions, brands, and internal functions that previously operated with inconsistent video production capacity.
What began as a solution for a single L&D team has become the company’s standard platform for internal communication and training globally — used by training, operations, and brand teams to reach workers consistently, in their language, and at the speed the business requires.
Read Related Case Studies
Consulting Firm Uses
Vyond Across Multiple Departments, Reduces Production Time by 97%
Fortune 50 Bank Trusts Vyond’s Secure Platform for Their Compliance and Manager Training
Salesloft Helps Reps Adopt a New Company Narrative with Vyond
See All Customer Stories
65% of the Fortune 500 and millions of users rely on Vyond.
Try Vyond Today
#### How Securitas Direct Revolutionized Its Training and Improved Employee Satisfaction
How Securitas Direct Revolutionized Its Training and Improved Employee Satisfaction
Account managed by trusted partner:
About Securitas DirectSecuritas Direct is the leading company in total protection, both inside and outside homes and small businesses, with a presence in 17 countries across Europe and Latin America.
IndustrySecurity Technology
Employees26,000
Challenge
Optimize the quality of employee training and improve learning outcomes
Securitas Direct’s training strategy needed to evolve to better meet the current needs of its teams. Opportunities for improvement were identified, aiming for greater flexibility and dynamism in training processes. The goal was to enhance the learning experience, standardize training quality, and facilitate large-scale implementation.
Content digitalization: a key to evolving e-learning solutions
In this context, content digitalization has been a fundamental pillar in moving toward a more flexible and efficient model. The integration of high-impact multimedia resources has raised the quality standards of the content while enabling continuous updates. The role of the tutor has also been redefined—now acting more as a consultant or guide throughout the training process, focused on adding value to the student’s experience and encouraging more autonomous and dynamic learning.
Approach
Short animated videos distributed via a more automated platform
To improve the efficiency of Securitas Direct’s training plan, we proposed new training solutions based on content digitalization. The Vyond platform allows for the easy and intuitive creation of animated videos that integrate smoothly with Rise by Articulate 360, Securitas Direct’s e-learning course creation software. The materials not only have a greater impact but are also developed and updated more quickly and autonomously. This reduces tutor dependency and facilitates the onboarding of new employees.
Hybrid training methodology integrating learning simulators
The use of flexible digital platforms increases the capacity to produce easily adaptable and updatable courses for a wide variety of learner profiles. Online training incorporates simulations of the processes and tools used in operational areas. This highly practical digital experience is combined with in-person sessions led by trainers and active employees who interact with customers daily. Altogether, this strategy makes onboarding at Securitas Direct faster and more successful.
How Vyond Helped
The revamped training structure boosts employee satisfaction and smooths onboarding
The ultimate goal of any corporate training strategy is to support the company’s business objectives. The best way to achieve that is by ensuring employees are satisfied and motivated. With this dual purpose in mind, Securitas Direct worked with Actua, Vyond’s partner in Spain, to redesign its courses to enrich the learner’s experience. A more skilled and capable employee, empowered by the resources provided by their company, feels both the ability and the responsibility to contribute to shared goals.
The implementation of the Vyond tool and the adoption of a new, more digital and structured training methodology have led to the following outcomes:
Digitalization of key business areas: Customer Service, Sales, and Field Operations.
More proactive learners: Training is now more interactive, and learners enjoy and request more practical exercises.
Diverse learner profiles: Senior employees also take the courses, demonstrating that the model works well across different experience levels.
Higher learner satisfaction: Employee satisfaction with the training scores over 9.
Trainers more focused on adding value: The training team is smaller but more efficient; advisors can mentor new employees, fostering an internal mentorship dynamic.
Better-trained designers: New, high-quality, and easily updatable courses and materials have been developed.
Antonio Chia VeloDigitalization & Projects Manager, Securitas Direct
“Thanks to tools like Vyond, we’ve been able to standardize quality, streamline processes, and offer a disruptive training experience tailored to the real challenges of our operations.”
65% of the Fortune 500 and millions of users rely on Vyond.
Try Vyond Today
#### How Shelter Insurance Builds Cyber Resilience with Vyond
How Shelter Insurance Builds Cyber Resilience with Vyond
After Vyond training, clicks on email phishing links dropped by 50%.
About Shelter Insurance
Launched in 1946, Shelter Insurance is a Missouri-based U.S. property casualty insurance company operating in 21 states.
Industry
Financial Services
Employees
2,000+
Challenge
Recently, the information security team at Shelter Insurance realized they needed a new, more engaging way to help their employees, agents, and board members protect themselves, and the company, from increasingly sophisticated phishing attacks.
Given bad actors’ rapid pace of developing new tools and methods, Information Security Analyst Melissa Camper was concerned about the short shelf life of cybersecurity training. Melissa was also looking for a way to move away from simple compliance — a purely “check the box” exercise — and toward a fresher, more dynamic approach to engage and educate learners.
When Melissa came to eLearning Designer Linda Winn to find a new approach, Linda had an idea: Vyond videos.
Linda had recently brought in Vyond to create a prep video for an executive presentation skills course, and she said it spread “like wildfire.” Stakeholders liked the animated style and shorter, scenario-based learning approach. Business partners were asking, “how’d you do that? Could you do that for my project?”
Based on the video’s success and widespread popularity, Linda thought Vyond would be a great option for this cybersecurity project as well.
Approach
Linda and Melissa partnered with Linda’s teammate, fellow eLearning Designer Craig Gladney, to come up with their concept: an ongoing series, “Crash of the Titan,” about the evolving cybersecurity challenges that crop up at a parody insurance company, Titan, and how employees do — and should — respond. Scenarios included the many ways Titan’s data and information systems could be at risk — like phishing and social engineering — and the important role employees play in protecting them.
“Using Vyond to create scenario-based training has allowed us to expand understanding and responsibility to everyone in the company,” says Linda. “Our employees understand that cybersecurity and protecting the company is everyone’s responsibility.”
The first “season” for the series included five videos, released a week apart. And the program was so effective at both engagement and education, “Crash of the Titan” is now in its fourth season.
How Vyond helped
To measure their training’s effectiveness, the information security team sends a phishing simulation “pre-test” to their 5,000 employees, agents, and board members to benchmark how many click on a fake “bad link.” Then the team releases new cyber awareness training. Sometime later, they send another phishing simulation and compare results to the pre-test.
After the Vyond training, Linda says there’s been a 28% increase in the number of stakeholders who could recognize and thwart simulated phishing attempts. More importantly, the simulations show there has been a 50% decrease in the number of clicks on “live” phish, despite the exponential increase in phishing emails attempting to penetrate the company’s system.
As an added bonus, based on the steady positive feedback the team gets, audiences seem to actually enjoy the series.
Beyond “Crash of the Titan,” Linda, Craig, and the team continue to find new ways to use Vyond – like policy-related training for agents that was previously “long and boring.”
“We feel we’ve been able to up our game as far as people really enjoying training, being engaged, and learning,” Linda says. Craig adds, “We’ve found Vyond works well for both the conceptual and the really specific things. It’s just a matter of figuring out how to use what the tool does well.” And Vyond’s ease of use means the team can be agile as new training needs emerge — like with cybersecurity.
“You end up with new phishing techniques based on whatever’s going on in society,” Craig says. “So we tell our business partners: If something comes in, let us know — we can turn around something specific pretty quickly.”Melissa is thrilled with the approach that Vyond has made possible for cybersecurity training: “We’re able to deliver training now that’s highly relevant to what is happening in the world and to behaviors we see happening at Shelter. Our training does not get stale. It is dynamic, engaging, and always relevant. Before Vyond, we never had people tell us that they enjoyed the cybersecurity training we offered. They do now.”
We’re able to deliver training now that’s highly relevant to what is happening in the world and to behaviors we see happening at Shelter. . . . Before Vyond, we never had people tell us that they enjoyed the cybersecurity training we offered. They do now.
Melissa CamperInformation Security Analyst, Shelter Insurance
65% of the Fortune 500 and millions of users rely on Vyond.
Try Vyond Today
#### How the University of Illinois System’s Office of Medicaid Innovation Accelerated Video Production 400% With Vyond
How the University of Illinois System’s Office of Medicaid Innovation Accelerated Video Production 400% With Vyond
Vyond helped create training material 4x faster than an outside vendor
About University of Illinois — Office of Medicaid Innovation
The Office of Medicaid Innovation is a specialty unit within the University of Illinois System — a consortium of three public Illinois universities — that helps the Illinois Department of Healthcare and Family Services administer the state’s Medicaid program by providing administrative, clinical, and operational services.
Industry
Higher Education
Employees
36,700
Challenge
The learning and development team at the University System’s Office of Medicaid Innovation (OMI) is responsible for designing workforce learning experiences, resources, and solutions for partners across OMI’s scope of work, including behavioral health provider training.”
The team hired a vendor to produce an animated video training course related to behavioral health protocols. The vendor intended to create a series of one-character, one-scene monologues from scratch in Adobe. But after over two years, progress had stalled. It wasn’t clear when, if ever, the vendor would deliver the program.
Approach
Meanwhile, Dakota Thomas-Wilhelm joined the organization as the team lead for training and development. As Dakota reviewed the scripts and storyboard for the course, he saw an opportunity to both speed up production and make the experience more engaging by developing the characters more fully, letting them interact more, and breaking the course into shorter videos — from five modules into ten.
The team had already been using Vyond on other projects, and by then, Dakota started experimenting with the software. He offered to revise the script and create a prototype of the training course in Vyond while the team waited on movement from the vendor.
How Vyond helped
Working with Vyond’s ready-made templates, with just six months of Vyond experience, Dakota produced a new version of the training series in a quarter of the time it had taken the vendor thus far, despite multiple rounds of script rewrites and approvals. The team successfully launched the training videos made with Vyond, discontinued the original project, and continues to use Vyond to create more engaging, interactive training programs for the university.
Check out more Vyond success stories
Our administration was very, very pleased with the development time and the results.
Dakota Thomas-WilhelmTraining & Development Team Lead
65% of the Fortune 500 and millions of users rely on Vyond.
Try Vyond Today
#### How Vyond Helped a Leading Cruise Company Create Critical Training for Their Global Workforce
How Vyond Helped a Leading Cruise Company Create Critical Training for Their Global Workforce
With Vyond, the team delivered 100% of critical training content ahead of their post-pandemic relaunch
About the company
One of the leading cruise companies in the world, this organization has a global fleet of 50+ ships traveling to approximately 1,000 destinations around the world.
Industry
Travel
Employees
100,000+
Challenge
As a leading cruise company prepared to relaunch their fleet of ships after the pandemic, there were large gaps in training newly hired employees, upskilling existing colleagues to meet new safety guidelines, and educating staff on new products and initiatives aimed at bringing customers back.
Many members of the company’s client-facing, global contact center workforce speak more than one language, so for English-language content, visual and audio-based training programs resonate better than text-heavy materials. And with ever-changing guidelines, the three-person L&D content development team needed an agile, effective way to create materials while also increasing engagement and retention.
The team had tried other solutions, like Adobe Suite, but found them overly complex. They wanted something more accessible and scalable to help them meet business demands faster.
Approach
The content development team set to work creating the required new hire, upskill, and sales training videos, in many cases taking advantage of pre-built Vyond assets like scene templates and pre-animated motions rather than starting from a blank canvas.
The team’s scope eventually grew to include a new initiative: several business leaders wanted to circulate weekly updates to their departments. They wanted to use video for better engagement, but not everyone could regularly appear on video. The team created characters for them in Vyond, so each week, leaders simply sent in their audio and the team stitched it into a new video.
How Vyond helped
The content development team used Vyond to meet 100% of the new training demand. The team credits a few reasons why Vyond was so helpful in addressing this challenge.
First, Vyond was fast: rich libraries of content assets meant they never had to start from scratch. And as the team grew, new employees could jump in quickly and start contributing because Vyond is intuitive and easy to use.
Second, animated video was well suited to address the team’s challenges, then and now. Vyond’s capability to create custom characters let them reflect their customer bases around the world, ensuring that all their training videos were as relevant and appropriate as possible. And leaders could also deliver weekly updates in an engaging way via their custom characters.
Additionally, shifting from text-heavy training materials to animated video, which is especially effective with visual and auditory learners, generated an anecdotal increase in engagement and retention across the global employee base.
Even now, as the company has moved past its post-pandemic challenges, the content development team continues to appreciate Vyond’s versatility: they use it to create a diverse range of employee communications, including company announcements, sales trainings, and product rollouts.
Vyond let us add a level of engagement and interactivity quickly to meet our deadlines, without the learning curve.
Global Training Development LeadLeading Cruise Company
65% of the Fortune 500 and millions of users rely on Vyond.
Try Vyond Today
#### How Vyond Helps Whole Foods Market “Keep Up With the Speed of Business”
How Vyond Helps Whole Foods Market “Keep Up With the Speed of Business”
Vyond reduces average video production time by 75%
About Whole Foods Market
Founded in 1980, Whole Foods Market Inc. is a multinational supermarket chain headquartered in Austin, Texas, and a world leader in organic and natural foods. In 2017, Whole Foods Market was acquired by Amazon.
Industry
Supermarkets / Grocery Stores
Employees
100,000+
Challenge
At Whole Foods, the Learning and Development (L&D) and Change Enablement teams partner to provide the wide spectrum of training their employees need.
The L&D team delivers career development and soft skills training. And the 50-person change enablement team, including Bryan McElroy, Senior Team Lead of Change Enablement, Training and Communication, and Jason Ferguson, Principal Learning and Development Analyst, Change Enablement, is responsible for product- and skills-based learning, helping ensure consistent quality across stores and maintaining Whole Foods’ customer-centric culture.
As the demand for new training content increased company-wide, Bryan, Jason, and their colleagues knew they had to evolve their production process to keep up.
What they needed was a versatile tool that would help them create video content on a wide variety of topics efficiently; let them adjust and repurpose that content easily; and engage their workforce. Plus, they wanted to avoid the cost and hassle of shooting live videos.
Approach
Having used and benefited from Vyond’s video animation software in a previous role, Bryan purchased a few licenses for his team. But quickly, they found Vyond so invaluable that Bryan upgraded to the 35-seat Enterprise plan they have today, which is used by both designers and non-designers.
According to Bryan, “there’s not a day we don’t use Vyond.”
The teams use it for everything from sprucing up boring PowerPoints with animated GIFs, to creating microlearning videos series (the most recent involved 23 videos), to creating custom characters reflecting specific roles. “The animated characters are great for showcasing diversity,” Bryan says.“And on certain topics where we might not want to use animated human characters, we use graphical elements in Vyond,” Jason adds.
How Vyond helped
Since Whole Foods Market brought Vyond onboard, it has become an essential part of their training strategy, making life easier for both the L&D and Change Management teams on a number of fronts.
By using animated video instead of live action, the team saves time and effort they’d otherwise spend on in-store staging — aligning labels, hiding price tags — not to mention the cost of actors and production crews.
In upgrading to Vyond’s enterprise plan, Whole Foods is also able to capitalize on the Shared Spaces feature, which allows the teams to easily share assets, repurpose each other’s work, and generally collaborate across projects and initiatives.
And Jason has noticed that their team’s training video content tends to get more engagement—and more positive employee NPS scores — than the print content they share. “Anecdotally, more people like to watch a course than read it.”
The ability to create something great in a day with Vyond —when it used to take us three, four, five days to complete — has been a game changer for us to keep up with the speed of business — and it is fast.
Bryan McElroySenior Team Lead of Change Enablement, Training, and Communications
65% of the Fortune 500 and millions of users rely on Vyond.
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#### Illinois Courts Make Major Policies Stick with Vyond
Illinois Courts Make Major Policies Stick with Vyond
Vyond helps court staff across 102 counties understand high-stakes policies
About Administrative Office of the Illinois Courts
The Access to Justice and Court Services divisions of the Administrative Office of the Illinois Courts collaborate to ensure Illinois’ 102-county court system has the information and resources it needs to run their courts and assist court users.
Industry
Government
Challenge
The Administrative Offices of the Illinois Courts support state judges, lawyers, circuit clerks, and other staffers in serving court users across 102 counties and 25 judicial circuits.
One of the Courts’ most important training topics is the Safe Harbor Policy, which outlines what employees can and cannot legally say to court users. While the focus is on helping employees deliver good customer service to court users, there’s also risk. Employees who stray from the policy may cross the line into giving advice and could be prosecuted for “unauthorized practice of law.” For example: employees can point users to resources, but they can’t recommend a certain lawyer.
Previously, the Courts offered in-person training on Safe Harbor, with role plays, quizzes and knowledge checks, plus text-based materials. But hosting live sessions across the state was proving unsustainable — plus, staff are bound to courtroom schedules, so it’s difficult to coordinate in-person training attendance — and text-based content alone wasn’t enough. The Administrative Office team needed an effective, engaging digital approach.
“This wasn’t a ‘nice to have’ — it’s mission-critical that our circuit clerks and court staff understand and follow Safe Harbor Policy,” says Jill Roberts, Deputy Director, Access to Justice Division of the Illinois Courts. “We wanted to remake the training into an engaging digital experience, and we’ve got to invest our limited resources wisely. Vyond videos struck me as a great fit to accomplish both.”
Approach
Training Specialist Angie Kanak hadn’t previously used Vyond, but she got up to speed quickly for this project. She gathered and assessed all the relevant Safe Harbor Policy training content, then created a video series that incorporated light-hearted examples of acceptable and unacceptable interactions to explain important parts of the policy.
She organized the new video series into a scope and sequence in Rise 360, with a quiz between each video to check for learner understanding.
“I’m trying to make the course very engaging and convenient,” Angie says. “If learning is inconvenient, most people will not do it. Especially in a demanding workplace, sending learners an email with five different attachments and telling them, ‘you’ll be held responsible for knowing this material’ isn’t effective or engaging.”
How Vyond helped
Angie says the real test for the newly launched Safe Harbor Policy video series will come in 2025, when the next election cycle brings in a new cohort of circuit clerks for training. But early anecdotal feedback has been extremely positive.
“The new Safe Harbor Policy is an awesome addition to our current training,” says Hon. Katherine Keefe, Clerk of the Circuit Court in McHenry County, Illinois. “It gets away from dry material with no interaction and makes the content more fun, holding the interest of our diverse staff and reinforcing their understanding of this topic that they deal with every day.”
Building on the project’s success, Angie is currently creating a statewide onboarding training series about the basics of the Illinois Court system with Vyond. The goal is to give all new court employees the same strong foundation to build upon and help overcome disparities in training resources across counties.
Angie has plans to create externally-facing content, too. She’d like to help educate court users about the court system and navigating common processes, like changing a legal name or handling probate issues, and has been experimenting with Vyond Go to help her create short explainer videos.
“I want to build out a resource library to help all Illinoisans better understand our court system,” Angie says. “Vyond can help me do that.”
We’ve used Vyond animated videos to explain some serious legal topics, and they get positive reception from judges, state’s attorneys, and circuit clerks.
Angie KanakTraining Specialist, Court Services DivisionAdministrative Office of the Illinois Courts
65% of the Fortune 500 and millions of users rely on Vyond.
Try Vyond Today
#### Indeed Fuels Sellers’ Success with Vyond
Indeed Fuels Sellers’ Success with Vyond
Vyond-based tools training helps keep 1,000+ Sales reps at peak performance
About Indeed
Indeed is the #1 job website in the world. The global company offers products and services to jobseekers and hiring companies to connect people to new opportunities.
Industry
Outsourcing / Call Center Operations
Employees
4,000+
Challenge
Indeed’s sales leadership found a compelling correlation: the sellers most proficient with internal sales tools — customer relationship management software, sales enablement platforms — are also the ones who tend to generate the most revenue. So to help 1,000+ global sellers get the most from sales tools, enablement teams created a training series comprising short recordings of voice-narrated slide decks.
But there was a problem. Product managers for one particular tool noticed sellers were using it less and were also less engaged with training resources about it. So they partnered with Virgenia Hall, Senior Learning & Development Specialist, Systems & Tools, to revamp the training program for accuracy and stronger engagement.
Virgenia saw this project as a great fit for Vyond videos. She was already well versed in the platform: since 2021, Indeed’s Vyond users have spanned Virgenia’s broader team and five others across the company, like Talent Management, ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) and Information Security.
“I wanted to build a clearer case for not just how, but where, when, and why Sales reps would use these systems and workflows — the ‘what’s in it for me.’ That’s where Vyond would come in,” Virgenia said.
Approach
Virgenia gathered the team’s existing content and prompted Vyond’s AI-powered script and video generator, Vyond Go, with transcripts from the one-minute voiceover training videos. In the draft video outputs, she adjusted the characters and scripts, adding more context around workflow steps, including scenarios to help reps understand why and when they should take certain actions. She also added screenshots of tools’ interfaces where appropriate.
Then she used Elucidat eLearning software to create quizzes at the end of each course that gauged learners’ understanding and a “leaderboard” that showed learners how they were stacking up to their colleagues.
How Vyond helped
Virgenia says Vyond significantly reduced her time investment.
“Recreating those one-minute voiceover sessions into videos would normally have taken me a full day. With the plug-and-play aspect of Vyond Go, it took me two hours,” she says.
Going forward, Virgenia and her team will partner with system owners to do annual reviews of training content to reassess and make any required changes. “I’m imagining Vyond is going to make the updating process a lot less daunting,” she says.
At one point a Vyond competitor reached out with a pitch and I said ‘absolutely not — it doesn’t do what we need it to do.’ Nothing’s like Vyond. I’m a loyal customer.
Virgenia HallSenior Learning & Development Specialist, Systems & Tools
65% of the Fortune 500 and millions of users rely on Vyond.
Try Vyond Today
#### Leading Health Solutions Company Drives Learner Engagement with Vyond
Leading Health Solutions Company Drives Learner Engagement with Vyond
Constant change and quick turnarounds are blockers no more
About the company
This leading U.S. health solutions company provides a broad range of health care services from pharmacy to health plans.
Industry
Healthcare
Employees
300,000
Challenge
The 1,200 relationship managers working for the prescription insurance subsidiary of this major U.S. health solutions company provide firstline support for millions of end customers.
To succeed, it’s crucial that these relationship managers stay up to date on prescription policies and procedures so they can properly navigate the company’s complex systems and prevent claim processing errors. Mistakes can create problems with prescription pricing and accuracy, delayed claims processing, costly corrections—and poor customer experience. And relationship managers’ frustration with insufficient training leads to increased turnover.
Ensuring benefits relationship managers stay up to speed on business-critical information falls to the organization’s Client Services Training & Communications Senior Manager of Instructional Design and a broader team of 500 internal trainers. And videos created with Vyond are one of their biggest keys to success.
Approach
The team uses Vyond for many different relationship manager training programs, including onboarding. “We use Vyond for role-specific, day-in-the-life–style orientation videos and GIFs, all of which has been exceedingly helpful in creating engagement in our LMS lessons,” says the Senior Manager.
Vyond videos also help relationship managers understand major initiatives, such as a recent push to increase the accuracy of their responses. For this, the team created a series of videos explaining expectations, policies, procedures, and job role specifics, with plenty of examples. “Using Vyond helps keep the content consumable and simple,” he says.
Beyond training, the team uses templated videos made with Vyond to more efficiently showcase operational accomplishments, instead of asking leaders to record regular video messages.
How Vyond helped
The team says stronger learner engagement and time savings are the two biggest benefits of using Vyond.
“Vyond lets us give our relationship managers the why behind trainings to engage them at the outset,” the Senior Manager says. And better engagement paves the way for higher accuracy, better customer service, and reduced turnover.
Also, the team is spending less time creating content because of the platform’s intuitive interface, extensive template library, and features that allow them to quickly create and share assets across users.
“A few years ago we created a learning journey for account management where we animate the journey as a car,” he adds. “It took us about 20 hours to create it in Articulate. But now with Vyond, we can create something similar in just a few clicks.”
We use Vyond to grab our audience’s attention and help convey the context — the “why” — behind training courses and communications.
Senior Manager of Instructional DesignClient Services Training & Communications
65% of the Fortune 500 and millions of users rely on Vyond.
Try Vyond Today
#### Michigan State Guides Fundraisers Through Transformation with Vyond
Michigan State Guides Fundraisers Through Transformation with Vyond
Vyond content guided staff through a radical technology change
About Michigan State
Michigan State University is a top-30 public university in East Lansing with a global base of more than 500,000 alumni. The University Advancement department supports critical fundraising efforts by building relationships with MSU alumni, donors, and friends.
Industry
Higher Education
Employees
13,000+
Challenge
MSU’s University Advancement staff builds relationships that help secure hundreds of millions of dollars in donations each year to support university programs and growth. The department’s operations depend on accurate data, so it’s important that their 300+ busy fundraisers and staff members are trained up on systems and tools — and have the ability to find and input data easily on the go.
In 2021, the department was transitioning to a modern donor relationship platform. “This was one of the biggest changes fundraisers would ever go through here. They were learning a whole new language, all new business rules, new navigation, a brand new system, all in a remote environment,” says Adeline Wharton, Learning Designer and Instructor on the Business Process Improvement & Analysis team. “Even more than usual, this training program had to be engaging. PowerPoint and documents weren’t going to cut it.”
Adeline recognized the team needed a flexible tool that would help them create a variety of training video content. She bought a Vyond license on recommendation from peers at the University of Utah, who had used Vyond to train their staff on the same new platform.
Approach
Adeline, along with Training Specialist Laura Fenger, three volunteer staff members, and three student interns, partnered with subject-matter experts to build out a progressive, multiyear learning program that explained a whole new vocabulary and walked through navigation and workflows. Vyond’s vast asset and template library let the team organize courses into different themes — like a superhero story or “back to school” — to maintain momentum.
Beyond videos, Adeline and Laura also used Vyond to create a library of supplemental program materials, like graphics, quick-reference guides, GIFs, posters, stickers, and thumbnail images. All told, for this project the team delivered 119 documents, 166 Vyond videos, and 170 games based on the videos.
Because the training team was creating their content while the tech team was still building out and customizing the platform, there was a need to make constant edits. But Vyond’s user-friendly platform made adjusting on the fly simple. “Vyond made updates so much easier and helped us stay organized through the whole process,” Adeline says.
How Vyond helped
The new platform successfully launched in July 2023, in parallel with the old tool being phased out.
“This project was like the beginning of Wizard of Oz: we started in black and white, and by the end, we were all in color. It was a huge change. And Vyond helped us get there,” says Laura.
Feedback about the training has been extremely positive thus far: fundraisers report they “felt well prepared” to make the switch. And one fundraiser said that, at a conference with peers from other universities, they were able to show someone who was in the midst of the same transition how to do a workflow in the new tool.
Though the huge project has wrapped, Adeline and Laura say they continue finding new ways to use Vyond that improve their communications. Some of their current favorites include microlearning videos, enhancements to PowerPoint slides, GIFs for emails and intranet articles, graphics, and virtual Zoom backgrounds. “If an email has a Vyond GIF at the beginning, it’s much more likely to be read,” says Laura.
Our Vyond content is more effective at getting noticed across the department.
Adeline WhartonLearning Designer and Instructor, Business Process Improvement & Analysis
65% of the Fortune 500 and millions of users rely on Vyond.
Try Vyond Today
#### Percepta Empowers Global Call Center Excellence with Vyond
Percepta Empowers Global Call Center Excellence with Vyond
Constant change and quick turnarounds are blockers no more
About Percepta
Percepta is a global customer relationship organization that serves major automotive brands, managing all forms of contact with their clients, customers, prospective customers, suppliers, and distribution networks. Established in 2000, Percepta is a global joint venture with Ford Motor Company and TTEC Holdings, Inc.
Industry
Outsourcing / Call Center Operations
Employees
4,000+
Challenge
To keep call center reps informed about their automotive clients’ fast-changing technology and systems, Percepta needed a way to create engaging, multilingual training content that supported a contextually relevant task. A quality media solution needed to be created quickly and efficiently — sometimes within an hour. Producing traditional videos and translating content was slow and costly.
Percepta’s instructional design team needed a solution to make their media-production process more flexible and collaborative, ensure high-quality translations, help them meet fast turnaround times — and ultimately help to deliver a world-class learning experience to their clients.
Approach
To address these challenges, Percepta integrated Vyond into its content creation workflow. Vyond’s advanced features proved instrumental, particularly instant translation, ultra-high-quality AI voices, and Vyond Go, the AI-powered instant video maker.
The team started breathing new life into traditional, text-based program material. On one project, Chermaine Samodio, Instructional Design Supervisor, transformed a PowerPoint document into a dynamic microlearning module with Vyond Go. “I created a one-minute intro video with engaging scenes in five minutes,” she said. “Saved me a lot of time!”
The Vyond platform also makes frequent updates painless. “We used to have team members do our voice-overs, so when things changed, I spent an hour or two trying to hunt somebody down and schedule them and get them to re-record,” said Timothy Sanders, Instructional Designer Supervisor. “Now that we’re using AI voices, I can make updates in a few seconds and then translate instantly.”
How Vyond helped
The team has seen so much value in using Vyond and feels so confident in the time savings they’ll see with a new in-platform translation workflow that they’ve steadily increased their enterprise license from ten to 20 seats and have created over 2,000 videos so far!
“With Vyond Go, I can quickly create engaging, professional-quality videos that significantly enhance my eLearning content,” says Cris Buriel, Instructional Designer. “I can concentrate more on applying instructional design principles and developing effective content rather than getting bogged down by the technicalities of video creation.”
The team also sees higher engagement and positive feedback around their Vyond training content. Timothy recalls a celebrated project where he created scenario-based Vyond training to help employees better handle inquiries from upset customers and reinforce their roles as brand ambassadors. “It changed the perspective of how we can deliver content and bring humor to something serious while still getting the point across effectively.”
“The global edit feature is very efficient,” adds Robbie Lorenzo, Instructional Designer. “I frequently need to change my videos’ assets, characters, and other attributes, and it means I don’t need to go back and change each scene when changing assets. The hours I spend creating storyboards from scratch are shortened to minutes with this feature’s suggested video templates.”
Their success motivates the team to continue finding new ways to use Vyond, and usage has grown in areas like internal communications. In fact, one of their videos, explaining instructional design and how to best partner with their team, was a Gold winner at the 2022 MarCom Awards.
The range of languages has helped us tremendously. I use Vyond for translating all my video content.
Timothy SandersInstructional Designer Supervisor
65% of the Fortune 500 and millions of users rely on Vyond.
Try Vyond Today
#### ProMobile BI Designs Indian State Government Anti-Tobacco Campaign with Vyond
ProMobile BI Designs Indian State Government Anti-Tobacco Campaign with Vyond
Vyond videos raise awareness in India schools about tobacco’s risks
About Promobile BI
ProMobile BI is a global small business that develops L&D programs of all types: eLearning, instructor-led programs, video, AI and augmented-reality solutions. Their principals are experts in adult learning theory, instructional design, gamification, project management, data analysis, and program evaluation.
Industry
Business Services
Employees
20
Challenge
Throughout India, an estimated 29% of adults use some form of tobacco and it’s taking a huge human and economic toll. India’s department of education set out to address the problem starting within their ecosystem. With a grant through the U.S. National Institutes of Health, they partnered with experts from India’s Healis School for Public Health, Dana Farber Cancer Institute, and Harvard Medical School to develop a training curriculum to reduce tobacco use among school personnel.
The instructor-led pilot program proved successful for one small school district, earning the team more funding. But with hundreds of districts across India, the in-person program would be impossible to scale. So the team set out to find digital ways to deliver the content and an approach that would help build community around participants, reinforcing their decision to stop using tobacco.
The team recruited ProMobile BI’s India-based team, led by Paromita Mehta, and gamification expert Chuck Sigmund for help. Paromita and team had been using Vyond since 2015 when she was introduced to the tool during her time at Amazon and knew it’d be a versatile tool for creating highly engaging content that could be gamified, while simpler to use than other creative tools.
Approach
The team drew from the original curriculum to create a total of 150 minutes of content across 16 Vyond videos, with characters and scenes reflecting the 500+ participants across 80 schools. Topics ranged from the health risks of using tobacco to ways to support fellow teachers who might be irritable from nicotine withdrawal. Assessments and journaling activities helped reinforce learning and encourage reflection.
Mobile phones are everywhere in India, so a mobile app was an easy choice to deliver the six-month curriculum — and well-suited to strategic gamification and digital storytelling. To hold participants’ interest, the training program weaves in elements of Indian culture, notably the symbolic use of colors and kites.
The ultimate prize was recognition: the heads of Dana Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School will visit the winning school personally to deliver a plaque.
How Vyond helped
Using Vyond allowed the project team to tailor the content precisely for their audience and brought levity to a serious topic. “We could customize the smallest details to make sure people saw themselves in the videos,” Chuck said. “Vyond gave us the flexibility and power to create a highly creative and immersive environment for the participants. And the videos are well-suited for use in a fully gamified environment.”
Vyond’s extensive asset library was valuable and where assets didn’t yet exist, the Vyond team jumped in to help. For example, Chuck worked with Vyond’s customer success team to outfit a character in an authentic-looking kurta — a long, tunic-style shirt — by combining a t-shirt and apron asset in the same color. They also found clever ways to visualize healthy and unhealthy lungs.
Language versatility was another useful feature. Paromita and the team created the content in English, but translated all text and text-to-speech into Hindi. “The flexibility with language was critical for us using Vyond. This wouldn’t have worked as an English-based program.”
Based on this program’s impact and success, the project team is now working to secure funding so they can scale it across all schools across India.
“This program has a truly unique and creative design. The teams worked diligently to build something that is not only in line with Indian culture, but is engaging and truly impactful,” says Dr. Eve Nagler, Sr. Scientist, Dana Farber Cancer Institute.
“There’s value in all training, and I am proud of all the work we do at ProMobile. But from a ‘value to society’ perspective, I am extraordinarily honored to have been part of this project that is making a real difference in India,” says Chuck.
Vyond gave us the flexibility and power to create a highly creative and immersive environment for participants. And the videos were well-suited for use in a fully gamified environment.
Chuck SigmundPresident, ProMobile BI
65% of the Fortune 500 and millions of users rely on Vyond.
Try Vyond Today
#### Quickbase Doubles Customers’ Course Completion Rates with Vyond
Quickbase Doubles Customers’ Course Completion Rates with Vyond
Course completion rates jumped from 33% to 68% with Vyond
About QuickbaseQuickbase is a Boston-based software company. Its flexible application platform helps companies in any industry to see, connect, and control their projects and workflows.
IndustrySoftware and technology
Employees750+
Challenge
Quickbase offered an introductory course to help customers learn the basics of its platform and adopt the software more broadly across their teams and companies.
The problem was, only a third of the audience was completing the course. And that was after a recent revamp. Quickbase’s customer education team had already converted a text-heavy original course in Adobe Captivate into a more interactive one using Articulate. But the overhaul had only improved completion rates by a percentage point.
The pressure was on to get more customers both completing the course and the full certification program. “We had to find another way,” says Ashley DeKerlegand, Director of Customer Education at Quickbase. “That was when we brought in Vyond.”
Approach
Senior Technical Learning Experience Designer Jay Urquhart began rebuilding the Articulate content as a series of Vyond videos with a fun intergalactic theme, making use of Vyond’s scene template library.
“Before we get into using the product, we first want to cover some important basic concepts,” says Tracy Prentiss, Manager of Customer Education. “That gets boring when you’re just reading it in words. But watching it as part of a story, with characters explaining it to each other, becomes much more memorable and engaging.”
Given that the team would be making content updates frequently to match product release schedules, they opted to use Vyond’s text to speech and AI voices to simplify the process.
“Historically, we’ve had to record all that voice-over ourselves, which is not scalable,” says Ashley. “We’ve been so impressed by Vyond’s selection of AI voices — none of our content authoring programs has anything comparable.”
How Vyond Helped
Since the launch of the new Vyond course, the completion rates have more than doubled: up to 68% from 33%. The course’s Net Promoter Score (NPS) increased from 62 to 88. And Quickbase’s number of certified users and the product adoption rate of those users has dramatically improved.
“People are just raving about it,” Ashley says. “They just love the Vyond characters and storytelling.”
Ashley’s team is so proud of their work they submitted the course for the 2024 Brandon Hall Awards. And other departments at the company are taking notice.
“From a management perspective, I’m hearing the team say that Vyond projects are the best projects they work on,” Ashley says. “And our marketing team loves our videos so much, they’re interested in getting some seats too.”
Ashley DeKerlegandDirector of Customer Education, Quickbase
“We’ve been so impressed by Vyond’s selection of AI voices — none of our content authoring programs has anything comparable.”
Read Related Case Studies
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65% of the Fortune 500 and millions of users rely on Vyond.
Try Vyond Today
#### Salesloft Helps Reps Adopt a New Company Narrative with Vyond
Salesloft Helps Reps Adopt a New Company Narrative with Vyond
After training, reps’ use of new key terms significantly increased
About SalesloftFounded in 2011 and headquartered in Atlanta, Salesloft is an industry-leading software company that powers durable revenue growth for the world’s most demanding companies. Salesloft uses purpose-built AI to help market-facing teams prioritize and take action on what matters most, from first touch to upsell and renewal. More than 5,000 customers including Google, 3M, IBM, Shopify, and Square gain a performance force multiplier with Salesloft by shifting to a durable revenue engagement model, helping them solve the complexities of modern B2B sales and unlock revenue efficiency.
IndustrySoftware and technology
Employees900
Challenge
After Salesloft acquired Drift, the conversational AI company, the company’s identity evolved. What was formerly known as a revenue workflow platform for sales teams quickly became the premier end-to-end revenue orchestration platform, closing the gap between sales and marketing and allowing go-to-market teams to orchestrate a hyper-personalized, omnichannel buyer journey at scale. As a result, Salesloft leadership decided the company needed a new narrative to match the new market offering.
It was up to Salesloft’s Sr. Revenue Learning Manager Andrés Rivera to rally sellers around the new narrative and start speaking the new language.
“Our team’s job was to take the new Salesloft narrative from a presentation slides format, which contained a lot of new ideas and hefty new terminology, and translate it into an engaging learning experience for team members,” Andrés said. “I had used Vyond at my previous company and knew it’d be a great fit for the challenge.”
Approach
Andrés partnered with the marketing team to transform content from the slides into a script that told the story of Salesloft’s evolution through a salesperson’s perspective, using a Star Wars theme to aid in the storytelling and to draw the audience in.
Andrés used the Contemporary style for scenario-based storytelling, with interludes of an AI avatar and mixed media elements to provide additional context.
“I had saved an earlier interview clip of our CEO on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. He did an amazing job of telling our story, so it was a perfect fit here,” Andrés said.
All told, the hour-long course included 10 Vyond videos that Andrés hosted on Salesloft’s new LMS, Mindtickle.
How Vyond Helped
Upon launch, the course was rolled out to the entire 180-person revenue team and was 100% completed.
The ultimate goal was for sellers to consistently use language from the new narrative in their conversations with customers and prospects, something the team can monitor and analyze with the Salesloft platform. After the completion of the training, the team saw a significant increase in the use of the terms. And Vyond was a major contributor in helping the team elevate and deliver an amazing learner experience. “I definitely could not have delivered this experience without using Vyond,” Andrés said.
Based on the course’s success in the revenue organization, leaders asked for the course to be rolled out to all employees. The quality of the content had colleagues taking notice: “My marketing teammate was floored to hear that I created the content. They thought we hired a third party,” Andrés laughed. “That was the highest compliment!”
Andrés RiveraSr. Revenue Learning Manager, Salesloft
“My marketing teammate was floored to hear that I created the content. They thought we hired a third party. That was the highest compliment!”
Read Related Case Studies
Indeed Fuels Sellers’ Success with Vyond
This Global Tech Company Trains New Sales Reps 5x Faster with Vyond
Tanium Transforms C-Suite Presentations into Video Summaries with Vyond
See All Customer Stories
65% of the Fortune 500 and millions of users rely on Vyond.
Try Vyond Today
#### Tanium Simplifies Complex Cybersecurity Topics with Vyond
Tanium Simplifies Complex Cybersecurity Topics with Vyond
Vyond training helps Tanium’s customers, partners, and employees understand their platform
About Tanium
Tanium is a cybersecurity and endpoint management platform serving some of the world’s most security-conscious organizations.
Industry
Software and Technology
Employees
2,000
Challenge
Tanium’s cybersecurity and endpoint management solutions are highly complex. When customers and prospects don’t fully understand Tanium’s solutions, they miss out on the full value they’re due. So to help educate these audiences, the training team manages a certification curriculum.
“Getting Started with Tanium” is their free, public introductory course. Learners’ experience with the course influences whether or not they continue on with the program (and in some cases, if they want to move forward with becoming customers).
The challenge was that the course began with a series of text-based modules, requiring learners to absorb complex material through reading alone. There was a clear opportunity to improve engagement, course completions, and learning retention.
Tanium’s ten-person training team sought a way to boost engagement and make the content resonate better.
Approach
Chaya Rao, director of training development, suggested they deliver this critical content with videos created with Vyond.
“In a highly technical industry like ours, we’ve found that subject-matter experts may put more focus on the science — accuracy and details — than the art — the storytelling and learner experience,” Chaya says. “Both matter and it’s our job to keep them in balance.”
Chaya and her team assessed all the existing text-based material for “Getting Started with Tanium” to determine where scenarios and visuals would be most valuable.
“We wanted Vyond to help us explain not only what the product could do, but also the context for why or when someone would use a feature,” Chaya says.
The team brought their 50+ newly created Vyond videos into Rise 360 and added interactive elements like knowledge checks.
How Vyond helped
With the revamped intro course launched, the team continues to gather learner survey data about it. And anecdotal feedback has been very positive.
Given the positive reception, Chaya and her team next plan to use Vyond to overhaul a program that’s currently held as a three-day, in-person training. They’ve also been using Vyond to create simplified visuals of Tanium product features and to animate complex, product-related processes to make them easier to understand.
The team’s Vyond projects are getting noticed across the company. They’ve gotten requests for Vyond videos for sales enablement and marketing content, business processes and policies, compliance topics, and holiday-greeting content.
The team has been inspired to upgrade to an Enterprise license based on their broad Vyond adoption and the full development roadmap ahead. And especially because Tanium is a security company, the Enterprise Secure Suite features were also a major selling point.
According to Chaya, “At Tanium, Vyond is here to stay.”
More Tanium teams want to recreate their content in Vyond for higher impact. So we’re upgrading to an Enterprise license, onboarding more Vyond creators across the company, and training them to become power users.
Chaya RaoDirector of Training Development
65% of the Fortune 500 and millions of users rely on Vyond.
Try Vyond Today
#### Tanium Transforms C-Suite Presentations into Video Summaries with Vyond
TaniumTransforms C-Suite Presentations into Video Summaries with Vyond
Enablement, sales, and marketing teams use the videos to educate audiences on demand
About TaniumTanium is a cybersecurity and endpoint management platform serving some of the world’s most security-conscious organizations.
IndustrySoftware and technology
Employees2,000
Challenge
During Tanium’s annual user conference, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Matt Quinn delivered an in-person keynote presentation to customers, prospects, and partners on a timely and important topic: Tanium’s strategic approach to autonomous AI features and the company’s commitment to safety.
Tanium’s enablement team saw that, for maximum effect, Matt’s presentation and core messages had to reach beyond the conference. They wanted to distill the message down to its key components and repackage it in an engaging way. Doing so would allow Tanium’s sales, marketing, and education teams to bring the content to a much broader audience, across multiple channels.
Vice President of Enablement Stefanie Coburn was familiar with the Vyond content that Director of Training Development Chaya Rao’s team had been creating for Tanium’s customer education programs. She approached Chaya about creating a video version of Matt’s keynote.
Approach
Chaya and her team set to work creating an abridged, two-minute Vyond version of Matt’s core messages from the keynote.
Given Matt’s limited availability, and to create flexibility for future content edits, the team used Vyond’s Photo-to-Character feature to create an animated character version of Matt to deliver his talking points. They also used text to speech and an ultra-high-quality AI voice with an Australian accent to mirror Matt’s own, Chaya said. (Matt remarked that his animated character turned out like “a polished version of himself” — and even got the voice right!)
To visualize some of the technical aspects of Matt’s messaging, the team incorporated Tanium’s own imagery as well as Shutterstock photos and video clips.
How Vyond Helped
With Vyond, the team easily converted a key message from an 80-minute live presentation into a short, engaging video that Tanium’s marketing, sales, and training and partner enablement teams use to educate audiences, anytime, anywhere. It’ll also become part of a new course on Tanium’s autonomous features.
“Creating outcome-oriented messaging that’s memorable to our sellers, partners, and customers is foundational to how we approach our platform positioning,” says Stefanie Coburn, Vice President of Enablement. “We are pleased with how easy Vyond made it for us to create an animated character for our CTO, choose a realistic voice, and add real-world illustrations required for our story.”
Stefanie CoburnVice President of Enablement, Tanium
“We’re pleased with how easy Vyond made it for us to create an animated character for our CTO, choose a realistic voice, and add real-world illustrations required for our story.”
Read Related Case Studies
Tanium Simplifies Complex Cybersecurity Topics with Vyond
This Global Tech Company Trains New Sales Reps 5x Faster with Vyond
Indeed Fuels Sellers’ Success with Vyond
See All Customer Stories
65% of the Fortune 500 and millions of users rely on Vyond.
Try Vyond Today
#### This Global Tech Company Trains New Sales Reps 5x Faster with Vyond
This Global Tech Company Trains New Sales Reps 5x Faster with Vyond
Vyond helped transform a text-based onboarding course into an interactive experience that’s 80% shorter — and more effective
About the company
This global tech company is a world leader for integrated travel, expense, and invoice management.
Industry
Software and Technology
Employees
105,000+
Challenge
The Learning Experience team at a global multinational technology company creates training to help their 5,000+ sales and marketing team members supporting its enterprise platforms do their jobs well.
One of the team’s biggest initiatives is to provide new sales hires with a deep understanding of the key customer profiles, from accounts payable to enterprise leadership roles, like CFO and CIO, that they’ll be reaching out to: who they are, what they care about, and how to position their software as a solution that supports customers’ business goals.
For years, they assigned learners a primarily text-based course that comprised five sessions, each about 30 minutes. The information was great, says Laurel Schulert, Senior Director of Learning Experience, but the presentation was proving ineffective.
“It was dry. If you did all those courses back to back, it was really boring by the time you got to the third one, and we were asking new hires to complete five.”
So Senior Instructional Designer Dave Kerschbaum and a few other team members set out to revamp the onboarding course with Vyond.
Approach
Dave and the team used Vyond and Articulate Storyline to recreate the course as an interactive, video-game-style experience.
Learners “meet” key customer personas as Vyond characters in an office setting. Clicking on a character like the CFO opens a branching module where she’ll explain her responsibilities and challenges, the ways a tool like the tech company’s platform could help her team, and her potential objections.
How Vyond helped
Learners (and their managers) find the revamped course more engaging than the original course.
“You’re learning the same information as the text-based course, but you’re learning it through the roleplay of conversations and it’s so much more interesting,” Laurel says. “It’s not boring anymore. People are genuinely telling us that it’s fun, and we’re really proud of it!”
The new course also delivers the same information faster. The text-based course ran about 2.5 hours, whereas the new version takes learners 30 minutes maximum to complete — a time savings of 80%.
The Learning Experience team says they continue to rely on Vyond for projects big and small. One of their favorite use cases is creating short Vyond videos about customer stories to help new sales reps build a library of anecdotes they can reference in conversations.
The team also creates Vyond videos as standalone assets to embed within PowerPoint presentations or as a series to include in full eLearning courses. They’ve also used short Vyond videos to promote and build excitement for live, instructor-led training, like a recent course for managers on inclusive hiring.
We’re Vyond enthusiasts. It’s a tool we really enjoy using. It’s so easy for everyone to jump right in and it’s really fast to put together a high-quality product.
Laurel SchulertSenior Director of Learning Experience
65% of the Fortune 500 and millions of users rely on Vyond.
Try Vyond Today
#### Using Vyond with Premiere
Using Vyond with Premiere
Donna Huffman, Media Communications Specialist at McGohan Brabender, is a pro at blending Vyond with Premiere. Her creative and experimental video skills are why she is our January Video Hero. Vyond’s Video Heroes are customers whose videos are creative standouts and that we think other Vyond video makers can learn from.
Here is Donna’s innovative video across three screens that caught our attention.
We caught up with Donna to learn about her video-making process, usage of Premiere, and tips she recommends to new video makers. But, before we deep dive into her process let’s meet Donna and the rest of the McGohan Brabender video team:
What are the Vyond videos used for? Are you working towards a specific goal?
DH: I work for an insurance broker. We use these videos for clients, prospects, and employers that are looking for a simpler way to deliver employee benefits. My boss, who is a Marketing genius, researched and found Vyond online when we agreed to do an animated video series for a business partner. We decided to produce a series of 27 videos explaining how all the different lines of coverage work (medical, HSA, dental, etc.). The videos are used to assist our clients and their employees by increasing their knowledge regarding health care and to help them make the right choices individually. Our goal is to empower healthier living.
The nice thing about doing this in Vyond is how I can easily use a video I’ve already created and change one or two items to be specific to a company’s benefits. Employees can watch these at home with spouses and make educated decisions as a family.
We also use Vyond for what we call, “Daily Disruptors.” They’re videos our sales staff use on social media, in emails, and in meetings to show prospects and clients how we can help them engage their employees for healthier living, keep healthcare costs down, and why we can do this better than the competition. We film the consultant in our production studio and use animation to explain the “meat” of the story.
What advice would you give to a beginner making an animated video?
DH: One quick way to learn Vyond is to create a “test” video using the different scene templates. You start with a short script or story. Then put the scenes together, save them, and watch. Afterward, you go back and change some of the props, characters, backgrounds, etc. and customize them to suit your story.
I promise, you’ll be so into it and having so much fun, your brain will start exploding with ideas. We all learn as we go when trying something new. The more we do it, the better we get. Things like this have to be hands on.
Talk us through your start-to-finish process for making a video.
DH: When we create videos, our scripts are written by our professional writers. Because of deadlines, I make the animations before the voice-over is recorded.
I first create a scene with an extended length of time so that I have enough time to work with syncing the animation and the voiceover. Meanwhile, the “movements,” or effects, already in the scenes (eyes blinking, background movements, etc.) continue. Extending the timing of each scene means you can splice and cut the scene wherever you need to connect it to the next one without losing the emotion and movement.
Then I copy the scene and add it after the existing one. Afterward, I add the animated text entry, change of character expressions, etc.
Vyond is perfect for using green screen keyframing because when you delete the background in a template, it automatically creates the green background you can key out.
Let me show you what I meant with my escalator example. In one, I took out everything except the background which has the movement of the wall with pictures. For the other two I took out the background and made sure none of the characters had any green coloring that would also key out. One with the characters going down the escalator, the other with the reactions on their faces as the first character falls down the escalator (see video below).
Here’s how to do it in Premiere Pro:
Add the background on the timeline
Then add the first scene with characters in the timeline on top of it
Go to Effects -> Keying -> Color Key
Using the dropper tool, click to select the green in the scene and adjust Color Tolerance, Edge Thin and Edge Feather
Connect the next scene and key the same
The reason you would do it this way is to have the background movement be consistent. If the pictures on the wall are in different places when you connect the two scenes, it will be very noticeable.
The 3 Monitor Video
How did this video come to be? What led to the idea of using multiple monitors?
DH: The credit for this, once again, goes to my boss. We have a “room” called the “Immersion Center” at all three of our locations. We invite clients and prospects for meetings to show visually how we can help them engage employees while keeping their healthcare costs down. One of the ways we do this is to show multiple videos using a wall that has three large TV screen monitors. Because there are multiple people attending, everyone has a good view, making watching more fun. It’s innovative, just like our approach to taking care of our clients.
What technology was used to sync across multiple monitors?
DH: The process was done entirely in-house. You can buy complicated, expensive equipment that will put your video on multiple screens, but this will greatly limit what you can do. All it does is expand the video which means parts of it will be hidden (including any text) by the edging of the monitors. In my opinion, it is a waste of time and money.
My normal video sequence size in Premiere Pro is 1920 x 1080 HD. 1920 x 3 = 5760. I start by making a sequence of 5760 (W) x 1080 (H). Then I add two vertical lines showing three sections. After putting a few scenes together you will need to play it on the monitors to adjust these lines. The placement will depend on the mounting of the monitors and their edging size. From here, be creative about the way the scenes enter, exit, and which screen they show on. Save color backgrounds in Vyond so you can be consistent with what shows on the screens. This is a fun project and not as difficult as it appears.
What do you like to do to take your videos to the next level?
DH: Besides expanding the capabilities by using Premiere Pro, one of the many things I like about Vyond is the ability to make the videos fun. When creating videos, the key is to tell the story. In order to do that you not only need a good script, you need good visuals to keep your audience engaged.
Vyond’s extended library of templates, props, and characters, lets me put a humorous spin on boring topics that help keep the audience engaged.
Another thing I really like about Vyond is it moves; eyes blink, backgrounds move, and characters have emotions, expressions, and movements. You aren’t just putting a graphic up there that remains still. This helps keeps the audience’s attention while you are telling your story.
What are some of the challenges you face in Vyond and what are some workarounds you’ve found?
DH: The biggest issue I have with Vyond is syncing the audio with the visual. For me, it is difficult to have the animations change at the exact time I need them. Since you can’t listen to the audio while editing on the timeline, you have to: preview, go back and try to change the timing, preview again, and do this until you get it right. This is why I like creating the various scenes in Vyond and then taking them into Premiere Pro for the audio. It sounds like a lot of work but it is actually easier and faster. But, it is my understanding that the new Vyond is resolving this issue in the new video maker.
What are some of the best reactions and experiences you’ve had using Vyond?
DH: Clients like it because it also saves them time and money while ensuring all employees are getting the same message in a more engaging manner than a piece of paper. Employees like it because they can look at the information any time during the year, with spouses if need be, and always have it at their fingertips.
What is the single biggest reason you would recommend Vyond?
DH: You can create engaging, creative videos using the many templates, props, music, and characters. You can put a comical spin on it, make it serious, or create your own characters. It is fun putting these together and very easy. And you don’t have to use Premiere Pro or any other programs to do it. I have recommended this to people already, including some that have never made a video before.
#### WebCE’s Marketing and Product Teams Hit Sky-High Production Goals with Vyond
WebCE’s Marketing and Product Teams Hit Sky-High Production Goals with Vyond
A cross-team approach to video creates a competitive advantage
About WebCEHeadquartered in Dallas, Texas, WebCE is a leading provider of education and training solutions, from exam prep and continuing education to workplace and industry training. WebCE’s continuing education programs serve a variety of professional license types including insurance, securities, financial services, tax and accounting, and real estate.
IndustryOnline education & training
Employees100+
Challenge
Recently, company leadership at WebCE, a leading online education vendor, challenged its content-focused teams to help boost awareness of the wide range of educational content the company can create for its clients — including video training.For the company’s instructional design group, the obvious raw material to work with was its library of long-form (150+ pages) course curriculum documents.
Approach
First, on the product team, Design Services Supervisor Craig Hausmann and his team worked with subject-matter experts to identify segments of the curriculum for video transformation; then they wrote the scripts. After that, the video creation process is extremely fast. “Each video is done same-day. We’re a rapid-fire development company, and I’m always proud of that when we show off what we can do,” says Craig.
When Stacey Cessna, WebCE’s Director of Marketing, and Meg Aderholt, Marketing Media Specialist, saw what the Design Services team was doing with Vyond, they realized their team could also benefit by using Vyond to convert those training videos into bite-sized social media videos. So they added a seat for Marketing — and began publishing clips on WebCE’s YouTube channel, within blog posts, and on LinkedIn, where their content saw great engagement.
“Sharing our Vyond content across multiple channels keeps our brand in front of our audiences and helps us come across as the friendly, fun, and informative partners we want to be,” says Stacey. “Plus, it lets our audiences get a preview of our course experience.”
How Vyond Helped
Craig says Vyond has been key to WebCE’s high-volume, high-quality training course production. “For us, it’s always been about templatizing content, reusing characters, reusing scenes,” he says.
And, from a marketing perspective, Meg says that Vyond makes it a lot easier to take bigger content, chop it up, and recycle it in multiple different places. “I think that’s unique to Vyond video creation,” she says. “It’d be much more difficult if we were doing live action videos.”
Both teams say this Content Services and Marketing cross-team partnership is one of many examples of WebCE’s collaborative culture.
“Wherever we can share resources and leverage each other’s expertise for stronger results, like in this case,” says Stacey, “we’re going to do it.”
Meg AderholtMarketing Media SpecialistWebCE
“All the new Vyond features released over the past two years — and Screen Recording and Video to Action in particular — they’re really having a positive effect on our video creation. Can’t brag about them enough.”
Read Related Case Studies
American College of Education Creates High-Quality, High-Volume eLearning with Vyond
How the University of Illinois System’s Office of Medicaid Innovation Accelerated Video Production 400% With Vyond
Michigan State Guides Fundraisers Through Transformation with Vyond
See All Customer Stories
65% of the Fortune 500 and millions of users rely on Vyond.
Try Vyond Today
#### Why a Healthcare Products Company Relies on Vyond for Regulatory Compliance
Why a Healthcare Products Company Relies on Vyond for Regulatory Compliance
Vyond plays a key role in ensuring the company’s employee operators meet industry compliance standards
About the company
This multinational corporation produces pharmaceuticals, medical devices, and consumer packaged goods.
Industry
Healthcare
Challenge
At the pharmaceutical branch of a healthcare products company, the quality team’s mission is to ensure that their employee operators producing pharmaceutical products understand and follow proper procedures for safety, quality, and excellence.
In the heavily regulated pharmaceutical industry, even a small error can lead to costly consequences — like having to destroy entire batches of product — so effective training is critical.
The problem was, the text-heavy documentation outlining procedural pharmaceutical “good manufacturing practice” regulations (GMP) read like a legal contract — not an employee-friendly training manual. Even more confusing, process steps weren’t always laid out in the order employees actually experience them, because the documentation was written for compliance to health authority requirements rather than for operators. This formal, text-only approach was becoming a barrier to employee understanding — and better overall compliance.
“Wherever we can, we want to move away from read-only training,” says a leader from the quality team, noting this objective aligns to health authorities’ expectations, too.
While GMP requirements dictated that they couldn’t replace all written documentation, the team wanted to explore more visual — and multilingual — ways to train employees, using more operator-friendly language presented visually and audibly, leading them to Vyond.
Approach
The team started adding Vyond videos to their blended learning approach, which also incorporates training methods like individual hands-on training, eLearning, classes using virtual and augmented reality, live-action video, and classroom elements.
They’ve used Vyond videos to visualize and help employees better digest the content — like “good documentation practice in a GMP environment” — covering different learning styles since not everyone learns best by reading.
The team leader, who has by now produced over 300 Vyond videos, has found “error-based classroom training” supported by Vyond videos particularly helpful: creating specific content to correct common or recent errors.
“Our ‘find the error’ training videos stick with people more than reading five pages with no visuals,” she says.
“I like to use Vyond videos as an ice breaker for the training session,” she adds. “Trainees watch and say ‘oh, this can’t happen with us,’ and I’ll say ‘it did, two weeks ago.’ That captures attention. Then we can start our discussion and get into the details.”
How Vyond helped
Not only has Vyond increased their employee operators’ engagement with training and supported better results and training effectiveness, the leader also says it’s saved her team significant time and headaches from live-action video production.
Videos created in Vyond take 80% less time to produce than a live-action video, she says. They’re also much easier to edit and update, which is especially valuable in a highly regulated environment where processes change often.
She also appreciates Vyond’s text import/export feature, which lets her easily export video scripts for compliance reviews by quality experts. “If you want to make any changes, you just add the better wording in the cell, reimport, and the video is updated,” she says.
And finally, Vyond’s instant translation feature has been a big time saver for this international company with sites all over the world. “We can’t have materials only in English,” she says. “To translate things from one language to another, the translation feature is really saving us time.”
HR saw my Vyond training and wanted the same thing for all their training. A leader reached out to me asking, ‘what agency did you work with?’ I said, ‘it’s me — I’m the agency!’
Quality Team Leader
65% of the Fortune 500 and millions of users rely on Vyond.
Try Vyond Today
#### Why Terminix Relies on Vyond to Provide Critical Safety Training to Its Mobile Workforce
Why Terminix Relies on Vyond to Provide Critical Safety Training to Its Mobile Workforce
Enabling specialists to deliver chemical pest control safely to 50,000 customers daily
About Terminix
Owned by Rentokil Initial plc, Terminix is a leading provider of residential and commercial pest control. Combined, Rentokil and Terminix serve over 80 countries across 1,800 local branches.
Industry
Pest Control
Employees
19,000+
Challenge
Every day, Terminix specialists visit 50,000+ homes and businesses to protect them against pests like termites, mosquitos, and rodents. It’s critical that Terminix’s workforce is trained on best practices for the chemicals they use to ensure they’re operating in the safest possible way.
Specialists also need mobile access to technical content while they’re out in the field: for example, when they’re mixing pest control chemicals, technicians must always reference relevant label and safety information. Terminix’s proprietary mobile app was a great medium for delivering field training, but much of their training content was still text-based.
Senior instructional designer Jon Hegidio wanted to experiment with sharing microlearning videos, but live-action video production and upkeep had become too costly, both in dollars and carbon footprint.
Specifically, Jon and his team wanted the ability to produce animated videos that portrayed a wide variety of workplace environments and the flexibility to update videos as regulations changed. He had experience with Vyond from a previous role and thought it’d be a great fit for this challenge.
Approach
Jon’s team has used Vyond to transform complex, printed reference materials into highly engaging microlearning videos for Terminix’s mobile app on topics ranging from measuring a piece of land to mixing and applying a mosquito-control product with a sprayer.
“There’s a lot of work to be done and we want to get our specialists out into the field as fast as possible,” Jon says. “We’re seeing that our approach with training video and mobile access helps Terminix deliver better service more efficiently.”
How Vyond helped
Jon says Vyond helps Terminix move and iterate faster: now he and his team can quickly translate their ideas into storyboards and scripts, get stakeholder review, and create a finished product in house within hours, when it used to take days or weeks.
Using Vyond also saves the company “thousands and thousands of dollars” — and shrinks their projects’ carbon footprint — compared to traditional video or film production techniques, where script revisions, re-shoots, and talent rehires are not uncommon. In fact, their new animated video training approach has proven so successful, Terminix plans to expand its use globally.
“We’re turning around projects faster and less expensively than ever before,” Jon says.
Vyond has been such a great solution for us. It’s less expensive and labor-intensive compared to doing video production in-house, and it gives us the results we need. That’s a big win, both for our team and for management.
Jon HegidioSenior Instructional Designer
65% of the Fortune 500 and millions of users rely on Vyond.
Try Vyond Today
### eBooks
#### How Large Organizations Use Vyond
URL: https://www.vyond.com/blog/vyond_ebooks/how-large-organizations-use-vyond/
#### Improve Your Employee Communications with Animated Video
URL: https://www.vyond.com/blog/vyond_ebooks/improve-your-employee-communications-with-animated-video/
#### The Vyond Guide to Better Skills Training at Scale
URL: https://www.vyond.com/blog/vyond_ebooks/the-vyond-guide-to-better-skills-training-at-scale/
### Webinars
#### On-Demand Facebook Live: How to make a Vyond video from scratch
Create a Vyond video from scratch
Vyond video producers, Shahrzade and Sofala, went live on Facebook to share their production process for our “P.E.T.E” customer support training video. As they created a video from start to finish in Vyond, they shared tips about scripting, whiteboard animation, sound effects, transitions, character development, voiceover, camera movement, and more.
Watch their recording and follow along with template video below.
Customer support training video template
Here’s the completed video Sofala and Shahrzade build together in the recording above.
Have a Vyond account or free trial? Log in, open this template, and follow along with Sofala and Shahrzade to learn how to re-create the video on your own.
Customers are welcome to use this free template video as-is or customize it to fit individual needs.
Create your own animated video
#### On-Demand Marketing Webinar: Video at Scale, Creating More Value in Your Best Content
We use video in every piece of content we create, and that effort has a dramatic impact on our marketing results.
Hosts Taylor, Vyond’s video producer, and Amanda, Vyond’s marketing manager, will share their content marketing playbook for generating conversions with video.
Watch to learn their tips and tricks for getting started, how to integrate video into your existing content strategy, and how to get the most value from the videos you create. Then stick around to see to create your own videos with Vyond.
Webinar Promo Template
One live webinar attendee requested the promotional video from this webinar as a template. Watch the video below then open it and make your own edits. To do this, sign into your Vyond account or free trial and then click here to open this video template in Vyond Studio. You will be able to download videos on a paid subscription.
About Vyond
Vyond allows people of all skill levels in all industries and job roles to create dynamic and powerful media. With features that go beyond moving text and images, you can build character-driven stories or compelling data visualizations that engage audiences and deliver results.
Start making your own videos today. Sign up for a free trial and check out our latest webinars on Vyond’s capabilities, use cases, and how to get the most out of Vyond.
#### On-Demand Webinar: Create Engaging eLearning Faster with the Power of AI
The new generative AI tools popping up are making it possible to create eLearning content at scale more easily than ever before. But for many L&D and HR pros, keeping tabs on the most relevant tech and learning how to confidently use it is daunting. If that describes you, Vyond and Omniplex Learning are here to help.
In this webinar, Omniplex Learning’s Head of Learning Solutions, Leena Randhawa, and Vyond’s Director of Customer Success, Erin Champion, will provide an overview of the generative AI tools most relevant to L&D and how to make the most of them.
In this fun and informational presentation, our eLearning experts will:
Explain the pros and cons of the most relevant generative AI tools on the market
Demonstrate how to use this new technology to create better Articulate 360 courses and training videos
Show you how the new AI functionality in Vyond’s animated video creation platform can help you generate first-draft videos in minutes
And explain how to integrate all your new content creation skills into your existing eLearning workflow
Speakers:
Leena Randhawa–Head of Learning Solutions, Omniplex Learning
Erin Champion–Director of Customer Success, Vyond
Wednesday, June 14, 8am PT / 11am ET / 4pm GMT
Register Now
#### On-Demand Webinar: How AI and Gamification Deliver More Engaging Learning Faster
For years, gamified learning programs grounded in real-life scenarios and interactivity have been helping companies boost employee engagement, comprehension—and their bottom line.
Now, with the arrival of generative AI, L&D teams have the power to create even more personalized and relevant learning experiences in a fraction of the time, and at a scale never before possible.
In this presentation, Vyond CCO Van Diamandakis will talk with instructional design expert Professor Karl Kapp about his experience using AI tools to create gamified learning experiences. Karl and his colleague Professor Jessica Briskin will then show how you can quickly create interactive content using Vyond Go, Vyond Studio, and Storyline. Additionally, Christopher Annand, Director of Programs and Governance at Cargill, will explain how he and his compliance team have successfully used gamified AI-powered videos as a catalyst for behavior change.
What you’ll learn:
How AI is already transforming gamified learning—and the exciting advancements just around the corner
Multiple ways you can use Vyond Go, Vyond Studio, and Storyline to create engaging gamified learning experiences quickly
How one $130 billion company is using AI-powered video tools to boost engagement and drive better business results
Register now
#### On-Demand Webinar: Infinite Props, Instant Actions: Vyond’s Fall 2023 Release
With the advancements in Vyond’s Fall Release, transforming your best creative ideas into engaging, effective videos has never been easier.
Find out how to create instant custom props and more natural character actions using our generative AI technology. And discover how our new integrations and video captioning and language upgrades will ensure your content is relevant and accessible to your entire audience.
On November 1, Product Manager Carol Shum and Senior Customer Success Manager Emily Crane will give a demonstration of our transformative new tech you have to see to believe.
Join us to learn how to:
Generate an infinite number of custom props and more natural character actions with two new AI-powered features, Text to Prop and Video to Action
Ensure your company is reaching all of your employees with advancements in captioning and multilingual support
Create a broader range of engaging, business-relevant content with new Shutterstock and WellSaid integrations
Register Now
#### On-Demand Webinar: Take Your Vyond Videos from Good to Great
Do you feel like the videos you create in Vyond Studio are missing that extra spark to help capture your audience’s attention? In this webinar, Erin, Lye Cwan, and Tim from Vyond’s customer success team will teach you their tips and tricks on how to take your videos from good to great.
Watch to learn how to:
Make real, tangible improvements to your Vyond videos
Utilize scene transitions, use the camera tool, and add sound effects
Vary your camera movements to impact your scenes and keep your audiences engaged
Make your choppy scene transitions smooth and engaging
Try these great video templates
We shared three before-and-after video examples during the webinar to show how scene transitions, camera movement, and sound effects can help you take your videos from good to great. Watch each “after” video below. Then, open them in your Vyond Studio account to see how each was made, make edits, and use them as templates for your own videos.
To do this, sign into your Vyond account or free trial and then click the links below to open the video templates in Vyond Studio. You will be able to explore and edit the videos while on a free trial, and you will be able to download and use the videos on a paid subscription.
Scene Transitions
CLICK HERE to open this video in your Vyond account.
Camera Movement
CLICK HERE to open this video in your Vyond account.
Sound Effects
CLICK HERE to open this video in your Vyond account. Vyond Studio comes with 168 sound effects, and you can import your own MP3, M4A, or WAV audio files. Some sound effects in the video above are removed from the template because we do not have the legal rights to share them with you.
About Vyond
Vyond allows people of all skill levels in all industries and job roles to create dynamic and powerful media. With features that go beyond moving text and images, you can build character-driven stories or compelling data visualizations that engage audiences and deliver results.
Start making your own videos today. Sign up for a free trial and check out our latest webinars on Vyond’s capabilities, use cases, and how to get the most out of Vyond.
#### On-Demand Webinar: The Launch of Vyond Go – Creating Videos in Seconds Starts Now
The wait is over: Vyond Go — the industry’s first AI-powered script and video creator — has arrived. Join us for a virtual launch party to celebrate this industry milestone and learn more about how Vyond Go will supercharge your video creation.
In this fun, informative presentation, Vyond’s CEO Gary Lipkowitz, CTO Matt Harney, and Director of Product Management Katrina Yee, will join Lisa Smith, Vyond’s Head of Corporate Marketing, to show you how this powerful new tool can help you generate editable, relevant, and business-friendly scripts and video content in seconds.
Specifically, you’ll learn:
Why Vyond Go will be a gamechanger for companies of all kinds
How to create the first cut of a script and video in 30 seconds or less
How to use Quick Edit to adjust text-to-speech voices within Vyond Go—and edit further in Vyond Studio
Register Now
#### On-Demand Webinar: Trends in Applying Generative AI to Your Business Content
Generative-AI-powered content tools are all over the news–but to what degree are companies actually adopting and integrating them into their workflow? And for those interested, what’s the best way forward? On our next webinar, an AI industry analyst and an enterprise L&D practitioner will weigh in from their unique vantage points.
Join Vyond’s Head of Product Marketing, Enrique Olives, along with guest speakers Rowan Curran, a Forrester analyst focused on AI and data science topics, and Jason Ferguson, Principal Learning Technology Product Manager at Whole Foods. Rowan will share his latest findings on the application of generative AI into enterprise content workflows. And Enrique and Jason will discuss how Vyond’s AI-powered video platform is serving as a gateway for thousands of companies to bring generative AI into everyday use.
What you’ll learn:
How cutting-edge generative AI tech is finding its way into commercial content production
Practical ideas for how your company can use these tools to help quickly create relevant, on-brand content
Why generative AI pairs especially well with creating video content — and how you can get started with Vyond
Register now
#### On-Demand Webinar: Vyond’s Spring 2023 Release, The Future of Video Is Here
It’s spring release time! Learn how our newest product enhancements—including many powered by AI—will help you create videos more quickly and intuitively than ever before.
In this webinar, Product Manager Tracy Srivastava offers a guided tour of the latest Vyond updates to help you create relevant videos faster.
Join us and learn how to:
Create videos quickly using Vyond’s new AI-powered script and video creator
Easily edit videos, collaborate with your team, and organize libraries with the latest enhancements
Make your videos even more relevant with fresh content library assets
Wednesday, May 31, 11am PT / 2pm ET / 7pm GMT
Register Now
#### On-Demand Webinar: Write Better Video Scripts Faster with ChatGPT
With the right inputs (and expectations), the popular AI tool ChatGPT can help you get a jump on scripting your most important business videos. Vyond’s CEO, Gary Lipkowitz, will walk you through everything you need to know to get started.
In this webinar, Vyond CEO (and former TV and film producer) Gary Lipkowitz will cover the ins and outs of using ChatGPT for drafting video scripts.
What You’ll Learn:
What ChatGPT is, how it works, and how it can help L&D, HR, internal communications, and sales enablement teams create high-quality video scripts more quickly
ChatGPT’s current strengths and limitations
How to write great ChatGPT prompts
How to edit ChatGPT’s (sometimes generic) output to create engaging and effective videos
Thursday, April 20 11am PT / 2pm ET / 7pm GMT
Register now
#### On-Demand: Show Tell and Sell: Tips for Better Demos and Tutorials
URL: https://www.vyond.com/webinars/on-demand-show-tell-and-sell-tips-for-better-demos-and-tutorials/
#### On-Demand: Vyond Spring 2023 Storytelling Masterclass
Vyond Storytelling Masterclass, Spring 2023
March 29, 2023 – 10 am (PST)
Becoming a confident storyteller—and more attentively listening to others’ stories—can help you create more engaging content, successfully promote new ideas, and transform you into a better collaborator and colleague.
In this entertaining and educational Vyond Masterclass event, you’ll get fresh ideas on how to accomplish all three from renowned experts in visual storytelling, improv, eLearning best practices, workplace humor, and more!
The Power of Your “Why”: How to Build Engaging Stories that Help You Teach, Lead, and Drive Business Growth
Dr. Jennifer Aaker, the General Atlantic Professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business and co-author of the national bestselling books, Humor, Seriously and The Dragonfly Effect, will guide you in strategically harnessing stories and humor as assets in your role.
What you’ll learn:
How to curate, craft, and tell more impactful stories in employee communications, trainings, and presentations of all kinds
How to tactically use humor and authenticity to connect with your audiences
How a storytelling mindset can help you be a better leader and colleague
How a “Yes, And…” Mindset Can Help You Create Better Employee Communications and a More Collaborative Work Culture
In this fun, interactive presentation, Lele Mason and Jeannie Cahill Griggs, alumni of the world-famous Second City improv troupe, will talk about how the principles of improvisation, including active listening and a “Yes, And…” mindset, can help you make better decisions, become a stronger collaborator, and ultimately create more helpful content for your employees.
What you’ll learn:
How improv was developed initially by childhood educators—and what they discovered
What the latest scientific research says about the benefits of improvisational thinking in business
What a “Yes, And…” mindset is and how to use it when developing content, working with others, and making important business decisions
The Art and Science of Visual Communication in eLearning: What Really Works and Why
In this presentation, Connie Malamed, the author of Visual Design Solutions and Visual Language for Designers, and founder of The eLearning Coach website, will share new and time-tested ideas on how to use imagery, design best practices, and animation to create employee courses that “stick”—and the science behind why it works.
What you’ll learn:
When and how to use imagery to convey big ideas (and when not to)
Why animation is particularly engaging—and ideas on using it well
Best practices for leveraging proven design principles to make more engaging eLearning courses
Register Now
### Press
#### ¿Qué es Vyond y por qué los colombianos están usando esta plataforma?
URL: https://www.vyond.com/press/que-es-vyond-y-por-que-los-colombianos-estan-usando-esta-plataforma/
#### ‘The show must go on’ in Sandusky, as a high school musical is animated online for all to see
URL: https://www.vyond.com/press/the-show-must-go-on-in-sandusky-as-a-high-school-musical-is-animated-online-for-all-to-see/
#### 11 predictions for 2021 from PR insiders
URL: https://www.vyond.com/press/11-predictions-for-2021-from-pr-insiders/
#### AARP: Many Say Work-Life Balance Has Improved in Telework Era
URL: https://www.vyond.com/press/aarp-work-life-balance-improved-telework-era/
#### AI Video Leader Vyond Deepens Investment in Chicago
Company expands team, doubles footprint in Fulton Market after rapid growth in 2023.
Company expands team, doubles footprint in Fulton Market after rapid growth in 2023.
CHICAGO – March 21, 2024 – Vyond, the leading AI video creation platform for the enterprise, today announced the expansion and relocation of its Chicago office. The company’s new location at 401 N. Morgan Street opens after a year of accelerated business and team growth, as well as continued expansion of its AI-powered video capabilities to drive new levels of engagement and business outcomes for its 20,000 customers, including 65% of the Fortune 500.
Vyond’s new Chicago office is over 6,000 square feet, double the size of its previous space at 159 N. Sangamon Street. Officially opening March 21st, the office is part of the company’s ongoing investment in Chicago’s booming startup landscape. It will staff the company’s local team, which has grown from 3 to 43 employees since Vyond first opened its Chicago office in December 2022—including sales, marketing, customer success, customer support and human resources team members. Vyond joins the building’s anchor tenant, Morgan Manufacturing, as well as restaurants Tabu and Professor Pizza, in addition to a world-class event hall and an outdoor rooftop.
“We strongly believe Chicago will only continue to grow as a leading tech hub as it has for the past decade. We’ve grown our own team rapidly in large part due to the Chicagoland area’s market of highly skilled talent,” said Gary Lipkowitz, CEO of Vyond. “At Vyond, we’re scaling the generative AI revolution for video creation. We need the right people, office space, and surrounding ecosystem to support our business and technical vision. Chicago and Fulton Market specifically have proven to be the perfect Midwestern hub to support our growing customer base here and on the East Coast.”
This expansion comes on the heels of continued innovation and investment in Vyond’s AI video creation platform. In 2023, the company launched and rapidly built out its core generative AI product, VyondGo. The enterprise-grade video maker helps teams create engaging, dynamic, customizable videos in minutes to unlock business-critical content engagement and retention at scale. The company’s growing presence in Chicago underscores the city’s role as an incubator for emerging tech and the next generation of paradigm-shifting software.
“Vyond is one of the only companies today using generative AI in enterprise SaaS to drive tangible business outcomes for customers across sectors—from financial services, to health tech, software, and beyond,” said Kevin Willer, Vyond Board Member, founding CEO of 1871 Tech and co-founder of Google Chicago. “Their local investment and growth is a feather in the cap of Chicago’s burgeoning tech hub. Vyond is emblematic of the kinds of companies that will cement our region as a destination for forward-thinking innovators for decades to come.”
About Vyond
Vyond is the leader in AI video creation. Over 65% of the Fortune 500, tens of thousands of businesses, and millions of end users use Vyond to transform mission-critical content into vibrant business communication that engages customers and employees, and drives positive business outcomes. Vyond is the leader in hundreds of verified customer reviews on G2, Capterra, and GetApp. The company has offices in Silicon Valley, Chicago, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Thailand.
Press Contact:
LaunchSquad for Vyond
vyond@launchsquad.com
#### Animate It! Explain complex concepts and amplify learning with animation (ATD membership required)
URL: https://www.vyond.com/press/animate-it-explain-complex-concepts-and-amplify-learning-with-animation-atd-membership-required/
#### Create Engaging Animated Video at a Budget-Friendly Price with Vyond
URL: https://www.vyond.com/press/create-engaging-animated-video-at-a-budget-friendly-price-with-vyond/
#### Creating Vibrant Business Videos in Seconds Starts Now: Breakthrough AI-Powered Script and Video Creator Now Available from Vyond
American Express, Cargill, CVS Health, Johnson & Johnson, Whole Foods Market and Other Early Customers Say Vyond Go is a Breakthrough in Video Creation
SAN MATEO, CA – June 28, 2023 – Vyond Go, the industry’s first AI-powered script and video creator, is now available from Vyond. Vyond Go is seamlessly integrated into the Vyond Platform and will help companies supercharge the speed, ease, and scalability of their business communications.
Vyond Go is a breakthrough in AI-powered video creation. With an easy-to-use, prompt-based interface, users can build a first draft of their video instantly from a few simple prompts, with or without their own pre-existing content. Using Vyond’s simple text-based editor, users can quickly make edits to their script which are then immediately reflected in their video.
Videos can then be used as-is or users can bring them into Vyond Studio to further fine-tune and polish using Vyond’s full suite of editing capabilities. Vyond Go is available today to all customers at no additional charge across all Vyond plans.
“With Vyond Go, developing engaging, professional-quality videos has never been easier – which is a game-changer for business communications,” said Vyond CEO Gary Lipkowitz. “It is like no other product because Vyond Go integrates generative AI into our workflow and pulls content from our massive content library so that videos made in seconds are always relevant to the business and the use case. Our customers have signaled that this is our most innovative release to date.”
Vyond Go users can choose from different locations, formats, and vibes, and more than 70 languages to create the perfect representation of their message. The ability to go from a “blank page” to a relevant rough-cut video in seconds is a productivity multiplier, especially compared to expensive and time consuming traditional video production.
“When you’re creating new training content, sometimes you just don’t know where to begin,” said Jason Ferguson from Whole Foods Market. He is the Principal Learning and Development Analyst, Change Enablement there and manages a team of instructional designers who use Vyond. “My team will love this. Being able to go from prompt to editable video not only gets you past that initial block, it gets you most of the way there – in just a few seconds, instead of days or weeks. By bringing generative AI right into our existing workflow, Vyond Go will save us valuable time to focus more on strategy.”
Click here for more information about Vyond Go or access a free trial of Vyond here.
About Vyond
Vyond is the leader in AI-powered video creation. Over 65% of the Fortune 500, tens of thousands of businesses, and millions of end users use Vyond to transform mission-critical content into vibrant business communication that engages customers and employees, and drives positive business outcomes. Vyond is the leader in hundreds of verified customer reviews on G2, Capterra, and GetApp. The company has offices in Silicon Valley, Chicago, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Thailand. Visit vyond.com.
#### Customer Love for Vyond Grows with Eight #1 Rankings In Spring ‘23 G2 Report
AI-Powered Video Creation Software Company Earns a Record 36 Awards from B2B Software Reviewers Including Eight #1 Rankings
SAN MATEO, Calif. – April 19, 2023 – Vyond, the leader in AI-powered video creation, today announced that it has earned another 36 awards from G2, a popular B2B software review site, as part of its Spring 2023 awards across Video Creation, Presentation, Content Creation, and Animation categories.
G2 compares the best business software and services based on user ratings and social data, and utilizes collective, authentic knowledge – incorporating peer-to-peer, customer-driven reviews – to help buyers find the right solutions for their business needs. Users rated Vyond highly across numerous categories as part of G2’s Spring 2023 awards, bestowing the company with the following honors:
Eight #1 Leader Awards
#1 Leader for Best Results
#1 for Leader for the Enterprise
#1 for Best Usability
#1 for Best Estimated ROI for Animation
#1 for Most Implementable Animation Presentation
In G2’s Spring Report, Vyond earned 36 badges from customer reviews, including eight #1 rankings which exceeded last quarter’s five #1 rankings. Reflecting Vyond’s unique applicability for enterprise-grade, self-service video communications, four of the leader awards were in the enterprise category including one for best enterprise support.
Since its inception, Vyond has prioritized a relentless focus on customer success which shows in this quarter’s Q2 Spring Report and in the company’s customer satisfaction and NPS that both outpace industry standards. “Customers love Vyond because we make it easy for them to transform their mission-critical content – that can often be bland or boring – into vibrant business communications that engages their customers, partners and employees, and delivers positive business outcomes,” said Vyond CEO Gary Lipkowitz. “Once again, we are thrilled with these latest awards from G2 because they’re real customer love letters. Thank you to our customers and partners for their support as we continue to define the video-based learning sector.”
More details on Vyond’s G2 awards can be found here.
About Vyond
Vyond is the leader in AI-powered video creation. Over 80% of the Fortune 100, tens of thousands of SMBs, and millions of end users use Vyond to communicate better with their employees, customers, and communities with animated video. Vyond Studio is the leader in hundreds of verified customer reviews on G2, Capterra, and GetApp. The company has offices in Silicon Valley, Chicago, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Thailand. Visit vyond.com.
#### Customers Love Vyond: 35 New Awards from G2
Video Creation Software Company Earns a Record Number of Awards from B2B Software Reviewers – Including Enterprise ‘Leader’ and ‘Best Results’ Overall
SAN MATEO, Calif. – Jan. 30, 2022 – Vyond, the leader in AI-powered video creation, today announced that it has earned 35 awards from G2, a popular B2B software review site, as part of its Winter 2023 awards.
G2 compares the best business software and services based on user ratings and social data, and utilizes collective, authentic knowledge – incorporating peer-to-peer, customer-driven reviews – to help buyers find the right solutions for their business needs. Users rated Vyond highly across numerous categories as part of G2’s Winter 2023 awards, bestowing the company with the following honors:
#1 in Results, Implementation, and Usability – the top spot in three Animation categories and awards for “Best Results,” “Best Usability,” “Most Implementable,” “Fastest Implementation,” and “Users Most Likely to Recommend”
Five (5) Enterprise category awards – including “Leader” awards, as well as “Best Support” and “High Performer” honors
Ten (10) Overall “Leader” awards – including the “Leader” award for Animation, Content Creation, Video Editing, and Presentation; as well as “Momentum Leader” for Animation, Presentation, and Video Editing
Vyond was also an overall winner in the “Users Love Us” category. According to CEO Gary Lipkowitz, these latest G2 awards illustrate how its relentless focus on customer success makes Vyond even more relevant and compelling in today’s economic climate. “Our company has done so well because Vyond helps enterprise customers meet their learning and development objectives with AI-powered video that engages and educates, while remaining cost-efficient,” he said. “Our team is absolutely thrilled with these latest awards from G2 because they’re real customer rankings. I want to thank our customers and partners for their support as we continue to define the video-based learning sector.”
More details on Vyond’s G2 awards can be found here.
About Vyond
Vyond is the leader in AI-powered video creation. Over 65% of the Fortune 500, tens of thousands of SMBs, and millions of end users use Vyond to communicate better with their employees, customers, and communities with animated video. Vyond Studio is the leader in hundreds of verified customer reviews on G2, Capterra, and GetApp. The company has offices in Silicon Valley, Chicago, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Thailand. Visit vyond.com.
#### Encouraging Empathy in the Remote Workforce
Empathy isn’t an easy thing to teach and it certainly isn’t something Training professionals are typically focused on. But it’s more important than ever in today’s COVID-19 world.
#### Forbes: 12 Ways Busy Employees Can Seek Out Professional Development Opportunities
URL: https://www.vyond.com/press/12-ways-busy-employees-can-seek-out-professional-development-opportunities/
#### Forbes: 16 Questions HR Should Ask During Exit Interviews
URL: https://www.vyond.com/press/forbes-16-questions-hr-should-ask-during-exit-interviews/
#### Gary Lipkowitz of Vyond: How We Plan To Rebuild In The Post COVID Economy
URL: https://www.vyond.com/press/gary-lipkowitz-of-vyond-how-we-plan-to-rebuild-in-the-post-covid-economy/
#### Generation V: Using Video To Help A Diverse Workforce Learn
URL: https://www.vyond.com/press/generation-v-using-video-to-help-a-diverse-workforce-learn/
#### Good news: Americans are reporting improved work-life balance levels
URL: https://www.vyond.com/press/good-news-americans-are-reporting-improved-work-life-balance-levels/
#### HR departments everywhere are embracing video. Are you?
URL: https://www.vyond.com/press/hr-departments-everywhere-are-embracing-video-are-you/
#### HR Executive: 4 ways this ‘traditional’ company is embracing change
URL: https://www.vyond.com/press/4-ways-this-traditional-company-is-embracing-change/
#### Intelligent Video Creation Software Company Vyond Reports Ninth Consecutive Year of Growth
Increases in Customer Base and Headcount, Greater Client Satisfaction, and Geographic Expansion Buck Tech Industry Trends
SAN MATEO, Calif. – Dec. 20, 2022 – The close of 2022 marks the most successful year in the history of Vyond, the leader in intelligent video creation software. The company has achieved strong customer growth across key enterprise use cases, including learning and development, sales enablement, and internal communications.
Customers are embracing Vyond because it allows them to deliver mission-critical employee training and HR, sales, and marketing information in an unusually engaging, cost-efficient, and scalable way. The company added 400,000 new users to its roster this year; expanded its footprint in industries like banking and finance; and boosted its seat license count in high-growth sectors like software, healthcare, biotech, and pharmaceuticals.
“Vyond has had outstanding results this year because we continue to help our customers communicate better,” said Vyond CEO Gary Lipkowitz. “We deliver a powerful and highly-relevant solution for training, education, and internal communications and have always pursued a strategy of managed growth. By combining thoughtful product development, measured organizational expansion, and a zealous customer focus, we’re continuing to build a robust, sustainable business. I am thrilled with our progress to date, celebrate the team’s success, and look forward to a great 2023 and beyond.”
Industry-Leading Customer Satisfaction
Over the past five years, Vyond’s customer satisfaction scores (CSAT) have averaged an industry-leading 94%. This year, Vyond exceeded that average–and its lofty internal goals–averaging customer satisfaction scores between 97% and 99% throughout the year.
Vyond also achieved an outstanding Net Promoter Score (NPS) in 2022, earning a rating of 63, far exceeding industry average scores of around 30. Vyond’s exceptionally high NPS is attributed to positive customer evaluations that describe Vyond as “fast,” “easy-to-use,” “flexible,” “customizable,” and “fun,” and call out the company’s great customer service.
Rapid Growth in a Turbulent Tech Landscape
During a year in which many tech companies reduced their workforce, Vyond increased its total headcount by close to 40%. One of its most critical new hires was Chief Marketing and Business Development Officer Van Diamandakis, who will oversee the company’s new Chicago office, located in the Fulton Market tech hub. The company’s regional expansion in the Midwest will include more than 25 new hires in sales, marketing, and customer success. To support its growth in Asia Pacific, the company also created a wholly owned subsidiary, Vyond Company Limited, in Thailand which is led by Chief Technology Officer Matt Harney.
Ongoing Enhancements to Vyond Studio
This fall, Vyond introduced the latest release of Vyond Studio – extending the relevance, speed, and power of the company’s enterprise video creation software. This major upgrade integrated several customer-driven product enhancements, including AI-powered capabilities that enable users to experience up to 10x speed and efficiency improvements, including shorter review, collaboration, and feedback cycles.
It also delivered specific upgrades including support for SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) files, enhanced text-importing capabilities, AI-driven photo-to-character functionality, instant video translations in 95 languages, and enhanced security features, as well as extended brand control and brand management capabilities.
About Vyond
Vyond is the leader in intelligent video creation software. Over 65% of the Fortune 500, tens of thousands of SMBs, and millions of end users use Vyond to communicate better with their employees, customers, and communities with animated video. Vyond Studio is the leader in hundreds of verified customer reviews on G2, Capterra, and GetApp. The company has offices in Silicon Valley, Chicago, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Thailand. Visit vyond.com.
#### Intercom: Strategies for building a resilient business
URL: https://www.vyond.com/press/strategies-for-building-a-resilient-business/
#### Is Time the Biggest Obstacle for Training?
URL: https://www.vyond.com/press/is-time-the-biggest-obstacle-for-training/
#### It was fun at first, but videoconference fatigue is setting in
URL: https://www.vyond.com/press/it-was-fun-at-first-but-videoconference-fatigue-is-setting-in/
#### It’s official: Vyond is a Great Place to Work®!
In October of 2021, Vyond was certified as a Great Place to Work®!
What Vyond employees have to say
Survey says: 86% of our employees state Vyond is a great place to work. It has been a pleasant surprise to learn about our Talent’s positive experiences. This is a specially remarkable achievement when we compare it to the national average of 59%. We are honored to receive such positive responses from our employees and we aim to continue celebrating their talent and diligence.
A culture of collaboration
As for the responses for “Why is Vyond is a great place to work?” our employees express that people, creativity, and teamwork culture are key elements of their positive experience at Vyond. We invest in our employees’ wellbeing and growth in a holistic way. In response, our talent cares for the product we offer and the clients we serve.
Learn more about Vyond’s results from the Great Place to Work® Trust Index™ survey.
Other key findings
Furthermore, the report provided by Great Place to Work® also shares the following pieces of information about Vyond as a company:
91% of our employees feel Vyond’s services are excellent.
About 90% of our employees express our management recognizes their mistakes.
A total of 90% of our employees are proud to tell others they work at Vyond.
And finally, 90% of our employees report feeling welcomed when they join the company.
Head over to the complete report for more insights.
Join the Vyond team
At Vyond, we foster a culture of inclusion and appreciation of different identities and ideas. Moreover, we are proud of our employees and promote and celebrate their career growth. And finally, we welcome and encourage creativity and want to make our employees feel at home.
Check out our open positions at Vyond and become a member of our growing team!
Browse Jobs at Vyond
#### Leading Marketers Share Their Favorite Takeaway from Content Marketing World 2019
URL: https://www.vyond.com/press/leading-marketers-share-their-favorite-takeaway-from-content-marketing-world-2019/
#### Learning for Compliance: From Just Legal to Truly Effective
URL: https://www.vyond.com/press/learning-for-compliance-from-just-legal-to-truly-effective/
#### LinkedIn Live with Marketers: Why the Play Button is the Hottest CTA on the B2B Web
URL: https://www.vyond.com/press/linkedin-live-with-marketers-why-the-play-button-is-the-hottest-cta-on-the-b2b-web/
#### MarketingProfs: Brand Guidelines – It’s High Time to Revamp How We Create and Use Them (free subscription required)
URL: https://www.vyond.com/press/brand-guidelines-its-high-time-to-revamp-how-we-create-and-use-them-free-subscription-required/
#### Measuring in the Moment: Timely Tracking of Your Training Program’s Success
URL: https://www.vyond.com/press/measuring-in-the-moment-timely-tracking-of-your-training-programs-success/
#### More Than Ever, Leaders Need to Bring PTO Policy to Life. Here’s How.
URL: https://www.vyond.com/press/more-than-ever-leaders-need-to-bring-pto-policy-to-life-heres-how/
#### New Release from Vyond Unlocks Limitless Possibilities for Video Creation
Latest AI Features Allow for Any Video Element to be Created in a Click
SAN MATEO, Calif. – Oct. 25, 2023 – Vyond today announced the new release of its award-winning video creation platform. This release brings the power of generative AI inside Vyond, in existing workflows, where and when it is needed the most. Now, any video element imaginable is available at the click of a button.
“Businesses destroy value every day by communicating poorly,” said CEO Gary Lipkowitz. “With this release, we’ve essentially made our content library infinite. For our customers, this means finding relevant content is both fast and easy. And this translates into tremendous bottom-line value through better communication which is actually retained.”
Vyond customers are experiencing a 400% increase in employee productivity, savings of up to $1M in content creation costs, and up to an 80% increase in content engagement.
Infinite Possibilities for Relevant and Engaging Communications
Vyond’s new AI features allow customers to go from vision to video in seconds. With Video to Action, users can generate a custom character action by simply shooting a video (even with a smartphone) and sending it to Vyond. Text to Prop lets users instantly generate video props from text prompts on demand.
Vyond customer Rance Greene, who is a storytelling expert and author of Instructional Story Design, said “The characters in my stories need to be good actors. Realistic movement. Genuine emotions. With Vyond’s Video to Action, I can create an endless library of customized actions that bring my stories to life. Now, I’m really in the director’s chair.”
Vyond now also includes access to over three million images and video clips via a new integration with Shutterstock, and dozens of realistic and expressive voices through an integration with its high-quality AI voice provider partner. Vyond Go, the AI-powered script and video creation tool introduced earlier this year, now includes support for more than 70 languages.
Improving Accessibility
Addressing customers’ top request for new functionality, Vyond users can now make their videos more accessible. The new release includes Open Captioning in which captions and subtitles can be burned directly into the video. Closed Captioning is extended to include audio transcription and SRT/VTT export.
Vyond is used by 65% of the Fortune 500 to communicate better. While the new release announced today helps make AI work for everyone, Vyond is widely used by training, learning and development, sales enablement, and internal communications teams to increase the relevance, engagement, and effectiveness of their communications.
Patrick Jocelyn, CEO of Omniplex Learning, which is Vyond’s strategic reseller in the United Kingdom, said “Vyond has been a long-time leader in innovative applications of AI in its product that help companies create engaging and dynamic video. Now imagine being able to develop even more relevant content for the modern learner in every industry, every scenario, every audience. That’s what Vyond has done with this new release. This is a huge step ahead.”
More information about the new features in Vyond’s Fall Release can be found here.
Vyond at DevLearn October 25-27, 2023
Vyond will demonstrate its new product release at DevLearn in Las Vegas on October 25-27, 2023 at booth #411. On Thursday, October 26 at 1:15 PST, Vyond CEO Gary Lipkowitz will give a talk called “Making AI Work For You” as part of the conference’s Emerging Tech track.
About Vyond
Vyond is the leader in AI-powered video creation. Over 65% of the Fortune 500, tens of thousands of businesses, and millions of end users use Vyond to transform mission-critical content into vibrant business communication that engages customers and employees, and drives positive business outcomes. Vyond is the leader in hundreds of verified customer reviews on G2, Capterra, and GetApp. The company has offices in Silicon Valley, Chicago, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Thailand. Visit vyond.com.
#### New Research from Vyond and Epignosis: What Employees Want from L&D in 2024
Forty-one of percent U.S. employees will look for another job in 2024 if their company doesn’t provide them with training opportunities, survey finds
Personalized and non-work-related training are among the top L&D trends for 2024, according to a report by TalentLMS and Vyond.
[San Francisco, December 6, 2023] – Today, TalentLMS, the learning management system (LMS) for training success, in collaboration with Vyond, a leading AI-powered video creation platform, is releasing a research report on the 2024 learning and development trends within organizations.
The survey was conducted among 1,000 employees across industries in the U.S., revealing the pivotal role training plays in retaining a skilled and motivated workforce. Forty-one percent of employees said they will look for another job in 2024 if their company doesn’t provide them with training opportunities.
Given the importance of training for employee engagement and satisfaction, the survey explored the types of training and skills that will be important for organizations to provide in 2024. Eight in ten employees think personalized learning will be important in 2024, and 68% stated the same for non-work-related training that supports their overall well-being.
“There is a growing need among employees for training on topics and skills that transcend their job roles,” said Thanos Papangelis, Co-founder of TalentLMS. “Personal and professional growth are not separate roads to success. Companies should invest in nurturing well-rounded professionals, acknowledging continuous learning beyond job specifics is essential in the ever-changing business landscape.”
The TalentLMS-Vyond survey revealed the top three non-mandatory training topics employees want to get training on are leadership and management, mental health, and use of AI tools.
Underscoring the importance of training in career development, 72% of respondents said they have progressed in their careers thanks to the training they’ve received from their companies in 2023. In addition, 71% report feeling more prepared for the future of work because of the training they’ve been provided. Still, two in three employees (66%) think they need to develop new skills to be successful at their job.
“People-first companies know that skills development is essential to both the business and the employee,”said Van Diamandakis, Chief Commercial Officer at Vyond. “Getting it right for today’s workforce requires addressing the challenges of workplace learning, including cost effective, relevant and engaging learning delivered at the moment of need and at scale, surfaced in our findings.”
According to employees, when it comes to training offered by their companies, some of the main challenges they face are that training requires too much time and it isn’t delivered in an engaging way. In fact, 68% responded they take training on a personal basis to improve their workplace skills and 58% use social media to cultivate new skills.
Download the full research: https://www.talentlms.com/research/learning-development-trends
About TalentLMS
Trusted by 70,000 teams, TalentLMS is the training platform built for success and designed with simplicity in mind. With a course library, an intuitive interface, and all the tools you need to create transcendent training, you’ll be up and running in no time.
About Vyond
Vyond is the leader in AI-powered video creation. Over 65% of the Fortune 500, tens of thousands of businesses, and millions of end users use Vyond to transform mission-critical content into vibrant business communication that engages customers and employees, and drives positive business outcomes. Vyond is the leader in hundreds of verified customer reviews on G2, Capterra, and GetApp. The company has offices in Silicon Valley, Chicago, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Thailand.
#### Omniplex brings Vyond to the UK with launch event at the House of Illustration
URL: https://www.vyond.com/press/omniplex-brings-vyond-to-the-uk-with-launch-event-at-the-house-of-illustration/
#### Omniplex relaunches eLearning community at ‘Future of Learning’ Event
URL: https://www.vyond.com/press/omniplex-relaunches-elearning-community-at-future-of-learning-event/
#### Omniplex to boost video creation skills in the UK with Vyond
URL: https://www.vyond.com/press/omniplex-to-boost-video-creation-skills-in-the-uk-with-vyond/
#### Recognizing And Addressing Burnout In The Remote Workforce
URL: https://www.vyond.com/press/recognizing-and-addressing-burnout-in-the-remote-workforce/
#### SaaS Video Creation Market Leader GoAnimate Launches New Vyond Brand and Website at ATD 2018
Brand name change signifies the launch of next-generation product offering as it embraces the future of video and beyond
SAN FRANCISCO –– May 7, 2018 — GoAnimate, Inc. a SaaS video creation company that allows everyone to create video quickly and easily, today announced the launch of Vyond. The company will unveil its new Vyond-branded website and video creation platform at the Association for Talent Development (ATD) International Conference and Exposition on May 7 in San Diego. The Vyond brand signifies a commitment to media that moves others to action—a commitment to go beyond static content, beyond poor engagement, and someday even beyond video.
“We’ve experienced significant adoption and growth as GoAnimate, so much so that we’ve outgrown the idea behind it,” said CEO Alvin Hung. “We’re launching this new brand, not because of a sale or acquisition, but because we want our brand to accurately reflect both our current state and our vision for the future.”
Continued Hung, “We’ve rebuilt our product from the ground up to cement its status as the best-in-class video creation platform. We’ve also further strengthened our security and world-class customer service, which reflects our commitment to delivering maximum value to our subscribers.”
The official launch at ATD 2018, the world’s largest event for talent development professionals, will showcase how Vyond will extend its position as the market leader in video creation software by emphasizing three key areas over the coming months:
Performance (HTML5 software, improved workflow, enterprise-specific features)
Security (ISO 27001 certification, GDPR compliance, data privacy)
Support (Dedicated contact, resource center, and community platform)
“The way people communicate and learn continues to change so rapidly. Video has become expected whether you’re training a team internally or delivering a product message externally. We want everyone to be able to create high-quality video quickly and easily while also ensuring we safeguard critical assets for our subscribers,” said Hung.
With Vyond, companies can create and deliver high-quality video easier than ever. Vyond offers a huge library of templates representing hundreds of industries, occupations, and concepts, and also allows for the import of external audio and images. Complex actions and lip-sync are automatic. Manage colors and styles in seconds to conform with your brand guidelines, then export to the authoring tool, LMS, or hosting platform of your choice. To learn more visit vyond.com.
About Vyond
At Vyond, our mission is to put the power of video in the hands of everyone. Vyond allows people of all skill levels in all industries and job roles to create dynamic and powerful media. With features that go beyond moving text and images, you can build character-driven stories or compelling data visualizations that engage audiences and deliver results.
Founded as GoAnimate in 2007, Vyond has helped Global 2000 organizations, small businesses, and individuals produce their own videos easily and cost-effectively. Since its inception, the Company has served over 12 million registered users on six continents who have created more than 22 million videos.
#### Stratbeans Becomes Exclusive Reseller of Vyond in India and the UAE
New Delhi, August 25, 2020–Stratbeans, a company that drives digital transformation through AI-based online learning, today announced a strategic reseller partnership with Vyond to resell the latter’s cloud-based video animation software in India and the UAE. Vyond empowers businesses to create professional animated videos for all industries in job roles like marketing, training, and eLearning.
Through this collaboration, Stratbeans will allow customers in the two markets to leverage Vyond’s video creation platform to design and deliver high-quality animated videos. From small businesses to large enterprises, the platform and plan flexibility of Vyond helps organisations to engage and captivate the viewers with visual communication.
“We work with a global network of trusted resellers to deliver our services throughout the world. Our partnership with Stratbeans will help us to strengthen our presence in the Indian and Middle East markets while complementing Stratbeans’ existing solutions,” said Stephanie Schiff, head of business development at Vyond.
Commenting on the association, Sameer Nigam, CEO, Stratbeans said, “We take pride in partnering with Vyond for its cutting-edge animated video creation, which has been globally acknowledged. Undeniably, video is one of the most effective ways to communicate with your stakeholders. It is no longer a lucrative option for businesses but a necessity. In light of this, we are certain that Vyond will help businesses create engaging video content that positively affects their bottom line. As exclusive resellers, we will provide users with all technical support and will help them use the platform to its fullest.”
Over the years, Stratbeans has been trusted by global players like Articulate. Its partnership with Vyond further reinforces its position as a leader in the industry.
About Stratbeans
Stratbeans provides technology platforms for driving customer success through Digital Transformation of learning, collaboration, and revenue generation. Founded by Sameer Nigam, Prasoon Nigam & Pradeip Agarwal, Stratbeans provides enterprises with a 360-degree approach in Digital Transformation of all the business functions and enables individuals and teams to learn together to perform better for business growth and profitability.
About Vyond
At Vyond, our mission is to put the power of video in the hands of everyone. Vyond allows people of all skill levels in all industries and job roles to create dynamic and powerful media. With features that go beyond moving text and images, you can build character-driven stories or compelling data visualizations that engage audiences and deliver results.
Founded in 2007, Vyond has helped Global 2000 organizations, small businesses, and individuals produce their own videos easily and cost-effectively. Since its inception, the Company has served over 12 million registered users on six continents who have created more than 22 million videos.
#### TalentLMS: How to master eLearning video storytelling
URL: https://www.vyond.com/press/how-to-master-elearning-video-storytelling/
#### The Collision of Remote Work, Generational Differences, and Training
URL: https://www.vyond.com/press/the-collision-of-remote-work-generational-differences-and-training/
#### Train and Explain: Addressing Mental Health in the Workplace
URL: https://www.vyond.com/press/train-and-explain-addressing-mental-health-in-the-workplace/
#### Training Industry: “The Mom Exodus” – Leveraging the Power of Empathy Training to Support Working Parents
URL: https://www.vyond.com/press/the-mom-exodus-leveraging-the-power-of-empathy-training-to-support-working-parents/
#### Training Magazine: Three Myths about the Gamification of Learning
URL: https://www.vyond.com/press/three-myths-about-the-gamification-of-learning/
#### Unbounce: Why You Need Webinar Landing Pages in 2020
URL: https://www.vyond.com/press/why-you-need-webinar-landing-pages-in-2020/
#### Using Five Whys to Develop Employee Training Programs
URL: https://www.vyond.com/press/using-five-whys-to-develop-employee-training-programs/
#### Vibrant Business Videos in Seconds: Vyond Introduces First-Ever Prompt-Based Script and Video Creator
Latest Release of Vyond’s AI-Powered Platform Radically Improves the Ease, Speed,
and Accessibility of Video Creation Across the Enterprise
LEARNING TECHNOLOGIES LONDON – May 3, 2023 – Vyond, the leader in AI-powered video creation, today announced its most significant new product release ever. By harnessing the power of generative AI, Vyond is making video creation faster, easier, and more accessible for everyone in the enterprise. The Spring Release of Vyond’s award-winning video creation software includes major enhancements to Vyond Studio, as well as the introduction of Vyond Go – the industry’s first AI-based script and video creator that will revolutionize the speed, ease, and scalability of business communications.
“We are continuously enhancing the Vyond experience, and video creation will never be the same,” said Vyond CEO Gary Lipkowitz. “This is Vyond’s biggest, most innovative release to date, and because we listen intently to our customers, we’re delivering on their top five feature requests. Vyond Go is revolutionary because it integrates generative AI into existing user workflows and makes video creation even faster, easier, and more accessible. Developing a first-draft video with scripts and storyboard will be as easy as ‘ready, prompt, go’ – which is a game-changer for business communications.”
Vyond Go: From Prompt to Video in Seconds
Vyond Go is a new script- and video-creation application that will be integrated into Vyond’s AI-powered video creation platform. With an easy-to-use, prompt-based interface, users can build a first draft of their video instantly from a few simple prompts, and then use Vyond’s new text-based editor to polish it. Edit the script, generate voice-overs, and finish videos in minutes.
Whole Foods Anticipates Valuable Time Savings from Vyond Go
Whole Foods Market uses Vyond to create training and enablement videos for its workforce. Jason Ferguson, Principal Learning and Development Analyst, Change Enablement, at Whole Foods Market, leads a team of instructional designers and is excited about Vyond Go. “My team will love this. When you’re creating new training content, sometimes you just don’t know where to begin. Being able to go from prompt to editable video not only gets you past that initial block, it gets you most of the way there – in just a few seconds, instead of days or weeks. By bringing generative AI right into our existing workflow, Vyond Go will save us valuable time to focus more on strategy.”
Vyond Gives Cargill Compliance Team a Creative Edge
Christopher Annand is Director of Programs and Governance in the Ethics and Compliance Office at Cargill Incorporated, a global agricultural and food corporation. “Vyond helps my team present serious and/or complex content in more creative and engaging ways that are not often associated with compliance, and that enhances our relationship with Cargill employees,” said Annand. “What could take an in-house video production team 3-4 weeks to produce, we can complete with Vyond in 3-4 hours. The new AI application, Vyond Go, has the potential to make video creation even faster and easier. It’s like having the full power of a video studio as a part of your team at a fraction of the cost. The tool does most of the work – script writing, animation, and editing right at our fingertips.”
New Release of Vyond Studio
Vyond is also launching the new release of its award-winning Vyond Studio with several new features and capabilities, making it smarter, faster, and easier. Vyond Studio now delivers more relevance, speed, and efficiency – and adds a new focus on accessibility. Features and capabilities include:
Accessibility: Closed captioning functionality – a top customer request – now makes Vyond videos accessible to everyone. Audio transcription and SRT (SubRip File Format) export enables downloading of transcription files from existing text and dialog, and audio and text can automatically be transcribed to generate captions.
Relevance: New content library assets will enable Vyond users to make more relevant videos. Updated character packs, scenes, and backgrounds are available, including characters, props, and actions designed to portray different work environments such as healthcare, manufacturing, office, and home-office settings. Additionally, text-to-speech enhancements will allow users to add tone to voices and adjust speed and pitch, for a more natural sound.
Speed and Efficiency: New capabilities will help Vyond users locate content assets more quickly, and to rapidly create videos. Global Search streamlines asset search, while Shared Folders enables organized, and in-bulk sharing of videos with large teams; Asset Organization slashes the time for organizing and locating favorite assets; Bulk Audio Edit allows for streamlined updating of multiple audio tracks in bulk; and improved preview speed enables near-instantaneous video previewing.
Vyond at Learning Technologies London, May 3-4
Vyond will demonstrate the latest version of Vyond Studio and preview Vyond Go at Learning Technologies London on May 3-4, 2023 at Stand D30. On Thursday, May 4th, Vyond CEO Gary Lipkowitz will present “Applied AI for the Enterprise: Relevance, Brand Compliance, and Safety,” in Theatre 3, at 14:00.
New Certification Program for Vyond Partners
In a separate announcement today, Vyond also launched a new Partner Certification Program.
Vyond reseller partners now have self-service access to a world-class pool of resources to train customers in-country and in-language, as well as provide localized sales and support in their own time zones.
About Vyond
Vyond is the leader in AI-powered video creation. Over 65% of the Fortune 500, tens of thousands of SMBs, and millions of end users use Vyond to transform mission-critical content into vibrant business communication that engages customers and employees, and drives positive business outcomes. Vyond Studio is the leader in hundreds of verified customer reviews on G2, Capterra, and GetApp. The company has offices in Silicon Valley, Chicago, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Thailand. Visit vyond.com.
#### Virtual Meeting Overload: What It Is and How to Tackle It
URL: https://www.vyond.com/press/virtual-meeting-overload-what-it-is-and-how-to-tackle-it/
#### Vyond Achieves “In Process” FedRAMP Status, Making Secure Video Creation a Reality in the Government Sector
Following the Vyond for Government launch in June, the company’s flagship product is now available to thousands of federal agencies and contractors in the FedRAMP® Marketplace.
San Mateo, CA, December 5, 2024 — Vyond, the effortless, all-in-one video creation platform for business, has officially achieved “In Process” status from the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP). Now listed in the FedRAMP Marketplace, Vyond’s platform is available to thousands of federal agencies and government entities.
Vyond transforms critical information into engaging video content. As a result, customers can drive positive outcomes like increasing audience engagement and reducing production time by 75%. Vyond is a multi-faceted solution that seamlessly integrates cutting-edge technology to streamline productivity while providing world-class information security and data privacy.
Established in 2011, FedRAMP is a U.S. federal government-wide compliance program that promotes the adoption of secure cloud-based products across U.S. federal agencies and contractors by providing a standardized approach to security assessment and authorization. A FedRAMP “In Process” designation indicates that a company has undergone an extremely rigorous security assessment that was reviewed and approved by the FedRAMP Program Management Office and is currently working toward a FedRAMP Authorization. A FedRAMP Authorization, or Authority to Operate (ATO), signifies that an offering meets a holistic set of security controls designed to ensure confidentiality, integrity, and availability of government data.
“This accomplishment is a critical step for Vyond in accelerating video creation tools and implementation across government agencies — it’s not easily earned,” said Vyond CEO Gary Lipkowitz. “The potential impact of video creation in the public sector is vast. We built this secure and accessible version of Vyond’s flagship platform specifically for this sector’s users and organizations. Through this achievement, we empower federal entities to communicate better and drive greater organizational outcomes.”
Vyond’s FedRAMP “In Process” designation demonstrates the company’s continued business momentum and growth. In June, the company launched Vyond for Government, a new version of its flagship product available for federal agency use. With Vyond for Government, users can instantly and effortlessly transform critical information into powerful visual communications for employees, partners, and constituents effectively and at scale.
Vyond for Government enables government agencies to create engaging, custom videos at 10x the efficiency and cost savings compared to legacy video production methods. Vyond customers have seen measurable results like 130%+ increases in engagement rate, 80% reductions in onboarding course times, and millions of dollars in savings.
Read more
About Vyond for GovernmentVyond is the only all-in-one video creation platform built for business and government organizations. With a focus on privacy and security, simplicity of use, and powerful video creation, Vyond for Government grants federal and public sector agencies access to our flagship platform, enabling transformation of critical information into engaging videos for employees, partners, and constituents — effectively and at scale.
Press Contact:mark.rader@vyond.com
#### Vyond Achieves Official FedRAMP® Certification, Offering Secure Video Creation for the Government Sector
Following the Vyond for Government launch in June of 2024, the company’s flagship product is now available for use by thousands of federal agencies and contractors in the FedRAMP® Marketplace.
San Mateo, CA, July 7, 2025 — Vyond, the effortless, all-in-one video creation platform, is now officially FedRAMP Certified to operate and listed in the FedRAMP® marketplace at https://marketplace.fedramp.gov/products/FR2433985791. Thousands of federal agencies and government entities are now able to apply for a reciprocal ATO to use Vyond for Government.
Vyond transforms critical information into engaging video content. As a result, customers can drive positive outcomes like increasing audience engagement and reducing production time by 75%. Vyond is a multi-faceted solution that seamlessly integrates cutting-edge technology to streamline productivity while providing world-class information security and data privacy.
Established in 2011, FedRAMP is a U.S. federal government-wide compliance program that promotes the adoption of secure cloud-based products across U.S. federal agencies and contractors by providing a standardized approach to security assessment and authorization. A FedRAMP Certification, or Authority to Operate (ATO), signifies that an offering meets a holistic set of security controls designed to ensure confidentiality, integrity, and availability of government data.
“This is an important milestone for Vyond,” said Vyond COO Mark Deaton. “And it means all federal agencies can quickly and easily begin using Vyond to communicate better and drive organizational success.”
Vyond’s FedRAMP Certification designation demonstrates the company’s continued business momentum and growth. In June of 2024, the company launched Vyond for Government, a new version of its flagship product available for federal agency use. With Vyond for Government, users can instantly and effortlessly transform critical information into powerful visual communications for employees, partners, and constituents effectively and at scale.
Vyond enables government agencies to create engaging, custom videos at 10x the efficiency and cost savings compared to legacy video production methods. Vyond customers have seen measurable results like 130%+ increases in engagement rate, 80% reductions in onboarding course times, and millions of dollars in savings. Learn more.
About Vyond
Vyond is the only all-in-one video creation platform built for business and government organizations. With a focus on privacy and security, simplicity of use, and powerful video creation, Vyond grants federal and public sector agencies access to our flagship platform, enabling transformation of critical information into engaging videos for employees, partners, and constituents—effectively and at scale.
Press Contact:mark.rader@vyond.com
#### Vyond Adds More Visual Versatility With 1,300+ High Quality HeyGen Avatar Options
San Mateo, CA, March 27, 2025 – Vyond, the all-in-one, AI video creation platform for business has announced a new partnership with AI avatar provider HeyGen, which will integrate over 1,300 new avatar options into Vyond’s asset library.
Vyond’s versatile platform enables users to easily create training, sales, and marketing videos in a wide range of styles and formats. With the addition of HeyGen’s high-quality avatars to its existing Tavus inventory, Vyond’s library now includes over 200 unique avatars. Considering these avatars come with a range of industry-specific outfits and backgrounds and can be shown at different angles, Vyond’s total number of avatar options now stands well over 1,100.
Unlike standalone AI avatar providers, Vyond makes it easy for video creators to add their avatar hosts to an unlimited number of mixed media, animated, AI-generated, and photorealistic formats, directly in the platform.
As Vyond’s Head of Product and User Experience, Nicolas Lassus, says, “The headline isn’t just the HeyGen avatars. It’s all the different ways you can integrate them, and all the different styles of videos you can make with Vyond – whatever’s most relevant to your needs.”
Adds Kevin Raheja, Head of Product Partnerships at HeyGen, “We’re dedicated to delivering the highest quality avatar capabilities in the market and we’re thrilled to partner with Vyond – it’s a perfect fit. Combine the two and the possibilities are really amazing.”
Read more
About Vyond
Vyond is the only all-in-one, AI video creation platform for business, which includes an AI instant video maker (Vyond Go), a full-featured video editor (Vyond Studio), and more. Over 65% of the Fortune 500 rely on Vyond to help transform critical information into engaging videos. Since Vyond’s founding in 2007, customers like Whole Foods Market, Indeed, and Cargill have created more than 40 million videos on the platform.
Press Contact:mark.rader@vyond.com
#### Vyond AI speeds the production of relevant, brand-compliant videos
New features and user management enhanced by VyondAI
SAN MATEO, Calif., May 16, 2022 — Vyond, the leader in animated video content creation for enterprises, recently released new features powered by the all-new VyondAI. With the support of VyondAI, users can make videos faster and easier than ever before. These enhancements allow teams to find relevant video assets, build accurate color palettes, and remove an image’s background automatically.
“Our new features powered by VyondAI make it faster and easier than ever to build engaging videos relevant to the content and objectives of our enterprise customers. With these new features and powerful user management tools, Vyond is proving its commitment to delivering engaging communication solutions for the enterprise,” says Product Marketing Manager, Greg Quinn.
VyondAI is focused on benefiting both the individual video creator and teams. Enterprise teams are able to create, share, and collaborate on all projects created in Vyond. Among Vyond’s most anticipated new features is the ability for enterprises to create various user groups that can collaborate together. Vyond’s latest release allows companies with a decentralized budget structure to have multi-subscription accounts, allowing teams to pay together or separately while maintaining the ability to collaborate.
“Speed and relevance are critical factors in the delivery of engaging and effective content to business audiences” noted Nicolas Lassus, Head of Product and User Experience. “Vyond helps organizations tackle these problems head-on. We have combined our media creation know-how with the latest in AI to craft our latest features. This enables our users to reuse past content, optimize images and audio, and brand videos faster than ever.”
Vyond is consistently delivering best-in-class service and premium content quality, serving as the preferred video animation solution for over 20,000 customers across 150+ countries. Learn more about Vyond AI at vyond.com/blog/vyondai.
About Vyond
At Vyond, our mission is to put the power of video in the hands of everyone. Vyond allows people of all skill levels in all industries and job roles to create dynamic and powerful media. With features that go beyond moving text and images, you can build character-driven stories or compelling data visualizations that engage audiences and deliver results.
Founded as GoAnimate in 2007, Vyond has helped Global 2000 organizations, small businesses, and individuals produce their own videos easily and cost-effectively. Since its inception, the Company has served over 12 million registered users on six continents who have created more than 22 million videos.
For press inquiries, contact press@vyond.com.
#### Vyond Aims To Empower Professionals With Ability To Create Custom Videos
URL: https://www.vyond.com/press/vyond-aims-to-empower-professionals-with-ability-to-create-custom-videos/
#### Vyond and Vbrick Forge Strategic Referral Partnership to Transform Secure Enterprise Video Communications
San Mateo, CA and Herndon, VA, — Sep 25, 2025 — Vyond, the only all-in-one AI video creation platform, and Vbrick, the leader in secure enterprise video platforms, today announced a new strategic referral partnership. This alliance combines Vyond’s advanced video creation tools with Vbrick’s AI-powered video management, delivery, and analytics capabilities—offering organizations end-to-end support across the entire video communication lifecycle.
In today’s digital workplace, organizations depend on video to connect, educate, and engage employees, clients, and stakeholders. Vyond enables teams to easily produce compelling content for meaningful communications. Through this partnership, organizations can use Vbrick’s secure platform to intelligently manage, distribute, and analyze those videos at scale—ensuring reliable, compliant, and streamlined reach across the enterprise.
Vyond and Vbrick are both distinguished by their steadfast commitment to enterprise-grade security and compliance. Both platforms are FedRAMP Certified and GDPR-compliant, making them ideal in highly regulated industries such as government, life sciences, and healthcare. This shared dedication ensures clients can confidently use Vyond and Vbrick together, regardless of stringent regulatory and governance requirements.
“Our mission at Vyond is to help organizations drive measurable results efficiently with video. Partnering with Vbrick means the secure, compliant videos our customers create can be distributed safely and at scale—even within highly regulated sectors. Together, we deliver a seamless, integrated solution for modern workplace video communication,” said Gary Lipkowitz, CEO of Vyond.
“Vyond helps organizations streamline video creation, and Vbrick provides the secure, centralized hub where video can be stored, intelligently managed, and federated into any business application or process throughout the enterprise. Jointly, we empower enterprises to maximize the value and impact of video communications while maintaining rigorous security and governance,” said Paul Sparta, CEO and Chairman of Vbrick.
Vbrick’s enterprise video platform provides AI-powered content management, advanced governance, content approval workflows, SSO/SCIM and DRM integration, robust integrations with business-critical applications (including ServiceNow, Salesforce, and Microsoft Teams), and comprehensive user auditing. Vyond powers video communications for more than 65% of the Fortune 500, enabling users to rapidly create professional-grade visually versatile videos for every business need.
This referral partnership represents a significant leap forward in secure, scalable, and innovative video engagement for enterprises—facilitating every stage of the video lifecycle, from creative development to secure distribution and actionable analytics.
For more information, please contact:
Vbrick Media Relations: julie.kent@vbrick.com
Vyond Media Relations: mark.rader@vyond.com
About Vbrick:
Vbrick is the leading Enterprise Video Platform (EVP) provider. Its AI-powered, end-to-end, cloud-native solution provides a secure, central hub for video, making it easy to connect any video asset to any business process, unlocking the true power of video for the enterprise. The world’s most widely recognized brands rely on Vbrick’s proven unified streaming, video-on-demand, and content management capabilities to engage, empower, and transform their organizations at scale. To learn more, visit vbrick.com.
About Vyond:
Vyond is the global leader in AI-powered video creation, enabling organizations worldwide to produce impactful business videos that inform, activate, and engage—under the strictest standards for security and compliance.
#### Vyond Announces End of Beta for Vyond Studio, Enhanced Security Features
SAN MATEO, Calif., May 20, 2019 — Vyond, a SaaS video creation company that allows everyone to create video quickly and easily, today announced that the Company’s video creation platform, Vyond Studio, is out of beta and designated General Availability (GA). Moving out of beta signifies the integration of a year’s worth of customer feedback with product enhancements and stability improvements to deliver a best-in-class video creation platform.
Announced alongside the Company’s rebrand from GoAnimate to Vyond in May 2018, Vyond Studio offers a faster, more robust video-making experience than the legacy GoAnimate platform. Vyond Studio also includes new creative elements, such as a new Contemporary video style and Character Creator, and enhanced security features specifically designed for enterprise organizations.
“In our first year as Vyond, we have attentively listened to our community’s feedback and have incorporated both product and security features that meet—and often exceed—customer expectations,” said COO Mark Deaton. “Vyond Studio is by far the best solution for enterprises who want to empower their teams, from HR and training to marketing and beyond, to make videos.”
Specific to the enhanced data security requirements often required by enterprise organizations, Vyond has launched Vyond Secure Suite, offering administrator-friendly security requirements with the Vyond for Enterprise plan. With brute force login protection, inactivity logout, customizable password complexity and more, enterprises can trust that each of their unique data security needs will be met.
“Supporting stringent data security standards is table-stakes in software deployment today,” said Vyond CEO Gary Lipkowitz, “At Vyond, we work to ensure frictionless, fast, and rewarding video creation while understanding the needs of large organizations—thus providing the flexibility to create dynamic, high-quality videos in the most secure setting possible.”
Vyond will be demonstrating its technology at the ATD 2019 conference in Washington, D.C. from Monday, May 20-22 at booth #1609.
To learn more about the many milestones Vyond has achieved in its first year after rebranding from GoAnimate, visit the Vyond blog.
About Vyond
At Vyond, our mission is to put the power of video in the hands of everyone. Vyond allows people of all skill levels in all industries and job roles to create dynamic and powerful media. With features that go beyond moving text and images, you can build character-driven stories or compelling data visualizations that engage audiences and deliver results.
Founded as GoAnimate in 2007, Vyond has helped Global 2000 organizations, small businesses, and individuals produce more than 30 million videos. To learn more, visit vyond.com.
#### Vyond Announces Rich Text for Vyond Studio
SAN MATEO, Calif., June 26, 2019 — Vyond, a SaaS video creation company that allows everyone to create video quickly and easily, today announced the introduction of Rich Text – an all-new feature in Vyond Studio that allows users to control nearly every aspect of video text, including support for right-to-left languages.
Text within videos can call attention to important information, explain details, or display an audio track in other languages – significantly enhancing an audience’s engagement with videos. With Rich Text, Vyond makes it easy to modify the look of text in videos to make them more impactful, with the ability to adjust font weight, color, alignment, spacing and more. In addition, Rich Text also includes native support for languages written and read right-to-left such as Hindi, Hebrew, and Arabic.
“This exciting new update demonstrates the dedication our team has to making our product accessible to users across all countries and languages,” said Nicolas Lassus, Head of Product at Vyond. “Companies all over the world can easily create content that resonates with their particular audience, helping them make meaningful connections.”
More specifically, Rich Text includes the ability to bold or italicize text, change text color and size, and adjust alignment, spacing and text direction. Additionally, Vyond Studio is now offering the ability to change colors on whiteboard props, which allows creators to highlight messaging details in their videos.
“We’re thrilled to be able to provide features that our customers have been asking for,” explained Lassus. “Incorporating customer feedback is critical to the success of Vyond Studio. Many of our customers have content needs that span the globe or must reach different audiences – our aim was to make this a more simple and streamlined process.”
To learn more about the many milestones Vyond has achieved in its first year after rebranding from GoAnimate, visit the Vyond blog, and check out the Help Center for articles that can assist with common problems, provide tips and tricks, and enhance the overall Vyond Studio experience.
About Vyond
At Vyond, our mission is to put the power of video in the hands of everyone. Vyond allows people of all skill levels in all industries and job roles to create dynamic and powerful media. With features that go beyond moving text and images, you can build character-driven stories or compelling data visualizations that engage audiences and deliver results.
Founded as GoAnimate in 2007, Vyond has helped Global 2000 organizations, small businesses, and individuals produce more than 30 million videos. To learn more, visit vyond.com.
#### Vyond Announces Shutterstock Integration To Add Millions of New Visual and Audio Assets into its Video Creation Platform
Leader in AI-Powered Video Provides Customers Access to a World-Class Creative Library For Even More Engaging and Effective Storytelling
SAN MATEO, Calif. – May 23, 2023 – Vyond, the leader in AI-powered video creation, today announced an API integration with Shutterstock, the leading global creative platform. Vyond users will be able to discover and use Shutterstock content directly within the Vyond platform, empowering them to create even more engaging and effective videos for training, eLearning, HR, internal comms, and sales/marketing applications.
“The addition of Shutterstock assets to our platform is part of our ongoing strategy to make Vyond the most effective and efficient tool for creating vibrant business videos,” said Gary Lipkowitz, CEO of Vyond. “Our customers will have instant access to a world-class library of relevant and compelling visual and audio content that will enhance their Vyond videos, without slowing their storytelling process down in any way. This is another big win for our customers.”
Vyond has an unmatched library of original content. By integrating Shutterstock into its platform, Vyond is increasing its customers’ ability to create highly relevant and engaging communications. With this integration, Shutterstock will offer more than three million images, more than 100,000 videos, and nearly 7,000 music tracks from its expansive content library. Vyond users will be able to easily find authentic visuals that reflect scenes from everyday life; visuals from specific regions relevant to location and culture; and even more diverse and thoughtful representations of people within the Vyond asset library.
Product News from Vyond
Earlier this month, Vyond announced the Spring Release of its award-winning AI-powered video creation platform. The new release includes the introduction of Vyond Go – the industry’s first AI-based script and video creator that will revolutionize the speed, ease, and scalability of business communications. The company also released major enhancements to its award-winning Vyond Studio that will soon include the Shutterstock integration announced today.
Visit Vyond at ATD International Conference & Expo
Vyond is demonstrating the latest version of Vyond Studio and previewing Vyond Go at ATD ICE this week on May 22-24, 2023 at booth 1123.
About Vyond
Vyond is the leader in AI-powered video creation. Over 65% of the Fortune 500, tens of thousands of SMBs, and millions of end users use Vyond to transform mission-critical content into vibrant business communication that engages customers and employees, and drives positive business outcomes. Vyond is the leader in hundreds of verified customer reviews on G2, Capterra, and GetApp. The company has offices in Silicon Valley, Chicago, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Thailand. Visit vyond.com.
#### Vyond Appoints Gary Lipkowitz as CEO
Lipkowitz to lead company through next phase of growth as Chief Executive Officer, founder Alvin Hung named Executive Chairman.
SAN MATEO, Calif. — Sept. 7, 2018 — Vyond, a SaaS video creation company that allows everyone to create video quickly and easily, today announced its Board of Directors has appointed Gary Lipkowitz as Chief Executive Officer. Lipkowitz will oversee all of the core functions of the business. Lipkowitz, a media and entertainment expert, has served as Chief Operating Officer of Vyond since 2011. Alvin Hung, Vyond’s founder, has moved on from his post as Chief Executive Officer and has been named Executive Chairman.
“Gary and I have worked side by side for over seven years. Along with our dedicated team of employees, we have built a healthy, profitable growth business with great customers, both large and small, from all over the world,” Hung said. “After months of contemplation, we believe that adopting a more traditional management model where the Executive Chairman and CEO positions are held by separate leaders will benefit the creativity, energy, and growth potential of Vyond. We are currently in the midst of our strongest year ever. With Gary at the helm, we will continue on our mission of making video accessible to everyone, everywhere.”
Hung will continue to serve on the Board of Directors as its Executive Chairman. His primary role will be working alongside Lipkowitz and the Board to chart the right course for Vyond’s next phase of growth. Billy Chung has been appointed as General Manager of GoAnimate HK Ltd., and will manage daily administrative, HR, and finance responsibilities.
“I know that I speak for everyone at Vyond in thanking Alvin for his leadership and dedication to building a solid business our employees and customers can be proud of,” Lipkowitz said. “We have a talented team that is passionate about innovating, supporting, and marketing our product in new ways. I am excited about this new role and continuing to work closely with Alvin and the Board to move the business forward.”
Vyond has nearly 100 employees across the globe. The company rebranded from GoAnimate in May 2018 to extend its market leadership position in video creation software. To learn more, visit vyond.com.
About Vyond
At Vyond, our mission is to put the power of video in the hands of everyone. Vyond allows people of all skill levels in all industries and job roles to create dynamic and powerful media. With features that go beyond moving text and images, you can build character-driven stories or compelling data visualizations that engage audiences and deliver results.
Founded as GoAnimate in 2007, Vyond has helped Global 2000 organizations, small businesses, and individuals produce more than 30 million videos.
#### Vyond Appoints SaaS Industry Veteran Scott Ernst as Chief Executive Officer
Gary Lipkowitz transitions to Vyond’s Board of Directors as the company expands its AI-powered enterprise communications platform and accelerates its next phase of enterprise growth
SAN MATEO, Calif., June 1, 2026 — Vyond, a leading enterprise video creation and communication platform, trusted by more than 17,000 customers worldwide, today announced the appointment of Scott Ernst as Chief Executive Officer. Scott succeeds Gary Lipkowitz, who will transition to Vyond’s Board of Directors and continue to play an active role in guiding the company’s long-term strategy.
Scott brings more than 20 years of experience leading and scaling high-growth SaaS and technology companies from early stage through IPO and exit. He has built and transformed organizations across product innovation, go-to-market execution, and operational performance, including chief executive roles at Compete, Macromill and Drift. Throughout his career, Scott has helped companies accelerate growth, strengthen operational discipline, and navigate periods of significant market and technology change.
This leadership transition marks the next chapter in Vyond’s evolution as the company accelerates its enterprise strategy and expands its AI-powered enterprise communication platform. Vyond has helped organizations create over 40 million videos across training, HR, sales enablement, compliance, customer education, and internal communications.
“Scott is exactly the kind of leader Vyond needs for its next phase of growth,” said Matt Melymuka, Managing Partner at PeakSpan Capital and Board Member at Vyond. “He combines operational discipline with deep enterprise SaaS experience and a strong understanding of how to scale organizations through transformations. Just as importantly, Scott recognizes the incredible foundation Gary and the team have built over the last eight years. We believe his leadership will help guide Vyond through its next era of innovation and growth.”
Under Gary Lipkowitz’s leadership, Vyond evolved from a B2C animation platform into a trusted AI-powered enterprise solution used by organizations around the world to power training, onboarding, enablement, and communication workflows. During his tenure, the company significantly expanded its enterprise footprint, product and agentic capabilities, and operational scale.
“I’m looking forward to this next evolution of Vyond,” said Lipkowitz. “I am deeply committed to Vyond’s future and incredibly excited about the opportunities ahead. Scott brings the operational leadership, enterprise mindset, and scaling experience needed for our next chapter, and I look forward to partnering closely with him and the leadership team from the Board.”
Ernst said, “What drew me to Vyond was the combination of a proven customer base, a platform genuinely embedded in how large organizations operate, a strong team with deep experience and a product roadmap with real AI-driven upside. The next wave of enterprise AI isn’t just about creating content — it’s about helping organizations operationalize knowledge and workflows at scale. That’s a specific and executable opportunity, and I’m focused on translating it into durable growth.”
The announcement comes as Vyond continues to expand adoption among enterprise customers and accelerates investment in AI-driven innovation.
About VyondVyond is an enterprise video creation and communication platform that helps organizations create engaging, impactful visual communication at scale. Trusted by enterprises worldwide, Vyond enables teams across learning and development, HR, sales enablement, compliance, and communications to transform information into engaging visual experiences.
For press queries, please contact Kate Barron at kate.barron@vyond.com or 917.647.1885.
#### Vyond Expands ‘All-in-One’ Video Creation Platform with AI Avatars, Mobile App, and Powerful Business Tools
New offerings accelerate Vyond’s mission as the first comprehensive video platform built for the enterprise
SAN MATEO, California — August 21, 2024 — Vyond, the effortless, all-in-one AI video creation platform for business, today unveiled platform updates and expanded offerings. New features include AI avatars, a mobile app, enhanced brand management features, and more. These product launches align with Vyond’s vision as the first and only company to bring a comprehensive AI video creation platform to market. With Vyond’s new capabilities, users have the breadth and depth of tools — and full control — needed to create videos that resonate with audiences instantly and effortlessly.
Businesses today face limited video production budgets, single-purpose video solutions, and siloed workflows. With Vyond, companies have the comprehensive video creation platform necessary to drive positive business outcomes. New updates include over 30 avatar styles, the Vyond Mobile app, Vyond Go enhancements, and upgraded brand management features.
“Businesses are eager to adopt AI solutions — however, they’re looking for a complete, affordable, and brand-friendly solution that offers more than just a single function or specialized style,” said Gary Lipkowitz, CEO of Vyond. “That’s where Vyond comes in. We focus on understanding customer problems and turn them into lasting productivity improvements. Vyond’s continuous innovation means we’re consistently on the leading edge of what’s next.”
AI avatars allow users to incorporate diverse age groups, genders, and ethnicities into videos. AI avatars help improve engagements in technical training segments, serving as hosts throughout the video. Beginning August 28 on all Vyond plans, users can simply choose an avatar among templates, enter a script, and generate the final output.
Vyond Mobile brings video creation right into the palm of your hand. With Vyond Mobile, users can capture, create, and edit text, characters, and voices directly from their mobile devices. The Vyond Mobile app is now available in mobile device app stores today.
Vyond Go updates include document-to-video and script-to-video capabilities. With document-to-video, users can save time and take advantage of the information in existing documents by uploading them directly into Vyond Go. Script-to-video enables users to generate videos following scripts line-by-line. Both of these features will launch in September.
Brand management features include the ability to apply logos. Beginning in September, any character can be turned into a brand spokesperson by applying logos to character clothing, torsos, and hats.
These developments come at a time of accelerated growth for Vyond. To date, Vyond’s customer base has grown to approximately 20 million registered users across 160 countries. Of Vyond’s biggest customer accounts, the company’s top 100 accounts have cumulative revenues of $5.4 trillion, with an average revenue of $53 billion per company. Over the past year, Vyond has also seen an over 500% increase in enterprise customers.
To try Vyond’s new features and offerings today, visit our blog to learn more.
About Vyond
Vyond is the effortless, all-in-one video creation platform for business. Vyond provides everything needed to communicate better, including an AI-powered instant video maker (Vyond Go) and a full-featured video editor (Vyond Studio). Millions of global users, more than 20,000 companies, and over 65% of the Fortune 500 use Vyond to drive better business outcomes by quickly transforming critical information into engaging videos. Since Vyond’s founding in 2007, customers like American Express, Whole Foods Market, Indeed, and Cargill have created over 150 million videos on the platform. Visit vyond.com.
Press Contact:
LaunchSquad for Vyond
vyond@launchsquad.com
#### Vyond Expands AI Video Capabilities to Unlock Effective Business Communication
Powerful new brand management features allow customers to produce brand-compliant videos more efficiently to drive real business value.
LEARNING TECHNOLOGIES LONDON, April 17, 2024 — Vyond, the leading AI-powered video platform for businesses, today announced expanded generative AI capabilities and a robust set of brand management tools. The new features enable customers to produce effective, engaging, and brand-aligned video content to scale critical communications and drive tangible business outcomes.
Enhanced AI capabilities for Vyond Go make it faster and easier to produce video content that’s relevant to business objectives. Features now include the ability to dynamically generate visuals for your videos—based on prompts written in 95 languages. In combination with new brand management tools, teams can now scale video production quickly while ensuring consistent brand identity.
“Vyond’s tech stack is ever-evolving and every decision is made through the lens of customer value and business impact,” said Gary Lipkowitz, CEO of Vyond. “There’s a gap in the market today between the promise of emerging text-to-video and the reality of business communication needs for large, complex enterprises. For that reason, we’ve avoided bandwagons and copycat features. Instead, we’ve been intentional about integrating AI into multiple layers of the product over the last several years. This new launch combines business-relevant AI tools with enterprise-grade brand management and security to drive real business impact.”
New brand management features provide enterprise users the ability to maintain brand alignment. From approval controls, to adding logos and watermarks, to consistent colors, characters and assets, Vyond’s full-service brand kit allows users to quickly scale content with complete brand compliance. These brand management tools are available today for Vyond for Enterprise users.
Expanded AI tools drive business outcomes by increasing the relevance and effectiveness of video content and streamlining production workflows. New features available today in Vyond Go include:
Prompt-to-Prop: Automatically generate objects for videos that match any prompt entered into Vyond Go.
Multilingual videos: Generate videos in 95 languages.
New mixed-media templates: More template options give users a wide array of video options, including non-animated styles like charts and infographics to significantly expand content variety.
Infinitely customizable videos with “Vyond AnyStyle.” An expanded library of hand-created assets, stock imagery, and AI-powered features together enable Vyond AnyStyle, where customers can create videos in a wide range of styles—from animated, to photorealistic to everything in between. And with the ability to choose from more realistic and diverse characters, users can craft the perfect tone and aesthetic for any use case or brand need.
“Digital transformation and the proliferation of AI are profoundly changing the way businesses approach learning and development,” said Patrick Jocelyn, CEO of Omniplex Learning, Vyond’s UK-based value-added reseller. “That’s why market-leading innovators like Vyond are such game changers for our more than 4,000 customers, making it easy to produce amazing quality videos for a wide set of requirements. Leaders who invest in digital learning by embracing tools like Vyond not only stand to see gains in efficiency and effectiveness, but they’ll also benefit productivity, motivation, and retention.”
To learn more about Vyond’s new features, expanded AI tools, and brand management capabilities, visit our blog.
About Vyond
Vyond is the leader in AI video creation. Over 65% of the Fortune 500, tens of thousands of businesses, and millions of end users use Vyond to transform mission-critical content into vibrant business communication that engages customers and employees, and drives positive business outcomes. Vyond is the leader in hundreds of verified customer reviews on G2, Capterra, and GetApp. The company has offices in Silicon Valley, Chicago, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Thailand.
Press Contact:
LaunchSquad for Vyond
vyond@launchsquad.com
#### Vyond Gains Momentum in Video Creation Software Market, Opens Chicago Office
The Leader in Intelligent Animated Video Creation Software Expands Operations to Fulton Market Tech Hub, Growing Geographic Footprint, Leadership Team, and Enterprise Customer Base in the Midwest
SAN MATEO, Calif. – Nov. 29, 2022 – Vyond, the leader in intelligent video creation software for enterprise companies, today announced the opening of a new Chicago office. Located in Fulton Market, the city’s dynamic tech hub, the new location is part of the company’s ongoing geographic and market expansion, as global companies continue to embrace Vyond’s intelligent, AI-driven video creation software for business-critical eLearning, HR, internal communications, sales, and marketing applications.
The office is located at 159 North Sangamon Street and will open on December 5, 2022. It will be overseen by tech industry veteran and recently-appointed Chief Marketing Officer Van Diamandakis, who has led marketing and sales teams at WANdisco, Persado, Sage, Joyent, and Riverbed Technology, among others. Vyond’s Midwest expansion will initially include the hiring of more than 20 sales, marketing, and customer success professionals in Chicago where the company has more than 50 local customers, including 10 top healthcare and pharmaceutical companies and five higher education organizations.
“Enterprise companies everywhere – including so many great firms in the Midwest – are obtaining tangible business benefits from the use of smart video creation software from Vyond,” said Diamandakis. “Given my local roots and love for the Chicagoland area, I’m doubly excited to help Vyond grow in the region. I’m looking forward to helping our customers achieve their training, educational, and communications goals even more quickly by providing them locally-based support and expertise from our Fulton Square location.”
Local Venture Capital Perspective
According to Chicago Ventures Partner Kevin Willer, who is a personal investor in Vyond and a member of the board, the company’s entry into the Chicagoland and Midwest market for enterprise video is coming at the right place and at the right time.
“Vyond’s approach to animated video creation – which is designed to engage, educate, and achieve high retention – is a perfect fit for so many businesses that need to deliver important content that sticks,” Willer said. “Our region is ripe for growth in this type of technology, and Vyond’s new local presence will mean that they can connect with a greater number of customers in the region, and grow existing relationships. We’re excited about the potential of their new Chicago office, and about collaborating even more closely with Vyond’s leadership team.”
The Vyond Solution
Vyond helps companies create engaging and professional-looking videos for training, eLearning, human resources, internal communications, sales, and marketing applications, without the long lead time or expense of traditional video production techniques. The company’s Fall 2022 release of Vyond Studio, announced last month, integrates several ground-breaking production upgrades, including AI-powered tools that automatically convert photos of people into animated characters and an instant translation feature that makes it possible to efficiently translate on-screen text, voiceover narration, and character dialogue into 95 languages.
About Vyond
Vyond is the leader in intelligent video creation software. Over 14,000 organizations, including more than 65% of the Fortune 500 and millions of end users, use Vyond to communicate better with their employees, customers, and communities with animated video. Vyond Studio is the leader in hundreds of verified customer reviews on G2, Capterra, and GetApp. The company has offices in San Mateo, Calif., Chicago, Ill., Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Visit vyond.com.
#### Vyond Hires Technology Veteran Andrew Chan as New Head of Engineering
SAN MATEO, Calif., Feb. 14, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Vyond, a SaaS video creation company that allows everyone to create video quickly and easily, today announced Andrew Chan as the company’s new Head of Engineering.
Bringing more than two decades of experience managing software teams, designing high-performance and scalable systems, and delivering results-oriented project management, Chan will lead Vyond’s team of engineers as it continues to strengthen its leadership position in the video creation market. Specifically, Chan’s technical prowess will help Vyond build new and innovative technology, roll out new product features with greater velocity, and continually improve on already stellar information security and data privacy measures, all to drive growth in the market.
“We’re thrilled to add the expertise and technical leadership that Andrew brings to our team,” Chief Executive Officer Gary Lipkowitz said. “Leading our Hong Kong development team and as an integral part of Vyond’s leadership team, Andrew will help us keep pace with the growing demand for our market-leading video creation technology.”
Chan previously served as technical director at Wisers Information, leading a distributed Agile development team of dozens of engineers focused on big data solutions. In his new role, Chan will coordinate technology R&D, software development, and product delivery between the Asia Pacific development team and Vyond’s Bay Area commercial team.
“I’m excited to get started on such an innovative solution,” Chan said. “Vyond has such a great technical team in place and a strong work culture where people really enjoy collaboration and driving innovation.”
Vyond has nearly 100 employees across the globe. The company rebranded from GoAnimate in May 2018 to extend its market leadership position in video creation software. To learn more, visit vyond.com.
About Vyond
At Vyond, our mission is to put the power of video in the hands of everyone. Vyond allows people of all skill levels in all industries and job roles to create dynamic and powerful media. With features that go beyond moving text and images, you can build character-driven stories or compelling data visualizations that engage audiences and deliver results.
Founded as GoAnimate in 2007, Vyond has helped Global 2000 organizations, small businesses, and individuals produce more than 30 million videos.
#### Vyond is recognized as a Video Marketing and Video Making Leader by Capterra and GetApp
It is an exciting start of the year with yet another set of accolades for Vyond! On this occasion, we have the honor of being selected for Capterra’s 2022 shortlist in the categories of Video Marketing Software and Video Making software. Furthermore, GetApp has also named Vyond a 2022 Leader in the categories of Video Marketing and Video Making, taking sixth and seventh place among remarkable and well-established contenders.
Vyond is a Capterra Top Performer Product
Every year, Capterra filters the top-performing software based on trusted user reviews and popularity. The top contender products are then tested under rigorous criteria to ensure only the best-in-class software is featured on their list.
Vyond’s Capterra scores
Video Marketing Software
Vyond was deemed a Top Performer.
In the Popularity Score, Vyond scored 38/50 Points
And in the Rating Score, Vyond secured 49/50 Points
Video Making Software
Vyond also landed as a Top Performer.
In the Popularity Score, Vyond scored 41/50 Points
And in the Rating Score, Vyond received 49/50 Points
Head over to Vyond’s Capterra site for more insights and detailed reviews.
Vyond is a GetApp Video Marketing Leader
GetApp helps businesses by connecting them with the best software for their growth and prosperity. Each year, GetApp selects top-tier software ranked based on an objective scoring methodology developed by their research team, resulting in a trustworthy list of useful and relevant tools for any of your business needs.
Vyond’s GetApp scores
GetApp scores 5 key criteria, each worth up to 20 points. The maximum total score for a product is 100.
Video Marketing Software
Ease of use: Vyond obtained 19 points
Value for Money: Vyond scored 17 points
Likelihood to recommend: Vyond obtained 18 points.
Customer Support: Vyond scored 19 points.
Functionality: Vyond scored 16 points.
The grand total is 89 points and the sixth place in Video Marketing Tools.
Video Making Software
Ease of use: Vyond obtained 18 points
Value for Money: Vyond scored 16 points
Likelihood to recommend: Vyond obtained 19 points.
Customer Support: Vyond scored 18 points.
Functionality: Vyond scored 18 points.
The grand total is 89 points and the seventh place in Video Marketing Tools.
Head over to Vyond’s GetApp page for more insights and reviews!
Vyond is an ever-growing product that is continuously improving thanks to your reliable support, feedback, and interest. The positive reception of our product inspires us to continue working arduously to bring a reliable and compelling tool that empowers you and your business. From all of us at the Vyond team, thank you.
#### Vyond Joins Phenom Talent Marketplace, Expanding Access to Dynamic Video Creation for Talent Experiences
San Mateo, CA – Sep 8, 2025 – Vyond, the leading AI-powered video platform for businesses, today announced its partnership with Phenom, the global leader in AI-powered talent experience solutions. Through this collaboration, Vyond’s all-in-one video creation capabilities are now available in the Phenom Talent Marketplace, empowering organizations to seamlessly integrate dynamic video into their talent acquisition and employee engagement strategies.
With Vyond’s addition to the Phenom Talent Marketplace, users can now generate videos from simple prompts in a variety of styles—including avatar, photorealistic, and mixed media—enabling organizations to communicate more effectively throughout the talent journey.
“There’s no question about the power that video has to attract and engage,” said Jennifer Seith, Senior Vice President of Channel Strategy at Vyond. “By joining the Phenom Talent Marketplace, we’re making it easier for organizations to harness the impact of video across the entire talent journey—from recruitment to retention. Together, we’re helping companies communicate more effectively and create experiences that truly resonate.”
“Video is a critical tool for modern talent strategies, and Vyond’s solutions will enable our customers to deliver richer, more personalized experiences at every stage,” said Saumil Gandhi, SVP of Corporate Development of Phenom. “This partnership reflects our commitment to innovation and to providing our clients with the best resources to attract, engage, and develop top talent.”
Phenom’s Talent Marketplace is designed to illuminate career and learning opportunities, boost retention, and close skills gaps by connecting employees with tailored gigs, mentors, and on-demand learning programs—all powered by AI-driven recommendations. The inclusion of Vyond’s video creation platform further strengthens Phenom’s ability to deliver personalized, impactful content that drives meaningful results.
About Vyond
Vyond is the leading AI-powered video platform for businesses. More than 65% of the Fortune 500, tens of thousands of businesses, and millions of end users utilize Vyond to convey essential information via engaging videos that align with business objectives and generate favorable outcomes. Vyond is the market leader in hundreds of verified customer reviews on G2, Capterra, and GetApp. The company maintains offices in Silicon Valley, Chicago, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Thailand. For more information, visit vyond.com.
About Phenom
Phenom’s purpose is to help a billion people find the right work. Through AI-powered talent experiences, employers use Phenom to hire and onboard employees faster, develop them to their full potential, and retain them longer. The Phenom Intelligent Talent Experience platform seamlessly connects candidates, employees, recruiters, talent marketers, talent leaders, hiring managers, HR and HRIT—empowering diverse and global enterprises with innovative products including Phenom X+ Agentic AI and Generative AI, Career Site, Chatbot, CMS, Talent CRM, X+ Screening, Automated Interview Scheduling, Interview Intelligence, Talent Experience Engine, Campaigns, University Recruiting, Contingent Talent Hiring, Onboarding, Talent Marketplace, Workforce Intelligence, Career Pathing, Gigs, Mentoring, and Referrals. For more information, please visit www.phenom.com.
For media inquiries, please contact:press@vyond.com
#### Vyond Launches Global Partner Certification Program
Enhanced Reseller Program Enables Partners to More Effectively Sell and Train
With the Leading AI-Powered Video Creation Platform for the Enterprise
LEARNING TECHNOLOGIES LONDON – May 3, 2023 – Vyond, the leader in AI-powered video creation, announces a new Partner Certification Program as part of its Global Reseller Program. Vyond reseller partners now have self-service access to a world-class pool of resources to train enterprise and SMB customers with a focus on training and eLearning, human resources, internal communications, and sales and marketing. The launch of the Partner Certification Program means that Vyond customers gain faster access to in-country, in-language training, as well as localized sales and support in their own time zones.
“Our partners are central to our strategy as we grow around the world,” said Vyond CEO Gary Lipkowitz. “When a reseller integrates Vyond into its portfolio, they empower their customers to communicate better and achieve better business outcomes. Our new certification program accelerates the ability of our partners to expand their Vyond business, and to deliver enhanced customer service and satisfaction in their local markets.”
Vyond’s new Partner Certification Program enables resellers to grow revenue by bundling training services with sales of Vyond software licenses. Partners can also upskill their personnel to become “Vyond Certified Trainers,” and earn special badges that recognize their mastery of Vyond’s video creation software. Several of Vyond’s platinum partners – including UK-based Omniplex Learning – are already Certified Resellers, and additional partners across Europe, Asia Pacific and Latin America will be certified over the next quarter.
“Vyond’s video creation platform is second to none for creating engaging business communications and we have proven its importance and demand with numerous UK customers,” said Omniplex Learning CEO Patrick Jocelyn. “The new partner certification program is a great way to create both sales and customer success. Becoming certified in the Vyond platform empowers us to engage directly with the large addressable market for training, eLearning, and adjacent markets. We’re very excited to see the new program come to life.”
Joining the Program
More information on Vyond’s global partner program can be found here.
Product News from Vyond
In a separate announcement today, Vyond launched the Spring Release of its award-winning AI-powered video creation platform. The new release includes major enhancements to Vyond Studio, as well as the introduction of Vyond Go – the industry’s first AI-based script and video creator that will revolutionize the speed, ease, and scalability of business communications.
About Vyond
Vyond is the leader in AI-powered video creation. Over 65% of the Fortune 500, tens of thousands of SMBs, and millions of end users use Vyond to transform mission-critical content into vibrant business communication that engages customers and employees, and drives positive business outcomes. Vyond Studio is the leader in hundreds of verified customer reviews on G2, Capterra, and GetApp. The company has offices in Silicon Valley, Chicago, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Thailand. Visit vyond.com.
#### Vyond Launches Vyond for Government, the Best-In-Class Video Creation Platform for Federal Agencies
New offering features advanced security capabilities, access to white-glove support, and tailored implementation for federal agency use cases.
San Mateo, CA, June 11, 2024 – Vyond, the only comprehensive video creation platform built for businesses and government organizations, today launched Vyond for Government, a new version of its flagship product available for federal agency use. Federal agencies can now utilize Vyond’s comprehensive video creation solution to craft engaging, relevant videos with advanced security, and industry-leading ease of use.
With Vyond for Government, federal users can instantly and effortlessly transform critical information into powerful visual communications for employees, partners, and constituents effectively and at scale. Vyond for Government offers capabilities like a diverse range of custom imagery and characters, a brand management suite, and team collaboration features. The platform enables federal agencies to create engaging, custom videos at 10x the efficiency and cost savings compared to legacy video production methods. Vyond customers have seen measurable results like 130%+ increases in engagement rates, 80% reductions in onboarding course times, and millions of dollars in savings.
“Our federal customers are tasked with communicating critical, complicated, and sensitive information every single day. It’s challenging to do this at scale, while also engaging your audiences—that’s where Vyond for Government comes in,” said Vyond CEO Gary Lipkowitz. “Video is the future of storytelling, information sharing, and employee engagement. With Vyond for Government, federal agencies now have the ability to quickly create video content safely and effectively, with the peace of mind their data is fully secure.”
Vyond for Government is available now and will soon be listed as “In Process” on the FedRAMP Marketplace. The platform’s advanced security features will comply with FedRAMP controls under the Li-SaaS designation, which will give customers confidence that their data is protected. Vyond for Government is now undergoing, and will soon achieve, all rigorous requirements to obtain this designation, which includes:
Passing a comprehensive security assessment.
Adhering to stringent federal government standards for security requirements.
Passing an independent third-party audit to ensure all controls are implemented in adherence to FedRAMP standards.
Rigorous and continuous monitoring.
The new product offering comes on the heels of Vyond’s brand management feature release in April, which includes approval controls, and the ability to apply brand logos and watermarks, to ensure complete brand compliance. Vyond for Government represents another step forward in delivering innovative and effective communications solutions for diverse organizational needs across every industry. To learn more about Vyond for Government, connect with our team today.
About Vyond
Vyond is the only comprehensive video creation platform built for businesses and government organizations. Vyond provides everything needed to communicate better, including an instant video maker (Vyond Go) and a full-featured video editor (Vyond Studio). Millions of global users, more than 20,000 companies, and over 65% of the Fortune 500 use Vyond to drive better business outcomes by quickly transforming critical information into engaging videos. Since Vyond’s founding in 2007, customers like American Express, Whole Foods Market, Indeed, and Cargill have created more than 40 million videos on the platform. Visit www.vyond.com to learn more.
Press Contact:
LaunchSquad for Vyond
vyond@launchsquad.com
#### Vyond Names Alex Banks as New Head of Sales
SAN MATEO, Calif., July 9, 2019 — Vyond, the world leader in enterprise video animation software, has announced the hiring of Alex Banks as Head of Sales. Alex joins the Vyond leadership team after more than 10 years of international sales experience with Comscore, an international media measurement and analytics company. During his career at Comscore, Alex led the company’s West Coast sales team, as well as the company’s international expansion into Latin America. Before joining Comscore, Alex spent more than 10 years with various software, hardware, and business intelligence firms, including The Economist Intelligence Unit of the UK-based The Economist Group.
“I am thrilled to begin this new chapter at Vyond,” Alex said. “Vyond offers enterprise solutions which provide value and efficiency unmatched in today’s marketplace. Creating content with Vyond delivers positive and measurable ROI across multiple functions and industries.”
Additionally, Alex has been a guest lecturer and contributor for a variety of magazines and newspapers and has been recognized for his thought leadership on topics such as online video, digital media, advertising effectiveness, social networks, and e-commerce.
Originally from England, Alex has also lived in Germany, Mexico, Brazil, and Spain. He speaks and writes both Spanish and Portuguese fluently, and currently lives in the Bay Area with his wife and two daughters.
“We are very excited to welcome Alex to the team,” said CEO Gary Lipkowitz. “His years of international sales experience make him an ideal fit for Vyond as we continue to expand our global footprint. With his tried-and-true expertise and leadership, we look forward to providing video solutions for customers around the world.”
To learn more about the company news and updates, visit the Vyond blog.
About Vyond
At Vyond, our mission is to put the power of video in the hands of everyone. Vyond allows people of all skill levels in all industries and job roles to create dynamic and powerful media. With features that go beyond moving text and images, you can build character-driven stories or compelling data visualizations that engage audiences and deliver results.
Founded as GoAnimate in 2007, Vyond has helped Global 2000 organizations, small businesses, and individuals produce more than 30 million videos. To learn more, visit vyond.com.
#### Vyond Obtains Privacy Shield Certification, Validating Data Protections
SAN MATEO, Calif. — March 21, 2019 — Vyond, a SaaS video creation company that allows everyone to create video quickly and easily, today announced it is Privacy Shield certified. The certification, bestowed after a comprehensive verification by TrustArc, ensures that Vyond’s customer data is handled with the utmost care.
Privacy Shield was created by the U.S. Department of Commerce, European Commission, and Swiss Administration to support commerce between countries and fulfill data protection requirements when transferring personal data from the European Union (EU) and Switzerland to the U.S.
The Privacy Shield program requires a higher level of data protection and strong privacy policy from organizations to comply with the enforcement of GDPR in the EU and Switzerland. Once an organization certifies its compliance with the 23 principles concerning the use and treatment of personal data, it is accountable by U.S. law.
Vyond worked with third-party auditor TrustArc to verify compliance with the Privacy Shield frameworks through its TRUSTe Privacy Shield Verification program. TRUSTe verifies that Privacy Shield compliance is consistent with the requirements of the Privacy Shield Supplemental Principle on Verification.
“Anyone can just say they take data protection seriously,” said Vyond CEO Gary Lipkowitz. “We wanted to go the extra mile to demonstrate our commitment to data privacy and GDPR compliance to our prospects and customers in Europe, so we enlisted TrustArc to subject us to a rigorous independent third-party audit of our data privacy practices.”
“Our users create videos that often contain confidential personal and company information. We want them to know their information is protected,” Vyond COO Mark Deaton said. “Obtaining the Privacy Shield certification is an extra assurance and highlights another way we are securing our customers’ valuable information.”
To learn more about Vyond’s privacy policy and how it utilizes, collects, and retains personal information through its website, visit https://www.vyond.com/privacy/.
About Vyond
At Vyond, our mission is to put the power of video in the hands of everyone. Vyond allows people of all skill levels in all industries and job roles to create dynamic and powerful media. With features that go beyond moving text and images, you can build character-driven stories or compelling data visualizations that engage audiences and deliver results.
Founded as GoAnimate in 2007, Vyond has helped Global 2000 organizations, small businesses, and individuals produce more than 30 million videos. To learn more, visit vyond.com.
#### Vyond Promotes Mark Deaton From Head of Customer Success to Chief Operating Officer
San Mateo, Calif., Dec. 17, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Vyond, a SaaS video creation company that allows everyone to create video quickly and easily, today announced its Head of Customer Success, Mark Deaton, has been tapped to serve as Chief Operating Officer to accelerate the company’s growth and increase organizational efficiencies.
The position was left vacant when Vyond’s Board of Directors appointed Gary Lipkowitz as Chief Executive Officer in September. He began his career with Vyond in 2014. A 25-year veteran at developing and transforming various organizations, Deaton has worked for ADP, OpenTable, the federal judiciary, and several startup companies.
“There is no greater privilege for a manager than being able to promote from within. Mark is a shining example of the talented, hardworking people at Vyond who continue to respond to the challenges presented to them,” Chief Executive Officer Gary Lipkowitz said. “Mark’s expertise has been especially invaluable in bridging the gap between the commercial, technical, and operational sides of the business, a role he’s played for some time, and now he gets to expand on that while still directly managing the Customer Service teams.”
He will also be responsible for information technology, contract and vendor management, client relationship management, and project management. Deaton joins a tenured and accomplished executive management team. He recently spearheaded Vyond’s implementation and upgrade of security components from data privacy and GDPR compliance to the adoption of ISO 27001 controls.
“I am honored to have the opportunity to serve as COO. I look forward to joining Gary and a team of executives who all share an unwavering commitment to Vyond’s success,” Deaton said. “We’ve built a world-class service team and I look forward to using this foundation as we prepare for our next phase of growth.”
Vyond has nearly 100 employees across the globe. The company rebranded from GoAnimate in May 2018 to extend its market leadership position in video creation software. To learn more, visit vyond.com.
About Vyond
At Vyond, our mission is to put the power of video in the hands of everyone. Vyond allows people of all skill levels in all industries and job roles to create dynamic and powerful media. With features that go beyond moving text and images, you can build character-driven stories or compelling data visualizations that engage audiences and deliver results.
Founded as GoAnimate in 2007, Vyond has helped Global 2000 organizations, small businesses, and individuals produce more than 30 million videos.
#### Vyond Receives ISO Security Certification
SAN MATEO, Calif., July 15, 2019 — Vyond, the world leader in enterprise video animation software, announced that it has received ISO/IEC 27001 security certification. The certification is one of the most widely accepted and recognized international standards for information security management.
“Security has always been a top priority for us, as customers use our video platform to develop content that is often confidential,” said COO Mark Deaton. “Taking the steps to receive ISO/IEC 27001 security certification was a direct response to the needs of our customers and partners – they need to know that their data and intellectual property are safe in our hands.”
The certification process includes a rigorous audit of Vyond’s information security management systems and controls. Achieving the ISO/IEC 27001 standard certifies that Vyond has the requisite information security controls in place to protect client data. The certification is awarded only to those companies that can meet the standard as judged by an independent, accredited team of auditors.
“We’ve been laser-focused on making Vyond a serious enterprise tool for business professionals, and security is a huge component of that,” explains Deaton. “Launching the HTML5-based Vyond Studio, joining the EU and Swiss Privacy Shield Frameworks, and creating a suite of additional data security features were all part of these efforts, and we’re extremely pleased to now hold this certification.”
To learn more about the company news and updates, visit the Vyond blog.
About Vyond
At Vyond, our mission is to put the power of video in the hands of everyone. Vyond allows people of all skill levels in all industries and job roles to create dynamic and powerful media. With features that go beyond moving text and images, you can build character-driven stories or compelling data visualizations that engage audiences and deliver results.
Founded as GoAnimate in 2007, Vyond has helped Global 2000 organizations, small businesses, and individuals produce more than 30 million videos. To learn more, visit vyond.com.
#### Vyond Recognized by HR Technology Industry Analysts for Approach to Learning Technology
SAN MATEO, Calif., Dec. 21, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Vyond, a SaaS video creation company that allows everyone to create video quickly and easily, today announced winning a Bronze distinction in the 2018 Brandon Hall Group Excellence Awards in Technology for the “Best Advance in Unique Learning Technology.”
Vyond is being recognized for its approach to video technology application for large organizations, which drives learning and development outcomes through dynamic, engaging content.
“Recognition in the Brandon Hall Group Excellence Awards in Technology validates the unique capability Vyond brings to the learning and development and HR industries to quickly create dynamic videos that get results,” said Stacy Adams, head of marketing at Vyond.
A panel of veteran, independent industry experts and Brandon Hall Group senior analysts and executives evaluated the entries based on the following criteria:
Product: What was the product’s breakthrough innovation?
Unique differentiators: What makes the product unique and how
does it differ from any competing products?
Value proposition: What problem does the product solve and/or what
need does this product address?
Measurable results: What are the benefits customers can expect to
experience as a result of using this product?
“We’re proud to honor the innovators. As human capital management continues to evolve, the creativity of the award winners is breathtaking. Organizations of all size showed that creativity and technology can create new and better work experiences for businesses and their employees,” said Rachel Cooke, chief operating officer of Brandon Hall Group and head of the awards program.
About Brandon Hall Group Inc.
With more than 10,000 clients globally and 20 years of delivering world-class research and advisory services, Brandon Hall Group is the most well-known and established research organization in the performance improvement industry. We conduct research that drives performance and provides strategic insights for executives and practitioners responsible for growth and business results.
Brandon Hall Group has an extensive repository of thought leadership, research, and expertise in Learning and Development, Talent Management, Leadership Development, Talent Acquisition, and Human Resources. At the core of our offerings is a Membership Program that Empowers Excellence Through Content, Collaboration, and Community. Our members have access to research that helps them make the right decisions about people, processes, and systems, combined with research-powered advisory services customized to their needs. (www.brandonhall.com).
About Vyond
At Vyond, our mission is to put the power of video in the hands of everyone. Vyond allows people of all skill levels in all industries and job roles to create dynamic and powerful media. With features that go beyond moving text and images, you can build character-driven stories or compelling data visualizations that engage audiences and deliver results.
Founded as GoAnimate in 2007, Vyond has helped Global 2000 organizations, small businesses, and individuals produce more than 30 million videos.
Stacy Adams Vyond +1 650 525 4225 press@vyond.com
#### Vyond secures a spot on G2’s 2022 Best Software Awards for Design
Every year, G2 drafts their Best Software List which showcases the world’s best software companies and products based on trustworthy and timely reviews from real users. And in 2022, our team is happy to announce Vyond was selected as one of G2’s best software for Design!
According to G2, only the software that provides exceptional value and creates community claims a spot on the list for Best Software. And claiming the 22nd spot of the top 50 tools for design is a significant achievement that we are incredibly thankful for. We could not have done it without your support, feedback, and trust.
Vyond reviews on G2
Vyond has an overall rating of 4.5/5 stars with over 100 verified reviews recorded. When breaking down the survey categories, we obtain the following results:
In Ease of Use, Vyond has a rating of 9.1 out of ten. In comparison, the animation industry average is 8.6
Similarly, when it comes to Quality of Support, Vyond’s score is 9 out of ten, while the animation industry average is 8.3
Lastly, the Ease of Setup rating for Vyond is 9.2, while the animation industry average is 8.8
It is encouraging to learn about the positive reception of our product. We strive to continue bringing top-of-the-line software that satisfies all of your business needs.
Head over to Vyond’s G2 page for more insights and reviews.
#### Vyond Unveils Video Showcase Resource for Customers
SAN MATEO, Calif., Jan. 21, 2020 /PRNewswire/ — Vyond, the world leader in enterprise video animation software, announced a new showcase page on their website featuring customer videos, templates, and testimonials in an effort to make video creation even faster and easier. Learning any new tool can be difficult, and Vyond actively listened to its engaged customer base and strong community to provide the tools needed to enable customers to get started quickly.
“Even though Vyond is a much easier way to make videos than traditional production methods, we see tremendous value in providing our customers with resources that make it even easier. Examples of completed videos and templates that can be modified for our customers’ specific needs directly address the feedback we’ve received from our community,” said Community Manager Jessica Hobbs. “These resources go a long way in helping our customers get started with Vyond.”
The Vyond showcase includes over 100 videos broken into three categories: customer video examples, complete, customizable video templates, and customer testimonials. Vyond customers from novice to expert and free-trial users will find a variety of content to inspire them.
Vyond’s customers use the platform for a myriad of use cases, from language instruction to social media advertising. The customer showcase is a highlight reel of these applications that gives both current customers and prospects a taste of what’s possible with Vyond.
The free templates help customers start creating videos right away, pre-filled with props, backgrounds, characters, motion, and more, to help save time and provide instruction. Some videos can be used as-is or with customizations, other videos are more conceptual and meant to inspire creativity. There are also tools to help dissect complex videos and teach customers how to recreate them for their own projects. Users can search for specific scenarios like sales training, product explainers, and sticky workplace issues.
The testimonials highlight Vyond customers’ thoughts about using Vyond Studio, working with the Vyond team, and how video is changing the workplace.
Continues Hobbs, “We believe there’s no limit to what people can create with Vyond. With these resources at our customers’ fingertips, it’s simpler than ever to learn how to make videos that help them achieve their business communication goals.”
All the videos and templates are accessible to Vyond customers and free trial users. To learn more about the company, visit vyond.com.
ABOUT VYOND
At Vyond, our mission is to put the power of video in the hands of everyone. Vyond allows people of all skill levels in all industries and job roles to create dynamic and powerful media. With features that go beyond moving text and images, you can build character-driven stories or compelling data visualizations that engage audiences and deliver results.
Founded as GoAnimate in 2007, Vyond has helped Global 2000 organizations, small businesses, and individuals produce more than 30 million videos. To learn more, visit vyond.com.
#### Vyond’s Latest Intelligent Video Creation Software Release Improves Stakeholder Engagement and Drives Business Outcomes
Leader in Animated Video Enables Faster and More Effective Enterprise Communication Across eLearning, HR, Internal Comms, Sales, and Marketing
DEVLEARN, LAS VEGAS, Nev. – Oct. 26, 2022 – Vyond, the leader in intelligent video creation for enterprises, today announced the Fall Release of its award-winning Vyond Studio. By pairing its unmatched content library with Artificial Intelligence (AI), Vyond has made it faster and easier to create relevant videos for business-critical eLearning, HR, Internal Communications, Sales, and Marketing communications. Using Vyond, enterprise customers create professional videos 10X faster and at scale, achieving a 130% uplift in engagement, while doing so 10X more cost efficiently when compared to costly legacy video production using agencies.
“Leaders in Training, HR, Marketing, Sales – and across the enterprise – know that video is essential for communicating with employees, customers, and prospects. But scaling video creation across the organization is hard,” said Vyond CEO Gary Lipkowitz. “Unfortunately, companies often fall short in creating content that lands with today’s overwhelmed stakeholders. But with Vyond’s new AI-powered capabilities, we’re making the creation of relevant, powerful videos much more accessible and easy for business users, without sacrificing our commitment to enterprise-grade brand compliance and information security.”
The New Release of Vyond Studio: Unmatched Relevance, Speed, and Power
The Fall Release of Vyond Studio extends the strength of the company’s enterprise video creation software – relevance, speed, and power. With the 2022 Fall Release, users can now import SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) files directly into their library. Vyond has added hundreds of new advanced charts, characters, and actions – along with new scene and video templates representing a wide range of industries, occupations, concepts, and seasonal topics.
Review, collaboration, and feedback cycles have also been shortened, through the text export/import feature. Customers can now quickly export the text from a Vyond video, make changes, and import the new text – without the text reviewer needing a seat license on Vyond.
What’s more, the Vyond 2022 Fall Release also incorporates more AI-powered features into Vyond Studio. Users will experience up to 10x improvements in speed and efficiency with the ability to instantly create characters, localize videos into 71 languages, and find props faster.
Photo-to-Character: Upload an existing photo or snap & send from your mobile device, and VyondAI will automatically generate a character. That character can then be used as-is, or easily edited further.
Instant Video Translation: Any text in a video, whether on-screen text, voiceover narration, or character dialog, regardless of how it was created, can be instantly translated into a wide range of languages. This eliminates the need for tedious global translation and updates.
PowerPoint Video Creator: Quickly convert static slide-based content into dynamic video assets. Import your slides or deck into Vyond, and Vyond’s AI handles the rest.
Robust security, advanced brand control capabilities, and a responsive interface make Vyond powerful enough for even the largest organizations. Vyond’s Fall Release addresses key concerns of Marketing and Internal Communications teams with new brand management features that allow brand leaders to create, share and enforce brand guidelines across teams creating videos with Vyond. Team admins can create and share branded templates using only approved fonts, logos, characters, and props. A new notes panel makes it easy to collaborate with anyone with whom a video is shared.
Vyond in Action: Zoetis Animal Health
Zoetis (NYSE: ZTS), the world’s largest producer of medicine and vaccinations for pets and livestock, uses Vyond for intelligent video creation. Michael Peters, L&D Sales Tools Lead, and his team at Zoetis create sales enablement videos with Vyond to onboard their salespeople on Salesforce, Tableau, and other critical sales technologies.
As an early adopter experienced with Vyond’s 2022 Fall Release, Peters commented, “Vyond listens to its customers and incorporates our feedback into its product development. We’re especially excited about the ability to quickly create characters and assets from our own photos, and to easily convert content in static presentations to video. Now we will be able to work even smarter and faster to help our sales team onboard more quickly and efficiently.”
Perspective from the L&D Community
“As an instructional technology professor and as a consultant, my focus is providing students and L&D leaders the tools and expertise necessary to be successful, for both corporate and educational environments,” said Karl Kapp, Founder of L&D Learning Academy and Professor of Instructional Technology at Bloomsburg University. “Vyond is the leader in intelligent animated video creation and an important technology that I use in the classroom, as well as recommending it to my corporate clients to communicate better and deliver better learning experiences.”
Vyond at DevLearn
Vyond is introducing the new release of Vyond Studio here at DevLearn this week. Visit Vyond at booth #411 for a product demonstration. Vyond CEO Gary Lipkowitz will present AI and the Race for Intelligent Video Creation on Thursday, October 27, at 1:15 pm PT / 4:15 ET.
Vyond will also demonstrate its new release of Vyond Studio at a webinar on Wednesday, November 9, 2002, at 2 pm EST / 11 am PST. Register here.
About Vyond
Vyond is the intelligent video creation software company. Over 14,000 organizations, including 65% of the Fortune 500 and millions of end users, use Vyond to communicate better with their employees, customers, and communities with animated video. Vyond Studio is the leader in hundreds of verified customer reviews on G2, Capterra, and GetApp. The company has offices in San Mateo, Calif., Chicago, Il., Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Visit vyond.com.
#### When Zoom Fatigue Becomes Exhaustion: How to Help Employees Navigate Video-Related Stress
URL: https://www.vyond.com/press/when-zoom-fatigue-becomes-exhaustion-how-to-help-employees-navigate-video-related-stress/
#### Working Mother: One-Third of Boomers Think Kids on Video Calls Are a Violation of Remote Work Etiquette
URL: https://www.vyond.com/press/one-third-of-boomers-think-kids-on-video-calls-are-a-violation-of-remote-work-etiquette/
#### Your video tech could be putting your company at risk
URL: https://www.vyond.com/press/your-video-tech-could-be-putting-your-company-at-risk/
### Showcases
#### 10 Common Webinar Mistakes and How to Avoid Them by Bython Media
B2B Marketing company Bython Media often creates “video white papers” to help other marketers run effective businesses and grow their client list. Here, Bython shares advice about running effective webinar sessions. In the video, the company uses Vyond’s wide selection of props to model ideal webinar practices. For example, Bython highlights the differences between a visually stale webinar console that’s crowded with information and a more engaging format.
#### 3 Reasons to Attend an HBCU Video Template
This video breaks down what Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) are, using real images with animated hand gestures and narration. This template video can easily be modified to showcase any location with replaceable photo templates that can be used to feature a school or other destination.
Video Transcript: 3 Reasons to Attend an HBCU
Congress officially defines an HBCU as a school established before 1964, whose principal mission was and is the education of Black Americans.
These establishments became prevalent after the Civil War and were dedicated to the newly free African-American population. Before the establishment of HBCUs, access to higher education for Black students was virtually non-existent. In total, there are 106 HBCUs that enroll 11% of Black students in the US, while only representing 3% of colleges in the country.
Here are three reasons to consider attending an HBCU:
On average, HBCU tuition rates are almost 30% less than comparable institutions. That makes it the best buy with higher returns at a lower cost.
HBCUs provide the best value in education, which helps to eliminate or reduce student debt for low to middle-income families. This effort could dramatically narrow the racial wealth gap.
In a poll conducted by Gallup Purdue, it was noted that Black graduates of HBCUs are more likely to have felt supported while in college than those who graduated from predominately white institutions. HBCU campuses can serve as a safe and nurturing environment for some students.
These institutions have ensured that every student has had the chance to succeed. By way of affordable pricing and nurturing academic environment, HBCUs are producing some of the leaders of the future.
Create Your Own Animated Videos
There’s a reason why Vyond is the leading platform for creating your own videos. Robust and powerful customization features are all wrapped into our simple, easy-for-everyone studio that comes fully loaded with everything you need to build engaging video experiences.
See where your creativity can take you with a Vyond free trial; no credit card required.
#### 4 Tips for Stronger Google Searches
4 Tips for Stronger Searches
Adding animated annotations in Vyond Studio can help you highlight important elements and illustrate abstract ideas right on top of the recording.
The video above about stronger google searches is a great example of how to embellish a screen recording. Vyond customers can use it as a customizable template to create their own annotated screen recordings.
Pro tip: Use the replace feature to switch out this video with your own screen recording and then annotate on top of it with Vyond assets.
Video Transcription: 4 Tips for Stronger Google Searches
Stronger searching can be the difference between planning a trip to Paris, France, or Paris, Texas. Here are four tips to take your googling above and beyond.
Catch the travel bug from your co-workers’ vacay pics? Use reverse image search to find picture-perfect spots, even if you don’t know the name.
Do your research using credible sources. Searching “Paris, France transportation” will bring up results from travel agencies, bloggers, and anyone with internet. Adding a site search like site colon .fr can help you restrict your search to info from local sources.
You can also use site search with a specific domain or website to find artwork from your favorite painter for a trip to the museum.
Pick a prime Parisian pâtissier with Boolean search. Find the best bakeries to get one of your favorite French treats by adding OR between two queries. Then again, why not have both? Bon voyage.
Create Your Own Animated Videos
There’s a reason why Vyond is the leading platform for creating your own videos. Robust and powerful customization features are all wrapped into our simple, easy-for-everyone studio that comes fully loaded with everything you need to build engaging video experiences.
See where your creativity can take you with a Vyond free trial; no credit card required.
#### 48in48 Impact Report
Secure funding and continue bringing a stellar service to the community with an outstanding impact report video that showcases your non-profit’s annual contributions and achievements.
With video, you can share your most important metrics in a fun and engaging way by bringing your monotonous data to life with animations and attention-grabbing visuals.
Check out the following video highlighting the efforts of 48in48, a non-profit organization with a mission to build websites for other non-profits around the world. With a modern and optimized website, a non-profit has a better opportunity to obtain more contributions from the public.
Open this template with Vyond Studio and customize it to fit your business needs.
Create Your Own Animated Videos
There’s a reason why Vyond is the leading platform for creating your own videos. Robust and powerful customization features are all wrapped into our simple, easy-for-everyone studio that comes fully loaded with everything you need to build engaging video experiences.
See where your creativity can take you with a Vyond free trial; no credit card required.
#### 5 Steps to Develop Your Cloud Data Management Strategy by Bython Media
Bython Media often creates “video white papers” to help professionals stay on top of key industry trends. Here, Bython speaks directly to viewers who are seeking to manage their cloud data more effectively. Bython uses Vyond’s preset settings and props to depict different aspects of an office environment, from server rooms to boardrooms.
#### 7 Essentials for a Great Digital Experience by Bython Media
B2B Marketing company Bython Media often creates “video whitepapers” to help other marketers develop successful in-house tools and client offerings. Bython uses this video to explain their findings about how companies can develop engaging digital experiences. Bython uses a simple animation style—for example, only giving characters a few key facial features—to help draw attention to the details presented in the narration.
#### 7 Fruits Exotiques Mangés = 7 Plantes Tropicales à Faire Pousser by Big Bang Science
Big Bang Science created this video to explain how to go about growing tropical plants from the seeds of common fruits we eat.
#### A Day in the Life of Lockdown: Appreciating Key Workers (UK)
COVID has changed a lot about how we live our day-to-day lives. This video shows how people in the UK have responded by appreciating those key employees who have been on the front lines throughout the pandemic.
Video Transcription: A Day in the Life of Lockdown
Lockdown has taught us all a lot. But more than anything, it taught us to appreciate those we’ve taken for granted. From our parents to dustbin workers, our police force, ambulance service, and our firefighters, and those working to feed the nation.
To all of our key workers, thank you.
Find your brand new very British characters in Vyond Studio now.
Create Your Own Animated Videos
There’s a reason why Vyond is the leading platform for creating your own videos. Robust and powerful customization features are all wrapped into our simple, easy-for-everyone studio that comes fully loaded with everything you need to build engaging video experiences.
See where your creativity can take you with a Vyond free trial; no credit card required.
#### A Few Facts About Pride
Use this short, customizable video to celebrate Pride. Make the template your own by adding images, photos, and additional facts.
#### Agency Pitch Video
Capture the attention of your potential clients and make every second count with an animated agency pitch video. This short and appealing pitch will effectively entice the observer and allow you to deliver an offer that can secure your next deal. So go ahead and edit this animated template video and discover why 94% of marketers express video has helped them increase the audience’s understanding of a product or service.
Create Your Own Animated Videos
There’s a reason why Vyond is the leading platform for creating your own videos. Robust and powerful customization features are all wrapped into our simple, easy-for-everyone studio that comes fully loaded with everything you need to build engaging video experiences.
See where your creativity can take you with a Vyond free trial; no credit card required.
#### AI Compliance and Data Privacy
This modern avatar template is ideal for tech-related instructionals such as AI protocols. Customize it as needed to create a branded, eye-catching video for your company.
#### Animate with Anneke: Teach with Your Character as a Buddy
Instructional coach Anneke Camstra made this video to explain how to show how to create engaging experiences with custom animated characters. Camstra uses Whiteboard Animation to add an illustrative effect.
#### Animated Frames
URL: https://www.vyond.com/showcase/video/animated-frames/
#### Annual Party Invitation
URL: https://www.vyond.com/showcase/video/annual-party-invitation/
#### Annual Report Template
As it is customary with most businesses, the approaching end of the year means reporting on the overall company health and annual performance to customers, employees, investors, and stakeholders. Ace your reporting with a vibrant animated video that conveys your metrics and key performance indicators with ease and efficacy. Animated reporting helps you translate complex and unappealing topics, such as data reporting, into something enticing, dynamic, and visually pleasant. And most notably, your content will be informative and engaging!
Video Transcription: Annual Report
[Dina Adebayo]
Hi Zodio, this is your CEO and President, Dina Adebayo. As a team, we’ve done some amazing work over the past 12 months, and it shows. Here is Zodio’s Year In Review.
Our daily sales continued to grow, striking a much healthier balance of new and repeat business compared to last year. The volume of Zodio plans sold also went up steadily, with our Zodio Sun plan seeing the greatest uptick in November. New customers from last year make up a diverse representation of some of our key audiences, like HR professionals and C-suite execs. Speaking of our customers, here’s an update from Willow in customer success.
[Willow]
Our NPS score went up 12 points last year, and nine out of 10 customers said they would recommend Zodio to a friend. We’ve seen a lot less churn, too, bringing us closer to hitting our two-year retention goal.
[Dina Adebayo]
That’s all pretty amazing, and I’m so proud of the work we’ve done. Now, let’s get out there and shoot to the moon.
Create Your Own Animated Videos
There’s a reason why Vyond is the leading platform for creating your own videos. Robust and powerful customization features are all wrapped into our simple, easy-for-everyone studio that comes fully loaded with everything you need to build engaging video experiences.
See where your creativity can take you with a Vyond free trial; no credit card required.
#### Annual Review 2019 – Amacuro Team
Amacuro created this video to present an annual review of their team’s success in 2019. They created custom characters to look like each member of their team and used the video to call attention to their hard work throughout the year.
#### Anti-bullying and Harassment in the Workplace
Use this anti-bullying video template to discuss the serious issue of workplace bullying and harassment. Explore the different types of negative behaviors that can occur in the workplace and the impact they can have on employees. The video also shares practical measures that companies can implement to ensure that their workplaces are free of bullying and harassment, including encouraging respectful behavior, training management to identify and stop bullying, and providing confidential processes for reporting bad behavior.
If you are being bullied, the video provides advice on how to document everything that happens, from checking your workplace bullying policy and making a complaint.
Edit this video to fit your needs and teach your workforce how to eradicate bullying and create a safe and successful working environment for everyone.
Video Transcription: Anti-bullying and Harassment in the Workplace
[NARRATOR]
Workplace bullying and harassment describes a wide range of negative behaviors, including physical, verbal, and psychological mistreatment by one or others in the workplace.
We deserve to feel safe, comfortable, and at ease in our working environment.
Acts of bullying can include malicious comments and gossip, forcing someone to work overtime or blocking promotions; hazing, where you are made to do something humiliating or inappropriate to be accepted; or even physical violence.
When someone is being bullied, it makes it difficult to focus on daily tasks. A victim may feel scared, depressed, and it can even affect life outside of work too.
In a company where bullying flourishes, it can lead to high employment turnover and decreased trust, which leads to reduced productivity.
Here are some measures you can put in place to ensure your workplace is free of bullying and harassment: Encourage employees to act towards each other in a respectful and professional manner, make it clear in your company handbook that bullying is not tolerated, train management to spot and stop bullying, ensure there are confidential processes for reporting bad behavior, make a commitment to support bullied employees.
If you are being bullied, document everything that happens, check your workplace bullying policy and make a complaint. If an employee reports the issue of bullying, investigate and stop the behavior.
Eradicate bullying so that everybody can feel safe and successful at work.
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See where your creativity can take you with a Vyond free trial; no credit card required.
#### App Explainer
URL: https://www.vyond.com/showcase/video/app-explainer/
#### App Promotion
Have a new breakthrough application or product to share with the world? Use this template to show it off in a distinctively modern way. Modify the video to fit your brand and tailor it to your viewer using Vyond’s wide variety of customization features.
#### Best Practices to Make Your AWS Implementation More Secure by Bython Media
URL: https://www.vyond.com/showcase/video/best-practices-to-make-your-aws-implementation-more-secure-by-bython-media/
#### Big Bang Science: Twelve Tips for Science Communication with Quentin Cooper
Communication agency Big Bang Science shares tips for explaining scientific concepts. The agency uses Vyond’s Custom Character Creator to build a true-to-life representation of narrator scientist Quentin Cooper, with his playful non sequiturs, accent, and signature beard.
#### Black Characters in Children’s Books
This video articulates why representation matters in children’s literature, showcasing three excellent children’s books about joyful, self-determined, and unique Black protagonists. Originally created for Black History Month, this video can be used year-round to help teachers, childcare providers, and parents find stories that matter.
Video Transcription: Black Characters in Children’s Books
Celebrate Black history with children of all ages, by reading stories about Black leaders and change-makers.
For centuries Black Americans have overcome adversity and made their mark on the world. And it’s important to celebrate those themes in children’s literature.
It’s equally important to depict Black joy, ease, and comfort, and not just stories of overcoming oppression.
Books that center relatable and casual Black characters, help positively shift the image Black children see of themselves.
Here are three children’s books that you should consider adding to your rotation year-round.
Hair Love is a beautifully illustrated story, about a father giving his daughter an extra special hairstyle. The story positively depicts the bond between father and daughter, an ode to self-confidence, and the beauty of Black hair.
Gabe the Mighty is a series of books, that are designed to tell the imaginative stories of boys of color. These books are dedicated to painting a positive self-image for these young boys, and gives them an opportunity to fall in love with reading. In this installment of Gabe the Mighty, Gabe must clean his room while also fighting off imaginary messy minions.
Grace for President tells a story of a young girl’s ambition to become president of the United States. To prepare for her career in politics, she decides to run for class president at her elementary school. The story centers Grace’s tenacity and civic-mindedness, while also educating the reader on the American electoral college system.
Black history is not just the past. It’s happening right now. By meeting the need for more Black stories, we’re elevating future Black change-makers, and their accomplishments.
Create Your Own Animated Videos
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#### Blackboard for Instructors by Brandman University
URL: https://www.vyond.com/showcase/video/blackboard-for-instructors-by-brandman-university/
#### BookYourWeddingDay.com Explainer
BookYourWeddingDay.com makes planning a destination wedding painless. First, using animated maps, they show you how hard it is to plan a destination wedding without their service. Then they show how simple the process is by using their site’s interface and animation to walk you through the process.
#### Branded Explainer Video
This video shows the use of brand elements like colors, fonts, and logos. Customize the colors and other elements according to your brand guidelines and make it your own.
Video Transcription: Brand Explainer Video
Shopping online is super convenient. Did you know 2.05 billion people worldwide purchase goods online? It’s fast and easy, but waiting for your package to arrive is not. You can’t leave home, can’t make other plans. You might not even know how many packages will arrive until you hear the doorbell ring. Oops.
Introducing Logmoove. Logmoove is a one-stop logistics service, putting quick access to package position and delivery info right in the palm of your hand. You can select a delivery time in just a few clicks. Pick green energy delivery options to reduce your carbon emissions, making delivering more transparent. Logmoove, delivery for the digital age.
Create Your Own Animated Videos
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#### Brief introduction of DEI
This short video introduces you to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) concepts. DEI refers to the values and practices that aim to create a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive society, workplace, or community. Diversity entails recognizing and respecting differences among people. Equity means providing fair treatment and equal opportunities to all individuals, regardless of their backgrounds or identities in order to address historical and systemic injustices. Lastly, inclusion means creating a sense of belonging and a welcoming environment where everyone’s perspectives and contributions are heard, considered, and respected. Together, DEI promotes social justice, human rights, and fair treatment of individuals within a society. Edit this DEI template video with your company’s colors, brand, and messaging to teach about the importance of DEI and how it can benefit your workforce.
Create Your Own Animated Videos
There’s a reason why Vyond is the leading platform for creating your own videos. Robust and powerful customization features are all wrapped into our simple, easy-for-everyone studio that comes fully loaded with everything you need to build engaging video experiences.
See where your creativity can take you with a Vyond free trial; no credit card required.
#### Business Case Builder
Quickly and effectively address client questions or concerns with this easily customizable template that answers, “Why us? Why Now?”. Easily modify the video by uploading pertinent sales info, replacing the avatar, and swapping out colors and images to fit your brand and audience.
#### Business Pitch
This template is an ideal way for you to pitch new business proposals in a professional and engaging way. Customize the video to match your brand and make it as relevant as possible for your specific audience and purpose. Simply swap out the photo with one of Vyond’s avatars to create a further customized experience.
#### Celebrating AAPI Environmental Leaders
Happy AAPI heritage month! This time, we present to you a video template that celebrates trailblazing AAPI environmental leaders who have been at the forefront of climate activism and championing the planet’s well-being. From grassroots activists to renowned policymakers, these inspiring individuals dedicate their lives to protecting the environment and ensuring a sustainable future for all.
Our customizable video template offers a beautiful and creative way to honor and celebrate these and many other leaders. With fully customizable assets, you can personalize the video to fit your unique needs and showcase the AAPI environmental leaders who have made a significant impact on your life or organization.
Whether you’re an environmental advocate, a nonprofit organization, or a company looking to showcase your commitment to sustainability, this video template is a great tool and starting point for bringing your ideas to life. Add your own images, videos, and text to create a dynamic video that captures the essence of these inspiring leaders and delivers your message efficiently.
Create Your Own Animated Videos
There’s a reason why Vyond is the leading platform for creating your own videos. Robust and powerful customization features are all wrapped into our simple, easy-for-everyone studio that comes fully loaded with everything you need to build engaging video experiences.
See where your creativity can take you with a Vyond free trial; no credit card required.
#### Celebrating Juneteenth
Juneteenth, short for June nineteenth, is an annual holiday commemorating the end of slavery in the United States.
Video Transcript
Juneteenth is an annual holiday celebrated on June 19th, commemorating the end of slavery in the United States. It has been around for over 150 years. It all began on June 19th, 1865, when Union soldiers arrived in Galveston, Texas, with news that the Civil War was over and that enslaved peoples were to be freed.
Even though the Emancipation Proclamation had been issued more than two years earlier, it had little effect at the time of signing as news of the order had not reached the enslaved population of Texas.
The first major Juneteenth celebration was held in Austin, Texas, in 1866. By 1872, the celebration had been added to a calendar of public events, and that year, Black leaders in Texas purchased 10 acres of land to celebrate Juneteenth. Juneteenth was informally celebrated up until 1980, when Texas became the first state to proclaim Emancipation Day as an official state holiday. Today, nearly all 50 states mark Juneteenth as either a date of observance or a state holiday.
Over the years, Juneteenth has been celebrated by Black Americans all over the country in many different ways. On many occasions, an assortment of red foods and drinks are prepared to symbolize perseverance. But celebrations can range from small family gatherings and backyard barbecues to Grand festivals and parades featuring exhibitions of African-American music, literature, dance, and more.
More can be done to further support Juneteenth, such as local and state governments, formally recognizing the history and culture of the day and companies and local businesses incorporating it into their calendars even before it becomes a national holiday.
Ultimately, Juneteenth is much more than a holiday. It is a day for Black Americans to celebrate freedom, culture, and heritage, and for everyone to recognize and commemorate this pivotal moment in American history.
#### Children’s Books About Pride
Inspired by our Telly Award-winning video on Black Characters in Children’s Books, we created a brand new template sharing top-tier titles for sharing Pride Month with readers of all ages.
Give it a watch to discover some of the best books for broaching LGBTQ+ topics with kids, and create your own version to share with your audiences and working parents.
The book covers, colors, and characters depicted in the video above are Vyond-animated versions, inspired by the original book illustrations.
You can also find more LGBTQ+ training resources in our up-to-date guide for Pride Month.
Video Transcription: Children’s Books About Pride
Reading to children about LGBTQ topics fosters inclusivity and belonging. Here are a few books for young readers that you can share during Pride Month and beyond:
Show kids the beauty of gender expression and identity with They, She, He, Easy as ABC by Maya & Matthew. In this fresh take on the classic alphabet book, readers get to practice calling characters by their correct pronouns while dancing alongside delightfully diverse watercolor illustrations.
Fairytales can be inclusive, too! Daniel Haack’s books Maiden & Princess and Prince & Knight show same-sex love within fantastic adventures of self-discovery.
This Day in June by Gayle E. Pitman—illustrated by Kristyna Litten—offers a colorful and joyous introduction to Pride Month, complete with an adult’s guide for talking about queer history, culture, and celebration.
Happy reading!
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#### City of Coral Gables 2019 Smart City Application by The Laboratory of Everyday Things
Created by a team of architects, this video offers ideas for how life might be improved in the city of Coral Gables. It features animated walk-throughs of projects that the architects envision for Coral Gables, such as a transportation app and a trolley system. It won first prize and the 2019 Smart City competition. Note: Several elements of this video were created outside of Vyond.
#### Cleveland Water’s How to Find Water Leaks
Public-works company Cleveland Water provides tips on identifying leaks in water systems here. The organization creatively combines Vyond props to depict a water meter that counts upward as the narration continues to show the impact that even a small water leak can have on a viewer’s water bill.
#### Color Contrast for Web Accessibility
To be mindful of people with disabilities, you can make an effort to plan and design websites that will facilitate the navigation and consumption of web content. This video teaches you the basics of color contrast for web accessibility in accordance with the WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines). By simply increasing contrast ratios, you can significantly improve the experience of your website visitors.
Video Transcription: Color Contrast for Web Accessibility
[Mark]
Hi, everyone. I’m Mark, from Vyond. Today, we’re talking about color contrast and web accessibility. Whenever you create content, it’s important to think of everyone who may want to watch it, including those with disabilities. Luckily, we have the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, often referred to as WCAG 2.0, to provide a single shared international standard to ensure that web content is accessible to all.
According to the World Health Organization, there are more than 250 million people who suffer from some form of visual impairment alone. One area that’s often overlooked when creating animations for web content is color contrast. This web content generally refers to visual information that’s posted on a web page or application, like text, images, and video, all pretty important things to help tell our story.
According to the guidelines, the contrast ratio between text and its background should be at least 4.5 to 1, in order to meet the minimum conformance eligibility level of double-A, to look like this. This ratio becomes less prominent with larger fonts since it’s easier to read at lower contrast. So, for example, if your type is at least 18pt or 14pt bold, the minimum contrast ratio drops to 3 to 1.
The WebAIM color contrast checker is a free resource that will calculate the score for both the regular and larger test sizes. It’s perfect to calculate your values. Just enter your color values, and check the results for compliance. And that’s all there is to helping everyone access your content.
Create Your Own Animated Videos
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See where your creativity can take you with a Vyond free trial; no credit card required.
#### Company Awards
Inspired by the prestige and appeal of award shows, we present you with a creative video template for communicating your success to your audience. Whether you won a trophy, received some recognition from an important publisher, or simply want to showcase your recently awarded accolades, edit this fun and engaging Vyond video template and proudly celebrate your hard-earned wins.
Video Transcription: Company Awards
[Reporter 1]
We’re reporting live from the first annual Golden Moon Company Awards, honoring those companies that went above and beyond this year.
[Reporter 2]
Let’s take a look at the highlights.
[Presenters]
…And the award for Professional Development goes to… Zodio!
…And the award for Innovative Design goes to… Zodio!
…And the award for Best Business Solution goes to… (surprise surprise)… Zodio!
[Reporter 2]
In an astonishing flex, Zodio swept the first annual Golden Moon Company Awards.
[Reporter 1]
We love to see it, Tom.
Inspired by the
Create Your Own Animated Videos
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#### Company Intro
Your company only gets one chance to make a first impression, so make it stick with this bold, muti-framed introduction template. Modify the video to fit your brand and tailor it to suit your specific purpose and convey your message. Simply swap out the photo with one of Vyond’s avatars to create a further customized experience.
#### Company Updates and Newsletter
Note: Shutterstock assets included in this template are only available to Enterprise and Professional users.
#### Competitive Battlecard
When you’re up against stiff competition, this template helps you easily create an inspiring way to compare performance and highlight your advantages. Modify the video by adding in brand specific facts, figures, and imagery, and choosing the most effective avatar for your audience.
#### Conference Call Etiquette
It’s likely that you’re involved in more conference calls these days. We’ve put together some guidelines to help you and your co-participants enjoy successful and problem-free calls.
Video Transcription: Conference Call Etiquette
We are all likely involved in more conference calls these days. But conference calls can be clunky, awkward, and inefficient if the participants don’t follow some best practices. Lucky for you, we’ve put together some guidelines so that you and your co-participants can enjoy successful, problem-free conference calls.
Calling in a few minutes ahead of time is a good practice. It’s better to wait for other people to show up on time than for them to wait for you to show up late. The meeting organizer should supply an agenda before the call begins and should lead the call by keeping people on schedule and on topic. Save specialized conversations for another time.
Make sure to mute the microphone when you’re not speaking to prevent background noises from coming through. Try to conduct your call from a room that is free from background distractions. And if noise will be an issue, be upfront about it at the beginning of the call.
It’s not always easy for people on the call to identify you based on your voice alone. Be sure to state your name before speaking or have someone on the call introduce you before you begin. Most small microphones aren’t known for their superior audio quality. So be sure to sit close to your phone or computer and speak loudly and clearly.
It can be hard to know when to speak up on larger conference calls. To avoid participants all talking at the same time, the organizer should leave space between topics and ask if anyone has comments or questions. Before ending the call, the organizer should recap everything that was accomplished. If there are any action items, these should also be reiterated.
Lastly, sign off with a goodbye. Don’t just hang up and leave the remaining people on the call in a strange silence, unsure if the call has ended or not. With these tips, you’ll be sure to have the smoothest and most successful conference calls yet.
Create Your Own Animated Videos
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#### Conference Training – Qualifying Leads (5 of 5)
Use this video template to explain best practices about qualifying leads at a conference booth to a new sales hire. (This is the fifth of a series of five conference-related explainer videos.)
#### Conference Training – Scanning Badges (3 of 5)
Use this video template to explain best practices about scanning badges at a conference to a new sales hire. (This is the third of a series of five conference-related explainer videos.)
#### Conference Training – Travel Expenses (2 of 5)
Use this video template to explain how to manage conference travel expenses to a new sales hire. (This is the second of a series of five conference-related explainer videos.)
#### Conference Training – What to Know Before You Go to a Work Conference (1 of 5)
Use this video template to explain protocols related to going to a work conference to a new sales hire. (This is the first of a series of five conference-related explainer videos.)
#### Conference Training – Working the Booth (4 of 5)
Use this video template to explain best practices about working the booth at a conference to a new sales hire. (This is the fourth of a series of five conference-related explainer videos.)
#### Conflict Resolution Training: Attribution Bias
Use this template to teach employees about resolving issues with coworkers. It offers strategies for managing emotions at work and shifting to a positive mindset. This template specifically focuses on the issue of attribution biases, but you can replace the text, images, and narration to address another topic.
Video Transcript: Attribution Bias Training
Imagine you have an urgent task to complete and you need to do it with your partner Betty. But the problem is she’s late, really late. Your brain is quick to connect the dots. She doesn’t care. She really lacks discipline.
Well, your brain just took a common shortcut called the fundamental attribution error. When witnessing another person’s behavior leading to a negative outcome, we tend to attribute that behavior to their intrinsic nature while underestimating situational factors.
Because of the fundamental attribution error, you now have a negative perception of Betty and it further affects your judgment of Betty’s actions. Every mistake she makes now amplifies that negative perception. Because of that, you decide to handle your next project all by yourself and end up working very late to complete it. The next morning your alarm clock doesn’t ring for some reason, plus there were some delays commuting. The result is you’re late to work.
Apologizing to your boss, you feel guilty, but there was nothing you could have done. It’s just one of those days where everything goes wrong. You’ve just followed another brain shortcut called the self-serving bias. When we analyze our own behavior leading to a negative outcome, we attribute it to situational factors instead of our own intrinsic nature in order to see ourselves more positively.
Let’s wrap up. The fundamental attribution error is when we attribute someone else’s behavior to their intrinsic nature because we lack information about situational factors.
On the other hand, we tend to attribute our own behavior to external factors in order to protect our self-esteem. The important takeaway is that they are both subjective attributions. Looking at both intrinsic and external factors is key to learning and growing.
Create Your Own Animated Videos
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#### Cool Kids Series: Economy at a Glance by Texas Bank and Trust
Texas Bank and Trust created this video to teach kids useful money management tips. They use visual analogies from Vyond’s Business Friendly animation style to simplify complex topics for parents to share with young viewers.
#### Coping with Exam Anxiety by University of West England, Bristol
The University of West England, Bristol created this Business Friendly video to help students learn about managing anxiety. The video powerfully conveys the character’s emotions through dynamic facial expressions and narration without using text.
#### Coronavirus Precauciones – Español
Aquí hay una plantilla que puede usar para comunicarle rápidamente a su equipo información sobre el Coronavirus. Este video ilustra las precauciones básicas y las medidas preventivas que las personas pueden tomar para frenar la propagación del Coronavirus. Actualice la plantilla con sus propias políticas de salud y seguridad y cambie nuestra voz por la suya.
#### Coronavírus Precauções – Português
URL: https://www.vyond.com/showcase/video/coronavirus-precaucoes-portugues/
#### Coronavirus Precautions
Here’s a template video to help you quickly communicate to your team about Coronavirus. This video illustrates the basic precautions and preventative measures people can take to curb the spread of Coronavirus. Update the template with your own health and safety policies and swap out our voiceover for your own.
This video is based on March 2020 recommendations
Video Transcript: Corona Virus Precautions
This video will cover some of the precautions and preventative measures to take regarding the Coronavirus also known as COVID-19.
Symptoms to look for include fever, shortness of breath, and coughing. If you suspect you have Coronavirus call your local hospital or doctor’s office and explain your situation. They will direct you on the best course of action to take.
Some preventative measures you can take are:
Stay home if you are sick.
Avoid large crowds or densely populated areas.
Cover your coughs and sneezes. Remember it is best to cough or sneeze into the inner side of your elbow to avoid getting germs on your hands.
Avoid touching your eyes, mouth, and nose.
Disinfect commonly used surfaces around the home and office to help curb the spread of the virus. The CDC recommends cleaning your phone at least once per day.
Wash your hands frequently with soap for at least 20 seconds and use hand sanitizer between washes or when you’re on the go.
With the tips in this video, you can help protect yourself and prevent the spread of the Coronavirus and other respiratory viruses.
Create Your Own Animated Videos
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#### Coronavirus: Précautions et Mesures Préventives Contre la COVID-19 au Québec
URL: https://www.vyond.com/showcase/video/coronavirus-precautions-et-mesures-preventives-contre-la-covid-19-au-quebec/
#### Coronavirus: Returning to Work
Video Transcription: COVID-19 | Returning to Work
As we’ve been spending the last who knows how many days working from home. Many of us have been wondering “when will we return to the office?” And when we do, what will that look like? While we don’t have a date set for our return to the office, we have developed a set of guidelines following the California state COVID-19 industry guidance for office workspaces.
We’re going to do everything in our power to create a safe and secure workplace for us all. This means the post-COVID-19 office you come to will be a very different place from the one you remember. But that will be for the best. What will our office look like?
Well, first of all, it might be quite empty. Although the office may technically be open, if it isn’t essential for you to come in, we still encourage you to telework. For those of us returning to the workplace, here are some of the key steps the company is taking to ensure your safety.
We are redesigning the workspace to allow for a minimum of six feet of spacing between people. This means, for example, that a typical meeting room will only hold 50% of its normal capacity. We’re also planning alternating work shifts to minimize the density of employees in the office at any given time.
Finally, we’ve arranged to increase the frequency of our cleanings and created guidelines for the sanitation of high-touch surfaces. We’ll also be asking you to do some things; take daily temperature and symptom screenings upon arrival at the office, wear proper face covering, avoid handshakes, regularly disinfect your own work areas with provided supplies, take regular safety trainings.
If you are feeling at all unwell, notify your manager and do not come into the office. For a more detailed list of anticipated changes, please visit our worksite plan. Together we can build a safe workplace for everyone.
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#### Corporate Fitness for Employees
URL: https://www.vyond.com/showcase/video/corporate-fitness-for-employees/
#### Corporate Fitness for Employees
This fitness-focused template is perfect for your corporate fitness deliverables and can be customized for quick, impactful messaging that fits your brand and tone.
#### Corporate Giving Campaign
Video Transcription: Corporate Giving Campaign
Here at BizCorp Co, we believe that by giving back, we can make a positive and meaningful contribution to the communities where we live. Giving to local organizations helps them do amazing things for our communities.
And unites us as a whole.
That’s why this year, we’re launching our first annual on the double campaign, and we’re inviting all BizCorp Co employees, as well as their family and friends, to participate. From today until the end of the month, when you donate to a charity of your choice we’ll match your contribution, effectively doubling your donation.
And now making a donation is easier than ever with our automated system. Simply input your name, choose your charity from the drop-down menu, place your donation and we’ll take care of the rest. Let’s join together to help make an impact where we live and support local organizations working to make a difference in our communities.
Create Your Own Animated Videos
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See where your creativity can take you with a Vyond free trial; no credit card required.
#### Corporate Plan by City of London Corporation
URL: https://www.vyond.com/showcase/video/corporate-plan-by-city-of-london-corporation/
#### COVID Vaccine Supply Chain
Video Transcription: COVID Vaccine Supply Chain
With COVID vaccines rolling out across the globe, we thought you might like to know exactly how a vaccine makes its way from the manufacturer through distribution and finally, into the hands of professional healthcare workers.
Pharmaceutical companies acquire the necessary raw materials to create their vaccines through their own manufacturing or manufacturing partners. Through numerous calculated steps, they create a formulated bulk vaccine, which is then transported to a filling area and dispersed into glass vials. Once packaged, single-dose and multi-dose vaccines are stored in a cold storage facility as they await transport.
For vaccines that require refrigeration, the temperature must be kept between 2 to 8 degrees Celsius and must be closely monitored from the point of creation all the way through delivery.
To protect the integrity of the vaccine, manufacturers deploy cold-chain capabilities. Cold-chain is how the temperature of perishable products are managed in order to maintain quality and safety from end to end in the distribution process. Cold-chain is used for many things, from ice cream and other frozen foods to a variety of medicines and vaccines.
There are a few different ways of transporting the vaccines while maintaining the proper temperature, but the most common are refrigerated trucks and thermal shippers, packaging that can be loaded with dry ice to maintain recommended storage temperatures for up to 10 days.
To ensure the integrity of the cold storage, manufacturers use GPS-enabled thermal sensors during the shipping process that track the location and temperature of each vaccine shipment across their pre-set routes.
Once the vaccines arrive at their destination, there are three main ways they can be stored. If they are to be used immediately, the vaccines can be moved into a refrigeration unit, which are commonly found in hospitals.
Here, they can be stored at the recommended temperature for five days. Alternatively, the thermal shippers the vaccines arrive in may be used for temporary storage up to 15 days, but the dry ice needs to be replenished every five days. After 15 days in the thermal shipper, the vaccines may be moved into a refrigeration unit for five more days for a total of 20 days of storage.
Lastly, upon arrival, vaccines can be moved into ultra-low temperature freezers, which are commercially available and can extend the shelf life of the vaccine up to six months. Once the vaccine is thawed and stored under the recommended temperature between 2 to 8 degrees Celsius, it cannot be re-frozen and must be used within five days.
Now that you know how the supply chain for the COVID vaccine works, we hope you have a better understanding of how the vaccine makes its way to your town with quality and care.
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#### Create an Ergonomic Workspace at Home
Video Transcription: Create an Ergonomic Workspace at Home
Working from home for long hours throughout the day can be a challenging adjustment for some. Experiencing discomfort, strain, or pain can easily lead to a lack of motivation to work. Here are some tips to help you create an ergonomic workspace from your home.
Avoid the temptation to work from your couch or bed. Laying in bed while working may indicate to your body that it’s time to nap. Instead, find a good flat table or desk space to keep your places of comfort and relaxation separate from your workspaces. Find a comfortable seat that encourages good posture. Your chair should have solid back support and ideally lumbar support. You can also add a small pillow to support your lower back.
Make sure your shoulders are relaxed and not hunched. And ensure the height of the chair allows your feet to touch the floor comfortably, and that your legs are bent at a 90-degree angle. Adjust your monitor height to your eye level, and position at about one arm’s length away. Keeping the center of your computer monitor eye level ensures you don’t strain your neck or eyes. If you work with a laptop, you can use a stand or even a stack of books to raise your computer to an appropriate level.
Having a mouse and keyboard in this case will be necessary. Be sure to place them both on the same surface and at a height that allows you to keep your wrist straight, your upper arms close to your body, and your hands at or slightly below the level of your elbows. Optimizing your home workspace will help you have a productive workday. And your body will thank you in the long run.
Create Your Own Animated Videos
There’s a reason why Vyond is the leading platform for creating your own videos. Robust and powerful customization features are all wrapped into our simple, easy-for-everyone studio that comes fully loaded with everything you need to build engaging video experiences.
See where your creativity can take you with a Vyond free trial; no credit card required.
#### Creative Collaboration – Narration Scenes
URL: https://www.vyond.com/showcase/video/creative-collaboration-narration-scenes/
#### Creative Typography – Bundle
This video template is a perfect solution for adding flare to the text on your videos. Our Creative Typography – Bundle offers a diverse selection of video transitions, effects, and props that let you level up the engagement of plain text. By incorporating this video template into your project, you can effortlessly create a stunning set of clips that infuse your content with an additional layer of originality. Try it out today!
Create Your Own Animated Videos
There’s a reason why Vyond is the leading platform for creating your own videos. Robust and powerful customization features are all wrapped into our simple, easy-for-everyone studio that comes fully loaded with everything you need to build engaging video experiences.
See where your creativity can take you with a Vyond free trial; no credit card required.
#### Creative Video Transitions – Bundle
The following video template bundles an assortment of video transitions that will quickly and easily take your content to the next level. These creative transitions are great for content creators, marketers, or anyone looking to add some visual interest to their videos. The array of video transitions will seamlessly blend your video clips together, creating a dynamic and captivating viewing experience. From dramatic zooms to sliding props, this template has it all, ensuring that your video projects will stand out from the rest.
Simply select your desired transition, and make it all yours. The transitions are fully customizable, so you can change the props, and adjust the timing and duration to perfectly suit your content.
Create Your Own Animated Videos
There’s a reason why Vyond is the leading platform for creating your own videos. Robust and powerful customization features are all wrapped into our simple, easy-for-everyone studio that comes fully loaded with everything you need to build engaging video experiences.
See where your creativity can take you with a Vyond free trial; no credit card required.
#### Crisis Intervention & Trauma Course Intro by Brandman University
URL: https://www.vyond.com/showcase/video/crisis-intervention-trauma-course-intro-by-brandman-university/
#### Customer and Stakeholder Engagement
Use this modern, multi-framed template to engage clearly and directly with customers and key stakeholders. Customize it with your brand identity and photography to make it your own or even repurpose it for a different message altogether.
#### Customer Story/Proof Point
Nothing sells better than a ringing endorsement from a peer company and this template offers an easily customizable showcase for past ROI successes. Modify the video by uploading customer-specific facts, figures, and imagery, and choosing the most effective avatar for your audience.
#### Customer Support Phone Training: Insurance Claims
Teach your support team best practices for interacting with customers with this template. It uses the example of a customer who is frustrated about their insurance, but you can easily replace the narration to make the story about your own product.
#### Customer Support Training: The P.E.T.E Framework
Use this template to help employees manage sales and support calls more effectively. This video focuses on one particular framework—P.E.T.E.—but you can change the voiceover and individual points to model best practices for your own support team.
Video Transcription: Customer Support Training with P.E.T.E.
CALLER: This was honestly such a waste of time.
CONSULTANT: I’m sorry you feel that way, ma’am. I can–
[CALL DROPPING]
PRESENTER: Looks like you haven’t met P.E.T.E.
CONSULTANT: Pete? The guy from finance?
PRESENTER: Uh, no. The P.E.T.E model. Mastering this concept will ensure that you provide best-in-class service to all of our customers. The P in P.E.T.E stands for positive. It’s our responsibility to make sure each customer leaves with a positive mental image of Vyond. E is for effective. Give customers the most effective solution, not the easiest. T is for timely. No one likes to wait around for answers.
Get back to customers as soon as you can and set expectations if there could be a delay. E stands for exceed expectations. To provide great service, you need to exceed expectations in small but meaningful ways. Checking off P.E.T.E helps ensure a great customer experience and a positive reflection on Vyond.
CONSULTANT: Wow, this was very helpful.
Create Your Own Animated Videos
There’s a reason why Vyond is the leading platform for creating your own videos. Robust and powerful customization features are all wrapped into our simple, easy-for-everyone studio that comes fully loaded with everything you need to build engaging video experiences.
See where your creativity can take you with a Vyond free trial; no credit card required.
#### Cyber Security Training
Deliver mission-critical cyber security training with this sleek, modern, multi-framed template. Customize the video to match your brand and make it as relevant as possible for your specific audience and purpose. Simply swap out the photo with one of Vyond’s avatars to create a further customized experience.
#### Cyber Summit 2017: The Future is Already Here — It’s Just Not Evenly Distributed by Cybera
This video was created to promote the 2017 Cyber Summit event in Canada. It uses the colorful assets of the Business Friendly style and compelling scenario comparisons to pique viewers’ interest in the event’s core issue: tech accessibility.
#### Cybersecurity Threat Spy Scenario
This template video shows how to talk about serious content in fun ways. The mock training video turns a password compliance lesson into a spy game.
Video Transcription: Cybersecurity Threat Spy Scenario
Good evening, agent. Your mission is to take down the evil Dr. Ogma. Here’s the rundown on tonight’s cyber attack at OGMA HQ. It’s simple. Gain access spread the computer virus, destroy the data. Your destination is the application room located at the core of the building. There is only one way in.
First, climb through the Wi-Fi tunnel to the entry portal. Hide yourself in the incoming mail. There may be security guards on duty, but they seldom check. Once you’re in the storeroom, wait until the right moment to attack. Your friendly disguise should protect you from being noticed. And the antivirus system is out of date, so you should slip past easily.
Next, find the application center, and do your work quickly. Install the virus. You may find that the computer is password-protected, but you can usually see the password written down nearby, or make it easy to guess. Once installed, the virus will spread immediately. Get out before anyone notices.
Good luck. I look forward to your update.
Create Your Own Animated Videos
There’s a reason why Vyond is the leading platform for creating your own videos. Robust and powerful customization features are all wrapped into our simple, easy-for-everyone studio that comes fully loaded with everything you need to build engaging video experiences.
See where your creativity can take you with a Vyond free trial; no credit card required.
#### Deforestation
This short video about deforestation utilizes color, sound, and movement to tell a story without any voice. The template includes useful elements for a variety of video projects including an “unveiling” transition with plants, a colorful animal scene, and the effect of moving between the virtual world and the real world.
#### Digital Citizenship Training by Digital Respons-Ability
Freddy Future and Destiny Data teach elementary-aged kids basic guidelines for digital citizenship.
#### Digital Network Narration Scenes
This modern graphic template provides an excellent starting point for any techology-focused text presentation. Customize it with company facts, figures, and imperative info for an energetic, engagement-boosting video.
#### Dynamic Charts and Graphs – Bundle
The following video template contains several different dynamic charts and graphs that will take your numerical and data storytelling to new heights. Impress your viewers with visually stunning data representation and effectively convey your message with clarity and impact.
The assets showcased in this video are fully customizable, so you can select your props, adjust the numbers, colors, and change and duration to perfectly suit your content.
Create Your Own Animated Videos
There’s a reason why Vyond is the leading platform for creating your own videos. Robust and powerful customization features are all wrapped into our simple, easy-for-everyone studio that comes fully loaded with everything you need to build engaging video experiences.
See where your creativity can take you with a Vyond free trial; no credit card required.
#### Edge Computing Mitsubishi Electric Factory Automation
Mitsubishi Electric explains their edge computing products.
#### Educational Video by Mike Morrison: How to Create a Better Research Poster in Less Time
Michigan State University doctoral candidate Mike Morrison uses this video to help academics make their research poster designs more engaging. Morrison seamlessly inserts real-world assets (such as a presentation poster) into animated settings to help viewers envision how they might present a more readable, exciting poster with their own findings.
#### Effective Communication
Guide diverse or disparate teams towards more constructive communication practices with this simple, message-forward template. Tailor the template to fit your needs and create a video that speaks directly to your viewers in a compelling way. Simply swap out the photo with one of Vyond’s avatars to achieve a further customized experience.
#### Electric Vehicles as the New Normal by Bython Media
Bython Media often creates “video white papers” to help other marketers stay on top of key industry trends. Bython uses this video to break down consumer-preference trends in the electric vehicle industry. The company gives data-driven support to the narration as the imagery focuses more on cars and their next evolution.
#### Emotive Concepts
URL: https://www.vyond.com/showcase/video/emotive-concepts/
#### Empathy in the Workplace for Remote Teams
The new normal for today’s workplace is “no normal,” and every team member brings their own conditions with them, be it cooped-up kids, bottlenecked bandwidth, or a particularly disruptive dog. This template features tips on how to meet those challenges with a little proactive empathy.
Effective remote collaboration depends on having explicit discussions about empathy and team norms. Start the conversation with your teammates.
Video Transcript: Empathy in the Workplace
One third of boomers consider having kids in the background of video calls to be a violation of remote work etiquette. Gen X isn’t far behind with 30% of them agreeing, compared to 22% of millennials and 11% of Gen Zers.
Since more and more of us are working from home these days, it’s important to recognize that we’re all facing different challenges. The person who sat next to you in the office might be facing a completely different at-home reality than you’re facing.
How do we practice empathy in the remote workplace?
It starts with how we react to moments in everyday remote work life. We know that younger workers are challenged with separating their physical work environment from home life while older workers are struggling with feeling disconnected. There’s also a gender divide when it comes to work life balance. And there are many other factors at play contributing to your colleagues’ different experiences and adaptation to our remote work circumstances.
Proactively acknowledge that your colleagues may be facing new challenges. Genuinely ask people how they’re feeling. Try to understand their perspective and offer your support. Your recognition helps to build mutual empathy and create a healthy work environment. Even if you didn’t have a close rapport with your colleagues when you worked together in the office, it isn’t too late to start now.
Demonstrating compassion and empathy even digitally can go a long way. One area where you can practice more kindness is in your emails. With a thoughtful opening and closing to your emails, your communication can remain professional while conveying warmth and support. Whether or not you’re a manager, if you can adjust your behavior to fit your colleagues’ preferences, your flexibility will make you a pleasure to work with.
Ask how a colleague prefers to conduct a meeting. If they choose a phone call over a video conference and there’s no real need to chat over video, then go with it. When you do have specific preferences, be consistent. If you feel it’s important to conduct weekly team meetings as a video conference so that everyone can connect face-to-face, keep that structure predictable.
With so many of us needing to adjust to unfamiliar and erratic circumstances during these challenging times, it’s best to keep to a stable and consistent pattern wherever possible. Your empathy promotes trust, respect, and loyalty with your colleagues. Following these tips will make you a better co-worker overall and make you more enjoyable to work with.
Whether you’re working remotely now or planning to be back in a physical office sometime soon.
Create Your Own Animated Videos
See where your creativity can take you with a Vyond free trial.
#### Employee Benefits Template Video
Your company’s benefits are of paramount concern to its employees, but typically, those policies are extraordinarily complex and difficult to understand. What’s more; this information is usually being served up when the employee is already suffering from a deluge of information. By adding a video summary to your job posts, onboarding materials, and open enrollment communications, you can serve up an effective primer of what your company offers.
Beyond being more engaging, videos that explain benefits and policies can go a long way in reaching employees who might otherwise be too uncomfortable to ask. By tackling sensitive topics—like mental wellness and parental leave—with on-demand video, you can better ensure the right employees are seeing it at the right time.
Use this employee benefits template video as a starting point for your own benefits explainer.
Video Transcription: Employee Benefits Overview
When you join Vyond, you’re getting so much more than a job. Here are some benefits we offer to help you take care of yourself and your loved ones.
We trust you to manage your own time. All time off is covered by a single PTO plan, whether you’re sick, vacationing, or something else altogether.
You accrue time off at a generous pace from your first day of employment and have the flexibility to use it however you like.
Vyond employees get several options to choose from when selecting the right health insurance for themselves. Each plan comes with 100% coverage for employees and the ability to add dependents at a partial cost. In addition to choosing your provider. You can choose between an HMO or a PPO plan. Employees are also offered dental and vision insurance options at no extra charge.
Vyond employees can participate in the company’s 401(k plan, with a company match after the first year of employment. All Vyond employees are issued stock option grants upon employment too.
When you join Vyond, we’ll support you with other benefits like life insurance, commuter benefits, an employee assistance program, and flexible spending accounts. Want to learn more? Contact Jen, our director of HR.
Create Your Own Animated Videos
There’s a reason why Vyond is the leading platform for creating your own videos. Robust and powerful customization features are all wrapped into our simple, easy-for-everyone studio that comes fully loaded with everything you need to build engaging video experiences.
See where your creativity can take you with a Vyond free trial; no credit card required.
#### Enabling Colorblind Gamers by Microsoft Enable
URL: https://www.vyond.com/showcase/video/enabling-colorblind-gamers-by-microsoft-enable/
#### Envision Auto Relocations
Envision Auto Relocations makes great use of maps and animation to emphasize the difficulty that comes with trying to transport your car a long distance. Narration is used to supplement the on-screen text while showing the use of their app on a phone helps ground their solution in reality.
#### Equality vs Equity Explainer
Although sometimes used interchangeably for they aim to accomplish a similar goal, equality and equity are very different. Use this video/gif template to help visualize the fundamental differences between those two while also teaching your audience about other effective approaches to fairness and social change.
With animated videos, you can promote a healthy business culture, build trust, and instruct your audience about prosocial behaviors that are surely going to help with your company’s efforts of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.
Create Your Own Animated Videos
There’s a reason why Vyond is the leading platform for creating your own videos. Robust and powerful customization features are all wrapped into our simple, easy-for-everyone studio that comes fully loaded with everything you need to build engaging video experiences.
See where your creativity can take you with a Vyond free trial; no credit card required.
#### Event announcement
URL: https://www.vyond.com/showcase/video/event-announcement/
#### Excelling at Work From Home
Many people are adjusting to remote work for the first time. This video shares a few helpful tips for excelling at work from home. The template also includes several Vyond elements you may be interested to explore: character rear view, camera movement, transparent layers, and custom digital communication scenes. We hope you find it useful however and from wherever you’re working.
Video Transcription: Excelling at Work From Home
Working from home has its perks, but it also has its challenges. Let’s go over some tips to ensure you excel at working from home.
Keeping a normal routine is key to staying productive while working at home. Try to wake up around the same time each morning, get ready for the day even if you don’t plan on leaving home.
Take normal breaks and a lunch just like you would in the office.
Make yourself available at the same time as your teammates. This is especially important when working on projects that require collaboration and open lines of communication.
Having digital face-to-face communication with co-workers helps people feel connected with their team and the work they do together.
It’s also good to keep weekly one-on-one meetings to check-in and connect on work and life.
Create a space for normal conversation with your teammates whether it be in a Slack channel or a weekly meeting via video call. Having digital water cooler conversations can boost camaraderie and even generate great ideas.
Perhaps one of the most important things to have is a way for everyone to submit work, receive feedback, and get approvals. Long email chains are not the place for this. Instead, use one of the many task management applications available to track and streamline the work your team is doing.
Each person on your team was hired for a reason—because they’re good at what they do. Trusting that they will accomplish tasks on their own while working from home is crucial to a productive work-from-home environment.
While the tips in this video are not an end-all solution, they are a great start to forming productive habits and excelling at working from home.
Create Your Own Animated Videos
There’s a reason why Vyond is the leading platform for creating your own videos. Robust and powerful customization features are all wrapped into our simple, easy-for-everyone studio that comes fully loaded with everything you need to build engaging video experiences.
See where your creativity can take you with a Vyond free trial; no credit card required.
#### Fashion Style Tutorial
Use this modern, multi-framed template to quickly and easily create a stylish, social media fashion tip video, or repurpose it to create something new. Modify the video with your brand identity and photography to create an engaging, visually striking message that connects with your audience.
#### Finding Balance in Remote Work
Tips-focused template is perfect for laying out workplace how-to’s in a simple, straightforward way. Use it as is or customize it to match your brand and talking points, for a compelling, relatable HR communique.
#### Four Ways to Respect Ramadan in the Workplace
Ramadan is the holiest month of the Islamic calendar. It’s also one of the busiest. Use this whiteboard animation video template to help develop awareness on the practices, activities, and obligations that often make Ramadan an extraordinarily exhausting time for co-workers who are Muslim.
Video Transcription: Four Ways to Respect Ramadan in the Workplace
Here are four ways to respect Ramadan in the workplace.
Assume you have coworkers who are fasting, fasting as a practice meant to be integrated with everyday life. This makes fasting less apparent to others, but it’s probably still present at your workplace. 24% of the global population is Muslim and as many as 93% of Muslims fast during Ramadan.
No matter where you live or work, it’s safe to assume you have coworkers observing Ramadan. Understand the schedule of Ramadan. Ramadan is often an extraordinarily busy and exhausting month for those who practice it. It’s the holiest month of the year. So many double down on spiritual activities like charity, volunteerism, prayer, and religious study.
The typical day starts before dawn to eat and pray, followed by a regular day of school or work while fasting after many had to gather to break the fast. Also known as Iftar, a single household may be cooking and hosting several major feasts over the course of the month after breaking the fast.
Many head to the mosque for additional prayer in the last 10 nights of Ramadan, the holiest time of the year. This schedule will further intensify with late or all-night prayer and study. Be conscientious of physical activity.
Most employees who are Muslim will continue to work as normal despite the hectic schedule. If your team’s work involves physical exertion, consider finding proactive accommodations for employees who may be suffering, sleep deprivation, low blood sugar, and exhaustion as part of their religious practice.
Promote a Ramadan-friendly schedule, asking team members to arrive early or stay late has a disproportionate impact on Muslim employees during Ramadan, when scheduling meetings and sharing work, try to honor the standard workday during Ramadan. Ask team members when they prefer to meet.
For many Muslims, the early afternoons are ideal during the month of Ramadan. Avoid scheduling activities that center around food like brown board meetings or potlucks that would challenge and ostracize those who fast.
Ramadan, Mubarak.
Create Your Own Animated Videos
See where your creativity can take you with a Vyond free trial.
#### Gender & Pronouns
Use this gender & pronouns video template to teach your teams one small way they can promote respect for all. Customize the video to match your corporate identity, or use it as a jumping point for deeper conversations on diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Learn more about pronouns in the workplace.
Video Transcription: Gender & Pronouns
[DIANE] Hello.
[CALLER] Hello, sir. I’m calling for Diane.
[DIANE] Sir? This is Diane.
[NARRATOR] When we incorrectly assume one’s gender identity, we’ve misgendered them.
Accidental misgendering happens all the time. A simple apology is the best way to move forward, but it can still be uncomfortable and embarrassing for all involved. Beyond being awkward, these flubs can have severe unintended consequences.
Those of us who have had to reckon with our gender identity may feel vulnerable, exposed, insecure, or out of place when misgendered. Many of us have faced systemic violence which targets nonconforming gender expression. And being misgendered can cause us to experience very real psychological trauma.
Lucky for us, we have tools to avoid these mishaps.
Proactively asking people what pronouns they use even when their gender expression seems obvious shows that you care about their safety and humanity without forcing them to disclose the details of their identity.
By sharing your own gender pronouns in email signatures, online profiles, name tags, and business cards, you’re normalizing equitable respect for all gender identities. You’re also making it easier for the most vulnerable of us to share our pronouns.
Through open communication, we can create trusting relationships and kinder, more inclusive environments for all.
Create Your Own Animated Videos
There’s a reason why Vyond is the leading platform for creating your own videos. Robust and powerful customization features are all wrapped into our simple, easy-for-everyone studio that comes fully loaded with everything you need to build engaging video experiences.
See where your creativity can take you with a Vyond free trial; no credit card required.
#### Gender Pronouns by ADP Pride
URL: https://www.vyond.com/showcase/video/gender-pronouns-by-adp-pride/
#### GIF Bundle
We present to you a comprehensive collection of business GIF templates that you can use to elevate your communication game and enhance your brand image. Our GIF bundle includes content for various fields: Marketing, HR, internal communications, sales, and eLearning.
Whether you’re looking to create eye-catching promotional materials, internal memos, or engaging eLearning modules, our business GIF templates will help you convey your message in a dynamic and visually appealing way. Simply customize this template in Vyond Studio and start creating professional-looking GIFs that suit your specific needs and branding.
Vyond Studio comes equipped with thousands of customizable props and characters so you’ll have everything you need to make a lasting impression, no matter the platform or context. From witty marketing campaigns to informative HR announcements, let GIFs entice your target audience and leave a lasting impression.
Create Your Own Animated Videos
There’s a reason why Vyond is the leading platform for creating your own videos. Robust and powerful customization features are all wrapped into our simple, easy-for-everyone studio that comes fully loaded with everything you need to build engaging video experiences.
See where your creativity can take you with a Vyond free trial; no credit card required.
#### Global Accessibility Awareness Day Event – Invitation
URL: https://www.vyond.com/showcase/video/global-accessibility-awareness-day-event-invitation/
#### Goal Progress Thermometer
Engaging animated data graphs can enhance your complex data communication strategy by enticing your audience with stunning aesthetics and compelling storytelling. Vyond comes fully equipped with data visualization features like graphs, charts, and props to help you create a strong visual report. Animated videos like this one are perfect for capturing the attention of your desired audience and making a rather tedious topic fun.
Create Your Own Animated Videos
There’s a reason why Vyond is the leading platform for creating your own videos. Robust and powerful customization features are all wrapped into our simple, easy-for-everyone studio that comes fully loaded with everything you need to build engaging video experiences.
See where your creativity can take you with a Vyond free trial; no credit card required.
#### Good Behavior Game by AllCare Health
Education company AllCare Health highlights their “Good Behavior Game” program here. The video uses Vyond’s Whiteboard Animation and charts and grpahs features, so viewers are able to easily follow along with a gradual reveal of information and findings.
#### Happy vs Successful Customers
Video is one of the most engaging mediums to use for it lets you forge meaningful connections with customers by effectively capturing their attention while delivering a powerful message. Furthermore, video provides your customer success and support teams with on-demand content for educating your audience and nurturing their relationship with your brand. The following video covers the differences between content and successful customers. While happiness is acceptable, you may want to encourage customers to become successful and key contributors to your company’s growth.
Edit this video template and start fostering powerful relationships with your customers.
Video Transcription: Happy vs. Successful Customers
[Narrator]
Hello, everyone. Today we will be talking about happy versus successful customers. But what makes a customer happy and what makes one successful? What’s the difference? To start off, happy customers are pleasant, they don’t make any complaints about the product, they’re content with their overall experience, and are internally satisfied and advocates for the company.
Successful customers, on the other hand, they make support requests, they ask questions, they provide feedback, and ask for new features. And they really know how to stretch the limits of the product.
They know and receive value from our product. In other words, while happiness can be fleeting, success is something tangible we can really grow our business on. With that being said, our goal is to build long-lasting relationships with our successful customers in order to empower both of us to grow and thrive. To ensure early customer success, we can track our feature usage through email campaigns and enable our customers with our free trial.
But how do we gain more successful customers after this? Well, here are the three steps to success. By ruthlessly qualifying leads, we can identify who our most successful customers are currently, find similar-looking leads, and allow us to ask the right questions.
We also want to drive our customers, to our newer features. The key is to identify our software’s stickiest features, the ones that unlock our core value and correlate with long-term success and retention. So don’t be afraid to connect.
Some people can be content but may not be getting the results they want. By following up, we obtain feedback that can ultimately improve our product and our customer experience. Overall, successful customers are our best reward as their success can boost our morale and inspire us to grow and thrive as a business. If we have a wide base of customers to help succeed, we have the makings of a healthy company. Thanks for listening. Cheers
Create Your Own Animated Videos
There’s a reason why Vyond is the leading platform for creating your own videos. Robust and powerful customization features are all wrapped into our simple, easy-for-everyone studio that comes fully loaded with everything you need to build engaging video experiences.
See where your creativity can take you with a Vyond free trial; no credit card required.
#### Hassle Free Vacation: Travel Marketing
URL: https://www.vyond.com/showcase/video/hassle-free-vacation-travel-marketing/
#### Healthcare Concepts
This Healthcare Concepts template contains numerous animated healthcare-related images you can put to use in a variety of ways. Customize it with your brand identity and tailor it to your viewer using Vyond’s wide variety of features.
#### Healthy Food Promotion
This 9:16 template is a visually appealing showcase for nutritional, product and hospitality-related information. Customize it with company-specific copy and imagery to create an engaging video that catches your viewers’ attention and engages your customer.
#### Hispanic Heritage Month
Happy Hispanic Heritage Month! Celebrated between the 15th of September and the 15th of October, Hispanic Heritage Month offers a unique chance for everyone to immerse themselves in, appreciate, and learn from the vibrant and diverse Hispanic and Latinx cultures.
Fostering a deeper sense of unity and appreciation for the communities that have shaped the United States is a fantastic way of contributing, acknowledging, and commemorating the rich Hispanic cultural heritage in the US. Teach others about Hispanic and Latinx cultural significance and ways to support the community by editing this short Vyond video template.
Video Transcription: Hispanic Heritage Month
[Narrator]
Happy Hispanic Heritage Month, a celebration dedicated to recognizing and commemorating the history, culture, and significant ccontributions of Hispanic and Latinx communities in the United States. Here are a handful of ways to celebrate.
Attending a local Hispanic heritage festival or cultural event allows you to experience the vibrant music, dance, food, and traditions of various Latin American countries.
Art is a powerful means of expression, and it can provide valuable insights into the diverse cultures and experiences within the Hispanic community.
Visit museums or galleries showcasing works by Hispanic or Latinx artists. Observe and reflect on how their art represents cultural perspectives.
For those who enjoy the culinary arts, why not try cooking some traditional Hispanic recipes at home? Dishes like ceviche, empanadas, or ropa vieja offer a taste of diverse Latin American flavors.
Watch films or documentaries about Hispanic history, culture, or social issues. Reading books by Hispanic/ Latinx authors is also an excellent way to gain perspective on their experiences.
Dive deeper into Hispanic culture by researching aspects that interest you the most, whether it’s traditions, clothing, dance, art, folklore, or geography.
Discover something new.
Lastly, in our digital age, connecting with Latinx creators, artists, activists, and community leaders through social media is a great way to stay informed and learn from their perspectives. Follow them to gain insights into their daily lives and the issues they’re passionate about.
Hispanic Heritage Month provides a unique opportunity for all of us to immerse ourselves in, appreciate, and learn from the vibrant and diverse Hispanic and Latinx cultures.
No matter how you choose to celebrate, your participation helps honor and celebrate this rich cultural heritage.
Create Your Own Animated Videos
There’s a reason why Vyond is the leading platform for creating your own videos. Robust and powerful customization features are all wrapped into our simple, easy-for-everyone studio that comes fully loaded with everything you need to build engaging video experiences.
See where your creativity can take you with a Vyond free trial; no credit card required.
#### Holiday Break, by WebCE
This video, Holiday Break, from WebCE is a fun marketing and social media promotion encouraging their audience to spend time learning new skills during the holidays. WebCE offers continuing education courses for a wide range of professional licenses.
#### Hollaback!’s 5 Ds of Bystander Intervention
Hollaback! is on a mission to end street harassment in all forms. In this video, we take a look at their framework for everyone to empower themselves to intervene safely when they spot harassment. Watch this video template to learn Hollaback!’s 5 Ds of Bystander Intervention. You can customize this video for your context, and share it with your community. Together, we can protect the most vulnerable among us and prevent hate crimes and harassment.
Video Transcription: Hollaback!’s 5 Ds of Bystander Intervention
Have you ever seen someone being publicly harassed but had no idea how to help at that time, you might have chosen to walk away as a bystander.
You can help prevent, derail or discourage acts of harassment. Here are five tactics to effectively intervene when you spot harassment, also known as the five days of bystander intervention.
Distraction is a creative, non-confrontational way to shift attention and interrupt harassment. You can ask for the time or directions, pretend you know the person being harassed and strike up a conversation about something random, create a commotion by spilling your coffee or dropping coins from your wallet.
Turning to a third party for help, depending on the situation, you can delegate to a friend or someone in a position of authority, like teachers or security guards, or peace officers equipped to de-escalate the situation unless it’s a medical emergency. Don’t contact the police and check in with the person being harassed first. Many communities that communities of color, trans communities, and immigrant communities may not feel safer with police presence.
Recording an incident when it happens can be helpful when done safely and responsibly. There are a few things to keep in mind, such as make sure someone else is doing something to disrupt the harassment before you start filming.
Maintain a safe distance from the incident, film landmarks, and clearly see the date and time. After filming give the documentation to the person being harassed, giving them the power to decide what happens next.
Sometimes harassers leave before anyone can intervene. You can still check in on the person targeted afterward. Some things that you can say are: Are you ok? I’m so sorry that happened to you. Is there anything you need? Do you want to report this incident? Can I accompany you somewhere?
Confronting the harasser is the most direct and riskiest intervention tactic before you step in, assess everyone’s safety. If you feel safe to do so, you can confront the aggressor by naming the type of harassment, stating what you observe. After you clearly set the boundary, turn your attention away from the harasser and towards the person being harassed and checking on them. Don’t engage with the harasser and get into a back and forth. Whichever tactic you choose at the moment, remember that your action can be impactful as bystanders. You hold the power to make a difference.
Create Your Own Animated Videos
See where your creativity can take you with a free trial of Vyond.
#### Hospital Operations Report
Use this heatlhcare-focused video to create informative and engaging reports and executive summaries. Brand it with your organization’s colors and logos and highlight pertinent period-ending data and messaging.
#### How Does Breakfast Affect Your Body by The Fabulous
Lifestyle company The Fabulous created this video to explain the nutritional benefits of eating breakfast. Using entrance and exit effects, the video moves at a gradual pace that gives viewers time to process the health information being presented.
#### How Not to Motivate – Psychographic Segmentation by McGohan Brabender
Donna Huffman of McGohan Brabender made this Vyond video to show how they can help engage employees while keeping healthcare costs down.
#### How to Boost Engagement in eLearning
This colorful, animated template can be used to provide eLearning teams with helpful tips on engaging an audience. Or, customize it to deliver a quick explainer with a friendly, office-focused vibe.
#### How to Bubble RUN ™
First-time runners may not know what to expect in their first Bubble Run—a family-friendly 5K—but this video prepares them by highlighting the basic rules of the race. Using Vyond’s props, such as balloons and race banners, the Bubble Run team was able to depict the experience of the race for participants.
Create Your Own Animated Videos
There’s a reason why Vyond is the leading platform for creating your own videos. Robust and powerful customization features are all wrapped into our simple, easy-for-everyone studio that comes fully loaded with everything you need to build engaging video experiences.
See where your creativity can take you with a Vyond free trial; no credit card required.
Try Vyond for Free
#### How To Embed Video Codes From Any Source
Whenever you want to add media from a video hosting site to your page or blog, you’ll need to know how to utilize embed codes. The following video teaches you where to locate an embed video code and where to paste it within your website code to ensure the video plays smoothly.
Video Transcription: How to Embed Video Codes From Any Source
[Narrator]
Hi, everyone.
Today we’re going to show you how easy it is to embed a video into your site. For this example, we’ll choose this virtual onboarding video that a company HR rep wants to embed on their company intranet. If you’re not using YouTube, no worries. The important thing is to know where to get the code from on your hosting platform. YouTube makes it easy by posting the code here. Next, you’ll want to paste the code into your website. Once you find a spot in the body to place your code, just place it between the <div> tag with a class like this, and that’s all there is to it. Don’t forget, you can see more videos like this one on our Beyond YouTube channel, and when you’re there, be sure to give us a like and tell us what you think in the comments below. See you there!
Create Your Own Animated Videos
There’s a reason why Vyond is the leading platform for creating your own videos. Robust and powerful customization features are all wrapped into our simple, easy-for-everyone studio that comes fully loaded with everything you need to build engaging video experiences.
See where your creativity can take you with a Vyond free trial; no credit card required.
#### How to Have Difficult Conversations With Your Manager
Video Transcription: How to Have Difficult Conversations with Your Manager
Mustering up the courage to have a tough conversation with your manager can be nerve-wracking. Whether you want to ask for a raise, discuss a poor performance evaluation or an important issue with a co-worker; your manager isn’t a mind reader. So, it’s probably going to be up to you to initiate that difficult conversation.
Here are five tips to help you get through that tough talk with your manager.
Make sure to have a clear plan, purpose, and agenda before you meet. What issue do you need to address? What might a resolution look like for you? As you reflect, take time to adopt a bird’s eye perspective and consider the opposing point of view. If it’s helpful for you to jot down an outline, do so.
You can also try rehearsing your conversation with a trusted confidante. Whether or not you used an outline, focus on key points during your conversation. This is not the time to go off on tangents. By all means, tell your story, but bring facts and present your case objectively.
Don’t be critical or condescending. If you want to discuss a poor performance evaluation for example: “why did you mark my performance as below expectations this quarter. I did everything I was asked to do. I think you were just too focused on your own issues to notice the value I bring to this company. I was disappointed to read that my performance this quarter was below expectations. Could I share with you now some accomplishments that I couldn’t address in the evaluation and that you might not be aware of? I’m hoping that if I present you with some new information we might be able to adjust the evaluation. Regardless, any advice do you have for me would be much appreciated.”
Which brings us to the next point. Remember that this is a conversation and to ask for your manager’s feedback. Really listen and be receptive to what she has to say. Remain calm and be professional. Odds are your manager wants the best for you and your company.
During your conversation, if you notice you’re becoming anxious, defensive, or discouraged, recenter yourself and remember to breathe.
By being prepared, focused, objective, perceptive, and professional, you’ll be putting your best foot forward and your manager will be open-minded to hearing your point of view. No matter the outcome, you should be proud of yourself for initiating and successfully handling a tricky conversation.
Create Your Own Animated Videos
There’s a reason why Vyond is the leading platform for creating your own videos. Robust and powerful customization features are all wrapped into our simple, easy-for-everyone studio that comes fully loaded with everything you need to build engaging video experiences.
See where your creativity can take you with a Vyond free trial; no credit card required.
#### How to Properly Wear a Mask
Wearing a face mask can help protect against viruses and it’s important to know how to properly wear one.
At :30 the main character is shown in profile. This image was created entirely with shapes in Vyond.
Video Transcription: How to Properly Wear a Mask
Wearing a face mask can help protect against viruses but it’s important to know how to properly wear one. Before putting a mask on, start by washing your hands for at least 20 seconds with soap and water or use hand sanitizer.
Time to put on the mask. Make sure you have the mask right side up. Many masks have a stiff, bendable edge at the top that can be curved to contour your nose. Now, holding the mask by the straps, lift it to your face and bring the straps around either your ears or the back of your head depending on the type of mask. If your mask has a bendable top edge, go ahead and pinch it now to contour it to your nose. The mask should fit from above the tip of your nose to just below your chin. While wearing, avoid touching your face or mask with your hands so that you don’t contaminate anything. And do not lower the mask below your nose or mouth.
To properly remove the mask, once again, wash or sanitize your hands. Then holding the mask by the straps, pull it away from your face. Do not touch the external surface of the mask as it may be contaminated. Single-use masks should be thrown away, while the reusable masks should be washed immediately. Lastly, wash those hands one more time. Follow these tips to make your mask as effective as possible.
Create Your Own Animated Videos
There’s a reason why Vyond is the leading platform for creating your own videos. Robust and powerful customization features are all wrapped into our simple, easy-for-everyone studio that comes fully loaded with everything you need to build engaging video experiences.
See where your creativity can take you with a Vyond free trial; no credit card required.
#### How to Stay Sane During Home Isolation
Uncertain times have forced us to stay at home for a prolonged time. The resulting isolation, coupled with a series of stressors like financial strain and health concerns, has negatively impacted the mental health of the population. In order to take care of your sanity and wellbeing, Vyond has gathered some tips that will help you during these trying times. Use this video template to spread awareness about mental health and share relevant information about self-care.
Video Transcription: How to Stay Sane During Home Isolation
Humans are social creatures. So, as you might be realizing, staying indoors for an extended period of time can lead to boredom and stir craziness. Here are some ways you can maintain your sanity during home isolation. Do something creative. Painting, drawing playing an instrument, you have so many options here.
Keep a routine. Whether based around your work schedule meals or something else, the structure is helpful. Use this time to learn something new. You’ll have a sense of accomplishment taking on a new endeavor. Stay connected with friends and family by having virtual hangouts. Just because you’re stuck at home doesn’t mean you can’t socialize. Practice self-care. Exercise, meditate, eat healthy foods. Carve out time to do what makes you feel good.
Complete all those home projects you’ve been putting on the back burner. It’ll feel good checking these items off your list. This is also an excellent time to organize virtual files. By all means, stay up to date with the news, but stick to reliable sources and don’t go overboard. Limit your intake as it can get pretty overwhelming.
Finally, if necessary, seek help from a licensed mental health professional. This can be a difficult time, And it’s important to focus on your overall well-being as best as you can.
Create Your Own Animated Videos
There’s a reason why Vyond is the leading platform for creating your own videos. Robust and powerful customization features are all wrapped into our simple, easy-for-everyone studio that comes fully loaded with everything you need to build engaging video experiences.
See where your creativity can take you with a Vyond free trial; no credit card required.
#### How to Stop Using Filler Words when you Speak by Matt Moran
Professional public-speaking coach Matt Moran teaches viewers how to make their speeches more engaging by avoiding filler words here. Moran intercuts playful, humorous animated scenes with his in-person narration to create concrete examples of how speakers can enhance their presentation skills.
#### HR Virtual Symposium by HR.com
HR.com showcases their month-long virtual symposium in this video. They use samples of their website to show the sign-up process and then animated characters around the globe to emphasize the connected nature of the event.
#### Il Mostriciattolo con la Corona – Coronavirus
Mosaico eLearning created this story to help Italian children understand the Coronavirus and what they can do to defend against it.
#### Impact Report – End of Year Video Template
The end of the year is a critical time for organizations as they communicate their annual contributions and goal completions.
Showcase your accomplishments with an inspirational end-of-year video report that incorporates dynamic data visualization and engaging infographics. Captivate your audience and deliver a compelling message to investors and key stakeholders by adopting impactful storytelling through video, like this one for Big Brothers Big Sisters of New York City. Use this video template to create your own End-of-the-Year Impact report video!
Create Your Own Animated Videos
There’s a reason why Vyond is the leading platform for creating your own videos. Robust and powerful customization features are all wrapped into our simple, easy-for-everyone studio that comes fully loaded with everything you need to build engaging video experiences.
See where your creativity can take you with a Vyond free trial; no credit card required.
#### Imposter Syndrome by PDT Global
URL: https://www.vyond.com/showcase/video/imposter-syndrome-by-pdt-global/
#### Increasing Practice Efficiency with iWellness and OCT in Scleral Lens Fittings by Optovue
This video introduces iWellness’ practice-management tools and explains how they help optometrists increase their efficiency through integrations with modern practice-management software. iWellness imports some of their own visual assets and icons, such as real images of an optometrist’s office, to illustrate how medical professionals use their tools.
#### Industrial Manufacturing Scenes
This multi-framed template is ideal for training and internal communications in industrial and manufacturing-focused businesses. Use all the tools at your disposal in Vyond to customize the video, add to it, and make it as relevant as possible to fit your specific needs and audience.
#### Information Security Awareness – Contemporary
Use this template to teach employees why information security is important and share best practices for avoiding data breaches. You can easily replace the voiceover recording and/or the text to add information about your company’s security policies.
Video Transcription: Information Security Awareness
The purpose of security awareness training is to make all employees aware of information security policies, help us deal with problems when they arise, and to meet our compliance training requirements. We can have all the systems and technical controls in the world; but if we as human beings fail to follow our policies and security practices, then the whole system breaks down.
So first, what’s the risk? What’s the big deal? Well, there’s a monetary risk. Your company could be fined if you’re not found compliant with the laws in place. There’s also a legal risk if an employee violates the law– knowingly or unknowingly. And that risk extends to both the company and the individual.
Most importantly, though, there’s a risk of damaging the company’s reputation. You’ve seen it plenty of times where very big companies end up in the news due to data breaches. And you don’t want that to happen.
There are a number of technology-related reasons for data breaches, such as new viruses or malware. But the overwhelming number of data breaches are caused by human error and carelessness. A sensitive document is left out in the open. A computer is left unattended for a few minutes without password protection. Sensitive information is sent over unencrypted email without a password.
Another cause of breach is social engineering. Techniques can be as simple as calling a company office, claiming to be from another company location, and asking for protected information. It’s surprising how often this works.
Let’s discuss some specific actions you can take. One, Update your anti-virus and anti-malware software. Two, don’t install unapproved software. Three, keep your computer’s operating system current by installing updates when you are notified of them. Four, log off or lock your computer screen when not in use and make sure to use a password-protected screensaver.
Five, physically lock up documents that contain sensitive information when not in use. Six, adopt a clear screen, clear desk approach to your work. Seven, never write your passwords down. A password written on the sticky note on your monitor is the same as not having a password at all. And eight, never open email attachments that come from people you don’t know.
The key is to make security a habit and to report suspicious or potential security issues to your local information security officer. Work on making security a habit and help protect all of your company’s data, resources, and reputation.
That’s all for this video. Thanks for watching.
Create Your Own Animated Videos
There’s a reason why Vyond is the leading platform for creating your own videos. Robust and powerful customization features are all wrapped into our simple, easy-for-everyone studio that comes fully loaded with everything you need to build engaging video experiences.
See where your creativity can take you with a Vyond free trial; no credit card required.
#### Insuring Pets, by WebCE
This video, Paws Outside, Chaos Inside, is part of WebCE’s course Insuring Pets, which gives learners a deep dive into pet insurance regulations and policies. WebCE offers continuing education courses for a wide range of professional licenses.
#### Introducing Parabol: Retrospective & Check-Ins
In this video, tech company Parabol breaks down the capabilities of their collaboration software and the problems it can solve in the workplace. Parabol includes real screenshots and screen recordings from their product to show how employees can use the tool in the workplace.
#### Introducing Your Team
Video is a useful tool you can integrate into your onboarding procedures. Whether it’s to introduce the whole team, or help other departments get familiar with one another, this video template makes it easy to swap in your own co-workers and introductions.
Video Transcription: Introducing Your Team | About Us Video Template
We’re Creative Ink, a boutique communications agency that thinks big. This is our quick intro video to help you get familiar with our team.
Sam is our director and account manager. She is responsible for dazzling clients and then bringing the brief to the rest of the team.
Andre is our talented stylist and photographer and has an incredible eye for detail.
Billy is the resident writer, who crafts sublime sentences and checks for errant apostrophes.
When the images and coffee are all prepared it goes to Allison, our graphic designer, who packages it all neatly.
And ensuring the project gets seen we have Anita, our marketing manager. She’s a social media guru.
The team wouldn’t be complete or paid on time without Sandeep in accounting. As a team, you’ll find us at Friday Happy Hour sharing pizza and beer. It’s one of our long-standing traditions that we’ve even taken virtual.
Well, that’s us. Welcome to the team. We are Creative Ink. We all look forward to working with you.
Tips for using this template
In the opening segment introduce your team with a short description of what the department or company does
The video explains what a team member does in their individual role as well as giving an overall snapshot of the team’s workflow for greater context
Consider adding some fun facts about the team
Create Your Own Animated Videos
There’s a reason why Vyond is the leading platform for creating your own videos. Robust and powerful customization features are all wrapped into our simple, easy-for-everyone studio that comes fully loaded with everything you need to build engaging video experiences.
See where your creativity can take you with a Vyond free trial; no credit card required.
#### Learn By Watch’s Saturated Solution Educational Video
Education channel Learn By Watch created this video to teach students the scientific concept of saturated solutions. Rather than use live video alone, the organization includes animated characters next to footage of the dissolution process so they can easily explain it as it happens.
#### Learn Dutch Phrases with Bart de Pau – Amsterdam
URL: https://www.vyond.com/showcase/video/learn-dutch-phrases-with-bart-de-pau-amsterdam/
#### Making Sure Your Vote Counts in Wake County
The Wake County Board of Elections created this video to show viewers the steps election workers go through to ensure ballots are kept safe and secure during the voting process. The video uses live-action footage of polling-place workers alongside text and animation to drive home the narrative.
#### Managing Remote Teams’ Mental Health: Course Introduction
Ensuring employee mental health has always been important for building a strong organizational culture but working from home during a pandemic created a new set of challenges none of us could have imagined. In the past few months, employees have not only transitioned to working from home, but they’re also doing almost everything from home, and all this change and social isolation is affecting people’s mental health.
It’s not on managers to fix everything for employees, but it is on us to help create an encouraging space for our teams. So what can managers do to support their teams’ mental health? This 5-part video series explores:
Interpreting nonverbal communication cues
Communicating the importance of time off
Reducing virtual meeting overload
Promoting wellness and self-care
Video Transcription: Managing Remote Teams’ Mental Health | Course Introduction
Ensuring employee mental health has always been important for building a strong organizational culture. However, COVID19 has driven a large portion of the workforce to work from home for the first time, and almost every aspect of life has changed. These changes create a new set of challenges for managers to support and stay connected with their newly remote workforce.
It’s more important than ever to lead with mental health in mind as we face this situation. Leaders can lead by example within organizations—an even more critical role in our new remote workforce. It’s on us to help create an encouraging space for our teams. So what can managers do to support their team’s mental health during these unique times?
This video series explores:
Nonverbal communication cues to help identify behaviors that might indicate an employee needs support. How leaders can communicate about the importance of time off without guilt, fear, or shame. Reducing virtual meeting overload (yes, that’s a thing!). And, promoting wellness and self-care.
There’s no time to waste. So let’s get started!
Create Your Own Animated Videos
There’s a reason why Vyond is the leading platform for creating your own videos. Robust and powerful customization features are all wrapped into our simple, easy-for-everyone studio that comes fully loaded with everything you need to build engaging video experiences.
See where your creativity can take you with a Vyond free trial; no credit card required.
#### Managing Remote Teams’ Mental Health: Encouraging PTO to Recharge
Before COVID-19, over one in four American workers felt guilty about taking time off and 58% did not take their allotted vacation days due to feeling there was too much work to accomplish. Plus, one in five said their company shames employees who take allotted vacation time.
During any kind of stressful time, and now when people may feel lucky to have a job, employees might find it more difficult to request time away. But it’s important to take a break. Time away improves mental clarity, productivity, and focus. When your employees are recharged, it leads to better outcomes for them and better outcomes for the company.
Other videos in this series:
Course introduction
Interpreting nonverbal communication cues
Reducing virtual meeting overload
Promoting wellness and self-care
Video Transcription: Managing Remote Teams’ Mental Health | Encouraging PTO to Recharge
[Narrator] Paid Time Off or PTO gives people time to relax and recharge, leading to a more enjoyable and productive work environment for everyone. In these unprecedented times, however, taking time off may not seem like a priority or it may even feel like a huge ask.
Since our offices are now in our homes and kids are being homeschooled, leaving work behind is more challenging than ever. In fact, one in five Americans feel their company shames employees who take allotted vacation time.
So, what can managers do to support their teams in taking PTO?
Lead by example! Leadership can encourage employees to be intentional about their self-care while working remotely and take time off to unplug and recharge. Whether it’s to work on a home project, read a book, or go for a long walk, even small breaks from work can make a significant difference in your energy and stress levels.
[CEO] Here at BusCorpCo, we’re firm believers in the importance of taking PTO, especially during these stressful times. It’s important to recognize the need to take a break from work, even if it’s just for a day. Our PTO policy is in place for this very reason.
Personally, I’m going to take 2 days off next week to unplug and recharge. Even though we are unable to take a regular vacation right now, I plan to sleep in, exercise, and read during my time off, if my kids let me. Work with your managers to get your PTO scheduled and don’t forget to plan for the remainder of the year. Your managers will be setting up 1:1s to review your PTO schedule soon.
[Manager] You’ve been working so hard lately, you deserve some time off!” I noticed you haven’t used any PTO this year. I want to make sure you feel comfortable taking time off and know how to request it.
[Narrator] Your organization has a PTO policy for a reason. Positive reinforcement is the key to letting people know they can use their PTO.
As a manager, take note of employees who don’t take time off and let them know it’s ok to do so.
Let’s make the most of things and allow vacation days to serve their purpose – to refresh employees and provide a space to get away from the stress of day-to-day work. Let your teams know it’s more important now than ever before to rest and recover.
Create Your Own Animated Videos
There’s a reason why Vyond is the leading platform for creating your own videos. Robust and powerful customization features are all wrapped into our simple, easy-for-everyone studio that comes fully loaded with everything you need to build engaging video experiences.
See where your creativity can take you with a Vyond free trial; no credit card required.
#### Managing Remote Teams’ Mental Health: Nonverbal Communication Cues Template Video
When technology limits our interactions, how can you tell if your employees may need support? Some people are highly skilled at interpreting nonverbal communication, while others may need to make an effort. Listening, paying attention, and asking your employees about nonverbal cues will make you a better communicator and a better teammate.
Import this video into your Vyond account to make your own customizations.
View other videos in this series:
Course introduction
Communicating the importance of time off
Reducing virtual meeting overload
Promoting wellness and self-care
Video Transcript: Nonverbal Communication Cues
In times of ambiguity, employees may experience a range of emotions.
Sometimes, anxiety, frustration, and uncertainty can be hard to notice. So, what can managers do to support their team’s mental health during these unique times?
Listen. Pay attention. Ask.
People’s nonverbal communication cues—the way they listen, look, move, and react is a natural part of communication. In fact, research shows up to 93% of communication impact comes from nonverbal cues.
Tuning in to nonverbal cues can help managers gain valuable insight into their teams. However, in today’s remote workforce, nonverbal cues are limited to facial expressions. So the simple act of paying attention to nonverbal cues can be challenging.
Let’s take a look:
ANIMATED CHARACTER 1: How is everyone doing today?
ANIMATED CHARACTER 2: Oh, fine.
ANIMATED CHARACTER 3: OK. Great.
ANIMATED CHARACTER 1: Heads up I’m going to set up 1:1s with each of you this week to check in. Now let’s dive into the project updates.
I noticed you looked frustrated on the video call? Is there something that I can help you with?
I noticed you were quiet on the call. I wanted to get your thoughts on the project. How do you think it’s going?
I noticed you looked confused on the call. I wanted to check in and make sure you are understanding the project requirements?
NARRATOR: Managers don’t need to fix things for employees, but they can work to create a positive space that allows for productivity and improved performance. While some people are highly skilled at interpreting nonverbal communication, others may need to make an effort.
Listening, paying attention, and asking your employees about nonverbal cues will make you a better communicator and a better teammate!
Create Your Own Animated Videos
There’s a reason why Vyond is the leading platform for creating your own videos. Robust and powerful customization features are all wrapped into our simple, easy-for-everyone studio that comes fully loaded with everything you need to build engaging video experiences.
See where your creativity can take you with a Vyond free trial; no credit card required.
#### Managing Remote Teams’ Mental Health: Promoting Wellness and Self-Care
Change takes time to process and right now there is a lot of change happening at once. Our work lives, home lives, and social lives are all different. When adjusting to change, it becomes even more important to practice self-care. Managers should encourage employees to take time to take care of themselves and this video offers a few helpful strategies.
Other videos in this series:
Course introduction
Interpreting nonverbal communication cues
Communicating the importance of time off
Reducing virtual meeting overload
Video Transcription: Managing remote teams’ mental health | Promoting wellness and self-care
[Narrator] Humans typically have a hard time with change under normal circumstances. Now with COVID 19, the world is learning new ways to live life and build community and work, which can heighten feelings of frustration, anxiety, and stress. It’s important for organizations to lead with mental health in mind by creating a supportive space for teams.
Before COVID, almost 60% of employees never spoke to anyone at work about their mental health status. Many aren’t aware of the resources available or are afraid to use them. So what can managers do to support their team’s mental health? Lead by example. Being honest about your own mental health will help create that supportive space. Let’s take a look!
[Manager] Hi, everyone. I’ve been having a hard time these past few days. Feeling a bit anxious about all the changes that are happening. I’m trying to focus on what I can control, so I decided to participate in our remote meditation session this morning as part of my self-care. It helped me feel a little calmer to start the day. Has anyone else tried the session yet? What else are you doing for self-care these days?
As a reminder, don’t forget that BusCorpCo wants to help you deal with the challenges of working remotely. If you need to adjust your schedule to accommodate childcare, caregiving, or sickness, please trust we will work with you to be as flexible as possible. I’ll be setting up weekly check-ins with each of you to talk about any concerns.
I’m confident in the work we’re doing as a team and appreciate that you’re all trying to adjust to your new work environment. If you’re experiencing feelings of self-isolation or having trouble adjusting, please remember you can reach out to me directly or to the Employee Assistance Program. This program is confidential and designed to help employees when needed. I know this is tough, but I also know we can handle this together!
[Narrator] Organizations need to ensure that their employees understand the mental health benefits and resources available. Be specific with phone numbers and websites. Reiterate organizational support. And, lead by example through honesty, communication, and compassion.
Create Your Own Animated Videos
There’s a reason why Vyond is the leading platform for creating your own videos. Robust and powerful customization features are all wrapped into our simple, easy-for-everyone studio that comes fully loaded with everything you need to build engaging video experiences.
See where your creativity can take you with a Vyond free trial; no credit card required.
#### Managing Remote Teams’ Mental Health: Reducing Virtual Meeting Overload
Pre-COVID, two in five American employees thought there were more meetings than necessary. Now we’re having even more meetings and back-to-back video calls have replaced our daily in-person interactions. This is all on top of extra home responsibilities and increased stress.
These extra video calls are leading to meeting fatigue and it’s draining employees’ energy. Video calls are important and have their place, but they also force us to focus more on conversations in order to absorb information. This video offers managers tips for helping their employees fight video meeting fatigue.
Other videos in this series:
Course introduction
Interpreting nonverbal communication cues
Communicating the importance of time off
Promoting wellness and self-care
Video Transcription: Managing Remote Teams’ Mental Health | Reducing Virtual Meeting Overload
[Narrator] Are you dreading another video work meeting? Do you wish you could just call in to a meeting like the good old days? Are you tired at the end of the day from attending multiple video calls?
Well, you might be experiencing video conferencing fatigue. Yes, it’s a thing. A real thing.
These days, we’ve not only been video conferencing for work, but also for maintaining connections with family and friends. That’s a lot of video chatting!
Employee: I just got off my 3rd video meeting today. The thing that gets me about these video calls is maintaining constant eye contact. And you need to overly express yourself so the person can see your reactions. If you look away, it looks like you aren’t paying attention. It’s exhausting to pay that close attention on video calls multiple times a day!
[Narrator] Meeting overload was around even before the coronavirus pandemic. Over one-quarter (26%) of professionals think meetings are unproductive or unnecessary, with nearly half (48%) of managers saying there are more meetings than required in a week.
So what can managers do to help their teams ease the pain of video conferencing fatigue?
[Manager] I know most of you have been participating in many video meetings these days. I wanted to talk to you about some tips I have for managing video conferencing fatigue.
Avoid multitasking and stay present. It’s easy to get distracted by instant messaging or emails but staying present will limit the amount of energy used during the calls. Multitasking can cost you as much as 40 percent of your productive time!
Take breaks! On long calls, while you are listening, turn off your camera at times to give your eyes a break from trying to read everyone’s facial expressions.
Take the meeting on a walk using your phone instead! Walking meetings are known to improve creativity, and probably reduce stress!
[Narrator] Do what you can to support video breaks to help reduce video conferencing fatigue. Encourage your employees to make the best decision for their mental health!
Create Your Own Animated Videos
There’s a reason why Vyond is the leading platform for creating your own videos. Robust and powerful customization features are all wrapped into our simple, easy-for-everyone studio that comes fully loaded with everything you need to build engaging video experiences.
See where your creativity can take you with a Vyond free trial; no credit card required.
#### Marketing Course
Bring life to your training course or promote a webinar or event with this visually engaging template. Customize the video to match your corporate identity, highlight key features, and connect with your audience.
#### Megan’s Storyline & Vyond Tips
Megan Creegan, an eLearning Developer at Equity Residential, shares her Vyond tips for creating eLearning videos. By narrating in her own voice, Megan gives this Business Friendly video a credible, authentic feel.
#### Metaphors for Content Marketing
URL: https://www.vyond.com/showcase/video/metaphors-for-content-marketing/
#### Modern Retirement Planning, by WebCE
This video, Calculating the RMD for an IRA, is part of WebCE’s course Critical Decisions for Retirement Planning. WebCE offers continuing education courses for a wide range of professional licenses.
#### Morning Energy Office Scenes
Choose from this selection of energetic office scenes rendered in our Storybook style to create your own animated video with a workplace message. Customize it with brand colors to boost recognition and engagement.
#### Municipal Communications: Transportation Announcement
Use this template to share information about public services, such as transportation. The video is currently about changes in transportation service, but you can update it with text and backgrounds from Vyond’s library to make any type of municipal announcement.
#### Music Video by The Bergamot: One Mile
The Bergamot, an indie band, uses a blend of animation, live footage, and imported assets in this music video for their song “One Mile.” With slow-panning camera movement and a cityscape background, the video makes viewers feel like they’re walking with the band. Note: In the whiteboard effect at :20 only the bird and car are created with Vyond.
#### Nonprofit Event Promotion by SCV Gran Fondo & Vyond to Support the Davis Phinney Foundation for Parkinson’s
Vyond, SCV Gran Fondo, and Hartwick Home Imaging created this promotional video for a charity cycling event. The drone shots alongside Vyond’s Business Friendly characters and animations are visually engaging and build excitement for the event. Note: this video was created in partnership with Vyond (GoAnimate at the time).
#### Office Ergonomics by Occupational Physiotherapy Solutions Ltd Ireland
OPS, an Ireland-based health company, uses a combination of whiteboard text and colorful animation to offer tips on making your office more ergonomic. There’s no voice, only on-screen text, but you still get all the information you need.
#### Office Scenes
Choose from this wide selection of animated office scenes to quickly create your own video. Customize it with brand colors to boost recognition and engagement.
#### Onboarding Video – First Day
With its contemporary design, welcoming avatar host, and primary topics, this template is a great place to start for employee onboarding. Customize it with your own company branding, avatar, and talking points for an effective, retention-boosting video.
#### Online White Paper by Bython Media: Best Practices to Make Your AWS Implementation More Secure
B2B Marketing company Bython Media often creates “video white papers” to help other marketers run efficient organizations powered by the latest tools. Bython uses short video to teach companies how to implement their Amazon Web Services accounts to get the most out of the web architecture and data storage services. Bython features a call to action at the end of the video via kinetic text to drive viewers to contact the company and learn more.
#### Online Whitepaper by Bython Media: How to Spot Toxic Employees in the Workplace
B2B Marketing company Bython Media often creates “video white papers” to help other professionals stay on top of key industry trends. This video illustrates how to spot toxic employees and why it’s important to work to correct their maladaptive behaviors. Bython makes great use of our props to create “emoji-like” reactions that demonstrate the negative impact of toxic employees on the workplace.
#### Patient Intake Protocol
This graphics-based avatar video template is perfect for training purposes. Customize it with your company’s branding and statistics to create an engaging and informative healthcare video.
#### Perfecting the Sales Pitch
Use this template to teach employees how to effectively deliver pitches about your company. Update the video with a new voice-over recording so the main character is talking about your company instead of Vyond. You can also edit the character details to depict one of your own employees, so the video feels a bit more personal for your team.
Video Transcription: Perfecting the Sales Pitch Scenario
[ELEVATOR BELL RINGS]
[CHARACTER 1} Hey, I see you in this elevator all the time. You’re on the ninth floor. Right? What does your company do?
[NARRATOR] You have 15 seconds. What do you say? Where do you start? How do you begin? This is your chance. Focus on the basics and use simple language. What’s your company’s name? Who do you work with? And how do you help them?
[CHARACTER 2] We’re Vyond, and we help learning and development teams and marketing departments produce high-quality video for their internal and external communications
[CHARACTER 1] Wow, what a coincidence. Our employees have been saying we need to improve our internal training experience.
[“SUCCESS” MUSIC PLAYING]
Create Your Own Animated Videos
There’s a reason why Vyond is the leading platform for creating your own videos. Robust and powerful customization features are all wrapped into our simple, easy-for-everyone studio that comes fully loaded with everything you need to build engaging video experiences.
See where your creativity can take you with a Vyond free trial; no credit card required.
#### Personalized Prospecting
Use this sleek, easily customizable template to deliver a 1:1 direct and personal presentation to new and potential clients without hours of effort. Easily modify the video colors and images to fit your brand and tailor it by replacing the avatar for your specific audience.
#### Phone Skills for Successful Sales Calls
Educate your sales team on best practices for interacting with prospects over the phone. The template includes an overview of best practices, which you can easily update or change to fit your training goals.
Video Transcription: Phone Skills Sales Training
Phone calls, they can be tough. We know. So many things have to go right. Let’s go over some of the things you can do during your calls to ensure success.
Don’t talk your prospects’ ear off. Listen to them. So you can understand who they are and what they need to accomplish this. And you’re no longer a salesperson, but a trusted advisor.
When you do speak, make sure you’re not only heard but understood. Speak clearly and precisely. You don’t want your prospect to miss anything you say.
Your notes need to be thorough and understandable. Don’t just write down your prospects’ answers, but also your questions. You should be able to look at these notes in 10 years and feel like you had the conversation yesterday.
Ambient noise is your enemy. Take care so that the acoustics in your call room are pitch-perfect. The only thing your prospect should hear is your voice.
Don’t forget to have fun and smile. Yes, you heard right, smile! Your prospects can definitely hear that smile through the phone. Being happy and excited not only means you’re having a good time, but make sure your prospect is going to enjoy themselves too.
Once again, remember to: listen more than you speak, annunciate, take careful notes, ensure good room acoustics. Have fun.
Create Your Own Animated Videos
There’s a reason why Vyond is the leading platform for creating your own videos. Robust and powerful customization features are all wrapped into our simple, easy-for-everyone studio that comes fully loaded with everything you need to build engaging video experiences.
See where your creativity can take you with a Vyond free trial; no credit card required.
#### Ping, Ring, or Email
This animated video template is a fun example of how leaders can explicitly delineate channels to improve team communications.
Today’s modern office is chock full of channels for communicating with our colleagues.
It’s best to send quick updates asynchronously, especially if the employees work outside the office. Survey says 52% of remote workers prefer to avoid real-time conversations, opting for email when it comes to external communication.
Surveys also say that 54% of employees feel emails can lead to miscommunication and many have a hard time getting responses to their emails, too. If it’s a quick question that doesn’t require too much follow-up to answer. Use instant messaging.
What if you need to brainstorm for a new project? When working with brand new divergent ideas, it’s better to hop on a quick call instead of relying on written communication. A majority of employees say it’s hard to capture complex topics or data. 47% find it difficult to spark a brainstorm with text-based communication.
Remember that 44% of employees find it frustrating when colleagues communicate something in the wrong place with a little forethought for the channel you choose.
Video Transcript: Ping, Ring, or Email
Today’s modern office is chock-full of channels for communicating with our colleagues. Can you spot the right one for these common messages? Let’s play Ping, Ring, or Email!
Would you ping, ring, or email a client with a project update?
Uh, ring?
Ooh, nope! The answer we’re looking for is “Email.” For external contacts, it’s best to send quick updates asynchronously — especially if they work outside the office.
Survey says 52% of remote workers prefer to avoid real-time conversations, opting for email when it comes to external communication.
Next up: how should you ask your teammate a quick question?
Ping?
Ding ding ding! The answer is ping!
Survey says that 54% of employees feel emails can lead to miscommunication, and many have a hard time getting responses to their emails, too. If it’s a quick question that doesn’t require too much follow-up to answer, use instant messaging.
What if you need to brainstorm for a new project?
Ring!
Ring is right, I just like that buzzer sound.
When working with brand-new, divergent ideas, it’s better to hop on a quick call instead of relying on written communication.
A majority of employees say it’s hard to capture complex topics or data in written messages, and 47% find it difficult to spark a brainstorm with text-based communication.
That’s our game, folks! And remember: 44% of employees find it frustrating when colleagues communicate something in the wrong place. With a little forethought for the channel you choose, everybody can win big.
Create Your Own Animated Videos
See where your creativity can take you with a Vyond free trial.
#### Podcast & Interview Video
Turn your podcast and interviews into a video with Vyond Studio. By doing so, you’ll elevate the quality and appeal of your content by incorporating highly dynamic and engaging assets like animated characters and kinetic typography into your video.
Video Transcription: Podcast & Interview Video
[Ahmed Sidky]
So The Agile Manifesto was a document written in 2001. Basically, software methodology people came together and wanted to articulate the different way of working that they had been doing compared to what the rest of the industry was doing. Really, Agile is a mindset. It’s a way of thinking that’s defined by four values, described by 12 principles, and then manifested through an unlimited number of practices or different ways of working. And it’s simply a deep understanding and culture of learning and experimentation and trying things out.
Any creative work will benefit from this notion of an agile way of working. One of the misconceptions about Agile is sort of why. Why– why do I want to become Agile, is it just to be more efficient and more effective? And I think for some people, they may say yes, but for me, it’s not that. It really is about customer-centricity.
Agility is the best way to serve your customer. The customer today is in a constant state of motion There’s a lot changing for customers at all times. And acknowledging and understanding that because I want to be more customer-centric, and that the customer is in a constant state of change, I need to be more flexible, agile in the way I work.
And when I say I, I’m saying marketing people, HR people, finance people, product development, content creators, sales, any discipline, any function that is trying to serve a customer, Agile becomes a necessity, not a nice-to-have. Because you will not be able to truly surprise and delight and fulfill the needs of your customer without having a way of working where we are co-creating and trying things out, and experimenting, and expecting, and adapting, and innovating, and being OK with failure.
It is a different mindset. It is a different set of capabilities. And I think if you just boil it down to doing things differently, that’s all you’re going to do. You’re just going to do a bunch of things differently.
But if you want to be a different person that is ready for the next century of how business is done and creative work and customer-centricity, that requires a journey, a learning journey for yourself. But it’s a journey worth pursuing because it will change you, and it will change the way you work, and it will change what you can do for your customer.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Create Your Own Animated Videos
There’s a reason why Vyond is the leading platform for creating your own videos. Robust and powerful customization features are all wrapped into our simple, easy-for-everyone studio that comes fully loaded with everything you need to build engaging video experiences.
See where your creativity can take you with a Vyond free trial; no credit card required.
#### Pride for Instagram Stories
Use this short, customizable video to celebrate Pride Month at your company. Then upload it to Instagram Stories and rotate the video.
#### Product Teaser or Demo Preview
This modern looking template is the perfect format for a quick, engaging, step-by-by product problem-solving demo. Modify the video to fit your brand by easily switching the avatar, colors, and changing the images for a customized experience.
#### Promotional Apprenticeship by City of London Corporation
URL: https://www.vyond.com/showcase/video/promotional-apprenticeship-by-city-of-london-corporation/
#### Promotional Video by GM Voices: Santa’s Contact Center
In this video, GM Voices showcases the benefits of hiring a voice actor through a creative story: Santa’s Call Center. GM Voices uses Vyond’s office settings and props in combination with holiday assets to create a humorous portrayal of the North Pole.
#### Promotional Video by Wuvavi: North Pole Cyber Breach
In this video, cybersecurity company Wuvavi playfully explores the impact of a network breach by depicting how one might devastate Santa’s North Pole operations. For one scene, Wuvavi cleverly places a video within the video to show characters watching a newscast.
#### Promotional Video for Stakecam by Mobalysis
Tech company Mobalysis introduces their Stakecam ski-tracking tool here, exploring how it can help users find the best places to hit the slopes. Mobalysis used Vyond’s custom character creator to create realistic, detailed snowboarder figures with googles, boots, and more.
#### Proposal Recap or Walkthrough
When it’s brass tacks time, this template is ideal for effectively presenting a visual representation of next steps and plan implementation details. Modify the video by uploading customer and brand-specific facts, figures, and imagery, and choosing the most effective avatar for your audience.
#### Q&A Reveal – Bundle
This Q&A reveal bundle is an exciting and interactive way to present information. We have collected an assortment of scenes featuring fun props and characters that will keep your audience engaged and eager to learn.
To maintain the attention of your audience, keep them curious, and test their attention and memory, Q&A scenes are the perfect medium! From trivia to educational content, these scenes are versatile and can be customized to suit various topics and purposes.
Whether you’re an educator, an eLearning professional, a content creator, a business professional, or simply someone who enjoys engaging videos, our Question and Answer Reveal Bundle is a must-have in your toolkit.
Create Your Own Animated Videos
There’s a reason why Vyond is the leading platform for creating your own videos. Robust and powerful customization features are all wrapped into our simple, easy-for-everyone studio that comes fully loaded with everything you need to build engaging video experiences.
See where your creativity can take you with a Vyond free trial; no credit card required.
#### Quarterly Business Review (QBR)
Executive engagement post-sale is critical, and this template is the perfect showcase for engaging, in-depth performance reviews. Modify the video by adding customer and brand-specific facts, figures, and imagery, and choosing the most effective avatar for your audience.
#### Quarterly Performance Review
Use this clean and modern avatar template to easily create data-driven videos for sales teams. Customize it with company or client branding for engagement and buy-in.
#### Question and Answer Reveals in Vyond
What’s a great way to keep your audience’s attention? Suspense! By asking your audience questions and giving them enough space to think about their response, you are allowing them time to engage in your topic. When the answer is surprising or presented in an unusual way it can keep an audience excited for more. A great reveal can really make an impact.
#### Ramadan Race by Pious Projects
URL: https://www.vyond.com/showcase/video/ramadan-race-by-pious-projects/
#### Recovering from COVID-19 by Converging Solutions
URL: https://www.vyond.com/showcase/video/recovering-from-covid-19-by-converging-solutions/
#### Recruitment Challenges in HR
Use this recruitment-specific animated template to convey key HR tips and tactics in an easy-to-follow manner. Tailor it with your brand identity and modify it to fit your needs, creating a customized video that speaks directly to your viewers in a compelling way.
#### Remote Team Communication: Creative Ways to Stay Connected
Help inspire a culture of remote team communication and develop an engaged workforce in the absence of a communal workspace. Here are a few creative ways for remote teams to stay connected while working remotely.
Be sure to save this video to your account for the next time you need to visualize a virtual chat or video call.
Video Transcript: Remote Team Communication
It’s easy to strike up a casual conversation at the office, and it’s in moments like this where employees build personal connections. But when these moments aren’t possible, teams have to leverage technology in creative ways to inspire a culture of connection and develop an engaged workforce.
How can co-workers stay connected while working remotely?
When it makes sense, use video rather than email, messaging apps, or phone calls to have more engaging conversations. It’s much easier to connect when you can see someone’s face.
Consider beginning with an icebreaker to get the ball rolling. Such questions can lead to real conversations, building trust and empathy, and strengthening relationships between colleagues.
Schedule optional virtual morning coffee breaks, lunch sessions, or happy hours so co-workers have space to chit-chat about issues unrelated to work.
A weekly or monthly wellness session offers a nice, healthy way for people to connect.
Messaging apps are excellent for virtual community building. Create separate channels, so non-work topics don’t clash with the more official channels.
Start a water cooler channel for co-workers to post casual questions or comments at any time. Try asking a question of the day. It’s fun to see people’s responses, and these often inspire spinoff conversations.
A shout-out channel allows employees to call out colleagues’ accomplishments. Community recognition is important. Create a space for birthdays, family celebrations, and personal milestones, and encourage employees to share photos of their celebrations. An end-of-the-day, company-wide trivia game can be a great way to cultivate friendly competition.
Not everyone has to participate in each activity every time, but employees will appreciate having these options available to them. Even when colleagues are miles apart, you can still foster a culture of connection.
Create Your Own Animated Videos
See where your creativity can take you with a Vyond free trial.
#### Remote Team Training: Tips for Remote Managers | Video Template
Remote management is a skill. This video shares tips for how to be a great remote manager.
Video Transcription: Remote Team Training. Tips for Remote Managers
Managing requires a skill set all its own. And managing remotely is no exception. Challenges can range from a lack of face-to-face interaction, to trust issues, and in some cases, to employees feeling their manager is out of touch with their needs. Let’s go over some tips on how to be a great remote manager.
Make yourself available at the same time as your direct reports. This is extremely important as it allows you to have an open line of communication and enables you to ask and answer questions regarding tasks and projects without delay. The last thing you want is for your team to feel like giving or receiving information about a project is harder than it should be.
Different ways of communicating are necessary as there is no one size fits all solution. Time-sensitive questions or casual conversations are better suited for messaging applications where people can respond quickly and effortlessly. Email is better for sending larger chunks of information all at once, where it can be easier to archive or search for the information later. And lastly, more important or sensitive conversations are best over video calls which feel more personal than text or audio-only conversations.
Having digital face-to-face communication with your team is also important as feelings of loneliness and social isolation from their organization are some of the most common complaints of remote workers. To help counter that as a manager, you should hold weekly video calls with your direct reports, whether it be one on ones, or a team call to check-in and connect on both work and life.
Each person on your team was likely hired for being talented at what they do. As it is important to set expectations about when and how work should be done, allowing them to accomplish tasks on their own without constantly checking on progress is crucial to building a strong and trusting relationship with your direct reports.
It’s important as a manager that you offer encouragement and emotional support. If you see that someone is struggling with their work or even acting differently, don’t be afraid to reach out. Even asking a simple question like, “how is this remote work situation working out for you?” can reveal a lot of information to help you better support your team members.
The tips in this video are a great starting point for people managing a remote team. But the most important thing to do is try different solutions and find out what works best for you and your team.
Create Your Own Animated Videos
There’s a reason why Vyond is the leading platform for creating your own videos. Robust and powerful customization features are all wrapped into our simple, easy-for-everyone studio that comes fully loaded with everything you need to build engaging video experiences.
See where your creativity can take you with a Vyond free trial; no credit card required.
#### Retail Associate Training
This comprehensive training video is designed to equip you with the essential knowledge and skills for providing excellent customer service and mastering effective merchandising techniques. Award-winning customer service relies on genuine connections, and acknowledging customers’ personal feelings and experiences greatly enhances their overall satisfaction.
Video Transcription: Tips for Creating Emotions in Your Videos
Welcome to Vivian’s department store. We’re thrilled to have you join the team as a retail associate. In this training video, we’ll cover the five basics of providing excellent customer service and merchandising.
As a retail associate, you are the face of our store. It’s important to greet every customer with a warm welcome and make them feel at home.
Merchandising is an integral part of our business.
We want to ensure that our merchandise is displayed in an attractive way that entices customers to make purchases.
We take pride in our store’s appearance, so keep our shelves stocked and organized to help customers easily find what they want.
To provide effective customer service, it is important to connect with the customer by acknowledging their personal feelings and experiences.
When dealing with an angry customer, it can be helpful to listen to their frustrations, show empathy, and ask how you can make things right.
As a retail associate, you will be responsible for processing transactions.
Be sure to thank the customer for their purchase when all is said and done!
Thank you for watching this training video. We are excited to have you on our team!
Create Your Own Animated Videos
There’s a reason why Vyond is the leading platform for creating your own videos. Robust and powerful customization features are all wrapped into our simple, easy-for-everyone studio that comes fully loaded with everything you need to build engaging video experiences.
See where your creativity can take you with a Vyond free trial; no credit card required.
#### Retaliation Scenario
This instructional video shows a hypothetical workplace scenario in which one employee reports another’s unsafe practices to management. Even though the employee who reported the safety issue had everyone’s best interests in mind, he is teased, shunned, and retaliated against by others. The video is designed to help you create your own branched story about what retaliation is and how to handle it.
#### Rising Sea Level
This short video about rising sea levels utilizes color, sound, and movement to tell a story without any voice. The template includes useful elements for a variety of video projects including a rewind effect, advanced motion, and a colorful lighting transition.
#### Sales Account Expansion & Upselling
Video is a fun and dynamic medium for convincing your most loyal customers to expand their accounts. When equipped with sales account expansion training videos like this one, members of your sales team can upsell their clients in a compelling and engaging way. This video is a great example of how to delight customers using animation. (Keep an eye out, too, for its use of live-action webcam footage!)
You can load this sales pitch video into any existing Vyond account to use it as a customizable template.
Video Transcription: Sales Account Expansion & Upselling
Hi, Thomas, I’m Lyly Tran, BizCorpCo’s dedicated account manager.
I’m excited to introduce you to all things Zodio. Employee engagement has a huge impact on your organization’s success. That’s why we want to help you nurture a collaborative work environment by setting you up with a tool to bring your employees together.
Zodio is a unique employee engagement tool that personalizes each employee’s experience based on their zodiac sign. Zodio is used by enterprises all over the world. In fact, some of your colleagues at BizCorpCo might already be taking advantage of our fun and robust platform.
Take Liz Truman, for example. Zodio hasn’t just strengthened employee engagement, it’s worked magic for organizational culture. On top of having everything, you’d expect. Zodio’s fun horoscope features and powerful polling has enabled us to make sure everybody on our team feels valued.
When you sign up with Zodio, you’ve got our whole team support to ensure you’re successful. As a user, you’ll have access to our awesome community platform, weekly best practice webinars, and a 24/7 astrology team to answer your questions.
Keeping your employees happy and connected at work is the foundation of long-term success. As leaders in zodiac technology, we believe we can truly bring people together and create an environment where employees can thrive.
Want to give it a try? Help yourself to a 30-day free trial and see how BizCorpCo and Zodio are a match made in the stars.
Create Your Own Animated Videos
See where your creativity can take you with a free trial of Vyond.
#### Sales Enablement
Video Transcription: Sales Enablement
Hey Jake, it’s been a while since we last spoke. It’s great to see that your company is doing so well these days. Remember the last time we talked, you mentioned X, Y, and Z were big pain points for you on our platform. And I said those issues were on our product development radar. Well, you’ll be happy to know I wasn’t joking. Check this out. We’ve completely overhauled how those operations function.
See how the solution resolves those issues? Now you can do this work in half the time, it’s awesome. If you’ve got some time in the next week, I’d love to go with the suite of new features in more detail and show you how they can benefit you. Business aside, I’m looking forward to catching up, and I hope we can get sous chef life great neighborhood spot against them.
Create Your Own Animated Videos
There’s a reason why Vyond is the leading platform for creating your own videos. Robust and powerful customization features are all wrapped into our simple, easy-for-everyone studio that comes fully loaded with everything you need to build engaging video experiences.
See where your creativity can take you with a Vyond free trial; no credit card required.
#### Sales Quantities
This eye-catching, graphic template is a perfect way to make your mark at your next sales presentation. Customize the look to fit your brand identity and build on it to create a video that speaks directly to your viewers in a compelling way.
#### Sales Rep Onboarding Series: Introduction (1 of 5)
Onboard your new sales hires more effectively with the power of animated videos. This intro to your new sales role template is one of a series of 5 video templates you can use to create your own sales onboarding series.
#### Sales Rep Onboarding Series: Roles (2 of 5)
Use this short video template to explain a particular sales role to a new sales hire. (This is the second in a series of five video templates you can use to create your own sales onboarding series.)
#### Sales Rep Onboarding Series: Support Roles (4 of 5)
Use this very short video template to communicate the variety of sales and support roles at your company to a new sales hire. (This is the fourth in a series of five video templates you can use to create your own sales onboarding series.)
#### Sales Rep Onboarding Series: Support Roles (5 of 5)
Use this very short video template to explain your tech stack to a new sales hire. (This is the fifth in a series of five video templates you can use to create your own sales onboarding series.)
#### Sales Rep Onboarding Series: Top Benefits of Our Product (3 of 5)
Use this short video template to explain the highlights of your product to a new sales hire. (This is the third in a series of five video templates you can use to create your own sales onboarding series.)
#### Save the Date Wedding Invitation
URL: https://www.vyond.com/showcase/video/save-the-date-wedding-invitation-video-template/
#### SDR Introduction Video for Sales Enablement
With video, salespeople can cultivate a personal connection with their prospects, even before the first call. In this example, “Brad”—a sales development representative for the fictional company, Zodio—uses video to introduce himself in an authentic and personable way. By introducing ourselves with a more human touch, we can build trust in leads.
Pull this video into any existing Vyond account to get a head start on your own sales introduction video. (Brad isn’t real, so you can totally copy his work without him knowing.)
Video Transcription: Sales Introduction Video Template for SDR Sales Enablement
Hi, I am Brad Jackson, and this is Zodio. Employee engagement has a huge impact on your organization’s success. Engaged and connected employees help nurture a collaborative work culture, which results in innovative outcomes.
At Zodio, we believe employee engagement can be fun, which is why we baked fun right into our internal communications platform. Zodio is a unique employee engagement tool that personalizes each employee’s experience based on their zodiac sign.
In addition to all the features you expect of a robust employee engagement system, Zodio offers the fun sense of self that comes from astrology. You can participate in weekly mindfulness activities based on your zodiac sign. Create engaging surveys, organize virtual events and games, and more. Zodio also provides an engagement tracking feature that analyzes how employees are connecting and engaging over time.
Want to learn more? Schedule a personalized demo with me to see how your company and Zodio are a match made in the stars.
Create Your Own Animated Videos
See where your creativity can take you with a Vyond free trial.
#### Security Tips for Working Remotely
Help your team keep data safe while working remotely.
This template covers security risks that accompany remote work and shares how to avoid them with tips from Vyond’s own internal data security expert. Personalize the template with your company’s current remote work security policies and update it as needed for year-round use.
Video Transcription: Remote Work Security Tips
With more and more people working remotely these days, it’s as important as ever to keep you and your company’s data safe. Around 90% of data breaches are caused by human error. So with that said, here are some examples of the security risks that come with working from home and how to solve them.
The most obvious risks are physical. It’s much easier to have a laptop or phone stolen than a desktop computer that’s permanently located in your office. When working from public places, never leave your devices unattended. Always keep your devices within reach. Put them away and take them with you even if you plan to only get up for a second. Be sure to also watch out for looky-loos peering at your screen.
Avoid working in areas where people can look over your shoulder such as in front of windows or in the middle of a cafe. Even when you’re working from home, be vigilant about children and pets. They can easily delete work by accident or access files that shouldn’t be tampered with.
It’s good practice to create separate accounts for work and personal use with different passwords for each and to get in the habit of locking your screen when you walk away from your computer. You can even place your computer in a locked cabinet or room for extra safety when you aren’t working.
The less obvious risks are digital and can come in many forms. Many personal computers may not have the proper antivirus and anti-malware software installed. This can leave you wide open to phishing scams and hackers hijacking information. Whether you’re using your personal computer or work computer. The best method here is to never open emails from people you don’t trust or click on links or open attachments that seem suspicious.
You should also always use company-approved software for your work. Not all software is developed with the same security standards and third-party software can easily compromise the security of your device. Password security is also extremely important. Leaving post-its with passwords attached to your monitor or reusing the same password for all of your accounts is like having no password at all. It’s best practice to use a password manager, which makes it easy to create and update strong individual passwords for all of your accounts. Just remember that the password manager software you use should be approved by your company ahead of time.
Lastly, whether you’re connecting to the internet through a private home network or a public shared network, VPNs are the best method to keep you as secure as possible. VPNs work by routing all of the data coming from your computer through a private server, essentially blocking any unwanted visitors that may be connected to the same network. Follow these guidelines while working remotely to ensure you work as securely as possible.
Create Your Own Animated Videos
There’s a reason why Vyond is the leading platform for creating your own videos. Robust and powerful customization features are all wrapped into our simple, easy-for-everyone studio that comes fully loaded with everything you need to build engaging video experiences.
See where your creativity can take you with a Vyond free trial; no credit card required.
#### Setting up a Home Office in a Tight Space
Video Transcription: Setting up a Home Office in a Tight Space
If you’re not used to it, working from home can be an adjustment, and it can be especially tough, but not impossible if you don’t have much extra space.
How can you squeeze an inviting workstation into an already tight space? Chances are there’s a spot in plain sight just begging to be transformed into your workstation.
Swap out an end table by the sofa, or a nightstand by your bed, with a small desk.
Remove visible distractions. Only the items necessary for your work should be within arm’s reach. If you make video calls, remember to also tidy up the space behind you.
Getting rid of auditory distractions can be harder. This is where headphones come in handy.
Setting boundaries is especially important if you live with other people. Have a conversation with roommates, children, your spouse, or any other people in your household.
Come up with visual cues so they know when it’s safe to approach you and when it’s absolutely not OK to do so. But be forgiving too. In a small space, your workstation just might be in the path of… other essential rooms in your house.
If you’re going to be living at home with this workstation, you’ll need to like it. Don’t outfit your room with boring office furniture. Find a table that will blend in nicely with the rest of your space. You need to be able to see your work so you can focus.
Whether you use a table lamp or a hanging ceiling lamp, lighting is key.
You’ll need storage to keep your space tidy. A shelf along the wall can look great here, but a simple rolling cart works too.
Finally, a nice photograph or artwork will go a long way towards making your workstation pleasant and inviting.
Create Your Own Animated Videos
There’s a reason why Vyond is the leading platform for creating your own videos. Robust and powerful customization features are all wrapped into our simple, easy-for-everyone studio that comes fully loaded with everything you need to build engaging video experiences.
See where your creativity can take you with a Vyond free trial; no credit card required.
#### Shaping the Future of Business
Use this striking, design-forward presentation template to boldly outline company goals, achievements, and cornerstones. Customize the video to match your brand and make it as relevant as possible for your specific audience and purpose. Simply swap out the photo with one of Vyond’s avatars to create a further customized experience.
#### Sick Leave Policy
Use this template to explain your company’s sick leave policy to employees. Update the video by creating a new voiceover recording for explaining the unique details of your company’s policy, such as who to notify about taking a sick day and how many sick days are allowed. You can also change the text in the video to display your HR team’s contact information.
#### Site Safety Essentials Training
With subtle, industrial-themed graphics, this avatar template is a perfect starting place to help you create compelling workplace safety protocol videos or other jobsite training content.
#### Skateboard Music Video by OverTymeSimms
URL: https://www.vyond.com/showcase/video/skateboard-music-video-by-overtymesimms/
#### Skills Distribution in the Workforce
URL: https://www.vyond.com/showcase/video/skills-distribution-in-the-workforce/
#### Slow Motion in Vyond Studio
Slow motion is a great effect to add to your videos, and simple to do in Vyond Studio. You might use slow motion to show action replay, make a scene more intense, or to highlight an important moment of the story. Explore this template to see how the video was created.
#### Small Group Travel with Melanated Girls Around the World
The following beautiful video was created by Sarah Gaspari’s M.Ed. for Melanated Girls Around the World, a program founded by Christina “CJ” de Jiménez, an educator, instructional designer, certified scrum master, entrepreneur, and mom. The program focuses on low-stress and low-cost travel experiences for women of color.
Create your own travel agency and hospitality videos for guided tours in Vyond Studio.
Create Your Own Animated Videos
There’s a reason why Vyond is the leading platform for creating your own videos. Robust and powerful customization features are all wrapped into our simple, easy-for-everyone studio that comes fully loaded with everything you need to build engaging video experiences.
See where your creativity can take you with a Vyond free trial; no credit card required.
#### Social Work Research Course Intro by Brandman University
URL: https://www.vyond.com/showcase/video/social-work-research-course-intro-by-brandman-university/
#### Sociology of Deviant Behavior Course Intro by Brandman University
URL: https://www.vyond.com/showcase/video/sociology-of-deviant-behavior-course-intro-by-brandman-university/
#### Spin the Globe Travel: Why Work with an Accessible Travel Blogger
Spin the Globe uses this video to introduce their unique and memorable travel experiences for disabled adults. Infographics illustrate the organization’s international reach.
#### Spotting Ageism in the Workplace
Age diversity doesn’t have a very large share of the popular discourse around diversity, equity, and inclusion. When left unchecked, though, ageism can become just as pervasive and damaging to your organization’s culture as any other -ism. Animated videos like this one are a great way to not only reach all learners but to truly engage them with accessible material using dynamic visual content.
Video Transcription: Ageism in the Workplace
[Narrator] It isn’t always easy to spot ageism.
Like many other isms, ageism can sabotage, diversity, equity, and inclusion when we aren’t looking for it.
So what does ageism look like? Actions like excluding somebody based on presumed technical skill.
[Employee 1]”You can send a slide deck to me. I’m not sure if is all that good at PowerPoint.”
[Narrator] Only going to lunch with coworkers from the same age group as you. Or informing a hiring decision by guessing a job candidate’s age.
[Employee 2] How old are your kids? So when did you graduate?
[Narrator] All of us have our preconceived notions about age. Like any kind of bias, ageism is best-confronted head-on. So where do we start?
Examine your own feelings towards age and work to unlearn biases. Spend time getting to know people in different age groups.
[Employee 3] “Want to check out the new coffee shop with me?”
[Narrator] Talk about ageism with your colleagues and partner with leadership to combat ageism at work. By spotting and stopping ageism, we can create a more inclusive and equitable workplace for all.
Create Your Own Animated Videos
There’s a reason why Vyond is the leading platform for creating your own videos. Robust and powerful customization features are all wrapped into our simple, easy-for-everyone studio that comes fully loaded with everything you need to build engaging video experiences.
See where your creativity can take you with a Vyond free trial; no credit card required.
#### Staggering Effects: Video Template
We have put together some of our favorite advanced techniques for you to try in Vyond Studio. By combining simple shapes into groups and using delay on the enter effects, you can create a sense of wonder in your next video.
Import this template video into Vyond Studio.
Create Your Own Animated Videos
See where your creativity can take you with a Vyond free trial.
#### Startup Explainer by CertiQua (German)
The customer recommendation platform CertiQua created this video to showcase the benefits of using their site. They customized our Business Friendly style with images of their product to clearly explain the mechanics of their site. Note: Effects at:38 and :52 were created outside of Vyond.
#### Stop Procrastination by Samuel Fleming
Samuel Fleming, a professional voice actor, uses the Whiteboard Animation style in Vyond to tackle the issue of procrastination. Energetic and passionate voice acting, along with the clean whiteboard style, make the concepts within the video easy to follow and digest.
#### Story By Design: Story Design Workshop Promo
Rance Greene promotes his storytelling workshop in this video using metaphor and a foretaste of the workshop experience to build and maintain interest. Take note of camera movement that adds action to still shots and upbeat music.
#### Supporting Local Food Banks
Video Transcription: Supporting Local Food Banks
Food has a magical way of bringing people together during the holidays.
This year, food banks need more help than ever to ensure everybody has access to nourishing meals. With offices, schools, and community centers closed, food drives have slowed down quite a bit.
And for everybody’s safety, many charities have stopped accepting food items. Nevertheless, local pantries need help to meet almost double the need this year, with food insecurity at an all-time high. So what’s the best way to help? With donations!
Food banks are most in need of monetary donations. Instead of dropping off the groceries, send funds to help feed those without food. Share donation links with your friends and family, and encourage employees to give with matching.
Find your local food bank at foodpantries.org to learn how to donate and volunteer safely.
Create Your Own Animated Videos
There’s a reason why Vyond is the leading platform for creating your own videos. Robust and powerful customization features are all wrapped into our simple, easy-for-everyone studio that comes fully loaded with everything you need to build engaging video experiences.
See where your creativity can take you with a Vyond free trial; no credit card required.
#### Talk Track Breakdown
Breaking down sales calls is a highly effective training tool, and this template gives you a quick, easy, and compelling way to do it. Modify the video by adding in customer and brand-specific facts, figures, audio and visuals, and choosing the most effective avatar for your audience.
#### Team Intros (Onboarding)
Invite new hires to watch this template as a way to introduce them to each department on your team. You can edit the main character to reflect your own look and style and add a new voice-over recording to describe each team. This video introduces the teams in Vyond’s US office. Note: The template does not include our custom characters.
Video Transcription: Onboarding Introductions
Hello, and welcome to Vyond. In this video, I’m going to introduce you to each of the teams here at Vyond’s San Mateo office, and let them give you a little explanation of what they do.
The Vyond human resources team manages all employee-related activities. Which include recruitment, payroll, benefits, performance management, training, employee relations, and more, in order to ensure that employees are fully equipped to be productive and successful members of the company.
Our customer success department is broken down into four teams. My team, the support team, answers technical questions and video-making inquiries from customers, and to use our Vyond Studio expertise to help them make great videos. Our customer relationship managers on Erin’s teamwork directly with an assigned group of customers, to help them be successful long-term.
IT in San Mateo configures and maintains the network and hardware for you. IT also works with customer success and clients to troubleshoot complex technical issues.
And our project management team organizes and tracks large company initiatives, like our rebrand project, or our ISO security and GDPR compliance.
The marketing team runs campaigns and events to generate awareness and promote our product. We create content to educate our customers about video and Vyond Studio. And we work closely with other teams to support their communication needs.
The Business Development team is responsible for securing and managing all technology in video production partnerships, resellers, and affiliates. Our team also manages small business sales.
Our sales team works to sell our product to large organizations. The team is broken down into two main groups. Inbound sales development reps work to set meetings with large organizations. And our account executives then work with those prospects to the point of sale. Once a large company becomes a customer, they are introduced to our customer relationship managers on Erin’s team for onboarding and continued learning.
And finally, the accounting department is in charge of managing Vyond’s receivable and payable finances. We also plan, audit, and generate financial statements to report on the health of the company.
Well, there you have it. That’s our San Mateo office. I hope you enjoyed this brief introduction. Welcome aboard.
Create Your Own Animated Videos
There’s a reason why Vyond is the leading platform for creating your own videos. Robust and powerful customization features are all wrapped into our simple, easy-for-everyone studio that comes fully loaded with everything you need to build engaging video experiences.
See where your creativity can take you with a Vyond free trial; no credit card required.
#### Team Seas
Encourage your audience to get involved and support the causes you care about the most by creating donation drive videos. These videos are fantastic at efficiently communicating your mission and inviting others to contribute with donations. The following video created by Vyond’s video producer, Prakriti Rai, showcases #TeamSeas’ mission of eradicating marine pollution by collaborating with non-profits in their efforts to preserve marine ecosystems. Create your own donation drive video by using the following template; tell a story, and inspire others to make a positive impact.
Video Transcription: Team Seas
[Narrator]
Marine pollution is a massive problem. Our rivers, oceans, and beaches worldwide are defiled, negatively impacting at least 267 species and fueling climate change. Save the seas this holiday season without even leaving your home. Every dollar donated is worth 1 pound of trash removed.
Team Seas, an initiative started by popular YouTubers Mr. Beast and Mark Rober aims to remove 30 million pounds of trash by January 1, 2022. By partnering with two non-profit organizations, Ocean Conservancy and The Ocean Cleanup, they intend to remove garbage from the ocean, rivers, and beaches. This is how they plan to do it.
With the help from Ocean Conservancy’s Global Ghost Gear Initiative, they plan to remove lost, abandoned, and discarded fishing gear called ghost gear from the ocean. Team Seas will work with Ocean Conservancy to identify the world’s most vulnerable beaches and send crews to clean them up.
Team Seas will also work with the ocean cleanup to tackle trash from the rivers with their interceptor technologies. The interceptor is a solar-powered robot that can collect trash autonomously. The trash collected gets weighed and then disposed of or recycled with guidance from local authorities.
Head on to teamseas.org to learn more or contribute by donating. With the new year on the horizon, change is due, so let’s create a difference and help make our world a cleaner, better place.
Create Your Own Animated Videos
There’s a reason why Vyond is the leading platform for creating your own videos. Robust and powerful customization features are all wrapped into our simple, easy-for-everyone studio that comes fully loaded with everything you need to build engaging video experiences.
See where your creativity can take you with a Vyond free trial; no credit card required.
#### Teamwork Narration Scenes
URL: https://www.vyond.com/showcase/video/18762/
#### Tech Stack Tutorials
Introducing your team to their latest sales tools has never been this quick, easy, or engaging. Modify the video by uploading brand and product-specific information and imagery, and choosing the most effective avatar for your audience.
#### The Cognitive Psychology of Design and the Brain by Bython Media
B2B Marketing company Bython Media often creates “video white papers” to help inspire other marketers with the latest industry trends and findings. This educational video from Bython highlights the connections between design psychology and neuroscience. Bython uses a cinematic zoom (camera movement) technique that highlights key elements in images and helps viewers connect larger trends between the details shown.
#### The Fabulous Q&A: How to Keep Your Habits Up
The Fabulous app team discusses how to change your habits by changing your environment. This video uses a combination of animation, characters, narration, and on-screen text to keep the viewer engaged while also showing their app in use to promote their service.
#### The Future of the City of Calgary – Digital Portal by Cybera
The City of Calgary uses a fun, animated video to tell residents about a new online portal. This portal helps users to make the most of publicly available data to save money on utility bills, understand traffic patterns, avoid crowds, and more. What makes this video especially useful is the inclusion of the actual tool interspersed with animated visuals.
#### The Great Race, Chinese Zodiac Explainer
The Great Race tells the story of the animals on the Chinese zodiac. Video by Vyond customer Lam Quach.
#### The Quiz Game Show
Animated videos can make your eLearning fun and engaging by introducing an element of familiarity: well-known TV game shows! Unleash your creativity and capture the attention of your audience while also teaching them something new.
Edit the following video template and make it your own in Vyond Studio.
Video Transcription: The Quiz Game Show
[Host]
In this emerald city, Capitol Hill is known for nightlife and entertainment.
[Contestant 1]
What is Seattle?
[Host]
This icy adversary is responsible for sinking the unsinkable ship.
[Contestant 3]
What is an iceberg?
[Host]
The Capitol building in this state is one of the only ones without a dome.
[Contestant 3]
What is New Jersey?
[Contestant 2]
What is New York?
[Host]
This cast-iron statue evoking the goddess Minerva sits atop the US Capitol building in Washington, DC.
[Contestant 2]
What is the Statue of freedom?
[Host]
Well, folks, that’s our show. Thanks for playing.
Create Your Own Animated Videos
There’s a reason why Vyond is the leading platform for creating your own videos. Robust and powerful customization features are all wrapped into our simple, easy-for-everyone studio that comes fully loaded with everything you need to build engaging video experiences.
See where your creativity can take you with a Vyond free trial; no credit card required.
#### Thinking Outside the Box with Sound Effects
I hear the clip-clop of horse hooves. Except… Those are coconuts! Sound effects are a great way to enhance the movements you see on screen. But the original source of the sound doesn’t always match the action you see.
In this video, we have used sound effects from our library and paired them with a visual that may or may not be the same. Can you identify the sound effect?
Have fun exploring the sound effect library and bringing your stories to life.
Video Transcription: Thinking Outside the Box with Sound FX
It’s Sound FX, the game where you figure out what sound effect
from the studio library is used in the scene. Fingers on buzzers. Here we go! What sound effect was used in this scene?
Was it A.forest, B.cell phone buzz? The answer is B.cell phone buzz.
What sound effect was used in this scene? Was it A.pig eating, B.drill? The answer is A.pig eating.
What sound effect was used in this scene? Was it A.heartbeat, B.punch?The answer is a.heartbeat. What sound effect was used in this scene?
Was it A.in the train, B.dragster idle? The answer is B.dragster idle.
What sound effect was used in this scene? Was it A.waterfall crash, B.frying? The answer is B.frying.
What sound effect was used in this scene? Was it a.explosion, b.body fall? The answer is A.explosion.
Well, that’s about all we have time for today. It’s been a pleasure playing, Sound FX.
Create Your Own Animated Videos
There’s a reason why Vyond is the leading platform for creating your own videos. Robust and powerful customization features are all wrapped into our simple, easy-for-everyone studio that comes fully loaded with everything you need to build engaging video experiences.
See where your creativity can take you with a Vyond free trial; no credit card required.
#### Timeline
Ideal for internal or external communications, use this boldly contemporary, multi-framed template to document key chronological events in your company’s history. Modify it with your brand identity and photography or repurpose it to fit your specific needs.
#### Tips for Accessible Virtual Meetings by Microsoft Enable
URL: https://www.vyond.com/showcase/video/tips-for-accessible-virtual-meetings-by-microsoft-enable/
#### Tips for Creating Emotions in Your Videos
Learn about creating emotions in your videos through set design, lighting, different camera movements, and angles. The scenarios on this video template can help you elevate your storytelling by providing your characters with distinct personalities while also bringing their actions and speech to life.
Video Transcription: Tips for Creating Emotions in Your Videos
[Narrator]
Your audience might not recall every detail of your video, but they will remember how it made them feel. That’s why it’s important for your scenes to convey the intended emotions effectively. Take this scene for an example. With only a few changes, you can achieve totally different vibes.
To give your scenes a joyful atmosphere, make it feel spacious, and his bright color tones. You can also add props, such as flowers, decorations, and pets. Try not to make the characters happy from the beginning. The scene will feel more alive if their happiness comes as a reaction to something in the scene and for a touch of comedy. You can add something that feels out of place.
Now let’s try a different emotion. Increase the intensity of your character’s conflict by making it take place in an enclosed space with no visible way out. Then locate the most aggressive character as if they’re blocking the exit. Have that character do a lot of movement to make them appear bigger. As for the weakest character, you can enhance their feeling of stuckness by choosing actions that make them look smaller.
Let’s jump to the next emotion. When composing a gloomy scene, use as few characters as possible. Sadness is quite often considered a lonely feeling. Make the characters feel small by placing them in a dim environment with a lot of empty space. If the script requires your character to cry, give it some time before they shed their first cheer. And when they do, show it in a close-up to make it more impactful.
And finally, one last emotion to add to your toolkit. The trick to giving your scene a creepy atmosphere is to fill the background with humanoid props, such as portraits and dolls, and position them as if they are staring at two characters, then shroud them in darkness. Shoot the establishing shot from behind a prop as if someone is stalking the characters. Remember not to show the scare right away. Instead, build the tension slowly. Get the camera closer and closer to your characters as the tension builds up. And try these tips in your next video project and put your audience on an emotional roller coaster.
Create Your Own Animated Videos
There’s a reason why Vyond is the leading platform for creating your own videos. Robust and powerful customization features are all wrapped into our simple, easy-for-everyone studio that comes fully loaded with everything you need to build engaging video experiences.
See where your creativity can take you with a Vyond free trial; no credit card required.
#### Tips for Successful Support Calls
Teach your team how to successfully run support calls with this template about customer communication. Substitute your company’s favorite support call tips for the recommendations we include with this template. You can also replace the voiceover recording and speech bubbles to show the script you’d like your support reps to follow.
Video Transcription: Tips for Successful Support Calls
Hello. Is there something you need? Hi, how can I help you today?
When talking to customers, it’s always important to keep pitch, tone, and vocal inflection in mind. Hi, this is Roshni from Vyond. How can I help you today?
Hi there. I need some help with my account.
Acknowledge the customer by IDing the company, sharing your name, and offering to help. Lastly, make sure to actively listen to customers. You can do this by listening for contextual cues, meaning, and not letting things go in one ear and out the other. Thanks for watching.
Create Your Own Animated Videos
There’s a reason why Vyond is the leading platform for creating your own videos. Robust and powerful customization features are all wrapped into our simple, easy-for-everyone studio that comes fully loaded with everything you need to build engaging video experiences.
See where your creativity can take you with a Vyond free trial; no credit card required.
#### Tips to Collect and Address Customer Feedback
This colorful, animated video is perfect for easily creating compelling sales presentations and explainers. Brand it with company or client colors and elements for recognition and retention.
#### Training Certification
Note: Shutterstock assets included in this template are only available to Enterprise and Professional users.
#### Travel Vlog
This video combines video, photos, and animation to create a multimedia-rich vlog episode.
Video Transcription: Vlog
Hey guys, welcome back to my channel. I wanted to share my trip with you and tell you about some of the cool things I saw when I was in Norway.
So last year, I went to Norway with some friends and had a really good time. One thing I noticed was how different people behaved in the rain. Where I live, when it’s raining, everybody will stay at home or just hang out in shopping malls. But in Bergen Norway, it rains 300 days of the year. So people just get on with it. It was very surprising to see all these children playing in the playground, even out with pouring of rain.
I love hiking in Norway. We went to see Pulpit Rock and I was expecting something really dramatic. But what I saw was a big cloud. It was such an unforgettable experience.
One of the things I ate a lot on my trip was hot dogs, hot dogs, and more hot dogs. One thing I learned about Norway was that people really enjoy being on their own. Many people dream about finding their own place and living far, far away from anyone else. That’s really different where I live because everyone lives very, very, very close together.
I guess what I discovered is that we’re all humans, we’re creatures of habit and different traditions. Travel really opened my eyes to seeing the world in another way.
Thanks for listening guys. Hit that “Subscribe” button and leave a comment below.
Create Your Own Animated Videos
There’s a reason why Vyond is the leading platform for creating your own videos. Robust and powerful customization features are all wrapped into our simple, easy-for-everyone studio that comes fully loaded with everything you need to build engaging video experiences.
See where your creativity can take you with a Vyond free trial; no credit card required.
#### Types of Change Management
Learn about change management by enlisting on a journey through Changeland, a carnival of change management. This gamified eLearning video template is designed to help you learn about the four types of change management in a fun and interactive way.
Not only is this video engaging and interactive, but the gamification elements help reinforce your learning and make it more fun and enjoyable. Whether you’re new to change management or looking to brush up on your skills, this video is a great way to learn about the different approaches to change management and put them into practice in your organization.
Video Transcription: Types of Change Management
Narrator:
In this video, you’ll learn four different types of change management. Explore and learn, but pay attention. There’s a quiz at the end and prizes to be won.
Host:
Welcome to Changeland where change happens and improvements are made.
Travel through the carnival to get an overview of the different kinds of change management. Be sure to pay attention, for there are prizes to be won.
Let’s get started.
Rabbit:
You’ve entered the land of anticipation! Look around and learn about ‘Anticipatory’ change.
Host:
Let’s move on to the ‘Reactive’ booth. Their glowing orb looks intriguing.
Wolf:
Welcome to the orb of reactive change.
Narrator:
This type of change happens in response to an event that impacts the company like new regulations or global events.
Wolf:
It’s time for you to move on and learn about incremental change.
Lion:
RAWR
Welcome to my den where incremental change is on the table. Take a look around for yourself.
You have one more booth to visit. Hurry before it’s too late.
RAWR
Deer:
Welcome to my little island here at the carnival where any change is made strategically.
Narrator:
Strategic changes are made at a higher level and filtered down to the rest of the organization.
Examples would be a change in leadership or organizational restructuring.
Deer:
You’ve learned 4 types of approaches to change management. Now, see if you remember enough to win a prize.
Host:
Welcome to our game room! To win prizes, answer questions correctly. The more you answer right, the bigger your prize. Let’s get started.
Great job! Use the lessons you’ve learned to find the right approach for your change management process.
Create Your Own Animated Videos
There’s a reason why Vyond is the leading platform for creating your own videos. Robust and powerful customization features are all wrapped into our simple, easy-for-everyone studio that comes fully loaded with everything you need to build engaging video experiences.
See where your creativity can take you with a Vyond free trial; no credit card required.
#### UC OATS Workspace Overview by University of California OATS
URL: https://www.vyond.com/showcase/video/uc-oats-workspace-overview-by-university-of-california-oats/
#### Understanding COVID-19 by Bethel Health Builders
URL: https://www.vyond.com/showcase/video/understanding-covid-19-by-bethel-health-builders/
#### Video Resume
Opting for a video resume can be a fantastic idea. Video is a unique medium that few experiment with, giving you an advantage at capturing the attention of a hiring manager and securing an interview.
A video resume will help you establish an immediate personal connection with the employer and it’s a great way to cut through the noise, whether you email your video or include it on a resume website. With the right video resume, you’ll be on the fast track to landing a job you love.
Video Transcription: Video Resume
Hi, I’m Kendall Carraher, a results-driven campaign manager skilled in creating go-to-market program plans and leading successful cross-functional teams.
I bring an eclectic mix of experiences and interests to my work as a marketer in my personal life. I love automotive, sports, wine tasting, my horse, and my two dogs.
I studied business and animal science at Colorado State and went on to start my marketing career at a major veterinary medical device company. Marketing has always been the perfect blend of the technical and personal, allowing me to use my deep skills and analytics while creating meaningful interactions for audiences.
My 12 years of marketing experience includes generating demand for leading tech firms, as well as a stint with Ferrari Maserati. Most recently, my career brought me to Box where, after a few promotions, I’ve come to work as a principal campaign manager at Box. I launched first-time industry and customer campaigns, lifted account activations and dormant user engagement by 7, and also exceeded attendance targets for annual BoxWorks conference by 140%
Here are some of the skills that I’ve relied on. I’m looking to continue my growth in a role that allows me to lead demand generation teams, and I think your organization could be a great bet. Get in touch with me anytime.
Create Your Own Animated Videos
There’s a reason why Vyond is the leading platform for creating your own videos. Robust and powerful customization features are all wrapped into our simple, easy-for-everyone studio that comes fully loaded with everything you need to build engaging video experiences.
See where your creativity can take you with a Vyond free trial; no credit card required.
#### Video to Replace PowerPoint Presentations
When it comes time to seal the deal, most sales teams are still using static PDF versions of PowerPoint presentations designed for the big screen. Cut through the noise and engage prospects by sharing important information in a more dynamic way. In this video, we can see just how easily a presentation template can be adapted for video and then tailored to the client with something as simple as a new voiceover track.
If you already have a Vyond account, you can use this sales video presentation to create templates for your own sales team.
Video Transcription: Use Video to Replace PowerPoint Presentations
Hey there, Brad again from Zodio. I thought we could quickly talk through Zodio’s three subscription tiers and help you choose the best one for your needs. Zodio rising is our smallest basic plan.
With Zodio rising, you’ll have access to all Zodio features for teams of up to 25 users. This includes our proprietary and unique employee engagement tool with games, a survey creator, virtual event organizer, and a growing library of mindfulness activities. Zodio moon, our mid-level plan gets you all the same features as our rising plan for the teams of up to 75 users. Moon subscribers also receive monthly suggestions for new ways to collaborate and build camaraderie through the team, based on their charts.
Our top-tier plan, Zodio sun, gives you all the benefits of our moon plan for teams of up to 150 users, with the ability to add an unlimited number of extra team members for a nominal a la carte cost. Your team will also have access to chat with our in-house astrologers, where they can learn more about their astrology charts, work habits, and personality traits.
Zodio Sun subscribers also have priority access to our 24/7 support center, with guaranteed response times of less than one hour. All plans come with industry-standard security features like SSL and two-factor authentication, for greater control of how Zodio is accessed.
Based on our last conversation, I would suggest Zodio moon for you so you can keep growing your midsize team. If at any time you need to upgrade or downgrade your plan, it’s no problem. You’ll get pro-rated pricing based on where you are in your current plan.
So what do you think? Let me know if you have any questions and please feel free to reach out.
Talk soon.
Create Your Own Animated Videos
See where your creativity can take you with a Vyond free trial.
#### Virtual Care for Kids – At Home Telemed Service
Urgent Care for Kids makes it possible for parents to virtually connect with a pediatrician from the comfort of home. The marketing team at Urgent Care for Kids created this video advertisement to quickly spread awareness about their Texas-based virtual doctor visits and special offerings during the COVID-19 outbreak.
#### Virtual Event Invite
URL: https://www.vyond.com/showcase/video/virtual-event-invite/
#### Vyond: 6 Awesome Ways to Use Continue Scene
Have you tried using the ‘Continue Scene’ tool in all these different ways? Create fluidity with your animations and become a master at video production with these tricks.
Tips covered in this template video:
Break down complex actions
Time transitions
Snappy messaging
Change of direction
Stop motion
Camera movement transitions
Want to take inspiration from this video? Import this video into your Vyond account to make your own customizations.
Video Transcription: 6 Awesome Ways to Use Continue Scene
The Continue Scene function allows you to start a scene right where the last one left off. Here are six awesome ways to use Continue Scene in your videos.
Break down complex actions. Continue Scene is the simplest way to show a sequence of actions with smooth continuity. And no need to use entrance or exit effects. You can select all of the scenes and use asset view to adjust characters or props in one go.
Create cut scene transitions that show the passing of time in the same setting. Or build on actions to demonstrate growth.
Create snappy visuals for your message. Continue Scene allows you to reveal text bit by bit. Adjust text size to really capture your audience’s attention. Change the background color to make even more impact.
Show a change in direction. Use Continue Scene to help your character or props switch between left and right. Stop motion is an animation technique. Imagine every scene is like a series of photos with small adjustments in every frame. Move the objects a little bit in each scene to get this result.
Combine Continue Scene with camera movements to try this cut scene transition technique. Build atmosphere by focusing on different characters or details in a scene.
Well, that’s our roundup of six awesome ways to use Continue Scene in your videos. What’s your favorite way to use the Continue Scene tool?
Create Your Own Animated Videos
See where your creativity can take you with a Vyond free trial.
#### Warehouse Scenes
Choose from this array of animated warehouse scenes, characters, props, and backdrops to create your own warehouse-focused video. Customize it with your own messaging and branding for instant relatability and engagement.
#### Welcome to the Center for Instructional Innovation by Brandman University
This wonderful explainer video created by Brandman University (Now UMass Global) showcases a perfect use of mixed media to instruct students and faculty members about available resources at the university. Turn a dull and unconventional topic into a fun and engaging one in Vyond Studio. Capture the attention of your audience by adding props and characters from our large library of assets, and personalize your video to fit any of your business needs.
Create Your Own Animated Videos
There’s a reason why Vyond is the leading platform for creating your own videos. Robust and powerful customization features are all wrapped into our simple, easy-for-everyone studio that comes fully loaded with everything you need to build engaging video experiences.
See where your creativity can take you with a Vyond free trial; no credit card required.
TRY VYOND STUDIO FOR FREE
#### West Coast’s Mint’s D-Mannose Explainer Video
Here health resource company West Coast Mint breaks down the impact of D-Mannose, a supplement for combating UTIs. West Coast Mint uses whiteboard animation effects and camera movement to the draw attention to the various benefits of D-Mannose. Note: West Coast Mint imported their own “mascot” image.
#### What are stock options?
Many times, attracting the right talent requires offering coveted benefits that are appealing on paper but confusing and difficult to understand. Benefits like 401k matching contributions, expense reimbursements, and stock options. With this video, you can communicate your company stock option benefits with ease and efficacy. Simply edit and share this animated video with your prospecting candidates and impress them with the simplicity and effectiveness of video.
Video Transcription: What are Stock Options?
[Hudson]
Welcome to Zodio. We’re glad to have you on the team.
Your offer letter mentions stock options, but what even are stock options? Stock options are a way for Zodio employees to share in the company’s success. A stock option isn’t quite a share of company ownership, but an opportunity to purchase shares of Zodio.
In other words, we’re holding your spot in Zodio’s investor table. Once your stock options are vested, you can choose to purchase or exercise stock options at a standard rate. When you join the Zodio team, you’re offered 1,000 stock options that follow a four-year vesting schedule. The vesting period means that your stock options will incrementally become available to you over the course of four years.
Like most employee equity programs, our stock options follow a vesting schedule with a one-year cliff. That means you can exercise your first 250 stock options after your one-year Zodioversary. This is our way of thanking you for the time you serve on our team. The remainder will continue to vest or become available over the course of that four-year period. So long as you’re still at Zodio.
For recommendations on exercising stock options, contact an independent financial advisor if you have any other questions about your offer letter. Just let me know.
Create Your Own Animated Videos
There’s a reason why Vyond is the leading platform for creating your own videos. Robust and powerful customization features are all wrapped into our simple, easy-for-everyone studio that comes fully loaded with everything you need to build engaging video experiences.
See where your creativity can take you with a Vyond free trial; no credit card required.
#### What Are The New Health Reimbursement Arrangements (HRAs)? by WebCE Online Education & Training
Here is a creative way to present benefit information by WebCE health. This video makes excellent use of sound effects, camera movement, transitions, and color customization to capture and hold attention.
#### What are the three stages of money laundering?
Finance and operations training has a reputation of being complicated due to its reliance on math and complex policies. Nonetheless, it is fundamental to teach your employees about the mechanics of money laundering to prevent illegal practices from taking place. Luckily, animated videos can turn a tedious topic into a fun and engaging one that will surely capture the attention of your audience. Use this video template to create your own dynamic training video in Vyond Studio.
Video Transcription: What Are the Three Stages of Money Laundering?
[Narrator]
Money laundering happens in TV movies, crime novels, and here. Yep, money laundering can happen anywhere, including right under your nose.
[Employee]
In my sandwich?
[Narrator]
No, no, not in your sandwich. That was a metaphor. In 2020 the United Nations estimated that $800 billion to $2 trillion disappeared through money laundering. Want to learn how to stop money laundering? First, you’ll need to learn how it’s done. Money laundering is the process of making dirty money clean.
No, not like that. Money laundering is the process of making dirty money clean so that criminals can actually use their ill-earned cash without getting tracked down. The first stage of money laundering is placement. When the dirty money is placed in a legitimate financial system like a bank or a business. Cash intensive businesses where transactions aren’t closely regulated, like bars and pawnshops, are especially vulnerable. So let’s say you illegally got $10 million. Where would you put it?
[Employee]
Uh… In my sandwich?
[Narrator]
Enough with the sandwich. To hide that kind of money, a fraudster might create a few cash-heavy, legitimate businesses like an antique shop or a hair salon. Once the money is placed in the salon, it’s time to move to the second stage of money laundering, which is layering. Layering is the act of moving the money through complex transactions to make it virtually untraceable. So at the salon, you might gradually slip the dirty money into an unregulated tip jar to mingle with legitimate cash so you can’t tell the cash apart. The final stage of money laundering is integration. When you take that mixed-up money to the bank, once you’ve deposited the dirty money, along with the tips into the salon’s bank account, it becomes legitimate, untraceable, and expendable cash you could use to buy anything you want, including a sandwich. Understanding the basic mechanics of money laundering is key to knowing your customer and advancing the fight against real-life crime.
Create Your Own Animated Videos
There’s a reason why Vyond is the leading platform for creating your own videos. Robust and powerful customization features are all wrapped into our simple, easy-for-everyone studio that comes fully loaded with everything you need to build engaging video experiences.
See where your creativity can take you with a Vyond free trial; no credit card required.
#### What is Intersectionality?
The theory of Intersectionality was introduced in 1989 and has reformed our notions of feminism, human rights, and anti-discrimination. With the help of intersectionality, we can acknowledge the existence of very complex and real systems of privilege and oppression. Furthermore, identities differ, and these differences lead to unique forms of discrimination that ought to be addressed for the proper functioning of a diverse and efficient organization.
Certainly, teaching about intersectionality will have a beneficial effect on any business for it will remind employees of existing policies that aim to help them succeed in their professional lives as well as reinforce their trust in your company. Use the following video to inform your audience about contemporary efforts of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion by editing this animated Vyond video template.
Video Transcription: What is intersectionality?
[Voiceover]
You may have come across the idea of intersectionality when talking about diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workplace.
Intersectionality is a framework for understanding how intrinsic aspects of identity, such as gender, race, and age, shape the way a person experiences the world. Moreover, intersectionality acknowledges that discrimination like the individual can be intersectional. Racism, sexism, transphobia, and other forms of discrimination can intersect to create a complex model of oppression.
The term intersectionality was coined by Kimberly Williams Crenshaw, a professor of law at UCLA and Columbia University. Initially, intersectionality had the mission of critically examining how the law operates regarding race and gender.
Understanding intersectionality helps us listen, introspect, empathize, elevate, and include the voices of those who have been marginalized. Lastly, having a more holistic understanding of what informs a person’s identity can assist in building a workplace culture that is more inclusive and positive for everyone.
Create Your Own Animated Videos
There’s a reason why Vyond is the leading platform for creating your own videos. Robust and powerful customization features are all wrapped into our simple, easy-for-everyone studio that comes fully loaded with everything you need to build engaging video experiences.
See where your creativity can take you with a Vyond free trial; no credit card required.
#### What is Non-Binary Identity by PDT Global
URL: https://www.vyond.com/showcase/video/what-is-non-binary-identity-by-pdt-global/
#### Why Animated Videos Engage Employees Better
Transform your communications and upgrade your employee engagement strategy with animated videos! In this video, we explore the many benefits of this increasingly popular medium, including the ability to bring your wildest storytelling ideas to life. With animation, you can create visuals that capture your employees’ attention, make your message more memorable, and help people visualize and understand complex concepts with ease. Plus, animated videos are cost-effective and easy to personalize or update whenever needed. Looking to create high-quality content on a budget? Search no further and try Vyond Today.
Create Your Own Animated Videos
There’s a reason why Vyond is the leading platform for creating your own videos. Robust and powerful customization features are all wrapped into our simple, easy-for-everyone studio that comes fully loaded with everything you need to build engaging video experiences.
See where your creativity can take you with a Vyond free trial; no credit card required.
#### Workshop Invitation
URL: https://www.vyond.com/showcase/video/workshop-invitation/
#### Workshop Invitation
Use this mixed media template for invitations and event announcements from HR or Marketing teams. Customize it with brand elements and colors for immediate recognition and engagement.
#### World Mental Health Day
Celebrated on October 10th, World Mental Health Day aims to raise awareness about mental health issues and promote mental well-being worldwide. This celebration also teaches the public about various mental health conditions, calls for equitable access to mental health services, and highlights the importance of seeking help when needed.
In the workplace, there are several ways companies can encourage employees to take care of their mental health. From creating a culture of openness to destigmatizing mental health through discussions, here are some strategies to implement to improve the well-being of employees: Offer mental health awareness programs, workshops, or access to employee assistance programs (EAPs) to provide resources and support; allow flexible work arrangements that let employees balance their professional and personal lives; encourage breaks; promote physical fitness; and lastly, foster a workplace where employees feel valued, heard, and supported in their mental health needs.
Create Your Own Animated Videos
There’s a reason why Vyond is the leading platform for creating your own videos. Robust and powerful customization features are all wrapped into our simple, easy-for-everyone studio that comes fully loaded with everything you need to build engaging video experiences.
See where your creativity can take you with a Vyond free trial; no credit card required.
#### Youtube Bidding Strategies
Your marketing strategy can benefit from an explainer video that educates and engages the audience. On this occasion, we present to you different bidding strategies for YouTube ads. In this video, we discuss how much Google charges you for trying to achieve a goal. Setting up the wrong bidding strategies can make Google spend a large part of your budget on just a few conversions or website visitors. Therefore, choosing a bidding strategy that effectively aligns with your goals will lower your campaign’s cost and increase your sales.
Edit this template and teach your audience a trick or two with a dynamic and engaging video.
Video Transcription: YouTube Bidding Strategies
Hi, everyone. Adrian here from Vyond. Today we’re going to briefly touch on three YouTube bidding strategies– target CPM, viewable CPM, and CPV. First, let’s talk about target CPM. As you can see, cost per mille is the amount an advertiser pays to get 1,000 views. CPM on YouTube refers to the cost per 1,000 impressions. This is a great strategy for driving awareness and building your brand.
Next is the VCPM, which is an advertising metric that stands for viewable cost per mille. It works by monitoring placement and how long a user plays your ad or video in the browser, so you only pay for a viewable impression. The advantage of using VCPM is that it works to optimize your campaign by increasing the likelihood of making a genuine connection with viewers, enhancing the quality of your leads, and driving higher conversion rates.
And last, there’s maximum CPV. Maximum CPV, cost per view, is a bidding strategy where Google will only charge you if someone watches 30 seconds of your video or the full video. If it’s shorter than that, these time and budget restrictions ensure you never overspend or pay for a view from a person who’s not interested in your product. If you’re interested in seeing more videos like this one, be sure to swing by our YouTube channel. And don’t forget to tap the Like and Subscribe button while you’re there.
Create Your Own Animated Videos
There’s a reason why Vyond is the leading platform for creating your own videos. Robust and powerful customization features are all wrapped into our simple, easy-for-everyone studio that comes fully loaded with everything you need to build engaging video experiences.
See where your creativity can take you with a Vyond free trial; no credit card required.
#### 在宅勤務 自粛要請で自宅隔離中でも平常心を保つ方法
Vyond partner, Web Demo, adapted and localized a Vyond template for their audience in Japan. Access the original template from the link on the right.