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Video marketing is a crucial aspect of modern marketing strategies. Brands use various video formatsā€”webinars, social media clips, customer testimonials, and user-generated contentā€”to establish authority and engage audiences. However, the true impact of video marketing lies not just in producing videos but in telling the right brand storyā€”one that resonates personally with customers.

Now, that requires a reasonable bit of creative talent, and this is where your brand can stand out from the crowd by leveraging generative AI. It has the potential to become an excellent tool for quickly creating compelling storylines and videos for your marketing drives. Read on to explore how.

GenAI Capabilities for the Video Market

The video marketing process, from concept to completion, involves significant creative challenges and time-consuming technical tasks. Generative AI excels in both of these areas, offering substantial benefits.

While GenAI is known for producing reasonably good creative content, its true strength lies in enhancing the technical aspects of video creation. According to the Wistia State of Video Report 2024, 61% of companies cited time and bandwidth as their main constraints in video production. Other significant challenges included technical ability, team size, and resources, as noted by 44% of respondents.

Collating this data with a key industry insight by Andrea Hudson (Head of Audience Development, Distributed Platforms, HubSpot), “For businesses truly looking to scale: invest in creators, hire an in-house producer, and leverage AI video tools for your team.”

Generative AI resolves this very hurdle for marketing experts: it brings tools that drastically speed up ideation and video creation time.

GenAI-based tools help companies store their marketing assets and data centrally, including metadata and other key descriptions. The AI then analyses this data, collates and combines it with other insights, and generates a searchable and accessible repository of information for marketers.

Companies can use GenAI tools to develop prompts to speed up creative workflows, to quickly generate visual concepts that can be built upon through ideation, and so much more. Additionally, GenAI tools can assist in automating various stages of the video production process. From scriptwriting to scene creation, generative AI can craft cohesive and engaging narratives, ensuring consistency in the brand’s message across different video formats.

The Role of GenAI in Visual Storytelling for Digital Marketing

Generative AI opens up new frontiers in digital creativity that marketers can easily translate into their visual storytelling narratives. GenAI tools help breathe an animated life into ideas and imagination, helping drive the marketing narrative forward without inhibition.

Here’s a snapshot of how generative AI is transforming visual storytelling in digital marketing:

1. Prompts

Generative AI works with prompts. Simply by providing text-based prompts, marketers can create visual media or videos that align with their marketing policies and the preferences of their target audience. This drastically reduces the time taken to develop concepts, speeding up the campaign backend significantly.

2. Creative License

GenAI gives marketers the power to build multiple concepts within minutes, enhancing their experimentation capabilities to find the best-fit narrative. Furthermore, brands can leverage GenAI to create highly compelling visuals that not only tell a story but also deliver an experiential perspective on the product or service being advertised.

3. Integrity and Control

GenAI tools do all the heavy lifting of generating creatives and providing options and alternatives to choose from. However, the true control and approval power remain with the marketers using the tool. Selecting reliable GenAI tools like Demand Gen by Google ensures that the AI model is trained responsibly and treats organizational data according to regulatory compliance and privacy.

Understanding Demand Gen

Demand Gen is a popular Google Ads service that marketers leverage to convert more visitors into paying customers. It provides a suite of tools that enable marketers to enhance their outreach through various Google channels like YouTube, search, Gmail, and more.

Using Demand Gen, marketers can create rich, engaging, and relevant advertisements using storytelling formats that compel the audience to act. Furthermore, its AI engine allows marketers to import their image and video assets to scale their impact for a wider audience and better chances at conversion.

Earlier in April this year, Google announced that its Demand Gen campaigns suite was all geared up for generative AI tools that would help marketers create AI image assets.

Google announced that the tool would be able to create stunning and high-quality image assets using prompts provided by marketers within a matter of minutes.

Marketers would also be able to use their existing, high-performing image assets in the Demand Gen AI engine to create similar assets using the “Generate more like this” option.

By adding generative capabilities to the Demand Generation campaign tools, Google has drastically enhanced the marketing arsenal for brands. Marketers can now create engaging, compelling visual media within a fraction of the time using basic inputs.

This augmentation has a tremendous impact on the fast-paced and relentlessly competitive non-linear marketing landscape. According to statistics, this tool can prove invaluable for marketers.

According to Google, marketers running ads with video and images both in Demand Gen saw 6% more conversions per dollar in comparison to those who ran only image-based ads.

Marketers should now look for opportunities to leverage Demand Gen campaigns with generative AI to create impactful, relatable visuals that pique viewer interest and drive the brand message home.

The Demand Gen Edge for Visual Storytelling

The revolution of generative AI isnā€™t a passing trend ā€“ it is a major innovation that has the potential to transform the video creation workflows at your marketing department. By introducing AI-based video and image creation for Demand Gen, Google has opened up novel avenues for brands to massively scale their marketing operations without worrying about skill or creativity gaps in the process.

This new addition now empowers brands to create immersive, stunning visuals for their marketing campaigns in Demand Gen. This media can be leveraged across major Google platforms like YouTube, YouTube Shorts, Gmail, and Discover.

Perhaps, after a long time, brands now have the opportunity to combine creativity with production efficiency without losing consistency.

With that said, the tool comes with its own set of best practices that marketers can use to polish their video ideation, creation, and marketing operations in Demand Gen. It helps brands stay connected and engaged with their audience on multiple channels and levels:

1. Provide Google with Precise Assets

To ensure maximum impact and reach of your GenAI Demand Gen campaigns, provide Google with at least three images and videos in three key configurations: vertical, landscape, and square. Prioritize the visual assets based on their relevance and nativity to each format. For example, landscape assets would be best for advertising on Gmail.

2. Use Relevant Visuals

Demand Gen campaigns are a stellar tool for retailers. Statistics show that retailers that add their product feeds to Demand Gen campaigns experience 33% more conversions at similar cost per action. Combine that with the power of GenAI to create stunning visuals, and you have a high conversion recipe ready.

3. Evaluate and Optimize

With generative AI in Demand Gen campaigns, you can execute countless iterations of fine-tuning your visual media to optimize it for better conversions.

Leverage Genai to Create Stories That Customers Relate To

The marketing industry is set to experience a pivotal change through the augmentation of demand-generation campaigns with generative AI. Marketers can not only generate high-quality, compelling visuals at scale but also personalize them to suit the audience segments they advertise to.

Leverage Mediaforce’s all-encompassing services to enhance the performance of your ad campaigns even further.

Mediaforce is an advanced, data-backed advertising agency that enables you to tactically benefit from algorithmic advertising that is based on machine learning and data analytics. Leveraging the Demand Gen visuals you create, Mediaforce can help with developing high-scale lead generation funnels that magnify the impact of your creatives.

FAQs

1. Are generative AI images and videos unique?

Yes, GenAI leverages a technique called SynthID (an open-standard markup), which is presented as a watermark on each asset it generates. This enables the AI assets to be identified and prevents duplication or plagiarism, which helps ensure that the generated content is original.

2. Can I control the images I generate in Demand Gen?

Yes, you have full control over the assets you create in Demand Gen using generative AI. You get the last word on which images or videos to select for different campaigns and ads. You also control the generation process by giving accurate prompts about the images.

3. How can I get GenAI for Demand Gen?

You donā€™t have to do anything. Google automatically rolls out upgrades to all the users who have an account on Google Ads. If you are newly signing up for one, you will get the feature ready to use when you create an account.