Article's Content
Article's Content
The ability to manipulate realistic imagery has always been polarizing. On the one hand, we love a nice CGI-filled movie that transports us to make-believe worlds with startling reality. On the other, we’re concerned about how airbrushed ads and fake photos impact culture.
If we worry about this with stills, just imagine the concern over deepfake videos.
Sure, the technology isn’t quite there yet, but it’s moving fast, and Ross gave us all a taste of this technology last year.
One of the companies driving the growing AI video generation niche is Synthesia — an AI video creation platform. They have the funding, VC backing, and customer base to pull this niche from science fiction into the present. With many AI avatars, voices, and templates available, Synthesia is poised to transform the digital world forever.
Synthesia supports their growth like the best SaaS companies do — by creating and distributing key content assets to high-intent visitors.
In this post, we’ll examine how Synthesia uses templates to demonstrate the wide-ranging applications of their transformative technology and how they greatly increase the chance of conversion using distribution.
But first, let’s get the basics of Synthesia’s background:
What is Synthesia AI?
Synthesia, established in 2017 in the UK, is a pioneer in the AI video generation sector. They let users produce professional videos without expensive filming equipment like cameras and actors. They specialize in AI video generation capabilities, including over 150 “AI avatars” and over 120 different AI voices across various languages, accents, and tones.
These avatars are created by taking hours of footage from real human actors in a real studio and feeding it to Synthesia’s system.
In October 2023, Synthesia AI announced its Series C funding, taking its total funding to over $90 million. This funding helped to support technological development for more expressions, more natural movements, improved voices, and simple customization options.
Leading the Growing (And Controversial) AI Video Generator Industry
Synthesia AI is leading a burgeoning industry. Look at the Google Trends chart below for the term “AI Video Generator” to see that interest in this area has spiked considerably over the past two years.
But why do companies use AI to create videos?
The cost of producing a professional video can run anywhere from $5,000 to $20,000 per minute. Plus, the type of high-quality video content that consumers crave is a time- and labour-intensive task. Companies continuously seek ways to reduce costs, and AI production is a viable alternative.
As for the competitive landscape, G2 ranks Synthesia well above the next closest competitors, VEED and Rask AI, for the top video generation product available. It’s a wide gap in an industry with only a few dozen main options.
Before we look at how Synthesia uses AI templates, it’s worth noting that the AI video industry is not without controversy.
From AI experts to politicians and Hollywood actors, there’s a spectrum of concerns regarding this technology’s impact on the future. One major point of contention is the creation of celebrity deepfake videos, which has raised ethical and security concerns.
According to our state of AI in this marketing report, even SaaS marketers — a group often open to exploring disruptive technology — are worried. 78% of our respondents said they’re very concerned about video AI technology.
Synthesia must not only educate their target audience about the benefits of this new technology but also how they minimize AI’s potentially harmful impact. They cover the latter extensively across their website and social channels, so let’s focus on the education and conversion aspects.
How Synthesia Uses AI Video Templates to Help Drive Conversions
Templates are a powerful tool in the B2B SaaS space, as they make it easier for people to use a software product for a specific task with the help of pre-designed documents.
From a marketing perspective, templates serve two purposes:
- Showcase the value of the product to leads and new users
- Capture SERP space for high-intent, high-volume keywords
Product-led companies like Notion and Miro extensively use templates. These assets rank well in the SERPs, let people apply their products in a specific use case, familiarize them with the platform, and move them closer to becoming paying customers.
Synthesia uses AI video templates for the same reasons.
One hallmark of any good content library is making it easy to navigate. Synthesia AI video templates library contains over 60 fully customizable templates separated into 10 categories, including common tasks like:
- Reporting
- Training
- Sales
- HR
- Pitch Decks
Each template provides a multimedia walkthrough of how people can use Synthesia to “create engaging videos in minutes.” That tagline is everything a budget-conscious CMO or Creative Director wants to hear.
The nature of Synthesia’s platform means they can’t just give potential users a downloadable version of the product like Miro or Notion. (That would require full access to the product.) But they can give them the next best thing: A walkthrough of the final video asset.
In just a few minutes, these AI video templates demonstrate the quality and versatility of Synthesia Avatars and how easy it is for users to create a video that meets their exact needs.
Let’s take a closer look at one of the top organic template pages.
Synthesia’s orientation video template currently brings in around 40 monthly organic visitors. Visitors are first greeted with an embedded YouTube video that walks them through a personalized onboarding video for a fictional team member named Maggie.
The video shows one of Synthesia’s AI avatars — the notorious Alex — as she walks through an orientation slide deck covering:
- The company mission statement
- A timeline of Maggie’s first day
- A personalized first-week checklist
- The name and photo of each of Maggie’s team members
The Synthesia team follows up the video with some conversion-oriented copy explaining the benefits of personalized orientation videos and the features included with the orientation video template.
The page then walks through how it’s easy to turn this template into a personalized video in minutes by following four steps.
The Synthesia team optimizes each of these pages for SEO by including an FAQ section. Targeting these long tail keywords is a great way to get in Google’s good books (and a top SERP position).
These pages each end with a CTA module that prompts users to accelerate their video creation capabilities with a Synthesia account. It reiterates the main features included with the account — access to avatars and languages — and even has social proof from current customers.
In this case, the testimonial spells out the ability to easily create training videos for over 380,000 employees across 16 languages.
The Synthesia team has set the foundation for future conversions by applying this structure across many of their template pages.
So, how are they performing so far? The templates subfolder currently attracts around 450 visitors per month.
That’s not great.
But it’s important to remember that the AI video generation industry is still very early. The search volume for relevant keywords is understandably low but will likely grow alongside the industry’s popularity — just like we saw earlier with the interest in “AI Video Generator.”
Plus, there’s another channel Synthesia uses to get its templates in front of more potential users: YouTube.
The Hidden Driver Behind Synthesia’s AI Template Strategy
Each template page contains a fully optimized YouTube video. These AI templates’ conversion potential is much more pronounced when you consider the total numbers they generate across Google Search and YouTube.
Here’s an overview of the top five pages in Synthesia’s subfolder:
That’s nearly 12,000 chances people have been exposed to these Synthesia templates alone. Plus, each of these YouTube videos has a description that directs viewers to their corresponding template page, as well as:
- Other relevant YouTube videos
- Synthesia’s other social accounts
- A CTA to create a “Free AI Video”
Considering there are dozens of other templates available, Synthesia is likely bringing in many more potential users to its site through YouTube referrals.
It’s a simple strategy — increase the conversion potential of each template video by publishing it in multiple locations.
This is just another one of the countless examples where content distribution can drastically increase content’s reach and impact. Many SaaS marketers focus on LinkedIn campaigns, email drips, or forum discussions as a way to distribute content more effectively. Don’t get me wrong, these can be incredibly effective.
But sometimes, it’s as easy as embedding a video on one of your web pages — or 40 of them, in this case.
With the rate at which various AI industries are growing, and people are adopting new technology, it’ll be fascinating to see how this AI video template strategy plays out for Synthesia.
